Eisenhower's farewell speech, 1961

Although all the worst crises are over, I am still feeling rather overwhelmed by the multiple challenges of managing and possibly improving a flat, advancing my career as a translator, carrying on with my research, and finally keeping up a blog whose readers have come to expect the occasional weighty essay, and which, in the last two or three months, has produced nothing more than the occasional chirp. I fully intend to come back to the long and feisty kind of essay, and I have a few in mind. However, for the time being, I just want to to publish a new discovery of mine (and never mind if some of you have known it since 1961): President Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961. Not only does it contain ideas on which I intend to comment as soon as I have time, but I would say it has no match in any speech I ever heard or read since Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural for sheer responsible wisdom. The old army bureaucrat, who spent most of his career in offices, had seen clearly every one of the major challenges of his time and ours, and indicated how and in what spirit they were to be met; and his description of challenges which have since become obsolete - in particular, Soviet Communism - still fits those that have replaced. His words on the spirit and the ways in which the worldwide atheistic challenge was to be met fit equally well the problem of religious, all-too-religious world-spanning terrorism. A speech such as this does much to explain why all his soldiers trusted him through two years of appalling war, serious mistakes and occasional reverses, or why, once they were home, they twice sent him to the White House.
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