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On June 6th, 1944, a fifty-six-year-old brigadier general waded ashore at Utah Beach, walking with a cane.

He was the oldest man in the D-Day invasion, and the only general to land with the first wave at Utah Beach. He was Theodore Roosevelt Jr. — eldest son of the twenty-sixth president, a soldier who had been wounded and gassed in the trenches of the First World War a quarter-century earlier, and who had asked three times for permission to lead the assault before the Army said yes.

The currents at Utah Beach pushed the first landing craft about a mile off course. The men who came ashore looked up to find an unfamiliar shoreline and no clear plan. Roosevelt walked the beach, took his bearings against the landscape, and made a decision: they would attack from where they were. "We'll start the war from right here," he said.

Thirty-six days later, on July 12, 1944, Roosevelt died in his sleep of a heart attack in Normandy. He never made it home. His Medal of Honor was awarded posthumously — for the morning he steadied a beach full of men under fire, on terrain that was not the terrain he had been promised, and decided the war would go forward anyway.

Almost every politician is compromised.

Almost everyone who is not guilty of participating still knew it was happening and did nothing.

No one of consequence will go to jail or face any other repercussions for what they did.

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Imagine standing before King George VI, Winston Churchill, and the entire Allied high command, comprising Field Marshals and 4-star Generals, three weeks before D-Day. You're a 40-year-old, newly minted Major General, and you have to explain the Allied tactical air plan.

That was Maj. Gen. Elwood "Pete" Quesada's reality on May 15, 1944.

Maj. Gen. Lawton "Lightning Joe" Collins: "Pete, how are you going to keep the German Air Force from preventing our landing?"

Pete: "There is not going to be any German Air Force there."

The room snickered.

Winston Churchill: "Ahhhh, young man, how can you be so sure?"

Pete: "Mr. Prime Minister, because we won't let them be there. I am sure of it. There will be no German Air Force over the Normandy invasion area."

Pete wasn't bluffing.

On June 6, 1944, Allied tactical air power completely locked down the skies. The Allies fielded roughly 10,000 aircraft and flew more than 14,000 sorties to the Germans' roughly 300, securing the overwhelming air superiority that made the invasion possible.

Talk about calling your shot and backing it up.