Today President Obama will commemorate the establishment of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  

It was on October 25, 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating a new federal Cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs effective March 15, 1989.

Prior to its cabinet level stature, VA was formerly called the Veterans Administration, which was established July 21, 1930, to consolidate and coordinate government activities affecting war veterans.

In both its old and new forms, the VA drew its mission statement from an extract of President Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address.

Often associated with Lincoln, Obama will commemorate the Department during very difficult times.  In turbulent times of war and economic crisis like our own in many ways, Lincoln braced the nation for the final throes of the Civil War when thousands of spectators gathered on a muddy Pennsylvania Avenue near the U.S. Capitol to hear President Lincoln's second inaugural address.

With its deep philosophical insights, critics have hailed the speech as one of Lincoln's best.  In the speech's final lines, the president delivered his prescription for the nation's recovery:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all,
with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in,
to bind up the nation’s wounds,
to care for him who shall have borne the battle
and for his widow, and his orphan,
to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

With the words, "To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan," President Lincoln affirmed the government's obligation to care for those injured during the war and to provide for the families of those who perished on the battlefield.

Today, a pair of metal plaques bearing those words flank the entrance to the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). VA is the federal agency responsible for serving the needs of veterans by providing health care, disability compensation and rehabilitation, education assistance, home loans, burial in a national cemetery, and other benefits and services.

 

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