[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 76 (Tuesday, June 5, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1017-E1019]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  HONORING THE U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY AT WEST POINT, NEW YORK CLASS OF 
                                  2001

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENJAMIN A. GILMAN

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 5, 2001

  Mr. GILMAN. Mr. Speaker, Permit me to take this opportunity to 
congratulate the nine-hundred cadets of the graduating class of 2001 
from our United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.
  I was gratified to once again be able to join this year's graduating 
class, along with our Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz,

[[Page E1018]]

and our good friend, the distinguished superintendent of the U.S. 
Military Academy at West Point, General Daniel Christman.
  Regrettably, this year's ceremony will be the last West Point 
graduation for General Christman, who will soon be leaving the Academy 
for a private life. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my 
personal gratitude and the thanks of this entire body for his 
distinguished service to our Nation, and for his commitment to our 
Nation's military. His guidance, leadership, and spirit at West Point 
will long be missed.
  I was pleased to listen to the poignant remarks of Deputy Defense 
Secretary Wolfowitz and look forward to working with him. I am 
attaching a copy of his remarks for the Record and strongly recommend 
to my colleagues to review his message to the class of 2001 and to our 
Nation.
  To all the Cadets of the class of 2001, I extend my congratulations, 
my best wishes, my prayers, and my continued commitment to ensuring 
that our Nation provides them with the support they deserve for their 
service to our Nation.

     Commencement Address at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point

[Remarks by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Michie Stadium, 
                West Point, NY, Saturday, June 2, 2001]

