What Leadership Looked Like

I was reading this piece by Dick Meyer of CBS, in which he addresses Bush's "We are a nation in danger" remark of a couple of days ago, and it got me thinking. First of all, let me quote a bit of his article.

I think America in 2004 is about as far removed from fundamental danger as any nation in history has ever been. We may be scared, but we are, in fact, safe. Safe, at least, by any reasonable historic measure.

No other country on earth has military might even close to ours. Has such a global monopoly on armed power ever existed? Has any nation had less to fear from its neighbors and foreign armies?

Modern America does know real danger. The nuclear duel of the Cold War was real danger. America is safer than it was when the Soviet Union existed. The threat of nuclear proliferation, of a nuclear attack from a small state or terrorists, existed then, too. The country is probably better prepared to prevent that now.

We are safer from plague, pestilence, famine and weather than any of our ancestors ever were.

We have one of the most stable governments in human history. There is no risk of a dictator, a Gestapo or a civil war.

Well, I don't know about that last sentence, but, so far, pretty heartening, right? He continues:

Israel is in danger. Palestinians are in danger. Iraq is in danger. Sudan is in danger. Colombia is in danger. America is not in danger.

And America is not at war.

What happened in Afghanistan and Iraq was war. We should have stuck to that old-fashioned use of the word war. The battle now and ahead with the evildoers is not likely to be helped by calling it war any longer.

Perhaps it was necessary to use the rhetoric of war after 9/11 to marshal an adequate and swift response to the newly real threat. Perhaps. We’ve had wars on crime, a war on drugs and even a war on poverty. Why not a war on terror? There is no intrinsic reason why not.

But war, and even war rhetoric, can rationalize unwise and uncharacteristic choices at home – restricted civil liberties, plundered treasury, over-reaching bureaucracy, fear-mongering, and misplaced secrecy. Both the administration and the opposition party have bungled that balance; the glaring example of that is the dishonest case that was sold and bought for invading Iraq. Both sides have squandered credibility.

"War" is a word that ends arguments. So is "danger." The president has tried to sell a lot of policy by saying it was necessary because we are at war and in danger and so have the Democrats.

We don’t need to declare ourselves "a nation in danger" or "a nation at war" to carefully reform the intelligence bureaucracy, to respond to discovered plots and threats, to catch terrorists or to get other nations to help our cause.

We don’t need to be a nation of crybabies or a nation that cries wolf.

Again, he's got some pretty good points. Personally, I just get pissed off whenever doughy-faced Tom Ridge comes on TV and tells me to be scared. I live in Wisconsin. The only thing I have to be worried about is a cow revolution. The US government has people in places like Mississippi worried sick about terrorists. Terrorists don't want to attack Mississippi! The Taliban would feel at home there, what with the pervasive influence of fundamentalist religion on government and daily life.

Well, I started thinking about Bush's constant fear-mongering, and, perhaps naturally enough, that line of thought led to Franklin Roosevelt. He was first elected to the presidency in 1932, and took office in March of the following year. At that time, during the depths of the Great Depression, what did Roosevelt say? Famously, he proclaimed to the Congress and the country that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." That oft-quoted line is part of a larger sentence that bears examination: "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

First of all, let me assert my firm belief that George Bush could never deliver a line like that without stumbling over six or eight words, mispronouncing a dozen more, and smirking. Second, it's pretty obvious by now that nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror is that man's sine qua non. The only thing he's got going for him is fear--he certainly doesn't have any accomplishments about which to speak. He's counting on people's fear giving him a second term in office. Which fact, of course, makes for unbridled hilarity every time those Bush TV ads come on with him talking about his boundless optimism.

Now you might say, "But Jude--Roosevelt was talking about an economic problem, not a military one." And you'd be correct. In 1933, military action wasn't really on FDR's mind. But armed conflict certainly did figure into his thinking in January of 1941, when he gave the "Four Freedoms" speech.

Yes, I know that the US was not technically a belligerent in January 1941. However, the Cash and Carry policy was in effect, and, in March 1941, the "Lend-Lease" Act went into effect, providing 1.3 billion dollars in aid to the British--including a bunch of warships (a further $1 billion would be given to the Soviets in October 1941). These policies invalidated the 1935 Neutrality Acts, under which the United States would not provide arms to any belligerent country. So the US wasn't exactly neutral. German ships weren't pulling into US ports, loading up with tanks and airplanes, and sailing back to the Reich. However, I digress. To return to the "Four Freedoms" speech, we should note that when said speech was given, Roosevelt and other high government officials knew that it was simply a matter of when the US would join the war, not if such a thing would come to pass.

The fourth freedom Roosevelt enumerated in 1941 (a pretty bleak year by anyone's standards) was freedom from fear. That's right! With the certainty of massive war in the near future, FDR spoke about freedom from fear--for everyone.

The fourth freedom is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world available in our own time and generation.

Emphasis added.

So, in 1941, when the world was engulfed in the most wrenching, deadly, costly war ever seen, the leader of one of the countries affected by (and soon to be engaged in) belligerency could proclaim that fear is bullshit. I am less eloquent than Mr. Roosevelt, but I think I have captured the essence of his feelings about fear. More than the denunciation of fear, he denounced war altogether.

Compare Roosevelt's high-minded speeches with Bush's ham-handed fear-mongering. Or Roosevelt's call for worldwide abandonment of aggression with Bush's smirking brag that he's a "war president." It's amazing, isn't it?

So that's what leadership looked like.