Forty years after “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” another president seeks a similar breakthrough.
French President Francois Mitterrand and then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan walk between U.S. and French soldiers on June 6, 1984, in the American Cemetery of Colleville-sur-Mer near Omaha Beach. | PHILIPPE BOUCHON/AFP via Getty ImagesCOLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — Democratic presidents aren’t prone to adopt Ronald Reagan as a template.
“Autocratic impulses are perennial, and President Biden has rightly made the defense of democracy and of decency a centerpiece of his presidency,” Meacham said. “Normandy offers him an opportunity to honor the memories of the men who made our lives possible and to summon us to stand anew against the darker forces of autocracy — forces that threaten the rules-based, alliance-driven world order that emerged from World War II.
Aides are erecting a stage — at taxpayer expense — where Biden will give his speech. The president’s team has long viewed the moment as a tentpole event in a campaign that has yet to capture the country’s attention.
Reagan’s speech described those involved in the D-Day invasion as men who “had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.
Biden is unlikely to see a similar reversal of fortune; not simply because of the partisan rigidity and balkanized media landscape of the modern era, but because the contexts for the respective speeches still have substantial differences.
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