By Jerome A. Cohen
For several hours I have unsuccessfully tried to resist sending out a message about today’s significance in modern memory. I was playing basketball in the backyard with a friend when the news came by radio from Honolulu. Since then the world has witnessed many wars, three major conflicts in East Asia alone. While scholars have long debated the origins and lessons of World War I, we in America also especially focus on the causes of World War II and the subsequent conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Today is an appropriate time to renew our efforts to avoid yet another conflict, one that might well inflict more serious harm to mankind than even history’s most tragic precedents. I suppose we all recognize the importance of current discussions. Yet this seems a good time to recall the statement often attributed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., that we need education in the obvious more than vindication of the obscure.