Caspar Weinberger was a Harvard College and Harvard Law ('41) grad. A charter member of the greatest generation, he entered the army as a private. He was subsequently commissioned and served in the Pacific with the 41st Infantry Division; by the end of the war, he was serving as an intelligence officer on MacArthur's staff. After the war he entered private practice, but found his true calling in politics and public service. The culmination of his career in public service was of course his tenure as Secretary of Defense from 1981 to 1987, when he helped lay the groundwork for winning the Cold War. When Weinberger died this past March, NRO posted Jay Nordlinger's superb review of Weinberger's autobiography.

Weinberger's last book was published posthumously this past May: Home of the Brave: Honoring the Unsung Heroes in the War on Terror. In a letter Weinberger's coauthor Wynton Hall wrote me about the book, he said: "This book meant everything to Cap. We finished it just weeks before he passed. He knew we'd get slammed by the MSM, but as you know, Cap always loved a good fight." I asked him to elaborate a little about the book in a message for our readers. Both the book and Wynton's message seem especially timely today:

Well, Home of the Brave was Cap’s final battle. And every day that the NY Times exposes our most secret and successful intelligence programs, I’m struck by just how prescient Cap was in foreseeing where the MSM were heading with their coverage of the Global War on Terror. That’s why we spent the final two years of Cap’s life researching and writing Home of the Brave. When you’re 88 years old, a WWII vet who served on General Douglas MacArthur’s Intelligence staff, and helped Ronald Reagan win the Cold War, there’s only one reason left to write a book: you’ve got something dire to say that you believe future generations of Americans must read and remember.

Cap and I wanted to demonstrate just how upside down the MSM’s values have become. So we unearthed and researched the stories of 19 of our most highly decorated soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines fighting the Global War on Terror. What we quickly realized was that there’s a reason the liberal media don’t want to interview these guys and gals and report and inform us about their stories, and that’s because these warriors understand and support the mission; they get it. They don’t believe in moral equivalency like liberals want them to. And so when you read a book like ours that’s chock full of quotes straight from the mouths of the guns in the fight that stand firmly by their Commander in Chief, the mission, and the use of military power to shape the contours of history, you start to see why liberal media have no interest in these stories of hope and heroism and why they relegate them to footnotes, if that.

Whether we pick up Cap’s mantle and carry it forward remains to be seen. But we can’t afford not to. As President George H.W. Bush said in 1989, "Ours would not be the land of the free, if it not also the home of the brave."

With his message Wynton also forward an audio clip of Rush Limbaugh talking about the book in a segment that Rush has granted permission to link.

Our fellow citizens who fought back on United Flight 93 take a special place of honor among those who, like the heroes profiled in Home of the Brave, are keeping us free today. Anthony Giombetta is the husband of one of my colleagues at my day job. Anthony has just coauthored Fighting Back: Living Life Beyond Ourselves with Deena Burnett, the widow of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett. It is a touching and inspirational book.