The threat had always been there. And New York was always uniquely vulnerable to it, despite the cinematic protection offered us by Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis, who always got the bad guy in the last sequence of any movie that deigned to deal with terrorism. If anything America dealt with terrorism as a nation in the past by turning to Hollywood; we were, it sometimes seemed, protected more by our fantasy factory than by the reality, perhaps because the reality was so much grimmer. Yet anyone who paid any attention to the way the world was going understood that there were no longer any immunities for Americans and American cities in this world; on the last page of this book which I was in the process of publishing there was a sentence about the missile shield, which has always struck me as a kind of high-tech Maginot Line, saying that the real threat to this country would come not from some rogue state vulnerable to our own power, but from terrorists who could walk into any American city with a crude atomic bomb in a cardboard suitcase. That sentence was born not of any great prophetic sense, but regrettably, of more common sense.
The truth is America—and much of the rest of the West—has had a good deal of time—some twenty, twenty-five years, perhaps more—to understand several things; principal among them, that the great threat to a country like ours was not from some developed nation, which also had a nuclear strike force and against which our immense power was so readily applicable, but from terrorists who did not offer a comparable target, who hated the United States for what it represented in the world (a pervasive, in their eyes, corrupting decadent culture), and for whom its alliances (not just with Israel, but equally important with the allegedly moderate Arab states) were an affront.
It is also, I think, the confrontation between the most modern part of the world and the ultimate antimodernists. We modernists have enraged the anti-modernists and they witness us every night by dint of global television. Because we the modernists place a vastly higher priority on education, science, and technology, we have managed, in addition to being infidels, to become very powerful infidels, while they are left with being very weak, impoverished believers—enraged, impoverished believers. Ironically, the tensions between the two parts of the world are heightened by one of most modern instruments of communications, television. The poor can now sit in their part of the world and see the vast difference between the quality of their lives and that of the West, and their leaders like Osama bin Laden can sell in that harsh and cruel environment the dubious notion that not only are they poor, and we in the West rich, but they are poor because we are rich. This is a confrontation that I doubt would be taking place if we still lived in a radio era rather than a television era.
That the West, particularly America, was caught napping in the period between the end of the Cold War and September 11 is obvious. America’s political and media agenda was uniquely trivial, despite the evidence all around us that the world, post–Cold War, was dangerous in a new and different way, perhaps best described as a more fragmented but no less lethal kind of danger. Was this really the nation, so unconcerned about its relationship with the rest of the world—and all kinds of larger issues—that just two years earlier had submitted itself, in an orgy of self-indulgence, in an impeachment trial of a competent sitting president because he had so stupidly been caught in an assignation with a young intern? The answer is yes. The impeachment trial, post–September 11, seems incomprehensible now, given the real problems that lie before us.
Rarely have the previous agenda and the previous concerns of an earlier period seemed so inconsequential so quickly, that which had seemed important and galvanizing the previous week so trivial, most of it involving stories of petty scandal among celebrities, or would-be celebrities who would not have been very big celebrities without their requisite scandal. The historical demarcation point that we crossed on September 11 is even greater than the one we crossed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: whatever else, in December 1941 there had been all kinds of evidence that the rest of the civilized world, most notably all of our allies, was already deeply involved in a titanic struggle that would surely determine the outcome of civilization as we knew it. The only thing that had not yet been decided was whether we would be a part of it, and whether it would be earlier or later.
The war effort back in 1941, because of the particular nature of the attack on Pearl Harbor, became an immediate extension of America’s national will, and of the purest kind imaginable; it is important to remember that an earlier move towards preparedness on the part of President Roosevelt—that is to have a draft—passed by one vote only a few months before. That was the last gasp of the truly isolationist America, which took so much sustenance from the protection allegedly offered by our two great oceans.
