Chris Leppek retired after a 47-year-career with the IJN. Not Jewish, he mastered the intricacies of the Jewish community and earned the trust and admiration of the community’s great, near great and obscure. He embodied the IJN commitment to journalistic excellence. We tendered him a retirement party, at which these remarks were offered. (Leppek is a Civil War buff.)
Two score and seven years ago, our editors brought forth on this region a new journalist, conceived in the Navy, and dedicated to the proposition that all newspapers must be created with high standards.
Now we are engaged in a great journalistic war, testing whether that newspaper or any newspaper so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate an exemplar in that war, as a final “30” for one who gave his career that that newspaper might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this journalistic exemplar, who struggled on this great battlefield of standards and consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget the insightful stories that this journalistic exemplar wrote here. It is for us, the current staff, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished task which this exemplar so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from this honored role model we take increased devotion to that journalistic cause for which he gave his full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these standards shall not die in vain — that this newspaper, under the Constitution, shall have a new birth of integrity — and that journalism of the editors, by the writers, for the readers, shall not perish from the earth.
© IJN 2025
