In its March 22, 1969 number, the New Yorker turned over its Talk of the Town column to a speech given by Harvard Professor George Wald at a March 4 “antiwar teach-in” at MIT. Those were the days, my friend.
Professor Wald taught biology at Harvard. He had won the 1967 Nobel Prize in the field of physiology or medicine along with Ragnar Granit and Keffer Hartline for his discovery of the use of Vitamin A in the retina. All together, the three laureates were credited with “discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye.”
Wald’s speech had nothing to do with his professional interests. It was titled “A generation in search of a future.” Professor Wald’s son Elijah is the music historian and author of the book on which the film A Complete Unknown was based. Elijah Wald has preserved his father’s speech on his own site. Despite the fears expressed by Professor Wald in 1969, the future treated us better than we deserved.
Among other things, Professor Wald expressed regret that what was formerly known as the War Department was now known as the Defense Department:
[Y]ou see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense. All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side. I suppose this is why our ex-Secretary of State Dean Rusk went to such pains to insist, as he still insists, that in Vietnam we are repelling an aggression. And if that’s what we are doing—so runs the doctrine—everything goes.
Today’s New York Times reports on President Trump’s move to rename the Defense Department:
President Trump will sign an executive order on Friday renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War, the White House said, fulfilling the president’s pledge to realign the mission of the armed forces by reverting to a name used for over 150 years until shortly after World War II.
The Times encrusts the story with the obligatory aura of disapproval:
As Mr. Trump has sought to show strength, rather than the “wokeness” that he and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claim clouded the military’s morale and mission under former President Biden, he has often referred back to the country’s dominant role in global conflicts and complained that it has not been celebrated enough.
I would simply note that the renaming aligns with the wishes expressed from the academic left by the late Professor Wald. Perhaps this is a case of left and right meeting. Perhaps it is a case in which approval depends on the author of the initiative.