       Thank you. Thank you, General [Daniel] Christman 
     [Superintendent of the United States Military Academy], for a 
     very warm introduction. Please be seated. You neglected to 
     mention that 25 years ago, when we were very young, we were 
     working together to persuade the Congress not to take fine 
     Army forces out of Europe. And with the help of a lot of 
     other people, we succeeded. Those forces stood watch in the 
     Fulda Gap and other places around the continent of Europe, 
     and the result was one of the great strategic victories of 
     history of which every member of the Armed Forces and every 
     member of the U.S. Army that participated in that effort is 
     justly proud.
       I also want to complement General Christman and the Army on 
     the great spirit with which they said, we're going to go 
     ahead and hold this ceremony outdoors even in this terrible 
     weather, because it's more important to have all the families 
     able to come than to be inside warm and comfortable. 
     [Applause.] Coming from Washington where, as they say, no 
     good deed goes unpunished, it's wonderful to see this good 
     deed rewarded with a break in the weather.
       Senator Jack Reed, Congresswoman Sue Kelly, Congressman and 
     old friend Ben Gilman, Congressman Saxby Chambliss, and 
     Congressman Charlie Norwood; Commandant [of Cadets Brigadier 
     General Eric] Olson, Dean [of the Academic Board Brigadier 
     General Daniel] Kaufman, distinguished staff and faculty, 
     ladies and gentlemen, parents and family, and most of all, 
     members of the class of 2001:
       I want to thank the Class of '01 for giving me the honor of 
     sharing with you this very special day. I went to school just 
     up the road a ways in a place called Cornell where I studied 
     mathematics. According to my calculations, if you take the 
     corps of cadets and add a speech longer than 20 minutes, by 
     the time you're done, you'll have 40% that won't be 
     listening, 40% who will be sleeping, and 20% will be asking 
     for their money back.
       So, the responsibility of a commencement speaker is heavy 
     indeed. Your remarks should be sentimental to please the 
     parents, substantive to please the faculty, and short to 
     please the cadets [Laughter.] When we say the word ``short'' 
     to the class of '01, I'm told that we're talking to experts. 
     In fact, I can see that this class is so short [audience: 
     ``how short are we?''], you have fewer hours until you 
     receive your diplomas than the plebes have ears to graduate. 
     But, plebes . . . your day will come, too.
       Today also marks the last time that the distinguished Army 
     leader General Dan Christman will stand before a graduating 
     class as Superintendent. But, there was even a time when 
     General Christman was a plebe. Back then, in May 1962, he and 
     his fellow cadets gathered in the mess hall to hear General 
     Douglas MacArthur deliver the ``Duty, Honor, Country'' speech 
     that became so famous.
       Dan Christman left the Academy first in his class and 
     answered MacArthur's call, a call to serve ``a goal that is 
     high . . .  to reach into the future . . . to . . . remember 
     the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true 
     wisdom. . . .'' From fields of fire in Vietnam to the 
     peaceful Plain of West Point, from commanding troops in Korea 
     and Europe to advising senior leaders in the Pentagon and the 
     White House, General Christman has commanded, led and served 
     with the simplicity and open-mindedness that MacArthur spoke 
     of.
       General Christman brought an agile mind and a visionary 
     spirit to his tenure as your ``Supe''--building West Point to 
     keep it at the forefront of the nation's great educational 
     institutions. For the thousands of cadets that he has led and 
     loved, his legacy is simple and profound--West Point is a 
     stronger and better institution because he was here. For our 
     nation, his legacy is a whole generation of soldiers enriched 
     by Dan Christman's 36 years of leadership. And his great 
     supporter and partner, Susan Christman, was with him. Now as 
     they prepare to leave their final assignment in the active 
     duty Army, we thank them for their lasting contributions born 
     of a lifetime of service.
       There are many others who've been instrumental to the 
     achievements that we are honoring here today, but no one 
     deserves more credit than the parents who have supported and 
     encouraged you. May I ask the parents and guardians of the 
     class of 2001 to stand, so that we can give you a fitting 
     Army tribute?
       Today, in the year that all math majors know is really the 
     first year of the Twenty-first Century, you graduate. 
     Congratulations to the first West Point class of Twenty-first 
     century!
       As you leave, you leave well prepared for the demands of 
     future duty. Four years have tested you in ways you probably 
