On This Date

Introduction

Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana is known for expressing a sentiment that has become a cliché: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This quote is accurate—it comes from his book The Life of Reason—but he was not only making a negative point. The passage begins with an upbeat expression of the same idea. "Progress," he wrote, "far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness."

I would add to that sentiment an idea expressed by author David McCullough. Speaking at the 2003 Jefferson Lecture at the National Academy for the Humanities, McCullough defended historical books written for the mass public, and not just other academics.

"No harm is done to history," he said, "by making it something someone would want to read."

This admonition was somewhat self-serving, in that David McCullough has a gift for writing books that millions of people want to read. But his point is right. The approach used in this book, taking a digestible event from any given day—366 given days—was done with that in mind. The format comes out of a newsletter I send to some nineteen thousand subscribers five mornings a week in my capacity as Washington bureau chief and executive editor of RealClearPolitics.

Our online news site, devoted to politics and government, is assiduously nonpartisan. I'm aware that most journalists say similar things, and that for too many their work belies that claim. But at RCP our very business model depends on not taking sides in the great national argument between Republicans and Democrats—and Independents. In any event, I'm nonpartisan naturally, as the contents of this work will demonstrate.

Yet, it would be facile to claim that no guiding principles about America's place in the world inform this work. Many loyal readers of my "Morning Note" are already familiar with my underlying approach to writing about American history. I believe they can be distilled in a couple of sentences. The first is that notwithstanding the degraded condition of our dysfunctional, rude, hair-on-fire politics—and not minimizing the violence roiling the globe—through the years Americans have lived through similarly trying times, often facing even graver challenges.

My second point, which flows naturally from the first, is that we have usually prevailed. When we didn't prevail, we muddled through. Often, though not always, we learned something along the way. In researching this book, I stumbled across supporting evidence for this attitude in a 1921 essay by a Washington newspaperman and magazine writer named Edward G. Lowry. Well-known in his day and utterly forgotten now, Lowry helped popularize the famously taciturn nature of then vice president Calvin Coolidge. Lowry dubbed Coolidge the "Foster-Child of Silence," writing in one essay that the vice president was "a politician who does not, who will not, and who seemingly cannot talk."

The essay that caught my eye, however, was one in which he writes about how political life in Washington "proceeds from one crisis to another." He continued:

My first book, The Pursuit of Happiness in Times of War, was an examination of how American presidents and other national leaders employ the language in the Declaration of Independence to rally their countrymen in times of war or national peril. It was published after September 11, 2001, about the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and landed me on C-SPAN's Booknotes program, hosted by C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb. Brian is the rare on-air host who reads a book before interviewing its author. This is not always good for the writer. Brian noted during our interview that as far as he could tell, I didn't have a bad word to say about any U.S. president. There was an answer to this observation, but I didn't give it.

"You'll notice that Richard Nixon's not in it," I quipped.

This was supposed to be a laugh line, except that Brian Lamb—who is disinclined to indulge his guests by playing the straight man—barely cracked a smile. In time, I came to see that there was something else wrong with my jibe: It was a cheap shot. To atone, Nixon is mentioned in this book. I'll do it right now, because on April 13, 1972, he said something pertinent to this project. Speaking in Ottawa at a formal dinner hosted by the Canadian president, President Nixon told a self-deprecating story about playing golf in Canada when he was vice president and how their group went to a pub afterward without changing clothes—and without the presence of Secret Service agents.

"We went in and sat down," Nixon recalled. "The waiter looked us all over, and some way he seemed to think he recognized me, but he wasn't sure."

"After we had finished—he was a very polite waiter—and were ready to leave, the waiter came up and said, 'Sir, if you don't mind, I have a bet with the bartender, and you can help me win it or I might lose it.'

"What is the bet?" Nixon asked.

"I bet him five dollars that you are Vice President Nixon."

"Well, call him over and we will confirm it," Nixon recalled.

The bartender paid the bet, but as Nixon left the pub, the bartender mumbled to the waiter, "You know, he doesn't look near as bad in person as he does in his pictures."

Richard Milhous Nixon, speaking two years before he would resign from office to avoid impeachment, then summed up the moral of his vignette. "Maybe none of us look quite as bad in person as we may in our pictures," he said. "We must never miss the opportunity to see each other in person, to discuss our differences."

These are words to live by, especially in today's politically divided America where the election returns that don't go our way prompt rival inauguration weekend parades and #NotMyPresident campaigns on social media. Anyway, Nixon also told his audience about speaking in Guildhall in London in 1958 and how the most eloquent speech, and the briefest one, ever made in that storied venue had been delivered by a British prime minister 150 years earlier.

