So President Bush Thinks This is WW II and He's FDR?
On Sunday, June 6, President George W. Bush spoke in Normandy to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day and the beginning of the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In the buildup to this event President Bush gave speeches evoking the Good War, inviting comparisons between himself and another war president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The War on Terrorism has only increased FDR’s relevancy but also demonstrated the selective use of history that comes when commemoration and politics intersect.
President Bush is not the first to compare the War on Terrorism with World War II. Both wars were waged against foes that are nearly universally considered evil. Both wars were the result of a devastating surprise attack on American soil, the first at Pearl Harbor and the second at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the wake of September 11, 2001, the comparisons were hard to miss and were, perhaps, best represented by the juxtaposed images of U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima and firefighters raising the flag over the ruins in New York City.
The example of the Good War, Bush surely hopes, will provide moral clarity to an Iraqi war that is increasingly murky. Prior to this flurry of comparisons with World War II, the favorite historical allegory for Iraq was the Vietnam War. At the Library of Congress, opening an exhibit on Churchill, President Bush linked the two wars, arguing that “we are the heirs of the tradition of liberty, defenders of the freedom, the conscience and dignity of every person.” He continued that others “before us have shown bravery and moral clarity in this cause.” It should be obvious why President Bush would prefer the lessons of World War II to the lessons of Vietnam.
Of course, as countless cable TV pundits have told us, President Bush hopes to win election this November running on his record as a war president. Victories in Afghanistan and Iraq were to be the center pieces of his campaign and eventually for his place in history. As Teddy Roosevelt said “If there is not the great occasion you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace no one would have known his name now.” However, Iraq has demonstrated that war brings with it not only opportunities for greatness but also dangers. George W. Bush now finds himself in what historian William Leuchtenburg referred to as the “shadow of FDR.” FDR’s legacy as war leader gives Bush a ready-made argument that presidential greatness, and electoral victory, comes with overcoming adversity to triumph against evil in the international arena but it also holds out to potential for President Bush to be lost in that shadow.
Some of this comparison is simply timing. We have for some time been rightly concerned with honoring and understanding the generation who fought World War II before the passing of history takes its final toll on that generation. The dedication of the World War II memorial followed by the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day provides us with an evocative commemorative ceremony honoring the Good War. With the passing of time the Good War, fought by “the greatest generation,” has assumed a commemorative clarity that it lacked in the 1940s. The moral ambiguities of World War II (such as the American response to the Holocaust, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, and fire bombings) can be set aside to honor this passing generation. For President Bush, they can be set aside for the sake of a positive historical comparison.
There is, of course, some irony in Bush’s use of World War II. Prior to Pearl Harbor many conservatives were often isolationists. Conservatives have long disliked Franklin Roosevelt, the architect of the modern welfare state through his New Deal programs and the ally of Joseph Stalin in the cause of victory during the Second World War. Central to critique of FDR was the deal he struck at the Yalta Conference, recognizing Soviet military control over Eastern Europe in return for a pledge of aid in the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. Much as FDR allied himself with Stalin out of necessity, so too does President Bush evoke FDR out of necessity and perhaps why President Bush seems to prefer Winston Churchill to FDR. The comparisons with World War II has coincided with the Bush administration’s renewed interest in the United Nations, an institution that Roosevelt did much to help create and were built in the hope of substituting diplomacy for war. Once the commemoration ceremonies are finished, the president and the nation will find that the ambiguities, difficulties, and scandals of Iraq will return, perhaps opening the door to other historical comparisons of war and leadership. If this commemoration was a dialogue between the past and the present, history could teach us that some of the clarity of World War II is retrospective and that war often brings not certainty, but uncertainty. It is not at all clear how we will be commemorating the Iraq conflict in sixty years.