     never imagined. In Beast Barracks, you learned that you can 
     meet any challenge if you attack it with determination. You 
     learned that the soldier who inspires others to work together 
     can be an agent of change. You learned that one person can 
     make a difference, but that infinitely more is possible when 
     one person joins a greater commitment--to a common good. 
     Perhaps most importantly, you learned how many days are left 
     until Army beats Navy.
       Extensive scientific research has demonstrated that on an 
     average day in June, the average human brain is capable of 
     remembering at most one thought from a commencement speech. 
     But since today is cooler than average, and West Pointers are 
     definitely above average, I will challenge you to think this 
     morning about two words: ``surprise'' and ``courage.''
       This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of a military 
     disaster whose name has become synonymous with surprise--the 
     attack on Pearl Harbor. Interestingly, that ``surprise 
     attack'' was preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded 
     warnings and missed signals. Intelligence reports warned of 
     ``a surprise move in any direction,'' but this made the Army 
     commander in Honolulu think of sabotage, not attack. People 
     were reading newspapers in Hawaii that cited promising 
     reports about intensive Japanese diplomatic efforts, unaware 
     that these were merely a charade. An ultra-secret code-
     breaking operation, one of the most remarkable achievements 
     in American intelligence history, an operation called 
     ``Magic,'' had unlocked the most private Japanese 
     communications, but the operation was considered so secret 
     and so vulnerable to compromise that the distribution of its 
     product was restricted to the point that our field commanders 
     didn't make the ``need-to-know'' list.
       And at 7 a.m. on December 7th, at Opana radar station, two 
     privates detected what they called ``something completely out 
     of the ordinary.'' In fact, it was so out of the ordinary 
     that the inexperienced watch officer assumed it must be 
     friendly airplanes and told them to just forget about it.
       Yet military history is full of surprises, even if few are 
     as dramatic or as memorable as Pearl Harbor. Surprise happens 
     so often that it's surprising that we're still surprised by 
     it. Very few of these surprises are the product of simple 
     blindness or simple stupidity. Almost always there have been 
     warnings and signals that have been missed--sometimes because 
     there were just too many warnings to pick the right one out, 
     sometimes because of what one scholar of Pearl Harbor called 
     ``a poverty of expectations''--a routine obsession with a few 
     familiar dangers.
       This expectation of the familiar has gotten whole 
     governments, sometimes whole societies, into trouble. At the 
     beginning of the last century, the British economist Norman 
     Angell published a runaway best seller that must have drawn 
     the attention of professors and cadets of West Point at that 
     time. Angell argued that the idea that nations could profit 
     from war was obsolete. It had become, as he titled his book, 
     The Great Illusion. International finance, he argued, had 
     become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and 
     industry that it had rendered war unprofitable.
       One of Angell's disciples, David Starr Jordan, the 
     President of an institution on the West Coast called Stanford 
     University, argued that war in Europe, though much 
     threatened, would never come. ``The bankers,'' he said, 
     ``will not find the money for such a fight; the industries 
     will not maintain it; the statesmen cannot. There will be no 
     general war.''
       Unfortunately for him, he made that prediction in 1913. One 
     year later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell to an assassin's 
     bullet, plunging Europe into a war more terrible than any 
     that had come before it. The notion of the Great Illusion 
     yielded to the reality of the Great War.
       One hundred years later, we live, once again, in a time of 
     great hopes for world peace and prosperity. Our chances of 
     realizing those hopes will be greater if we use the benefit 
     of hindsight to replace a poverty of expectations with an 
     anticipation of the unfamiliar and the unlikely.
       By doing so, we can overcome the complacency that is the 
     greatest threat to our hopes for a peaceful future, the kind 
     of complacency that took the life of General John Sedgewick 
     at the Battle of Spottsylvania during the American Civil War. 
     General Sedgewick looked over a parapet toward enemy lines, 
     and waved off his soldiers' warning of danger, declaring: 
     ``Nonsense, they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.'' 
     Those were the last words that he spoke at the very moment 
     that a Confederate sharp shooter took his life.

