The 60th anniversary of D-Day promises moments of unique poignancy. By 2014, so it is generally understood, the ranks will be too thin and the survivors too frail for the veterans of 1944 to muster in France again. So this weekend will mark the last rallying of the liberators. And that means that never again will the leaders of the Western nations travel to the Normandy beaches to address them.
Please, let it be so. In saying this, I mean not one jot of disrespect for the fallen or their comrades. No, it's the commemoration -- not what it commemorates -- that is the problem. For, with the benefit of hindsight, the 50th anniversary celebrations of D-Day in 1994 were a well-intentioned disaster that has not done the world many favors.
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It would be unfair to place the entire responsibility on the shoulders of former US president Bill Clinton. But there is no disputing that Clinton's role 10 years ago epitomized the hubris of that moment. He came to Europe in 1994 with his ratings plummeting and his domestic agenda in tatters. He badly needed a public relations coup on the world stage.
With the help of some brilliant speechwriters, he seized his moment on the Normandy beaches.
At every turn on that June 1994 trip -- during which he met British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the first time -- Clinton explained that he had come to honor the generation that had made the modern world possible. He spoke, he said, for "the sons and daughters of the world they saved."
Addressing veterans in Italy, he told them: "We are the children of your sacrifice." On June 6 itself, Clinton's eloquence reached new heights, as he hymned "the fathers we never knew, the uncles we never met, the friends who never returned, the heroes we can never repay."
Other presidents had spoken with great power on similar occasions -- Dwight Eisenhower on Omaha beach in 1964, for instance. But Eisenhower spoke in the midst of the Cold War, which necessarily limited the universality of his message. Thirty years later, things were different. With the Cold War won, Clinton could address the world with unique authority, as leader of the sole unchallenged superpower.
He rose to the occasion, giving poetic voice to a heroic myth about the benevolence of American power.
Clinton's visit to Normandy was a culminating moment in the propagation of a major truth -- that the US-led invasion of France had indeed secured the freedom, peace and prosperity of Western Europe for half a century. But it was also the catalyst for an unprecedented celebration of that myth. Over the next five years the symbolism of the Normandy beaches was to reach parts of the American psyche that no modern event could rival.
The process was largely conjured by the work of three men -- Steven Spielberg, Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose. Across much of the world, it was Spielberg's movie Saving Private Ryan and his made-for-television series Band of Brothers (derived from an Ambrose book) that reached most hearts and minds, creating Homeric epics of the moral heroism of the GIs of 1944.
In the US, Brokaw's book was still more influential. Conceiving his project in an epiphany while in Normandy for NBC in 1984, Brokaw gave it a title which says it all -- The Greatest Generation. The book bestrode the US bestsellers for almost all of 1998 -- the year, not entirely irrelevantly to a nation in search of reassurance, when Clinton was under siege over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Of the three, though, it was Ambrose who was the most essential figure. The biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon was a guy's guy, but he was also a populist Democrat -- imagine Kevin Costner as a university professor and you get quite close. D-Day was his lifetime obsession -- it is due to Ambrose that the US National D-Day Museum is located in New Orleans, where he taught.
Through a succession of books, Ambrose honed his D-Day myth into an image of compelling potency. In the dawn of June 6, he argued, the world's future turned upon whether a generation of 18- to 28-year-olds who grew up in middle America's depression years would fight their way up the beaches against the firepower of the Wehrmacht.
"When the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought," Ambrose wrote. "They were the men of D-Day, and to them we owe our freedom."
And the truth is, of course, that we do. That's why the story of the men of D-Day is so potent. It is also why it has proved so difficult to live with, and live up to, for those whom Clinton described as the children of their sacrifice.
This brings us irresistibly to the way the world of 2004 sees D-Day. The world of the war against terror is one where the US, like most Western nations, is governed by the children of the mythologized Greatest Generation. "Millions of us are proud to call them Dad," was how US President George W. Bush put it on Saturday when he dedicated the World War II memorial in Washington. And while it would be silly to reduce everything about the war on terror to some baby-boomer Oedipal anxiety, it is beyond doubt that the rhetoric -- and therefore to some extent the assumptions -- of the war on terror bear the imprint of the Ambrosian mythology of the Normandy beaches.
You don't have to look far in the post-Sept. 11 speeches of Bush, for instance, to find him declaring that "another great generation" has been called into action, this time by the acts of Osama bin Laden. The identification is everywhere and very explicit.
"A great mission has been given to a new generation -- our generation -- and we vow not to let America down," was how he put it days after the attacks on New York and Washington. "Today, freedom faces new enemies, and a new generation of Americans has stepped forward to defeat them," as he told the nation in his weekly radio address last week.
In a sense, Bush is right. But the US, like Britain, has mythologized its own version of World War II. Both nations have internalized their own myths to such an extent that they now have to make a determined effort not to see the modern world through a false glass. In spite of our 1940 myth, Britain does not stand today alone against Europe. In spite of its 1944 myth, the US is neither the world's only hope of freedom nor seen as such by other nations.
This weekend, a wartime president will stand where a peacetime president stood a decade ago. Perhaps he will rise to a little humility in the face of 80-year-olds who learned the hard way what war is and what it is not. But don't count on it. Bush is unlikely to ask the veterans what they did right and what he did wrong. More probable, as historian Simon Schama put it last week, is that the man who has waged a really bad war will again eagerly invoke the reassurance of the Good War. It is absolutely the wrong lesson. Personally, I'll just be glad when this weekend is over.
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