Advice and dissent: An address at West Point

Bill Moyers delivered the Sol Feinstone Lecture on "The Meaning of Freedom” at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, on November 15, 2006. The following is an excerpt.

In the months leading up to the Iraq invasion, Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon who put his press empire at the service of the government in making the case for war, said that “the greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil.” Once the war is behind us, he added, “The whole world will benefit from cheaper oil, which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else.”

Today Murdoch says that he still believes it was right “to go in there” and that from a historical perspective the U.S. death toll in Iraq has been “minute.”

“Minute.” I have been reading about Emily Perez: Second Lieutenant Perez, the first woman of color to become a command sergeant major in the history of West Point, and the first woman graduate of the academy to die in Iraq. Because she lived in Washington, D.C., before coming to West Point, the Washington press told us a lot about her. People remembered her as “a little superwoman”—straight A’s, choir member, charismatic, optimistic, a friend to so many; she had joined the medical service because she wanted to help people. The obituary in the Washington Post said she had been a ball of fire at the Peace Baptist Church, where she helped start an HIV-AIDS ministry after some of her own family members contracted the virus. Accounts of her funeral said that fellow West Pointers wept as they contemplated the loss of so vibrant an officer.

“Minute?” I don’t think so. When I arrived at West Point I asked the academy’s historian, Steve Grove, to take me where Emily Perez is buried in the cemetery, below Storm King Mountain, overlooking the Hudson River. Standing there on American soil hallowed by Lieutenant Perez and others, I thought that to describe their loss as “minute”—even from a historical perspective—is to underscore the great divide that has opened in America between those who advocate war while avoiding it and those who have the courage to fight it without ever knowing what it’s all about.

Our founders warned us about this. They put themselves in jeopardy by signing the Declaration of Independence; if they had lost the war, that parchment could have been their death warrant, for they were traitors to the crown and likely to be hanged. In the fight for freedom they had put themselves on the line—not just their fortunes and sacred honor but their lives. After the war, they understood both the nature of war and human nature, and determined to make it hard to go to war except to defend freedom. They argued that war for any reason except preserving the lives and liberty of citizens should be made difficult to achieve. Here is John Jay’s passage in Federalist No. 4:

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.

And here, a few years later, is James Madison, perhaps the most deliberative mind of that generation in assaying the dangers of an unfettered executive prone to engage in war:

In war, a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

I want to be clear on this: Vietnam did not make me a dove. Nor has Iraq; I am no pacifist. But they have made me study the Constitution more rigorously, both as journalist and as citizen. Here’s James Madison again: