James Mattis: America is our great experiment | Guest Opinion
Richland native, General James Mattis, gave a Memorial Day speech on Monday, May 25, through KORD radio during a drive-through broadcast event at Sunset Gardens in Richland. This is the transcript of the speech provided by the Hoover Institution.
Thank you, fellow Tri-Citians, for including me in this year’s Memorial Day, centered in a sea of star-spangled banners at Sunset Gardens in Richland. I’m honored to join you, only a few yards from my parents & grandparents’ graves, and to share a few thoughts as we pause our daily routines, paying respect to those who have worn our nation’s cloth in defense of freedom.
This year we must maintain social distance from one another, but nothing detracts from the sense of closeness, the sense of community, and the sense of shared sacrifice that we feel for one another on a day when we come face-to-face with the human cost of freedom.
What do we owe our fallen and their families on this day? Remembrance for sure, yet we also owe a keen awareness of what they fought to defend: which is this great big experiment you and I call America.
I’d long considered America as an experiment, but earlier this year my good fortune had me seated next to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Sitting there he and I spoke at some length and he shared the historic echoes of this idea that America is an experiment.
In 1787, walking out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin was asked by a lady, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” His reply: “A republic…if you can keep it.” So, the idea that this country was a test, an experiment, was born the very day our founding fathers delivered our Constitution, hammered out among those willing to compromise, to give birth to this experiment.
Remember that: we only got our own country because we used compromise, and founded an entire government based on that premise. That compromise was key to having an inclusive republic. This came from our hard-headed founding fathers: most of whom were military veterans, men who had put their lives on the line for this revolutionary idea of gaining a republic for their fellow citizens.
These veterans’ leader, General Washington was elected our first president, remarking that, “My station is new, i walk on untrodden ground.” So, he recognized that what we set out to do was new.
In his first inauguration he said, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
In George Washington’s mind, this test depended on us, the American people to prove to the world that this could work.
A straight-spoken and honest man, in his wisdom and humility he saw the daunting challenge of keeping our experiment alive, and the American peoples’ role for proving to the world that people didn’t need a king, a tyrant or authoritarian: we the people could rule ourselves. In the years following our rugged birth this radical idea would need defending, by patriots we proudly call veterans, many of whom have given their lives and whom we honor today.
For example, some 30 years after President Washington was elected, Francis Scott Key observed a British bombardment while held hostage on board a Royal Navy ship firing on our Fort McHenry. He saw our flag flying from the ramparts as his countrymen fought back against the fearsome British fleet, then the most powerful navy in the world.
Inspired, he wrote the poem that, put to music, became our National Anthem. We’ve all heard the words, “…the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…”, but on this peaceful day in my hometown, here on the banks of the Yakima River, with hundreds of our flags flying within eyesight, the anthem’s words that resonate with me now are these:
“Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave…”
So, Francis Scott Key’s question hangs in the air at every sporting event, in every classroom, in every place we gather throughout the year when we sing our national anthem:
Does the star-spangled flag still fly?
Does the republic still exist?
Did we keep it as Ben Franklin challenged his fellow citizen?
Does the American experiment live to be passed intact to the next generation? A question each generation must ask and on Memorial Day we honor those who gave their all to answer that question. We know the patriots fighting at Fort McHenry held out and nearly 50 years later in the midst of our great Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke for the soldiers who had given their last full measure to hold our union together, for our nation had been born with the birth defect of slavery, a heinous practice imported from the old world.
In his short address that day dedicating a military cemetery, President Lincoln exhorted his listeners to resolve: “That these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Honest Abe knew he had to say it out loud, that this republican form of government could, in fact, perish, unless we fought for it, unless we dedicated our lives to living up to its ideals, unless we were willing to compromise with one another, while working always to improve the fairness of our country.
Even in the midst of that terrible war, President Lincoln recognized how precious is this legacy, one that generation after generation of patriots have given their all to keep alive.
President John F. Kennedy visited Hanford when I was attending Chief Joe Middle School, nearly 100 years after Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg. A red-letter day for us kids, since we got out of school to go see him step off his helicopter and listen to him, our president who, in his inaugural address, spoke honestly and from the heart when he said we must be ready to “pay any price, bear any burden to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
So, the same message, first heard from Ben Franklin on the very day our founding fathers finished drafting the constitution, has been echoed repeatedly right down to our own Tri-Cities, and it’s that message that reminds us why we gather here today to pay our respects to those who went down swinging to protect and defend our Constitution and our way of life.
Because our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Coast Guardsmen and Marines to this day are sworn to support and defend that Constitution creating our republic, the document that began this experiment we proudly call America. The patriots we honor today, who fell in service to a country that, even in its most raucous times, is worth defending. Our troops swear to do so at their personal peril, signing a blank check to all the American people, payable with their lives.
Our veterans have learned the hard way, having lost buddies in battle, that this nation has no ordained right to exist. Our freedoms do not stand unassailed in a world where tyrants and authoritarians see their vulnerability in our open freedoms even while they oppress their own people, casting, as they do, fearful eyes at our freedom, our experiment, our republican model, a model that threatens everything they stand for in terms of oppression.
It is to our veterans who fell that we owe this freedom that rides so lightly on us, this peaceful day in the Columbia Basin; it is our veterans who fell, and their families, to whom we owe the most for the survival of this experiment. Veterans like the World War II marine who said a country didn’t have to be perfect to be worth fighting for!
In return for their commitment, what we owe those who fell is our commitment to respecting one another in this land of boundless possibilities, because those who faced down danger and paid the price on our behalf deserve no less. We have an obligation to carry out our generation’s responsibility, that with respect and genuine friendship towards one another as fellow citizens proving that a people can unify around our radical idea, including those with whom we sometimes disagree, as we keep improving the justice and fairness of our society.
Many of us here today are enjoying America’s freedom by an accident of birth; and we all live free today in this land by our own choice, yet each of us has a responsibility to turn over to the next generation a republic in better shape than we received it and that’s a responsibility each of us carries, because this government is an experiment…an experiment of the people, by the people and for the people and only with compromise between us will we keep alive this experiment that those we honor today passed to us.
To the veterans here who recall buddies lost in battle and years since, thank you for your service. Let us remember our comrades who fell for who they were: the very best of us, and let us every day be committed to keeping vibrant the experiment for which they died and for which their gold star families paid an everlasting price.
Thank you, and long live the United States of America.
This story was originally published May 30, 2020 at 4:49 PM.