President Dwight D. Eisenhower signing HR7786 June 1, 1954, changing Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
-- Walt Whitman
("Reconciliation" by Walt Whitman appears in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Ed. David Lehman, Oxford University Press, 2006)
-- sdh
