The Time of Our Lives (4 page)

John F. Kennedy, who pledged to “fight any foe” in the “long, twilight struggle” against Communism, nearly stranded his presidency on the shoals of the Bay of Pigs and then successfully finessed what could have been a nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban missile crisis.

His successor after the fateful Friday in Dallas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, started on a high note of national unity, a breakthrough on civil rights, and a landslide election win, only to spiral down into forced retirement as a result of his anguished but stubborn prosecution of the Vietnam War. His final year in office was marked by assassinations, racial rage, and mounting war losses, culminating in the election of his archnemesis Richard M. Nixon, thwarting all that Johnson had hoped to accomplish.

Nixon brilliantly opened the way to China and reorganized the federal government into a much more efficient model, but he remained hostage to his Cold War instincts in Vietnam. At home, the deep, dark side of Tricky Dick led to an imperial presidency of vendettas against so-called enemies and disregard for the rule of law. His Oval Office was a bunker stocked with illegal conspiracies and presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.

We survived all of that and the subsequent stumbles of succeeding presidents. Gerald Ford, the healer, didn’t prepare the nation for his pardon of Richard Nixon. We gave Jimmy Carter his chance and then moved on to the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan, who recast the role of the federal government, got entangled in Iran-Contra, and so skillfully kept the pressure on the Soviet Union that its end was inevitable. George H. W. Bush impressively managed the fall of Communism and a war against Iraq but failed to deal with a short, sharp recession in the last year of his term.

Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, brought youthful energy and a different Democratic Party to the White House, lighting up the skies with a bright, bright economy before succumbing to his worst personal failings and standing trial in an impeachment. George W. Bush and the rest of us were blindsided by 9/11, the terrorist act that led to the two longest wars in our history and to continuing questions about Bush’s judgment in foreign policy and in his stewardship of the economy, which went into free fall during his final year in office.

That Polaroid portrait of our recent history is offered as a reminder that our strengths and prominence, our size and influence, bring with them commensurate assaults on our well-being. We have the world’s most robust democracy, most powerful economy, most dominant military power, and most ambitious values agenda, but we are not impervious to the riptides of envy and competition.

THE PROMISE

The drumbeat of problems for President Obama and, by extension, for all of us did not end with the 2010 midterm election.

The Great Recession and all of its political and economic consequences; the rise of China and India; the upheaval in the Middle East; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the massively destructive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Japan; the environmental calamity of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill; the economic disarray in the European Union; the lawlessness throughout Mexico, our southern neighbor—all represent a confluence of problems that, taken together, are unparalleled in the American experience in the post–World War II era.

We’ve experienced grave crises before but never so many all at once representing such a wide range of disastrous possibilities: the new world DIS-order.

Add to that the polarization in the political and governmental institutions in Washington, D.C., and we have a historic set of challenges that demand attention and action that go well beyond a testy exchange on cable television or a food fight in the blogosphere.

Those atrophied muscles of the national character that the president mentioned in Dresden demand our attention. Can they be developed so that they provide the strength to carry us through this treacherous passage? Do we have the will to restore a sense of national purpose that unites us rather than divides us? Shouldn’t we take a realistic inventory of our strengths, needs, objectives, and challenges as we head into a new century in a changed world?

None of us has all the answers, but so many of the problems are self-evident that we should begin by first addressing those that threaten our core vaues: political pluralism, broad-based economic opportunity, national security secured by means other than the barrel of a gun, cultural and religious tolerance.

The first step: Establish a climate for listening as well as for shouting.

What better time than now, when we’ve been through the searing, frightening experience of a historic economic setback? What better time than now, when our principal political, economic, and cultural competitors are expanding at a breathtaking pace, especially in educating their young for the demands of a new age.

As time goes by, we’ll have fewer ideal opportunities to reignite the American Dream and face the territory ahead with a renewed sense of who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re determined to go.

The lessons of just the past decade are self-evident. The big picture for American primary and secondary education was a canvas of discordant colors and composition. Republicans and Democrats alike were enablers in the wave of easy credit, big government spending on the pet projects of congressional power players, and the launch of two wars simultaneously with no realistic means of financing them beyond the much-too-optimistic scenarios for success.

The plethora of historic challenges before us didn’t start with the inauguration of President Obama, and those challenges will not end with the next election cycle, whoever is the victor.

We have miles to go before we sleep, as Robert Frost reminded us.

We can learn from the past as we grapple with the present and work to renew and fulfill America’s promise.

CHAPTER 2
 

One Nation, Indivisible

FACT:
It’s now accepted that independent voters make up about 30 percent of the American electorate, and with every new election they’re proving to be a powerful swing vote. In 2008, President Obama won in large part because he had an 8 percent margin among independent voters; by the midterm elections of 2010, independents favored Republicans by 18 percent.

QUESTION:
When was the last time you voted a straight party line?

