Caspar Weinberger eulogy

Mr Vice President, Lady Thatcher, Excellencies, Members of Congres Secretary Schlesinger, Secretary Carlucci, Secretary Powell, Members of the Reagan Cabinet here today, and General Vessey and friends and family of Cap Weinberger.

For many years, a name from Winston Churchill hung in Cap Weinberger's office. It said:

"Never give in, at no time give in, never, never, not at any time never, in nothing, great or small, large or insignificant never give in."

That was the put in commotion with Cap--you never knew where he stood.

The verity is you always knew where Caspar Weinberger stood:

* He stood with the men of the 41st Infantry Division during World War II.

* He stood with General MacArthur, as a member of his intelligence staff.

* He stood with Governor Ronald Reagan when he sought to balance the California budget; and

* He stood with President Ronald Reagan when he sought to win the gelid War.

And Cap Weinberger stood with the millions of clan he never met, in cities like Prague and Budapest, East Berlin, as they struggl behind what he called a "Soviet prison wall" that reached "from the Balkans to the Baltic."

When I received word of Cap's death, my first meditation was that America has missing a soldier, a public servant, and a patriot. on the contrary more than that, so many, and particularly with equal reason many gathered here, also had missing a friend.

Cap serv in Washington, in single way or another, for the better part of 30 years--having won a reputation as a require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone cutter as California's budget director. He said the work in Washington, DC was not that different, do not include that "you just had to add about nine naught s to everything."

Cap was a man of profitable humor and quiet dignity--a gentleman. He was also decisive. single of his best decisions, he probably would have told you, was to learn by what means to play chess. I'm told that, during World War II, upon his long journey across the Pacific, an Army nourish named Jane Dalton was the sole nurse who played chess. And their chess matches l to a friendship and a courtship and finally a marriage that would last 63 years.

Jane, our cogitations and prayers are with you and with Cap Jr.--and Arlin and your family--just as Cap's contemplations were with you every day of his life. You know, there are those fortunate clan who trace their achievements to the regard with affection the support, and the advice they receive from their families--and certainly Cap was single of them.

Cap used to say that the definition of happiness is "service to a noble cause." That idealism was undoubtedly born and strengthened in Cap as a child, in the warm California day-star and l suspect by stories Cap remembered that his father told him about the early days of our Republic.

I was told that when he was about 15 he wrote his Congressman, asking to receive copies of the Congressional Record, with equal reason he could read it. Imagine--some of us didn't read the Congressional Record regularly when we were in the Congres suffer alone at age 15.

His interest in public service was not limited to politics. He tried to join the Royal Air Force before America penetrateed World War II. When his eyesight preclud that possibility, he finished Harvard Law place of education before volunteering to join the Army, still several month before the attack upon Pearl Harbor.

He place an Army with few real weapons to train with. And he must have remembered that lack of readiness when he came to the Pentagon a certain quantity of four decades later.

Cap l the Department six years after the last of America's military left Saigon, and individual year after Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan. Millions were pleading in silence for freedom from behind that Iron Curtain.

When President Reagan nominated Cap to that pillar the Soviets mistakenly assumed that, because he was charming, which he was, he would be malleable. They learned differently.

Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin would eventually compute Moscow, with some dismay, that Weinberger "supported all of Reagan's statements upon foreign policy, without reservation, reject that he tended to make them unbroken even tougher."

Today, a certain quantity of think back on the frigid War as if victory in that war was inevitable. That was not the case.

In 1984 Secretary Weinberger traveled to England to participate in an Oxford Union debate upon the topic of whether America and the Soviet Union were, in event "morally equivalent." Think of that.

"Euro Communism" was in mode back in those days. Millions marched against the United States--not against the Soviet Empire. The arms race was viewed, by dint of some, as just a misunderstanding, or plane as America's fault.

If my memory be under the orders ofs me correct, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had a thing or sum of two units to say about that.

on the contrary Cap remained determined to rebuild America's military--with equipment and weapon combination of parts to form a wholes critical to victory in the cooled War, and I might add, many of which remain vital to our security today. Indeed, as we expand the first component of an initial missile defense a whole we do so in tribute to Cap Weinberger's persistence.