Article March 31, 1986 Issue

SECOND THOUGHT

Looking again at news and commentary

Ronald Reagan

From remarks of U.S. President Ronald Reagan at a National Prayer Breakfast, February 6, 1986

"Last week, when the shuttle exploded, we hadn't, as a nation, had a tragedy like that that we actually witnessed it as it happened. And as I watched the coverage on television, I thought of a poem that came out of a war. And it became literally the creed of America's flyers all over the world. I quoted a line from that poem when I spoke on TV the night of the tragedy. That poem was written by a young man named McGee.*

"He was nineteen years old, a volunteer in the Canadian Air Force. He was an American, but he'd gone there before our country was in the war. He was killed four days after Pearl Harbor, but he left something that does live on—that poem. It says:

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