I understood that all these efforts to imbue us with pluck were boot camp for the ultimate virtue—moral courage. Despite his high regard for physical bravery, my father told us that moral courage is the rarer and more valuable commodity. In 1965, he wrote in Life magazine after reaching the summit of Mt. Kennedy that it was not “blind, inexplicable, meaningless courage” that he admired. “It is courage with ability, brains, and tenacity, and purpose. Winston Churchill called this kind of courage ‘the finest of human qualities’ because it is the quality that guarantees all others.”