The enemy back in 1941 was more easily definable, the definition of the war more traditional, and America’s power, industrial and technological, more readily applicable against those two enemies than the unusually elusive enemy we now face operating from among the shadows, often at so great a distance from us, and often, it also turns out, in secret cells and under aliases right among us. Today the more visible the enemy is, the further he is from the magnetic field of our intelligence operations and any potential military strike. It is not that America, as it enters a very different kind of battle, lacks weaponry, it is that the particular kind of weaponry we specialize in lacks targets. This will be a difficult military-intelligence-security challenge: What we do best, they are not vulnerable to. What we do least well, they are vulnerable to. What they do best, we are to a considerable degree vulnerable to.
This then is a brand new era, and the war has come home to us, as it never had before. When I was a young, ambitious journalist some forty years ago, in order to witness the most dramatic conflict of our time I had to volunteer to go some 12,000 miles away to Vietnam to cover a distant war. Now when I am much older, the newest war has come to within five miles of my home.
America then is no longer distant from the conflicts of our time: in that way the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ended a unique historical span for us as a great power, one that I would place at nearly a century, or perhaps eighty-four years to be a little more exact, a period in which America has been a major player in the world, but has been given at least a partial immunity from the ravages of modern warfare and weaponry because of the combination of its unique geographical position and the sheer force and magnitude of its almost unparalleled industrial and technological base. It has taken a group of rebels without a country, a ghost nation as it were—that is their particular strength—to become a threat to us.
In that nearly nine-decade period the immense carnage of the modern era was always somewhere else. I am, I think, unusual as an American not just because I have been a foreign correspondent, but because I have always had an obsession with the bloodier landmarks of the modern era, and have always wanted, indeed needed to visit them—Verdun, Auschwitz, Dienbienphu, Monte Cassino, Hiroshima, Omaha Beach, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the British cemetery outside Rangoon in Myanmar. The cruelty of the last century has always fascinated me; yet most of my fellow citizens have remained largely indifferent to it, a luxury provided them, of course, by the good fortune of our oceans. Because of our strength and our geography we were for a long time permitted many illusions, some of them existing long after it was obvious that those illusions were in fact just that, and no longer valid.
We became, in no small part because of our geography and our power as that eighty-four-year span continued, somewhat schizophrenic; a curious blend of innate isolationism, a factor of our two great oceans, our size and richness and our self-sufficiency, combined with the quite involuntary role of being the richest, most powerful nation in the world—a democracy, sworn not just to protect our own freedoms, but to shield, in a shrewd estimation of our enlightened self-interest, like-minded democratic regimes. Yet true internationalism has always been a somewhat uneasy role for America, we were not only protected for so long by the oceans, but we were innately large, rich, and self-sufficient (we had our own self-sufficient agriculture, and our own indigenous sources of energy) as a nation. Even on our own continent we seemed invulnerable, as Europeans nations on their continent were not; we have a large neighbor to the north which though different and sovereign, was not really foreign, and a neighbor to the south which was historically weak. On our own continent, we were largely unthreatened.
Our isolation, which was physical in one era, clearly ended long ago, but it nonetheless remains a part of our outlook, a formidable undertow to a new reality of this modern age, more psychological than physical now, more a hope than a reality. Our geography therefore has always dominated our psyche, we are by instinct apart from Europe and we like being apart from Europe. Our modern history confirms our ambivalence to, and love/hate relationship with, internationalism. In 1914, even as America was beginning to surge forward as a major industrial player, World War I began; we came in three years after the other major powers. With most of Europe already bled white and exhausted, we eventually played a decisive role. Then, still protected by our two oceans, we went back to our old ways and rejected our own president’s attempt at internationalism. During World War II, we once again came in later than most of the other players—two years later if you set the clock from the war’s beginnings in Europe, longer if you mark Asian events. We became, as Churchill and Roosevelt both understood we would, the arsenal of democracy, our industrial base, unlike the industrial bases of any other major participant, invulnerable from enemy weaponry. We were also the only industrial nation with its own sources of gas and oil.
