Remembering Reagan
"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war." Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1984 Pointe du Hoc, Normandy, France
About "The Boys"
Excerpted from The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion by Douglas Brinkley. Copyright 2005 by Douglas Brinkley. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc. All rights reserved.
On June 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan visited France to mark the 40th anniversary of D-Day. The speech he delivered at the windswept Normandy promontory looking out over the English Channel--known now in history as the Boys of Pointe du Hoc address--was the opening salvo to a new American indebtedness to World War II veterans. By honoring the daring action of the 2nd Ranger Battalion--225 young Army volunteers whose mission was to climb the treacherous 100-foot-high Pointe du Hoc cliff while being shot at by entrenched German soldiers--he was paying tribute to an entire generation. (Out of those 225 "boys," only 99 survived the Battle of Normandy.)
By the 1980s, these youths were aging gray hairs. "If I have one enduring memory of Reagan, it's the way he crisply saluted World War II veterans that afternoon," Ken Duberstein, a former White House chief of staff, recalled. "These were his guys . . . . As president, Ronald Reagan delivered three unforgettable speeches: Pointe du Hoc, the Challenger disaster, and the Berlin tear-down-this-wall number. But it was the first of these--Pointe du Hoc--that set the tone for the others."
If it hadn't been for Reagan's two elegiac June 6, 1984, homilies--written by Peggy Noonan (Pointe du Hoc) and Anthony Dolan (Omaha Beach)--there may never have been Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers, Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, or the many memorials built to exalt the citizen-soldiers who liberated Europe.
With Reagan as president, the time had come for the World War II generation to speak out. By 1984, the stars were aligned for thousands of these stoic war heroes to finally offer eyewitness testimonials for posterity's sake. It was, in essence, a generational reckoning. At Pointe du Hoc, President Reagan became the self-appointed spokesperson of the "greatest generation." Although he never fought in the war, Reagan had served in the Army Air Corps, eventually becoming a captain. The hundreds of propaganda movies he made then were, in essence, a dress rehearsal for Pointe du Hoc.
But it wasn't just about World War II. With the timing of a maestro, Reagan galvanized that generation into performing one last task: reminding a nation cynical after Vietnam and Watergate that America truly was still the shining city on the hill. What Reagan understood was that compared with the testimony of an Army Ranger who, climbing the Pointe du Hoc cliffs, had been forced to watch a buddy drown in the English Channel or a young officer get his legs blown off by a Nazi mine, 1970s slogans like "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion" were political throwaway lines of a decadent and largely self-indulgent recent past.
What Reagan was trying to engineer--using the World War II generation and the American flag as his platform--was the creation of a combustible patriotism, one that would spread like wildfire: an extension of his 1980 presidential campaign's embrace of increased military spending and upgrading the armed forces. He essentially wanted to turn the clock back to an unambiguous black-and-white era when, as Ambrose said in Citizen Soldiers, the sight of a GI meant joyous cheers from communities that had been occupied by fascist troops. The way Reagan saw it, too many young people knew about the atrocities at My Lai and not enough about the raw gallantry of D-Day.
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