HEROES: The Legacy

One cool afternoon last week, a hundred dignitaries crowded into the shingled house on the Long Island estate where Henry L. Stimson had lived for 47 years. They gathered to pay last respects to the ex-Secretary of War who had been in the Cabinets of four Presidents. The will he left was businesslike, but he had already written a final testament. It was the “Afterword” to the memoirs Stimson wrote three years ago. Quoted at his funeral, it bequeathed a faith for his unpeaceful times:

NEITHER a man nor a nation can live in the past. We can go only once along a given path of time, and we can only face in one direction, forward . . .

It is true . . . that in the last forty years the peoples and nations of the world have made many terrible mistakes; it is a sad thing that more than half of such a book as this should have to be devoted to the problem of warmaking. Yet even so, it is well also to reflect how much worse the state of mankind would be if the victorious peoples in each of the two world wars had not been willing to undergo the sacrifices which were the price of victory. I have always believed that the long view of man’s history will show that his destiny on earth is progress toward the good life, even though that progress is based on sacrifices and sufferings which taken by themselves seem to constitute a hideous mélange of evils.

This is an act of faith. We must not let ourselves be engulfed in the passing waves which obscure the current of progress. The sinfulness and weakness of man are evident to anyone who lives in the active world. But men are also good and great, kind and wise. Honor begets honor; trust begets trust; faith begets faith; and hope is the mainspring of life. I have lived with the reality of war, and I have praised soldiers; but the hope of honorable, faithful peace is a greater thing and I have lived with that, too. That a man must live with both together is inherent in the nature of our present stormy stage of human progress, but it has also many times been the nature of progress in the past, and it is not reason for despair.

I think. . . that the people of the world and particularly our own American people are strong and sound in heart. We have been late in meeting danger, but not too late. We have been wrong but not basically wicked.

Those who read this book will mostly be . . men of the generations who must bear the active part in the work ahead . . . Let them charge us with our failures and do better in their turn. But let them not turn aside from what they have to do, nor think that criticism excuses inaction . . . and let them believe in mankind and its future, for there is good as well as evil, and the man who tries to work for the good, believing in its eventual victory, while he may suffer setback and even disaster, will never know defeat . . .