Obama's Insensitive Hiroshima Gesture

Some 25 years ago I was asked to speak at a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the death of the famous war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, who had been killed by a Japanese sniper on a small island off Okinawa in the last days of World War II. The memorial was held in the Punch Bowl, the national military cemetery overlooking Honolulu.

It was a mid-morning affair that attracted more than a thousand spectators, most of them veterans of the bloody campaigns in the Pacific from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima and Okinawa ― all of them "Ernie's boys.'' In the mist and sunshine of a glorious Hawaii morning with the weathered faces of America's best generation surrounding me in campaign hats and medals, it was one of the most humbling experiences I have ever had.