T
hat great American philosopher P. J. O’Rourke, a former hippie, now a New Hampshire country squire, sums up the self-righteous nature of the two major American political parties well when he says, “Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove crabgrass from your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

O’Rourke has also observed that “America wasn’t founded so we could all be better; America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well pleased.”

THE PRESENT

In a nation of so many voices, all of them, it seems, with access to some kind of megaphone, whether it’s call-in radio talk shows, Internet blogs, or rallies on the National Mall or in a town square, the American political character is to some degree in flux. In a 2010 Gallup poll to determine the ideological makeup of the country, people identifying themselves as liberals were outnumbered by those who call themselves conservatives by a two-to-one margin, but moderates were within five percentage points of the conservative bloc.

The 2010 numbers were a big gain for conservatives, who trailed moderates in the last term of President George W. Bush. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as conservative was the highest in Gallup’s polling history. Much of that, no doubt, was a result of the stratospheric levels of federal debt piled up, beginning with the Bush years and accelerating in the first half of the Obama term, twinned with the persistently high levels of unemployment and the anxiety over the new national health care plan.

The upswing in the conservative numbers paid off for the Republican Party in the midterm elections, obviously, and GOP leaders once again began speeches with the phrase “The American people have spoken.” Just two years earlier, Democratic Party leaders were using the same phrase, and four years before that President Bush was invoking the American people in his speeches.

Six months after the Gallup poll, an NBC survey found that 79 percent of the respondents thought the country was too divided politically. That’s a very big number, but it didn’t surprise me, because everywhere I go, whatever the ideological or cultural makeup of the audience, that is the overwhelming sentiment of the audience when the talk turns to politics.

For me there was no more poignant demonstration of the frustration over the cold war among partisans in Washington than an encounter I had on Capitol Hill. Two bright young men approached me after a reception for the International Rescue Committee, a renowned refugee organization with bipartisan support. They were dressed in the standard uniform of Capitol Hill aides: serious blue suits, white button-down shirts, and red ties. One said, “Mr. Brokaw, we want to ask you about the old days here in Washington.” Given their youth, I was afraid by “the old days” they meant the first Clinton term, but I volunteered to help however I could.

They went on, as one gestured to the other, “We’re best friends even though he’s a Democrat and I’m a Republican. We go into Georgetown, drink beer, and argue politics and at the end of the night we’re still friends.

“But his boss is a Democratic congressman and mine is a Republican and they won’t talk to each other. It’s really frustrating. Was it always this way?”

I explained that no, it wasn’t. When I worked in Washington at the height of the Watergate scandal, an acrimonious time, Meredith and I would often find ourselves at dinner parties with prominent Republicans and Democrats, sharing a drink and stories from some dustup on the Hill. Senators Bob Dole and George McGovern, I told them, two World War II veterans representing opposite ends of the political spectrum, are close friends and often worked with each other on fighting global hunger.

If anything, the partisan cold war in Washington has gotten worse since that chance encounter with members of a younger generation determined to serve but frustrated by the consequences of the fundamental incivility that courses through Washington these days.

My friend Bob Schieffer, host of the highly regarded Sunday morning public affairs program
Face the Nation
, has been in Washington more than forty years and he says it’s never been worse. He cites a prime example of the juvenile behavior that takes place on too many Sunday mornings when he tells of one show in which he had one Republican guest and one Democratic.

The Sunday shows all have what is called a “green room,” where the guests and journalists gather for coffee, makeup, and any last-minute instructions. Bob told me, incredulously, “We had a call from the staff of one of the men, a senior leader of the Senate, requesting separate rooms so the guests wouldn’t have to be together. I said, ‘No. We’re not changing our behavior just to suit theirs.’ ”

House Speaker John Boehner was asked on NBC’s
Meet the Press
to review a video of some Iowa citizens who believe President Obama is a Muslim and that that guides his policies. Moderator David Gregory asked the Speaker if he felt compelled to correct those voters. Boehner declined, saying his job is “not to tell the American people what to think.”

The Speaker said he believes the president when he says he is a Christian and that he accepts the state of Hawaii’s declaration that Obama was born there, making him an American citizen, but he chose not to say that those who believe otherwise are wrong. As I watched, I wondered what the Speaker would say if a panel of voters told a moderator that Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is a member not of a real Christian faith but rather a cult, or that Ron Paul is a fascist. Would the Speaker not strongly challenge those erroneous beliefs?

When confronted with similar allegations early in the 2008 campaign, Senator John McCain, running for the Republican presidential nomination, quickly corrected an Obama detractor. McCain said, “Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of to have as president.”

Slashing rhetoric and outrageous characterizations have long been part of the American national political dialogue—Abraham Lincoln was portrayed as a subhuman ape in the highly partisan newspapers of his time—but modern means of communication are now so pervasive and penetrating they might as well be part of the air we breathe, and therefore they require tempered remarks from all sides. Otherwise, that air just becomes more and more toxic until it is suffocating.

Personally, I’d like the partisan combatants on both sides of the aisle to explain their attitudes to a junior high civics class. Maybe their adolescent audience could teach them some manners and lessons in teamwork.