[[Page E1019]]

       I am told that in your time here, you grew accustomed to 
     looking beyond the next parapet, to anticipate where you 
     wanted to take this corps. You convinced your leaders to give 
     you unprecedented authority in the day-to-day running of the 
     corps. That kind of innovation and initiative are the keys to 
     anticipating the unlikely and preparing for the unfamiliar, 
     to being prepared to overcome the surprises that are almost 
     inevitably going to come.
       Perhaps the simplest message about surprise is this one: 
     Surprise is good when the other guy can't deal with it. Let 
     us try never to be that other guy.
       Tomorrow, you, the Class of 2001 will become leaders in 
     transforming the Army. General Shinseki has called on each 
     soldier to embrace change, to make the Army of the future 
     lighter and faster. It's a big undertaking, one that will not 
     happen overnight. Fundamental change like that is like 
     turning a supertanker--it can't be done on a dime. To 
     redirect a massive vessel takes planning, patience, and time. 
     But it will build an Army that is able to deal with the 
     unfamiliar and the unexpected.
       A century ago, on a peaceful day in 1903, with great 
     foresight, Secretary of war Elihu Root told Douglas 
     MacArthur's graduating class, ``Before you leave the Army . . 
     . you will be engaged in another war. It is bound to come, 
     and will come. Prepare your country.''
       One day, you too will be tested in combat. And if your fail 
     that test, the nation will fail, too.
       We are counting on you, all of you. You must prepare 
     yourselves--with the day-to-day choices that you make. And 
     nothing is more important than that other word I'd like you 
     to think about today: courage.
       Today, America's lieutenants demonstrate physical courage 
     as they lead combat patrols in Korea on the Demilitarized 
     Zone. In Kuwait, solders stand ready to fight on a moment's 
     notice. In Kosovo, young lieutenants have been leading 
     patrols to keep warring ethnic groups in check, always at 
     most one breath away from combat. And in Bosnia, since 1995, 
     the courage of American soldiers has brought an end to a 
     terrible war. Every day, our young soldiers face situations 
     that require tact and diplomacy, but also toughness, 
     discipline and courage.
       Courage comes in many forms. Sometimes even more demanding 
     than the physical courage to face danger is the moral courage 
     to do what's right: doing your job the way it's supposed to 
     be done, even if others advocate the easy way; choosing the 
     harder right over the easier wrong, even if you have to take 
     a hit for speaking up for what you think is true.
       Moral courage means taking responsibility for the decisions 
     you make, not shifting blame to others if something goes 
     wrong. It's standing alone--when your only company is the 
     knowledge that you did your best; your only comfort that you 
     answered MacArthur's higher call.
       On the eve of the great invasion at Normandy, having made 
     the final fateful decision to go ahead in the face of great 
     risk and uncertainty and warnings of bad weather, knowing 
     full well that failure was a real and terrible possibility, 
     General Dwight Eisenhower penciled a short message that he 
     tucked away in his wallet . . . a few words that he planned 
     to read if the invasion failed.
       ``My decision to attack at this time,'' he wrote, ``was 
     based upon the best information available,'' he wrote. ``The 
     troops, the airmen and the Navy did all that bravery and 
     devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to 
     the attempt it is mine alone.''
       Ike was a great hero, a man of great moral courage with the 
     willingness to shoulder responsibility that is the mark of a 
     great leader.
       The Long Gray line has never lacked for courageous leaders. 
     General Barry McCaffrey, class of '64, and General Ric 
     Shinseki, class of '65, both proved their courage in combat 
     in Vietnam, where they suffered horrendous wounds.
       It took great moral courage to come back from that 
     experience and decide to stay in an Army that had been 
     shattered by Vietnam. But, by that choice, and the choice of 
     so many like them, were able to rebuild that Army into what 
     it is today: an Army without equal.
       Courage comes in all ranks--all shapes and stripes. Look to 
     your left--look down the line to your right--you may well be 
     seeing a hero; you may be looking at another Rocky Versace.
       After graduating from West Point in 1959, Rocky grew bored 
     with stateside duty and volunteered for Vietnam where he 
     served with enthusiasm and distinction. In October of 1963, 
     just weeks shy of completing his second tour, he was captured 
     by the Viet Cong.
       When Rocky was tortured and left for dead in a three-by-
     six-foot cage--he sang ``God Bless America.'' When he was 
     dragged from village to village with a rope around his neck, 
     he cursed his captors in English and French and Vietnamese. 
     His will could not be broken.
       A fellow captive recalled that for Rocky, ``as a West Point 
     grad, it was duty, honor, country. There was no other way. He 
     was brutally murdered because of it. He valued that one 
     moment of honor more than he would have a lifetime of 
     compromises.''
       Rocky Versace exemplified honor and courage. Forty years 
     after his death, his life, his determination, his patriotism, 
     and his courage call out for recognition. If Congress agrees, 
     we will answer that call and recommend to President Bush that 
     Captain Rocky Versace, class of 1959, be awarded the 
     Congressional Medal of Honor.
       Like Rocky, like Generals McCaffrey and Shinseki, you that 
     know your profession is about leadership. To lead soldiers, 
     you must first become one--in body, mind and spirit.
       You must know your job, set the example, lead from the 
     front. Most of all you must be a model of moral courage and 
     integrity for your soldiers, the way your role models at West 
     Point were for you.
       Yours will not be a life of personal gain, but it is noble 
     work. You will man the walls behind which democracy and 
     freedom flourish. Your presence will reassure our allies and 
     deter the enemies of freedom around the world. Be prepared to 
     be surprised. Have courage. And remember what General 
     Eisenhower said to those American and Allied troops before 
     they were about to land on the beaches of Normandy. ``You are 
     about to embark on a great crusade,'' he told them. ``The 
     eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of 
     liberty loving people everywhere march with you.''
       Today, as you, the Class of 2001, go forth on your own 
     crusade, our hopes and prayers go with you. Thank you, God 
     bless the Class of '01, and God bless America.

     

                          ____________________