The Time of Our Lives (3 page)

QUESTION:
A hundred years from now, what will be our indelible and measureable legacy? What will our grandchildren say of us? Of our country? Historians will not judge our time by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or the Tea Party alone. We’re all in the dock.

T
his book really began when I found myself at the intersection of history and my life while on assignment in Europe. It was June 5, 2009, a cloudy day with intermittent rain showers, and I was standing on the terrace of the Royal Palace in Dresden, Germany, awaiting the arrival of the young president of the United States, Barack Obama, for a
Today
show and
Nightly News
interview.

Mentally, I reviewed the loose ends of my appointment: What should I ask about his upcoming visit to the notorious Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald? How would he compare his challenges as president with those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression and World War II? What did he plan for his speech the next morning, at the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion?

In several personal trips to that stretch of Norman beach and the windblown headlands, on solitary walks through the simple white headstones at Colleville-sur-Mer, the American cemetery where so many young Americans are buried, I have come to see the invasion as what should have been a template for our modern world. It represented political cooperation and vision; military genius; and courage, sacrifice, and shared determination to defeat a great unambiguous evil. It was a distillation of all the heroic efforts to roll back the darkness of fascism and make the world, if not perfect, then more just.

Now I was with a young American president who would face his own tests of vision, courage, and political acumen in the twenty-first century. For the moment my more prosaic considerations were dictated by the imperatives of broadcast news. Was the
Today
show ready to take in the video feed, edit the interview, and get it in shape for that morning’s telecast? Given the subject and the setting, these are the occasions when great thoughts should prevail, but they would have to be deferred until the logistics were satisfied.

President Obama arrived right on schedule, surrounded by his posse of top aides. He strolled with his easy athletic gait along the walkway of the magnificent Baroque building, past the priceless porcelain vases collected by Saxony kings, and gave me a soft shout-out. “Hey, Brokaw—we’re here.”

THE PAST

This was in the early months of his first term and he was casually confident, as yet untested and, oh, so young. He had just arrived from Cairo, where he had given a well-received speech to the Islamic world on the need to find a more peaceful path to the future. I had just come from Berlin, where, I told him, I had been the night the wall came down in 1989. He laughed and said, “I remember; I watched. I was in law school at the time.”

What?

Law school? And you’re now the president? I was about to be fifty when the Soviet Union collapsed; it was just yesterday in my life, and he was at Harvard, a student with a promising but unresolved future.

After a moment or two of casual banter the president took his place and with his characteristic ease responded to questions about the Holocaust, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel, his great-uncle’s experience in World War II, and the moral character of the American people.

That character, he suggested, has to be refreshed. “The biggest lesson we learned from World War II,” he said, “is America can do anything when it puts its mind to it, but we gotta exercise those muscles.”

He went on, “I think they’ve atrophied a bit. We’re soft in ways that are profoundly dangerous to our long-term prosperity and security.” Here he hesitated slightly. “And, you know, we—we’ve gotta start working those—moral muscles and service muscles and sacrifice muscles a little more. That’s still in the American character, and I’m confident we’ll be seeing it in the years to come.”

As he was leaving, I suggested he try to find a solitary moment the next day when he would be in Colleville-sur-Mer, the American cemetery on a bluff above Omaha Beach. “Walk through those headstones with just your thoughts,” I said, “and be prepared to have your knees buckle.”

As I have learned in more than a half-dozen visits to that landscape of simple white tombstones, the initial response of first-time visitors to the American cemetery, and the beaches, is often tearful, but I was confident such a walk would generate more than an emotional reaction for the president.

The lingering lesson of Omaha Beach is the deeply affecting value of common cause supported by uncommon valor against monstrous tyranny. It is a lesson that need not be reserved for great wars alone.

Since my first visits to Normandy, Pearl Harbor, and other World War II battle sites, I’ve often been unduly agitated by petty feuds or tempted to abandon vexing problems that require more personal investment than I anticipated. Then I imagine being strafed in a surprise attack or wading off a Higgins boat into the face of withering fire and knowing that if I survive it is just the beginning of another year of hellish combat, lost buddies, and horrific sights. It is a useful perspective and, judging from the personal accounts of strangers who have approached me over the years to describe their visits to Normandy, it is a common reaction.

In Dresden, the cloudy skies brightened and I took my place for the
Today
show transmission, which went smoothly.

I’ve been in this line of work for almost half a century and while a presidential interview is always memorable, the following day you’re off to another development, in pursuit of another news maker, asking, “What’s next?”

This time, however, the occasion, setting, circumstances, and subjects lingered. I wondered how this young president and all of us would be tested anew. The answers came swiftly enough, especially for President Obama. Following a triumphant tour, the president returned home to the realities of a severely broken American economy—one so shattered it had ignited a national dialogue about values and proportion, greed and appropriate reward, and the role of the government in the marketplace.

Unemployment rose from 8.1 percent in March 2009 to a persistent 9.6 percent in the summer and fall of 2010 and then to 9.8 just before the midterm elections. That number didn’t reflect those off the statistical grid who had given up looking for work. Confidence in the young president and his team drawn largely from the academic and political worlds plummeted heading into November.

President Obama was vilified as a socialist out to destroy the country, and questions were raised about his birthplace, despite a newspaper account and evidence from the state of Hawaii that, in fact, he was born in that state on August 4, 1961.

A national libertarian movement called the Tea Party arose out of a rage against government spending, anxiety about the economy, and the perceived distance between the priorities of Washington and those of grassroots America.

