Memorial Day 1968
Today The Times editorial board the soldiers who have died this year in Iraq and Afghanistan. Forty years ago, the board wrote a full editorial about the practice of remembering dead warriors from heartfelt remembrances after the Civil War to mere moments of silence at beach barbecues around mid-century.
The board presented a better way to honor the soldiers, tens of thousands of whom had been killed by the time the editorial ran. It would be the final Memorial Day piece by the board until after America’s withdrawal from the war in Vietnam, which now stands as the only American conflict to have endured for more years than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And when it next wrote--in relatively peaceful years--the board spoke only of gas shortages, summertime, and ball games. (War would only enter into a Memorial Day editorial again in the still more peaceful 1990s.)
Here is the 1968 editorial, “Lasting Tribute to War Dead,” in full.
In 1868, three years after the end of the bloodiest and most traumatic conflict in the nation’s history, the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic ordered that the graves of the late Union dead be suitably decorated on May 30 as a mark of remembrance for the sacrifices they had made.Thus began the custom of Memorial Day. In time it evolved as a commemoration for the dead of all the nation’s wars, and is today observed in nearly all states throughout the land.Few holidays, secular or religious, remain static in observance. The respectful simplicity of the early Memorial days has grown into a time of speechmaking and parades, of brief paid vacations for most Americans, of an opportunity for picnicking or beach-going or whatever, punctuated at public gatherings perhaps by a single minute of silent tribute to the nation’s war dead.We note these obvious facts, removed as they are from the purpose for which this day was first proclaimed, not in any spirit of sanctimonious condemnation.The personal grief felt by many thousands whose relatives and friends fell in time of war does not require any special day for expression. For millions of other Americans the deaths of their countrymen on foreign fields is something of an abstraction, not inviting of sustained, mournful introspection. Tacitly, we all accept this.But a Memorial Day commemorated in the midst of a war is particularly deserving of more than pro forma observance.The last few weeks in Vietnam have witnessed the highest death tolls for Americans since our initial involvement in the conflict began seven years ago. The President speaks somberly, and no doubt accurately, of planned accelerated efforts by the enemy to inflict further civilian and military casualties and widening damage on the allied cause, in hopes of creating political and psychological pressures that will gain at the conference table what is unattainable for him on the battlefield.At the Paris talks, the facile predictions of foreign and domestic critics of U.S. policy, who proclaimed for so long that if only the right American concessions were made the Communists would show themselves to be reasonable fellows willing to work for an honorable compromise, have thus far proven erroneous.Instead we are once again face to face with an obdurate opponent who has proved himself ready to sacrifice the lives of combatants and innocents alike to realize his odious goals.We do not know how much longer the struggle in Vietnam will go on, or how it might end. All that seems predictable, if we can use the past as a guide, is that future Memorial Days will, sadly, serve to commemorate many who have yet to give up their lives in their country’s service.We would suggest that the best remembrance, the greatest tribute, we can pay those who have died in their nation’s wars, and those fated to do so, is not simply to institutionalize their sacrifice on one day out of the year. Rather it is to live our own lives as citizens of this Republic, and conduct our affairs as a power in the world, according to the higher goals in whose name these sacrifices are made.That would be tribute indeed, and surely little enough to ask.