The war ended with America emerging as a new superpower; we were dramatically more internationalist than when we entered, virtually forced into what were on occasion unwanted connections with the rest of the world by the leaders of the generation that had actually fought the war, had lost their friends and college roommates, and had witnessed the calamity caused by the previous generation’s isolationism. It was a generation which also understood the most important new element added to an old equation, that the new weaponry unsheathed at the very end of the war, the atomic bomb and the German V-1 rockets (inventions which were obviously about to be twinned together), made isolationism no longer viable as a possibility. Thus for the first time did we begin to deal with knowledge that some of the immunities or protections that had long been ours no longer existed. That brought us with a certain inevitability into a new kind of internationalism: Europe, shattered by two suicidal wars within twenty-five years, was in ashes; the British, exhausted emotionally, physically, humanly, and financially by the two wars, could no longer sustain their role as the leader of the West. No bombs had fallen on us: we were rich in a world which was poor, our economy had been brought, kicking and screaming, to the zenith of its power, by the very nature of a war which maximized our production lines.
Thus did we begin an almost unwanted ascent to superpower status. That the ascent has been more unwanted than desired is critically important to understanding how America responds to crises in foreign policy, why it does this more slowly and more awkwardly than other nations, but when finally aroused does it with a certain finality. Our instinct, born of geography, is to be apart. We are a vast country, with all kinds of different ethnic factions and regions and classes; we do not lightly—it is I think, in the long run, a source of both strength and tolerance—respond too quickly for any one single purpose. We have other preoccupations.
It is important to understand one other thing about America, post–World War II, which made it different from most of the rest of the world. Our principal allies, exhausted by those events, were also watching their own colonial eras come to and end. In a world where even the victors were pessimistic and exhausted, America was stronger than ever, more optimistic than ever, and felt better about itself than before the war. In this country, people now spoke readily of an American Century
The period that followed World War II was a new and chilling one. A hot war was followed by a cold one. In Eastern Europe lines were drawn and we, new to our international role, found ourselves in almost immediate conflict with the challenge from a formidable new Soviet empire—worse, a totalitarian one. We were, based on the lessons of World War II and the threat of modern weaponry, involuntarily pulled into a new and once again unwanted (at least in vast sections of the country) internationalism. The lessons of World War II morphed into the new demands of the Cold War. That which had always protected us in the past, and thus defined our essential foreign policy, our geographical isolation, no longer existed; we had been the ocean-protected civilization, and now the oceans had become ponds.
We were, for the first time, becoming internationalist, but almost involuntarily so; it is easy today to forget that even as a terrifying new kind of nuclear threat became evident in those days, one that could easily have undermined many of the then-vulnerable democracies in Europe, there were powerful currents of isolationism at play in America, especially in the Midwest. It is easy to underestimate today the resistance to much of the policy of containment in the forties, of Americans who never again wanted to become involved in Europe and did not want to help strengthen those then quite fragile European allies, and who, in some cases, believed that our old alliances were a source of vulnerability. (In the Midwest the fear that it was the old Eastern Establishment doing the work of the British was powerful. The least Dean Acheson, he of a certain generational anglophilia, with his fancy-the-old-boy manners, his guard’s moustache and British tailoring, could do to help an embattled President Truman politically, Averell Harriman once told friends, was to shave off that British guard’s moustache.)
Much of the country was still isolationist and resistant to the programs which would form the basis of containment. Resistance to Soviet imperialism could not be sold in too abstract a way, as Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a last minute convert in switching from isolationism to internationalism, told Acheson. If Truman wanted his containment policy to go through the Congress, Vandenberg continued, he could have it, “but he will have to go out and scare hell out of the country.” That he did, and America became in time both internationalist and anticommunist, though in the end more of the latter than the former. If there was any weakness to the larger American view of the world in the forty-some years from the time that Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech to the moment when the Berlin Wall collapsed, it was an obsession with communism, a tendency to see complicated parts of the world where the most important issue at stake was nationalism (Vietnam for example) in simplistic terms of communism and anticommunism. This was true right to the end, to the crisis which helped cause the current conflict in the Middle East, when the Americans reached out to those forces in Afghanistan fighting the Russians, and when the Russians finally departed Afghanistan as a defeated enemy, Washington paid no attention to what was left behind, the nature of the vacuum there. The Russians were gone, communism was collapsing—that was enough. From that vacuum came much of today’s crisis.
