War & Peace Quote by Neil Sheehan

Sheehan is doing something journalists do at their best: praising without letting praise metastasize into myth. The line starts with a concession that sounds almost devotional - "thank God that they did" - then pivots to the real target: what victory does to a country’s imagination. World War II becomes less a historical event than a permission slip. If the last war was righteous, then war itself can start to feel like a moral instrument rather than a brutal contingency.

The phrasing "our cause was the cause of humanity" is intentionally sweeping, the kind of grand narrative a nation tells itself when it needs coherence after mass death. Sheehan isn’t denying the reality of fascism or the necessity of the fight; he’s flagging the cultural aftertaste. Glory and victory, once banked, become political capital: they lubricate recruiting, sanctify intervention, and make skepticism feel unpatriotic. Romanticization is the soft-focus filter that turns maimed bodies and compromised choices into a story with clean edges.

The context is postwar America sliding into Cold War permanence - a standing military, a booming defense industry, television heroics, and later Vietnam, where Sheehan’s own reporting helped puncture the narrative. The subtext is accusatory but controlled: the problem isn’t that Americans admired soldiers; it’s that we mistook one historically exceptional war for a template. He’s warning that moral clarity is addictive, and that nations, like people, will chase it again even when the next conflict can’t possibly deliver the same absolution.