Word: discerning
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...professional soldiers to discern their role and function with some degree of comfort. For most of the years since World War II, the U.S. and its fighting men have been suspended in a murky, twilit world, where neither war nor peace prevails. World War I, World War II and even Korea were what Colonel Samuel Hayes, head of West Point's Psychology and Leadership Department, calls "Manichaean" conflicts, ringing clashes between good and evil, with no doubt about the identity or nature of the aggressors...
General Eisenhower himself had written the words that will be placed on tablets above his grave: "Give us," he said in a prayer preceding his first inaugural address in 1953, "the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby, and by the laws of this land. Especially we pray that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race or calling. May cooperation be permitted, and be the mutual aim of those who, under the concepts of our Constitution, hold to differing political faiths, so that...
...central convictions of their beings." To critics who argue that the sincerity of such a personal code is too hard to ascertain, Wyzanski tartly replied, "Often it is harder to detect a fraudulent adherent to a religious creed than to recognize a sincere moral protestant. We can all discern Thoreau's integrity more quickly than we might detect some churchman's hypocrisy. The suggestion that courts cannot tell a sincere from an insincere conscientious objector underestimates what the judicial process performs every...
...uncover an enemy's secrets "receive their instructions within the tent of the general and are intimate and close to him." Yet when Richard Nixon becomes Commander in Chief, he will need an extraordinary measure of sagacity, wisdom, humanity and justice-not to mention delicacy and subtlety-to discern the truth in the reports prepared for him by Washington's intelligence operatives. As Inauguration Day approaches, the capital's cloak-and-dagger community is bickering furiously over Viet...
...Moreover, he has vigorously criticized those who wear such labels. "Soft-liners [and] left-wing critics of American foreign policy seem incapable of attacking U.S. actions without elevating our opponent to a pedestal," he wrote in the Brookings Institution's recently published Agenda for the Nation. "If they discern some stupidity or self-interest on our side, they assume that the other side must be virtuous." As for hardliners, he continued, they "follow the same logic in reverse...