For when the Soviet empire collapsed the bipolar threat that had hung over this country for some forty years also disappeared. The oceans which had become ponds became, in the minds of far too many people here, oceans once again. John Kennedy, writing of the period before England rallied itself to the threat posed by Hitler, once wrote a thesis turned into a small book called Why England Slept. If I were looking for a somewhat better subtitle to this current book about America from the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to September 11, 2001, I might call it, Why America Napped. When social historians come to measure us in the future, they may look at the era that just past with unusual distaste, of a time of trivial pursuits and debate in our public sector and singular greed in the private one, and of unacceptable rewards to the heads of our largest corporations. There is a poem that W. H. Auden wrote at the time of the start of World War II. It is called “September 1, 1939.” The first five lines go: “I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street/ Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade.”
With luck, and I say this very carefully, with luck, that era of such consummate self-indulgence is passed. What is at stake here, not just in America but in any comparable democratic society, is something both precious and elemental to what we are as a people and a nation, and it is the survival of the open or free society, where in this new era, the very openness of the society makes it unusually vulnerable to its enemies. Those of us who have over the years worked in societies which are not free have, I suspect, treasured more than most this quality about America, not just the freedom to move about, but the freedom to be what you want to be, to be different from those who went before you in your own family, to, if necessary, reinvent yourself and become the person of your own imagination. I believe, as a matter of political faith that freedom, represents not merely an easier more pleasurable life in the simplest sense for the individual, but that all of America’s considerable strengths, industrial, scientific, military, and artistic flow from it, that the freer we are, the more we are able to use our fullest talents. In effect, we waste less human potential than any other society that I know of. When other societies suppress some part—or all—of an individual’s rights and beliefs, we never know how much of that person’s talent they are also suppressing. Simply stated, the freer we are, the stronger we are.
This is a new and infinitely more complicated era for a nation accustomed to exercising its power at a distance, and never being in the immediate firing line. We who are the richest nation in the world—our down cycles are like up cycles for most peoples in the world—face an enemy whose very weaknesses, that is his rootlessness, his alienation from the societies around him, his ability to move around freely at night in the poorest part of the world, has become his strength. What a strange, complicated, and insidious new equation that is for us, an attack against us right here at home. What an irony, that we who have consciously or unconsciously always depended on our scientific and industrial excellence are threatened not by a first world, or even a second world, or even a third world force, but a de facto terrorist or guerrilla group, rootless in terms of nationhood, with, in our view and that of most of the civilized world, a medieval vision of the present and the future, but which has managed to find exceptional financing and to adapt itself surprisingly well to a shrewd if minimalist application of borrowed or stolen modern technology. Even as we reel from this assault, our enemies are trying to buy the most modern weapons of mass destruction, and they have shown an exceptional ability to move money around the world to finance their operations, done in a manner worthy of the most modern multinational corporation. What they have achieved is something quite chilling, and it represents something entirely new, an adversary against whom we have little in the way of an immediate deterrent.
I was seven years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, which I believe to be the previous comparable moment in American life when the world changed so quickly and dramatically for us in just one day. I remember with great clarity hearing the news that Sunday morning, understanding from the hushed voices of my parents that our lives had changed with a certain finality—which they had. My father, who had been a medic in World War I and was now a doctor, went back in the service, and we moved from New York, and our lives were never quite the same.