The president’s failure to aggressively attack unemployment and his concentration instead on a massive and complex health care reform law troubled even his most ardent supporters. By the fall, national polls showed that by a margin of four to one, likely voters felt their personal finances were worse off in the last few years.

The president and his team responded by relying on the power of personality, sending Obama into the heartland for backyard sessions with “just folks” and into large rallies with the party faithful.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party derided a federal stimulus program, reform of the big financial institutions, and an auto industry rescue as more examples of government run amok. In fits and starts Obama tried to find his voice as a populist and then as a healer, but the troubled economy resisted his charms and policies.

Nothing worked.

In the November 2010 congressional elections, the president, in his own word, took a “shellacking.” Democrats lost sixty-three seats in the House, dropping to their lowest level in that chamber since 1940. They barely hung onto the Senate, encouraging Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to immediately announce his goal was to deny President Obama a second term.

THE PRESENT

More unexpected dramatic and consequential change was just over the horizon in a part of the world where America remained deeply involved in the longest wars in its history—in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by extension Pakistan.

The president, the CIA, and the U.S. military gave the world a startling and welcome May Day 2011 surprise. They ordered a nighttime raid deep into Pakistan to attack a fortified compound in a bucolic residential area where they suspected Osama bin Laden was living.

The president made the call to proceed with the high-risk mission. A Navy SEAL team helicoptered across Pakistan from Afghanistan on a Sunday to make the strike, and it was brilliantly executed. Osama bin Laden, the number one terrorist in the world, was killed in the raid. No Americans were wounded or lost.

President Obama’s credibility as a leader, a cool and courageous commander in chief, soared briefly just at a time when the country was expressing deep doubts about those qualities for his management of the economy and his reaction to earlier, unexpected developments in the Middle East.

The administration and most of the world had been caught off guard by events that profoundly reordered the political and physical landscape of the region. When a Tunisian fruit vendor committed suicide by setting himself on fire to protest his homeland’s autocratic and corrupt government, news of his desperate act spread across the Islamic world, including Egypt, the most populous of the Middle Eastern countries and a close ally of the United States.

Demonstrators took over Cairo’s central city, demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruthlessly ruled his country for more than thirty years, mocking Egypt’s constitutional guarantees of free elections.

In the opening days of the uprising, the Obama administration steered an uncertain course, publicly calling for its ally Mubarak to leave immediately and privately pleading with him to institute a succession plan that would play out over several months.

Finally, Mubarak, pushed by his own military, stepped down. Demands for democracy and more economic opportunity spread throughout the region. It was the beginning of a new era in the world’s most volatile region and a dramatic reminder to the United States that its reliance on Middle Eastern oil and non-democratic regimes was long overdue for a reset.

The seething of the underclass spread to Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi responded with vicious military attacks on the insurgents that drew international condemnation and resulted in NATO military help for the Libyan rebels.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers, the most important economic allies of the United States in the Middle East, ordered military action against protestors in their country and sent troops to help Bahrain suppress an uprising there.

As this populist rebellion played out across Yemen, Syria, and more moderately in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, I went to the region to take the measure of the uprising’s depth and long-term effects in a region where we have such a high-stakes investment in oil, counterterrorism, and the need for political and military stability.

From the souks of Iraq to the presidential palaces of Jordan and Saudi Arabia there was a consensus on only one conclusion: The Middle East would never be the same. Just how it would be altered and what the consequences would be, no one could say. An Iraqi street merchant said to me, “Democracy is good but look at us. It is so hard.”

Abdullah II, the forty-nine-year-old energetic, American-educated Hashemite king of Jordan, told me, “This time will define my monarchy; I will spend every day for however long it takes to expand political participation in our country. We need to have a representative government.”

In Saudi Arabia, the ruling family was much more guarded. Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the seventy-year-old foreign minister, acknowledged the government must be prepared to make some changes but, alluding to the United States, he emphatically added, “A Middle Eastern country has to change itself; if you have interference from the outside it can only be detrimental.”

Not surprisingly, the prince also blamed the tensions in the Middle East on Israel for failing to find a way to accept the establishment of a freestanding Palestinian state.

The so-called Arab Spring was another reminder that the Middle East’s lethal mix of zealous tribes, faiths, ambitions, autocrats, and arsenals is a hair trigger for violence. It pumps more oil and gas than any other region in the world and its interfaith rivalries are like something out of the Middle Ages. Israel is a heavily fortified presence in a sea of antipathy.

In March 2011, global chaos spread to Japan in the form of a monstrous earthquake that triggered a tsunami so destructive it will surely be the stuff of legends for centuries to come. The tidal wave was followed in quick order by a catastrophic breakdown of Japanese nuclear facilities, the ultimate modern-age nightmare.

Japan was gravely wounded by these calamities and the long-term recovery prospects did little to help the American economy, given the strong trade relationship between the two countries.

The failure to have sufficient safety standards in place at their nuclear plants, the chaotic and unsuccessful attempts to head off a meltdown, and the terror of long-term radiation poisoning are colossal failures for a culture that not so long ago was widely praised as the future of the world.

With the Middle East uprisings and the Japanese calamity, President Obama learned again, as all presidents do, that it is the unanticipated and unexpected events that can be the most perilous for a chief executive. He had already been buffeted by the great BP oil blowout of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico—an environmental disaster, a management crisis, and a severe strain for the “no drama” Obama style.

Other modern presidents have faced unexpected assaults on their carefully ordered promises of expanded peace, prosperity, and renewed pride in all things American.