Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [392]
Next to our farm is the Taos Pueblo, thought to be the oldest, continuously inhabited community in North America. The Native American tribe that founded it has made the area its home for more than a thousand years, centuries before the first Europeans set sail for the New World and well before a Declaration of Independence pitted thirteen colonies against an empire. Few other places in America serve as a more vivid reminder of how young our nation is, which for me only makes even more miraculous what has been achieved in its short existence. When I am in New Mexico and see the majestic landscape and endless blue skies, I sense what this great land of ours represents: promise, possibility, and renewal.
A few years after New Mexico became part of U.S. territory, the American Civil War began. During that conflict, deep divisions between those loyal to the North and South led to skirmishes in the area, including efforts by Confederate sympathizers to take down the American flag flying over the Taos Plaza. Eventually, a group of men, including the legendary frontiersman Kit Carson, resolved to nail the Union flag to a tall wooden pole, where it was kept under twenty-four-hour watch. Though federal regulations prevented municipalities from flying the Stars and Stripes after sundown, Congress passed a special law authorizing Taos to be the first city in the nation allowed to fly the flag day and night. And there the flag has flown ever since, through times of war, economic despair, disease, and disaster—in the cruelest of times as well as the best of times.
Our still-young country has withstood tragedies and trauma of unimagined scope. And yet it has continued to thrive, thanks to proud and resilient citizens and leaders from both political parties who have done their best to guide the nation. “If those young Americans who have the advantage of education, perspective, and self-discipline do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability,” Adlai Stevenson once said, “America will stumble, and if America stumbles the world falls.” He warned, “For the power, for good or evil, of this American political organization is virtually beyond measurement. The decisions which it makes, the uses to which it devotes its immense resources, the leadership which it provides on moral as well as material questions, all appear likely to determine the fate of the modern world.”22 Those words remain as true and profound today as when I first heard them at my senior class banquet at Princeton University in 1954.
Those who have been privileged to serve our country have been the guardians of one of the greatest achievements of mankind. Our United States of America, at once imperfect and extraordinary, has offered more opportunity and improved more lives, both at home and throughout the world, than any other nation in history. In writing this book I have looked back over a life enriched beyond measure by those opportunities. I hope readers will come away with a conviction that service to America is an obligation to be fulfilled, as well as an honor to be embraced.
Acknowledgments
This book has been four years in the making. To help organize its writing, as well as to put order into my voluminous documentary record and establish the supporting website, I have relied on an extraordinary team of individuals. The core group was headed by Keith Urbahn, my chief of staff and a Navy reserve intelligence officer, who has taken on historical, creative, and managerial responsibilities well beyond his years. Victoria Coates brought an academic perspective and a relentless insistence on documentation and precision—invaluable assistance from an art historian, of all things. Matt Latimer, an attorney and former Pentagon and White House speechwriter, contributed not only his considerable knowledge and talent but also his boundless interest in Richard M. Nixon.
This group was ably supported by our outstanding staff led by our office manager, Linda Figura. Aliza Kwiatek was an intrepid and meticulous fact