The America of 1941 was, however involuntarily, very different from the American of 2001, for it was poorer, and expectations were much, much lower, and it was much closer to a certain kind of Calvinist root, and there was a greater sense, I believe, on the part of ordinary citizens of what they owed back. This is a much more self-absorbed society, one that demands ever-quicker results: it is accustomed, at its upper, more successful levels, to being rich and secure, and of course, entertained. When things go wrong it is likely to be thought of as someone else’s fault, and therefore a mistake that ought to be rectified. And quickly. What is important about this new challenge, especially for a nation like ours at this moment, is that it challenges our attention span.
If there is any vulnerability to the America today it is a kind of national impatience—a need for things to do be done and done quickly. What! We’ve bombed the Taliban for four weeks and the war isn’t over? How could that be? What! We picked up some traces of anthrax in the mail, and we haven’t caught the sender yet and a month has passed? Part of the reason for that impatience is the result of a nation that is always in overdrive where work is more honored than leisure, part of it is a reflection of the technological inventions of the last fifty years, especially in communications—faxes and the internet—which put more pressure on people for ever-faster answers and ever-faster results. And part of it is the result of a nation where the economic formation is not just a stock-market driven, but driven by a new kind of people’s stock market. For in 1941 only a tiny percentage of Americans actually had an investment in the stock market, and most of the heads of big companies were proprietors rather than mangers, and they had a long-term view of business. Now those companies are run by managers, almost everyone has a stake in the stock market, even if it’s only through pension plans, and the managers live and die by quarterly reports. Sometimes that works to a company’s benefit, and sometimes it creates a hopelessly shortsighted view of the future that is damaging both to the company and the society.
Take our media world, and particularly our television networks for example. Of the many results of the end of the Cold War—the amazing surge in the American economy, six thousand points in six years in the Dow during the Clinton years, the rise of nationalism and tribalism in certain parts of the world—the most surprising, and by far the least predictable, was the almost immediate and quite dramatic trivialization of the American political and media agenda, most especially the decline of the importance in serious news, above all foreign news from our nightly television screens. It was as if the old geopolitical impulse that had preceded World War II and the Cold War, America apart from the rest of the world, had been restored, especially in an era where, because of the quantum breakthroughs in communications, the pull of home screen entertainment became so seductive. Of our many traditional freedoms was added a new one—the right not to be bored in your own home. We became something unique: a de facto monopoly superpower, the richest, most powerful nation in the world, bingeing on self-involvement.
The people who ran the newsrooms in our television networks learned, all too easily, in the eighties that the country was less and less interested in foreign news. It was now considered boring. The world was no longer threatening. Foreign reporters were expensive, and worse, brought low ratings. But celebrity journalism, especially in the period after the end of the Cold War, when the country was bingeing on self-absorption, brought high ratings. People now cared desperately about the lives of celebrities. Would Tom stay married to Nicole? Would O. J. be convicted? Would Monica ever find true love and marry? If it was journalism at its worst then it was economically viable: celebrity journalism was good for the ratings, which was good for the stock, but of course bad for the country. The senior people who ran the network news empires neglected the cardinal rule of a great editor—the need to balance what people want to know with what they need to know.
We became in the process an entertainment society. We went quite systematically from a serious agenda worthy of a monopoly superpower, to an ever more trivial one of scandal and celebrity; the contradictions of that are self-evident. We have wanted (or needed), in the last decade or so, to exercise our power in certain foreign policy crises, but because of the disconnect between our complex international role and the lack of public support—and a governmental willingness to seek greater support—we have acted with what was a de facto Zero Casualties prohibition on ourselves, especially after the events in Somalia in 1993. Whatever else, that ended on September 11.
Both our politicians and the leading television news personalities, with their parallel sensory perceptions (supported by endless polling of constituents), have understood this change, but the media, I think, has been worse than the politicians. The networks, like the politicians, were all picking up on the same thing, that the American people were tired of serious news, especially foreign news, and they wanted a respite. I would repeat here the importance of one anecdote I tell in these pages: the story of Bill Clinton, a few days before his inauguration, meeting with House Democratic chairman and going around the room asking them their specific problems. When it was the turn of Lee Hamilton, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, he began to enumerate what was on his plate—problems with China, the difficulties of dealing with Saddam Hussein—before Clinton quickly cut him off. He had been out campaigning for a year, he said, and no one cared about foreign policy except for a handful of journalists. Hamilton, taken somewhat aback, did not note that that might be true, but that foreign policy had a way of defining every one of our recent presidents.
