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Congressional Daily Record
This section covers nominations, confirmations, or other executive branch business. It mentions members such as John F. Reed.
Official title: U.S. Military (Executive Session)
Issued
June 17, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextbeen the trust of the American people. Their trust is hard won and relies upon the belief that our military remains above politics. I fear that trust is being eroded by the current Secretary of Defense.
I want to begin with Dwight Eisenhower. This month marks the 82nd anniversary of D-Day and the American invasion at Normandy. General Eisenhower spent the night before those landings walking among the men he was sending into battle, asking where they were from, what they did back home, and how were their families.
He wrote two messages after that meeting. The rallying call for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force was one of those messages, but a second message—a message he had hoped no one would ever read—was written in case the landings failed.
It read:
If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine
alone.
understood that the privilege of command carried the full weight of its consequences.
In 1947, Eisenhower addressed the graduating class at West Point. He had just finished commanding the largest military campaign in human history and witnessed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Americans. He knew what war was, and this is what he told the cadets:
War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly . . .
himself—again stood at West Point and said:
[T]he soldier, above all other people, prays for peace . .
.
anniversary. He stood at the American cemetery above the beaches where more than 2,500 Americans died in a single morning. Standing on that sacred historic site, Secretary Hegseth did not use his platform to express humility or unity, but to preach an anti-immigrant message. He said:
Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by
different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy,
in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will
European capitals do something about that invasion?
speech grotesque. I would call it a desecration and an ignorant one also.
300,000 foreign-born individuals served in the U.S. Army alone. More than 109,000 of them were not even American citizens. They were men and women who crossed an ocean to fight and die for a country that had not yet fully claimed them and earned their citizenship through their service.
children of immigrants. For example, U.S. Navy coxswain Amin Isbir, the son of Syrian immigrants who settled in Pittsburgh, was among the first men off his landing craft when it reached Omaha Beach under heavy fire. After securing his landing craft on the beach, he was killed by a German shell while helping load a fellow wounded soldier onto a stretcher.
the sons and daughters of immigrants or immigrants themselves. Yet Secretary Hegseth stood above their graves and used the moment to deride the kind of people they were.
Point cadets at their commencement. Where Eisenhower and McArthur spoke of wisdom, humility, and caution, Pete Hegseth boasted about lethality, claimed that West Point had turned into “woke Princeton” and made such bluster as “you can't throw your pronouns at the enemy.”
the