When I travel with the president of the United States on foreign trips, I will have days when I do not believe that I was actually getting paid for the experience. One was June 6, 2004. President George W. Bush was in Colleville-sur-Mer on the French coast of Normandy, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-day landings.
The ceremony under a clear, blue sky was quite moving (and I was sitting behind Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, of “Saving Private Ryan” fame). I’d rather walk between rows of hard white crosses and some Stars of David on them Normandy American Cemetery. I am alone but for a few Englishmen. One held a clipboard and seemed to direct the others to a specific grave. I watched him, then interrupted.
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. He has decades of experience in the White House and Congress.
It turns out that the old man is from the town where US soldiers lived in 1944 while waiting for orders to cross the English Channel. They have a list of names and grave numbers for American visitors who are long buried in this place. At each grave, they left a cross, 7-by-4 inches, with a red paper poppy pasted above the word “REMEMBER.” He gave me one, which has had a place of honor in my home for 20 years. When I get dusty, I do it with respect.
The small token contains extraordinary symbolism, both of great America – its citizens willing to sacrifice to preserve democracy against tyranny for themselves as well as foreigners – and the gratitude of our allies. In that spirit, but with an interesting difference, I watched it coverage from President Biden’s visit to Normandy to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
Twenty years ago, few if any of us listened to that tribute with a thought democracy represented there, or the alliance that was born from World War II, they are in every way threatened. But now both look almost as fragile as 180 veterans gathered at the cemetery, usually in a wheelchair, bent over and blanketed. The survivor “Pointe du Hoc boy” and other Normandy operations are now centenarians.
In the commemoration of the next decade, the last living connection with the liberation of Europe from Nazism and fascism will surely disappear. But what is the country and the cause of the war? The challenge for all of us is to ensure that they survive.
The challenge is Biden’s theme in him 16-minute speech in Colleville on Saturday. What the United States and its allies did 80 years ago, he said, “is a powerful illustration of how alliances, real alliances, make us stronger — a lesson I pray the American people will never forget.”
The fact that Biden even added a line about forgetting is telling of his insecurities, and ours. The president, who is still an infant on D-Day but has for the past half century been an actor in the US foreign policy debate, knows better than anyone the recent right-wing shift in domestic and global politics, and the growing threat. When he delivered his message Friday in Pointe du Hoc, echoes of Ronald Reagan’s famous speech there 40 years ago put Biden closer to Reagan’s internationalist vision than Reagan’s own party.
In Biden first state of the Union address two years ago, just six days after Russia invaded Ukraine, a US and European ally, he was even more confident: “In the war between democracy and autocracy, democracy has risen so far.” But he has it is almost unsustainable the once-strong US military commitment to the 50-nation coalition supporting Ukraine. He faces “America First” isolationism among Republicans in Congress, who are taking orders from Donald Trump. And he may be defeated in November by the former president.
Biden’s international audience at the American cemetery Thursday clearly showed the uncertainty about the free world, and about the will of the US to continue to lead.
There was applause, in years past that might not have been there, when Biden revealed that after the war, the allies created NATO. Applause seemed surprised; it doesn’t have to be. Subtext: Listeners fear that if Trump is reelected, he will succeed past threats to weaken or abandoned NATO and for support the Russians to do “whatever you want.”
“Isolation was not the answer 80 years ago, and it’s not the answer today,” Biden said to applause. The test case is Ukraine: “We will not leave,” he said. Applause again. But Biden has said it before, and he was almost proven wrong.
The president’s audience is as much at home as it is in front of him on the green expanse of the cemetery: “Let us be the generation that when history is written about our time – in 10, 20, 30, 50, 80 years from now – will say: When the time comes , we meet the moment. … Our alliance is made stronger. And we also save democracy today.
The choice could not be clearer: Biden is seeking re-election against a rival who created the “Make America Great Again” movement, which is authoritarianism at home and a dictator-friendly approach abroad. Trump has no respect — or you — for America’s history of sacrifice and leadership abroad. As president, he canceled visits to American World War I graves in France, grousing for advisor“It’s filled with losers.”
It would have horrified the Englishman I met in Colleville 20 years ago, who would have crossed the Channel to honor an American who did the same and died on foreign soil. Now we must do our small part to honor the sacrifices of past generations, and save democracy.
@jackiekcalmes
