The story starts with her father getting honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in the fall of 1945, expecting never to hear from that institution again. The economy faced significant disruption as military activity wound down and millions of veterans searched for work amid the uncertainty. (After the war my own father, a chemical engineer, finally found work as an insurance actuary.)
Ms. Corrigan:
And how special he must have felt in late December of 1945, when a letter [http://www.npr.org/assets/img/2013/05/28/corrigan- letter_archive.jpg] from Washington, D.C., came for him at his sister's house in Llanerch Hills, Pa. My father was living with his sister and her family because, by then, both of his parents had died. The letter, signed in fountain pen, was from the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. It began:
My dear Mr. Corrigan:I have addressed this letter to reach you after all the formalities of your separation from active service are completed. I have done so because, without formality but as clearly as I know how to say it, I want the Navy's pride in you, which it is my privilege to express, to reach into your civil life and to remain with you always.
...
The beauty of the letter's opening paragraph literally took my breath away.
Those words took my breath away too, not because they are eloquent, although they are, but because someone - Forrestal, or perhaps the Second Assistant to the Undersecretary of Naval Whatever - thought to send such a letter. If every veteran WWII U.S. sailor received one in that pre-computer, pre-xerox age, as apparently was the case, this was a massive endeavor; at its WWII peak the U.S. Navy had 3,405,525 active duty sailors.
Eloquence emanates from the idea behind the words, not the words themselves. In Gettysburg, the power of Lincoln's words derive from surprise. A whole bunch of people had assembled there to do something; Lincoln said that they couldn't do what they had set out to do, and that they should do something else instead.
Forrestal can't hold a candle to Lincoln, not least because the fate of the nation did not hang in the balance. Nevertheless his eloquence also comes from an idea: to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the timing is the message. The letter needed to be civilian-to-civilian, therefore the timing was critical, indeed so critical that timing becomes the very focus of the letter.
