Born the year after World War II ended, Clinton is hardly the first president to miss serving in the armed forces. More than a third of American presidents weren’t veterans. But not since Grover Cleveland (who bought himself a substitute in the Civil War) has the absence of this entry in a presidential resume seemed quite so relevant. The scars from Clinton’s avoidance of the Vietnam draft have not fully healed. Even retired Adm. William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this spring found his nomination to be ambassador to Great Britain stalled for six weeks because obnoxious GOP senators still blame him for providing cover for Clinton by endorsing him during the 1992 campaign.
In fact, Normandy 1994 was nearly the site of a new confrontation. If Clinton hadn’t finally fired the Republican retired brass who make up the American Battle Monuments Commission, he would have been greeted at the formal ceremonies by the commission’s outgoing chairman, retired Marine Gen. P. X. Kelley. It was Kelley who late in the 1992 campaign attacked Clinton for “callously manipulating the system” to avoid the draft. The handshake with Helmut Kohl when Clinton visits him in July will no doubt be warmer than that one would have been.
Bill Clinton and D-Day. The two go together about as well as …Ross Perot and the NAACP. D-Day is about resolute leadership of the Allies; it’s about Roosevelt and Churchill and Eisenhower risking it all to commit the free world to one goal. Though the stakes are far lower, Clinton’s foreign policy has been characterized by irresolute leadership, especially in Bosnia. Instead of committing (or retreating), he finesses; instead of leading the alliance against aggression on the European continent (the first since the war), he temporizes. Of all the hats a president wears, commander in chief is still the one that doesn’t fit.
D-Day is also about risking failure. Some historians claim that the Allies’ numerical advantage made the success of the invasion inevitable. This is wrong. (When he heard midday about heavy losses on Omaha Beach, Gen. Omar Bradley thought the assault “had suffered an irreversible catastrophe.”) Clinton is more willing to risk failure than some of his critics suggest. For instance, he threw himself into the recent vote on the assault-weapons ban even when the odds looked long, Still, braving fire to take and hold a position is not exactly the first image one associates with this president.
And D-Day is about the unmistakable line between good and evil. Even 10 years ago, when Reagan spoke, the distinction was clearer. In 1984, the Soviet Union was still spreading lies about the landing, suggesting that the invasion met light resistance because the Allies and Germans were in cahoots against the Soviets. Today, the D-Day forces have carried the flag of democracy all the way to Moscow. But the weather in world affairs is cloudy and confused. This isn’t Clinton’s fault. Any president would have difficulty sounding the call to battle.
Most of all, D-Day is about dying for a larger idea. “The president has to use this forum to make sure the younger generation knows the sacrifices needed to secure freedom,” says House Minority Leader Bob Michel, who landed in the fourth wave on Utah Beach and was later wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. “I’m sure he’ll be moved. I hope so.”
Clinton shouldn’t have any trouble shedding a tear. And his aides point out that he is at his best as an explainer and even a teacher, in this case conveying to his own generation and the one that follows the debt of gratitude they owe. In explaining that debt, he will serve the cause of historical understanding and, perhaps, enhance his stature by exceeding the modest expectations for his performance. It’s a sign of adulthood to be able to honor one’s parents.
The problem is that the legacy of the parents is so much more formidable than anything yet offered by their children. After all, D-Day symbolizes the most significant military accomplishment of this century; the life we know flows from that day. It’s the difference between freeing half the world and, say, going to Woodstock. The weight of that difference cannot help but diminish Clinton, rendering almost anything he says artificial, subordinate, less significant than from someone who fought for freedom. In electing Bill Clinton, the American people traded the tired members of the D-Day generation for a lease on the future. was time for them to go. But if nothing else, Clinton’s appearance at Normandy may remind us of just how much we are losing in that transition.
