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
Among the many other Ranger families who later made the pilgrimage to the Pointe, the Wintzes of Nebraska may serve as an exemplar. Kathie Wintz Abts brought her nine children to collectively say the Lord's Prayer in memory of U.S. Army Ranger Richard Wintz. A second lieutenant who had climbed the treacherous cliffs, Wintz always talked of bringing his wife and children to the knife-shaped promontory at Pointe du Hoc but never got around to it. A member of what author Robert Putnam calls "the long civic generation," Wintz eventually succumbed to cancer in 1981, surrounded by his family. "Dick had never talked much about his experiences, but during the last days of his life, his family convinced him to tell his story, and they recorded it," Joan Burney of the Omaha World-Herald reported in 1994. "They were overwhelmed. Kathie hadn't planned to go to France this year. But when the anniversary of D-Day approached, and stories of it dominated the newspapers and the broadcast media, she said 'I was just a basket case. One of the problems was I realized how naive I was.'" Like so many children of World War II veterans, she had been sheltered by her dad, who didn't want his children to know the horrors he had seen at Normandy.
Usually speeches of any kind are forgettable. This was not the case with Ronald Reagan on this particular morning. With all those graying Rangers in front of him--not to mention D-Day families who had lost somebody dear to them 40 years earlier--and a finely written Noonan speech in his pocket and on the teleprompter, he strode to the podium like a man with a mission. There was nothing boring, hokey, or mundane about his demeanor. When he saluted the flag it was done with such conviction that it made you want to stand up straight yourself, to embrace the fact that you too were part of the great American pageant. He was the American statesman about to remind the American people--with the English Channel and the Pointe du Hoc Ranger Monument at his back--what true patriotism was all about.
The entire Rangers-climbing-the-cliff story, in fact, served Reagan's worldview as a metaphor for life. Like Job, you start your ascent up the dangerous mountainside with great fortitude. But you never know what will knock you down, or when it will cripple your ascent. Life was precious. The important thing was stoically trying, one foot at a time, with God as your guide, to succeed, always heading upward to the sky. Determination and faith were what mattered. Complaints never accomplished a thing. When you fell, you picked yourself back up and tried again.
With these thoughts in mind, and because of a combination of luck and design, the stage was set at Pointe du Hoc for Reagan to deliver the most remembered speech of his first term. The words Noonan had written for him that afternoon were a distillation of his anti-Communist thinking of almost four decades. Looking the part of a world statesman, Reagan, dressed in a handsome dark suit, cleared his throat, looked directly at the wife of Colonel Rudder, and began. "At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs," he intoned, making direct eye contact with the returning Ranger veterans. "Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance."
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