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
Noonan finished a preliminary draft of the Pointe du Hoc speech and handed it in to her boss, Ben Elliott, at 1:30 p.m. on May 21. He marked it up and returned it to Noonan. Subsequent drafts were circulated over the next few days to others for input. As Noonan kept on reading and talking to the young officials who had done the advance work in Normandy, she realized that Pointe du Hoc was going to be an ultradramatic spot for Reagan to speak. It wouldn't be his Gettysburg Address--as some foolish, history-deficient White House hands were already boasting--but it could be a defining moment for Reagan's re-election campaign. Noonan started studying up on the surviving Rangers--and fast. American news organizations were already promoting the 40th anniversary of D-Day--and it was still May. What gave Reagan's upcoming trip a real boon was Time magazine, whose May 28 cover story was "D-Day: Forty Years After the Great Crusade." Veteran journalist Lance Morrow did most of the analytical writing for the Time package, which was accompanied by a stunning Robert Capa photograph printed from his 11 surviving negatives of Omaha Beach. Morrow began his article with a quote from Shakespeare's Henry V: "From this day to the ending of the world . . . we in it shall be remembered . . . we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother."
Eight years later, Stephen Ambrose would title his book about E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Band of Brothers , borrowing from Morrow, who had borrowed from Shakespeare. Ambrose also decided to use the dramatic Capa photograph of an American soldier wading ashore with the first wave of troops on Omaha Beach, water up to his neck, determination on his face, as the jacket photo for the book. The packaging and repackaging of D-Day as a cottage industry had begun.
Clearly, Noonan had read the Time article. An underlined copy of it can be found in her Normandy files at the Reagan library. And in her speech she quoted--as Time had done--Gen. Matthew Ridgway lying on his cot, remembering God's promise to Joshua: "I will not fail thee or forsake thee." But what is even more significant about Morrow's piece is his trenchant analysis of why, in 1984, D-Day was about to become the election-year symbol of the Reagan administration's New Patriotism. "The ceremonies in Normandy will celebrate the victory and mourn the dead," Morrow wrote. "They will also mourn the moral clarity that has been lost, a sense of common purpose that has all but evaporated."
Moral clarity. That was the ticket Reagan would push to get re-elected. What voter could argue that Adolf Hitler wasn't a villain worse than Idi Amin or Muammar Qadhafi? Who wasn't proud of the job America's armed forces had done in 1944-1945? According to the Reaganites' view, NATO now faced an equally horrific threat from the Soviet Union. Munich-style appeasement was wrong in 1938, they believed, and it was wrong in 1984. But it was Morrow's understanding of how the D-Day story had spellbinding, redemptive qualities that Reagan could sell to Cold War America that really hit the mark.
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