In the months after September 11, there was a sense that America was briefly interested in foreign affairs, driven by these dramatic events that had taken place on domestic soil and that had so seriously shaken the nation. Television news shows that had been featuring fluffy celebrity reporting suddenly became fascinated by events on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There was a great deal of talk in certain media circles that Americans had finally woken up to real challenges after a prolonged hibernation. Late hour variety-show hosts competed to have serious public officials like Dick Holbrooke come on and talk seriously about the Middle East (while perhaps telling one self-deprecatory joke or two). Various New York magazine editors vowed that the era of celebrity journalism was over. Not everyone watching all this thought that the dynamic had changed completely, given the economics of the networks, and the need to entertain rather than to inform.
The question of how deep the new interest in foreign policy went was another one. The decline in interest had not been an overnight phenomenon, and it reflected a deeper truth about the country. After all, the senior Bush had clearly been somewhat out of synch with the country when he had shown so much interest in foreign affairs during his one term: the country—and the pollsters—felt that he had become too interested in foreign affairs, a charge that Bill Clinton subtly and not so subtly used against him in 1992. During the Clinton presidency there was a constant ambivalence about how great a priority to pay to foreign policy, especially on the part of a president so nuanced to political winds, who seemed to know how many votes each issue presented him. Certainly late in his presidency, stung by the Lewinsky scandal and looking for some kind of legacy, he had made an all-out effort to bring a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
But the danger of talking about foreign policy in a political campaign remained very much a part of the national fabric. When Al Gore had run for the presidency in 2000 he had been careful to hide his own considerable expertise in foreign affairs—seemingly pretending that he had never been vice president for eight years, played a key role in NSC meetings, had never been a principal activist in the Balkans, and never had exceptionally close and valuable relationships with a number of top Russian officials—it was as if all of these accomplishments might somehow turn into political liabilities. When George W. Bush was elected in 2002 it was clearly as a unilateralist. September 11, at least momentarily changed that.
If the Bush people responded quickly to the military aspect of the September challenge, nonetheless some of the messages they subsequently gave out were mixed, or at the very least a reflection of a divided government. It was as if in this particular region they were willing to be militarily multilateral, but in many other ways, they remained somewhat more unilateral. The Americans were becoming, noted one European foreign minister in February 2002, minilateral, as if we only want to be involved with the rest of the world when it served our most immediate purpose.
The administration appeared seriously divided between those who believed that American power was so great that we could wield our influence in the Middle East by military power alone, and others, led by Secretary Powell who appeared to think the world more complex and thought some seemingly easy military moves had consequences that might, in that region, work against the long-range interests of the United States. This debate seemed to center more than anything else on the use of American military force against Iraq—and fears that any additional action against Saddam Hussein might have negative results domestically in Pakistan, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and in how others in the Middle East viewed that conflict.
If anything the very quality of American military high technology sometimes seemed almost too seductive; it inevitably created, however unconsciously, a certain unstated arrogance of might—a belief that you do not really need allies and do not need to consult with others, something our closest allies began to feel was true about us.
Its effect on American policymakers was equally seductive. It tended to have a considerable psychological effect on the architects of policy as well. Because it was extremely effective and something we did very, very well, because the casualties tended to be low, and because no other country could come near matching us in our abilities (and because the other things we had to do in dealing with terrorism were extremely hard and difficult to master), we tended to reinforce what we did well, and neglect things we did not do so well—such as upgrading our ability to come up with traditional forms of intelligence about the other side. The danger here was that the military aspect in a struggle like this remained relatively small. The hard parts, improving domestic security and gaining valuable intelligence on the terrorist operations, were much more difficult to master. Because it clearly was going to be extremely difficult to penetrate the top layer of terrorist cells with human agents, there was a need to use our high technology in gaining intelligence about the enemy leadership and aiding our domestic security people. But here we were well behind the curve—the frustration of the varying intelligence agencies in the months after the terrorist attacks was readily apparent.