After Lord Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, William Pitt the Younger was toasted at a banquet in his honor as the savior of Europe. He rose to respond, answering in these words: "I return you many thanks for the honor you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example."

Nixon, speaking without notes, had the quote almost exactly right. This is also a timely sentiment, in the wake of Britain's election to part with its Continental neighbors. It's timeless, too. When Germany fell on May 8, 1945, Winston Churchill stood on the balcony of a government building overlooking Whitehall and told the huge crowd serenading him below, "God Bless you all. This is your victory."

"No," roared back the adoring crowd, "it is yours!"

It was Churchill who had it right. To extrapolate to the United States of America, certainly our nation has been served in its time of utmost need by marvelous men and wonderful women, but mostly, it was built by all of us, one day and one deed, at a time—and not only by the "Greatest Generation."

Speaking of that dwindling cohort, just before the sixtieth anniversary of the 1944 Normandy invasion, I visited Pointe du Hoc, where the U.S. Army Second Ranger Battalion used ropes and knives to scale the cliffs on D-Day. The Rangers' bravery has been immortalized in forums ranging from a 1962 movie classic starring John Wayne called The Longest Day to a stirring June 6, 1984, speech at Normandy by onetime Hollywood leading man Ronald Reagan.

"Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs—and before me are the men who put them there," President Reagan said while looking upon the aging citizen-soldiers who'd returned to the site of their former glory.

"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc," Reagan added. "These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. And these are the heroes who helped end a war."

The Americans and their Allies were not the only fighting men at Normandy on D-Day. Those foreboding cliffs were defended that day by the Wehrmacht's 352nd Infantry Division, a veteran-studded force under the overall command of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In The Longest Day, an officer named Werner Pluskat is the first German soldier to spot the huge American and British armada as it appears out of the dawn mists. He frantically calls headquarters on the field phone from his concrete bunker as it's being shelled.

"You know those five thousand ships you say the Allies haven't got?" he yells into the phone. "Well, they've got them!"

The real-life Major Pluskat may or may not have been on the beach that morning. Some of his men later claimed he was carousing in Caen the night before and slept late. But Pluskat survived the war and was a paid consultant to Daryl Zanuck and Cornelius Ryan on The Longest Day, so in the film version he is not only there, and sober, but in full uniform with his faithful German shepherd by his side when the Allied invasion commences. Some of Normandy's concrete bunkers still stand; while a White House correspondent I went to see them in advance of President George W. Bush's 2004 visit. When I arrived, a German family was inside the structure looking around. Recognizing me as an American, the father, a middle-aged man my own age, became agitated.

"Lass uns gehen," he said to his wife. Let's leave.

She seemed unsure, as did their children. I had smiled at them, and certainly had not been unfriendly.

"Hinausgehen!" he told his family with more urgency. Go out. And they did.

The encounter was slightly unsettling. It was the flip side of the warmth bestowed on me six decades after the invasion by appreciative French residents in the coastal Normandy towns of Colleville-sur-Mer and Sainte-Mère-Église. Although I appreciated pro-U.S. sentiment—especially coming from people who had so much to be thankful for—I hadn't personally done anything to merit their gratitude, any more than the German man who felt embarrassed by my presence in the bunker had done anything to feel shame. When I hiked up the bluff from Omaha Beach to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, no enemy machine guns fired away at me. Quite the contrary: Old men in their berets deferentially stepped off the footpath to let me pass.

"Américain," one Frenchman told his grandson as I walked by. The little boy saluted me.

John McCain once wrote that he learned to love his country—truly love his country—while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. I think I know what he means. I had always been proud to be American, but hadn't really done anything to merit that pride. United States citizenship was conveyed on me at birth, a gift from the cosmos, on account of being born in San Francisco to American-born parents. Not an accomplishment; an act of good fortune.

After my visit to Normandy, I began to see this happy accident as an obligation. To do what? Pay my taxes, and be thankful for the opportunities this country has given me and my family? To exhibit a welcoming attitude toward immigrants? To vote, and recycle, and volunteer, and make charitable donations? Sure, all of that.

But I also felt called do my part by aiding in the task of telling America's story—to ourselves, and the rest of the world. This book is an effort to fulfill that duty. It tells individual stories, one day at time, a snapshot of an event or person that I hope will flesh out a constantly changing marvel that a friend of mine once dubbed "the American Identity."

Carl M. Cannon
Arlington, Virginia
July 4, 2017