Photo of the Day

A badge of honor.

For a long time, it was customary for the valedictorian of West Point’s graduating class to be commissioned into the US Army Corps of Engineers.

MacArthur in 1905, two years after his West Point graduation.

And so it was that Douglas MacArthur, the top-ranking cadet of the West Point class of 1903, became an Army engineer, a job he’d fill for the first fourteen years of his Army career.

Douglas MacArthur, in curls on the left, with his family, late 1880s. A third child had died of measles in 1883.

As a graduation present, MacArthur’s family presented him with two 14-carat gold pins in the shape of a castle, the West Point logo.

The pin on the left is shown with its back facing the camera to reveal MacArthur’s initials.

MacArthur wore these pins as a young engineering officer.

Brigade Commander Douglas MacArthur near St. Juvin, France, November 3, 1918.

And he carried the gold pins with him for more than forty years, as military assignments took him all over the globe.

Left: MacArthur, then West Point superintendent, escorts Edward, the Prince of Wales, on a campus tour, 1925. Right: Statue of MacArthur on the West Point grounds.

But, in 1945, he gave the pins to Gen. Leif Sverdrup, a trained civil engineer who had served as chief engineer on MacArthur’s staff in the Southwest Pacific during World War II.

It is said that MacArthur felt Sverdrup was more deserving to wear them.

MacArthur in the Philippines near the end of WWII. He served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific during the war.

Thirty years later, Sverdrup presented them to the man who then served as Chief Engineer.

And a tradition was born.

Lieutenant General Scott A. Spellmon, the current Chief of Engineers and Commanding General of the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

Every Chief of Engineers now wears MacArthur's pins, including the man who currently serves in that capacity.

MacArthur presided over the Japanese surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, and then became the administrator of occupied postwar Japan.

MacArthur’s pins are a coveted symbol of his life of dedicated public service and are said to embody the spirit of the engineer regiment.

New York gives MacArthur a ticker tape parade, April 20, 1951, after President Truman relieved him of duty.

Yes, this a small story.

But it illustrates the role of honor and tradition in the lives of faithful public servants.

MacArthur meets with President Kennedy, August 16, 1962. They would meet on three occasions, as Kennedy sought advice on Vietnam.

Honor and tradition are guiding beacons in times of moral and political uncertainty.

They pierce through chaos.

A dishonorable man would never understand this.

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda