Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

Remarks at the Dedication of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University

October 13, 1958

President Bunn, Your Excellency Archbishop O'Boyle, Distinguished Clergy, and friends:

It is indeed a memorable occasion when there is dedicated here this School of Foreign Service in the name of Edmund A. Walsh.

Though the day may be saddened by our knowledge of the passing of a very great man, His Holiness Pope Pius, yet we cannot fail to remember that in our own memories of two such men, we have inspiration that should lift up the lives of all of us.

Your President mentioned one of my early associations with your University, a matter of some five or six years ago.

Probably no one here knows I coached a football team--a service team--playing against Georgetown. I think it was in the fall of 1924 Lou Little was your coach, and he beat us. But it was a very happy circumstance, because it brought me the friendship of another man, Lou Little, who to this day remains my very warm associate and friend.

This School seems to me to symbolize not only father Walsh's hope for the peace of the world, but for the very great effort he made to promote that concept--and particularly to educate us--those of us who had the privilege of listening to him over the years. I was one of those people. In the War College Class of 1998-1929, he came to lecture. I saw something that day that I never hoped to see in any lecture room. After two hours a recess was called, and the class as one man demanded that he return to answer questions and to give us something more of his knowledge that was so interestingly presented.

The subject of that talk was the threat that an atheistic dictatorship posed to the free world, and the certainty that that threat would grow unless we--all of us--armed ourselves with the spiritual and intellectual capacities that we could develop so that we could get others to understand and so that we could oppose that threat practically and effectively.

He made no wild charges. In fact, it was a speech where every statement was annotated--corroborated--by the documents that he himself had procured and brought out, often out of Russia. That series of documents, by the way, was in a suitcase--two suitcases. They were filled, and he knew exactly where to go to pick each one and to read it. So I still remember that occasion if for nothing else than because of the excellence of the presentation.

Through those years it was my privilege to be on the rim of little gatherings where I was a Major and he was a central figure and instructor, and to hear more of his wisdom given so freely and generously. So I should like today, therefore, to pay my personal tribute of respect, of belief in him, and even of affection for him. I know so many of you here today are doing the same.

As President, the highest executive official of this government, I want to do one other thing, to thank the University and the Society and all of their supporters for the work they are doing in educating soldiers of peace.

Certainly this is what we expect our diplomats to do--to be officers of the great army that has as its first business the developing and sustaining of a peace with justice and with honor.

I am told of figures that were of no later vintage than April 1957, that 87 of your graduates are actively working now in the Foreign Service. Possibly there have been hundreds through these forty years. That seemed to be the figure now actively working.

I would hope your number would increase. We need people who will find, in the service of their country and of peace, their great satisfaction. We need people who will apply themselves to understanding that the world, as we saw symbolized in the revolving globe at the entrance to the hall, is a single entity. We need people who are not too much concerned by the immediate considerations of private gain or the effect on our own particular community of a wool importation, or the bad effect that is caused at times by some intemperate, ill-tempered description of other people in the world. We need people who see that no part, no matter how important, can be greater than the whole. In developing our country, they recognize that they must help to develop understanding and knowledge throughout the world; they recognize peaceful intentions, and they are determined to make those intentions reality.

So, to say that I am honored today by the University--that I am complimented by its presenting to me its Honorary Doctorate--is a great understatement. I assure you that the presence here of these dedicated men and instructors and students in this audience is an inspiration--a memory that I shall carry with me.

Thank you.

Note: The President's opening words referred to the Very Reverend Edward B. Bunn, President of the University, and the Most Reverend Patrick A. O'Boyle, Archbishop of Washington.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks at the Dedication of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/234088

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