Walter F. Murphy, a Hero of War, and of Scholarship

Adria and I traveled to Washington the night before last so that we could make it to the Administration Building of Arlington National Cemetery by 8:30 a.m. yesterday morning for the interment of the ashes of our friend Col. Walter F. Murphy, USMC ret.  As any of you who have visited Arlington will recognize, the Cemetery is an awesome place, with its row upon row of identical white grave stones.  We had visited a few years before for the interment of Walter’s first wife, Terry—spouses of veterans are entitled to be buried with them.  But Terry had not been a member of the armed forces, and we were not prepared for the stunning impact of a burial with full military honors.

We gathered at the Administration Building with Walter’s second wife, Doris, a childhood sweetheart from Charleston, S.C. who lovingly saw him through his last illness, a small number of public law colleagues, and several of his closest Marine buddies.  At 9 a.m. we drove a short distance to a gathering point at which Walter’s urn and an American flag folded into a neat and compact triangle were transferred to the honor guard. It was a breathtaking sight.  The Marines in the guard were clad in parade dress, all blue and white, and there must have been 75 of them, each carrying his rifle.  There was also a large Marine band, wearing brilliant red jackets. 

The honor guard flanked a horse-drawn caisson, on which there was a flag-draped coffin.  And following the caisson was a riderless horse, empty boots turned backward in the stirrups.  Two marines took Walter’s ashes and the folded flag and placed them into a receptacle at the rear of the coffin.  The band played two hymns, and we proceeded to the columbarium for a brief Roman Catholic burial service.  The choreography was meticulous.   Six Marines unfolded, held, and refolded the flag over Walter’s ashes during the service.  Three officers, a colonel, a major, and a gunnery sergeant, presented the flag to Doris and spoke privately to her.  Seven riflemen fired three times each.  A bugler played “Taps.”  The band played another hymn, and then as we walked to the columbarium to place Walter’s ashes in their final resting place, the band played the Marine hymn in half-time, and in a minor key.  It was one of the most amazing and moving scenes I have ever witnessed—and I had a hard time putting myself in the place of Walter’s former comrades, who must have been imagining their own final visits to Arlington.

As many readers will know, Prof. Walter Murphy was one of the leading constitutional scholars in the United States.  He was one of the founders of the field of comparative constitutional law, and he was one of the leading experts in the field of constitutional interpretation.  Walter was the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence for 37 years—and this is perhaps Princeton’s most hallowed chair, previously held by Woodrow Wilson, Edward S. Corwin, and Alpheus Thomas Mason.  Walter’s course in Constitutional Interpretation was probably the best-known undergraduate course in our college, implicitly required of any student thinking about a career in law, or any student willing to subject himself to the most rigorous academic humanities challenge the college provided.  He was a great scholar and teacher.  And he was a particularly close friend and professional colleague of mine.

But of course that is not why he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.  Walter was a war hero.  A genuine war hero.  He joined the U.S. Marine Corps shortly after graduating from the University of Notre Dame, and shortly after completing basic training his unit was rushed to Korea. 

There, on June 10, 1951 he led his platoon up one of the three peaks of Hill 676.  The peaks were strongly fortified by North Korean troops, so that Walter had to lead his men straight into enemy fortifications.  They came under heavy rifle and machine gun fire, and suffered a large number of deaths and casualties — one particularly brave Marine dashed into the open to take out the remaining North Korean machine gun nest with a grenade.  Walter and his comrades had to dodge grenades that the enemy rolled down the slope into their midst. He later wrote that “Another grenade landed a few feet in front of me and slowly, very slowly, rolled between my legs.  I prayed it farther down the slope, where it blew up.  I remember thinking ‘You don’t have to know Sigmund Freud to be terrified by that.’” 

They took the hill with a final bayonet charge, but only 14 members of the platoon survived the battle.  The Marine who sacrificed himself to destroy the enemy machine gun received the Medal of Honor.  Walter received the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery on Hill 676.  One of his non-coms later said “We’d storm the gates of hell if Mr. Murph would lead us.”  You can read a moving account of this battle in a fine book written by John Nolan, one of Walter’s closest Marine buddies:  The Run-Up to the Punch Bowl:  A Memoir of the Korean War, 1951 or in an only slightly fictionalized account in Walter’s The Vicar of Christ (Macmillan, 1979).  Yes, Walter was a successful novelist, too!

Walter Murphy thus richly deserved the respect he so fully received yesterday in Washington.  But of course it was impossible, in Arlington, not to think of those Americans who were not so lucky as Walter.  According to the official funeral schedule, there were 29 burials at Arlington yesterday, 18 for service men and one for a service woman, and 10 for spouses.  As we drove away from the columbarium, we passed two funerals, one Navy and one Army.  How many of those were for military personnel just killed in action?  If you look at the interactive site hosted by the New York Times, you can see the names and faces of service men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

These wars are of course very different from “Murph’s War,” in which men fought in units in specific battles. But IED’s kill just as surely as machine guns. There seems to be no end in sight to our current wars.  But since there is no longer a draft, many of us do not know the men and women engaged in battle.

I was forcibly reminded of my own remoteness from war when Adria and I took a driving trip to New England recently.  When we stopped at a roadside deli for lunch, we encountered a large back limo depositing a small group of formally dressed older people, one woman clutching a folded, triangular flag.  We could only assume that she was coming from the funeral of her son or daughter.  Later, we stayed for the night in Ipswich, Massachusetts and I went for an early morning walk, passing two houses displaying gold stars in their windows.  There are no gold stars in my neighborhood.

Most of us do not know our nation’s heroes.  But there are heroes, and we should do our best to recognize them.  It was my privilege to have had a hero as a friend for the past 30 years.  I miss you, Murph.  And I grieve for all the heroes.

Funeral photos by Judith S. Rivkin; portrait at The New York Times