Arlen Specter: “Today, Veterans Day, we honor America's veterans. It is to serve as 85 years of recognition after armistice was declared…”

“Today, Veterans Day, we honor America's veterans. It is to serve as 85 years of recognition after armistice was declared on November 11, at 11 a.m., in 1918. We pay tribute to our veterans today, but I suggest to my colleagues and fellow Americans we ought to pay more tribute to veterans every day. The first veteran I knew was my father, Harry Specter, who was a veteran of World War I. My father had come to the United States as an immigrant, at the age of 18, in 1911. The Czar in control of Russia at the time wanted to send my father, among many others, to Siberia. My father chose instead to come to America. He literally walked across Europe, barely a ruble in his pocket, and traveled at the bottom of the boat to the United States to make a new life for himself. He did not know at that time that he had a round-trip ticket to France, not to Paris and the Folies Bergeres with the dancing girls, but to the Argonne Forest where he was wounded in action. My father carried shrapnel in his legs until the day he died. The U.S. Government promised the veterans of World War I a $500 bonus and, as has been the case so frequently with the U.S. Government, the promise was broken. The veterans then mounted a march on Washington in 1932 to seek redress, exercising their constitutional right to petition their Government, and also in petitioning their Government, to have the Government fulfill the promise the Government had made to pay the veterans a $500 bonus.”