The Cost of Freedom
The nation was on edge and the world was at the brink of nuclear war between two superpowers when the Tuesday, October 23, 1962, edition of The New York Times ran the headline, “U.S. imposes arms blockade on Cuba on finding offensive-missile sites; Kennedy ready for Soviet showdown.”
The night before, on Monday, October 22, President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation from the Oval Office. U-2 reconnaissance imagery presented to the president a few days earlier had shown proof of Soviet missile bases under construction on the island of Cuba.
“The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere,” Kennedy said.
He announced a naval blockade around the island, preventing any missiles or supporting military equipment from landing in Cuba, a move that would prove effective in opening the dialogue of diplomacy and averting a catastrophic confrontation.
Near the end of the speech, Kennedy explained the American ethos in this dire moment of crisis. “My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out.” Yet “the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”
In language that should be recalled every Memorial Day—if not every day—and in tone that expresses the American mind and soul, Kennedy said, “The cost of freedom is always high—and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission. Our goal is the not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.”
187 years before Kennedy’s Oval Office speech, the physician and patriot leader Joseph Warren stood on Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. The date was Saturday, June 17, 1775, the fateful day of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Warren had been active in the colonial cause, leading spy rings from the shadows, serving as president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and eventually leading the colony’s militia as a major general.
“Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of,” he told Bostonians on Monday, March 6, 1775. “Our enemies are numerous and powerful; but we have many friends determining to be free, and heaven and earth will aid the resolution,” he shouted. “You will maintain your rights or perish in the generous struggle.”
Americans, he had written, “esteem death, with all its tortures, preferable to slavery.” Another time, when taunted by British soldiers in Boston, he replied, “I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!”
At Breed’s Hill, Warren stood on the muddy redoubt with musket and sword in hand, watching as the red jackets of British troops marched up the hill.
When the battle started, Warren stood and fought with all his might. When the outnumbered colonists’ position weakened beyond repair, Warren stayed behind to cover their retreat. Turning back, facing the enemy, a musket ball struck Warren in the face. He died instantly and fell, as he once hoped, in the baptismal blood of American independence.
“He fell,” Samuel Adams wrote mournfully but with pride, “in the glorious struggle for public liberty.”
Almost a century later, on Saturday, July 18, 1863, another Bostonian, the Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, had a decision to make: rally his troops of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry or withdraw.
He had led his all-Black regiment—one of the first in the war, whose ranks included two sons of Frederick Douglass—under heavy fire across the sandy beach to the base of Fort Wagner, located on Morris Island, just south of the Confederate stronghold of Charleston, South Carolina.
It was, by all accounts, a near-suicidal task: breach the walls, take the fort. In effect, he and his regiment were cannon fodder for the Union assault, leading the initial charge into rebel fire.
Pausing at the base of the wall, the deeply religious and staunchly abolitionist Shaw, just twenty-five years old, caught his breath, drew his sword, shouted for his men to follow, and scaled the parapet himself. It was the clearest act of leadership, the purest reliance on the will of God.
A burst of lead tore through him the moment he reached the crest. He died and fell where he stood. But Shaw’s rallying cry lived on; his men rushed over the wall, engaging in brutal combat.
In the end, the assault was not a success. The battle was tactically lost. But the war was ultimately won. And the valor of the 54th Massachusetts, which suffered forty percent casualties, gained immortality in the cause of right.
Because he led a Black regiment, the Confederates stripped and robbed Shaw’s body, burying him in a mass, unmarked grave alongside his troops. Shaw’s father believed that his son’s resting place was more fitting than insulting.
“We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better company,” he wrote to the regimental surgeon; “what a bodyguard he has!”
Under the warm sun of a Pacific sky, 82 years later, the hero Marine John Basilone ran across the rocky, volcanic ground on Iwo Jima. Twenty-eight, the New Yorker Basilone had received the Medal of Honor for heroism at Guadalcanal in 1942, where he held off a fierce Japanese assault with a machine gun crew for two days.
The Marine Corps had sent him on a celebrity tour stateside, hoping to draw recruits. But he was a soldier, not a celebrity. His men needed him. His country needed him. He pleaded with his superiors to send him back into the fight. After much resistance, they gave in and shipped him to Iwo Jima to fight Imperial Japan.
Completely exposed, Basilone “began guiding the tanks and pointing out targets,” a fellow soldier recalled of Monday, February 19, 1945. “It seemed nothing could touch him.”
Then a mortar shell whistled through the air, landing at Basilone’s feet and those of three others. All four were killed.
Four days later, on Friday, February 23, the U.S. flag was raised atop Mount Suribachi, captured iconically by Joe Rosenthal and made possible by the valor of men like Basilone.
Our history is full of examples, like those above, of Americans who paid the ultimate cost of freedom as John F. Kennedy described—who, despite danger and death, despite the forgetfulness of future generations, chose duty and sacrifice above retreat and shame.
“Each one [is] a link in the chain of honor stretching back to our founding days,” President Joe Biden said at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, May 27, 2024. “Each one bound by common commitment—not to a place, not to a person, not to a President, but to an idea unlike any idea in human history: the idea of the United States of America.
“Because of them, all of them, we stand here today,” he concluded. “We will never forget that. We will never, ever, ever stop working to make a more perfect Union, for which they lived and for which they died. That was their promise. That’s our promise—our promise today to them. That’s our promise always.”