How much the country itself had changed, and how genuinely interested it was in foreign affairs—other than a fascination with the events of September 11 and an interest in the military struggles with the Taliban and al Qaeda—was also difficult to determine. In the days and weeks after the terrorist bombings there was a dramatic jump in serious reporting from the Middle East, as well as reporting on the sources of terrorism. But gradually that began to recede. If there was a sign that much of the nation—especially many of the top executives in the media—had not yet changed their real value systems because of September 11, it was the news, in March of 2002, that the executives of Disney wanted to get rid of Ted Koppel and his program Nightline, self-evidently the single best program on any network dealing consistently with foreign policy, and replace him with David Letterman because Koppel, in the words of one ABC executive, was no longer relevant. That was staggering—Nightline was the jewel in the crown in all of network television, the best and most serious public affairs program on television, and yet the people running the company obviously did not value it.
This then posed a fascinating challenge for the American political system. It was a country pulled in two very different directions, one by the challenge of the new threats, and the other by powerful forces, already at work, for it to keep on as it had been going for years, to stick to business as usual, and because of the pressures in the corporate media world, to continue to present a remarkably trivial agenda.
I had hoped to see a broader kind of change in terms of Washington’s attitude towards the rest of the world (and a recognition of the importance of energy in our national security agenda—and thus the beginning of a long-range energy policy that increasingly liberated us from dependence on the Middle East). The overall changes that I had hoped to see in America’s attitude toward the rest of the world (and the idea that terrorism is connected to larger issues in foreign policy) had come more slowly than I had hoped. Perhaps that is typically American. Nonetheless, I remain somewhat optimistic about the long-range future.
One of the advantages of being someone older and having some degree of historical knowledge is the faith in the free society that eventually comes with it. The terrible thing about the communists, the poet Allen Ginsberg once told me years ago when I was in Eastern Europe and he had had a difficult little struggle with the Czech and Polish authorities, is that all the clichés about them are true. I would add to that a corollary, that one of the good things about democracies is that many of the clichés about them are true—you just have to stick around long enough to bear witness. But in my lifetime I have seen the resilience of American democracy in action time and again. That encompasses those months after World War II, when we moved so quickly from sleeping isolationist nation, to what we so soon became, an awesome new international power, occasionally vigilant, occasionally not so vigilant, that we are today. When the Cold War was over we spoke too much of who won it, and not of the cool, deliberate, understated leadership of the men who determined our earlier responses, starting with Truman and Acheson and Kennan and others, ironically, much maligned in those early days for being soft even as they rallied the nation for what was then a new and very complicated and somewhat distant challenge. And, post-Sputnik, it reflected our capacity to go all out in space, with the pledge of John Kennedy in 1961 to put a man on the moon, and the ability only eight years later for us to do exactly that.
What I have come to admire over the years, and to believe in, is the degree of muscularity and flex in this society, in the loyalty and energies of free men and women freely summoned, and never to underestimate this country’s resolve, once that resolve is focused. More than anything else I have great faith in our pragmatism, our common sense, and our resilience.
What I have also learned is that opponents of the free society—whether it was the Germans (Hitler saying he would wring England’s neck like a chicken, and Churchill answering with complete contempt, “some chicken, some neck”) and the leaders of Imperial Japan in 1941, or the Soviets during the Cold War (Khrushchev saying he would bury us—his son now teaches at my daughter’s college in Providence, Rhode Island), and even more recently Slobodan Milosevic, who kept telling America’s diplomats that he could outbluff us because he could accept death and we could not—tend to underestimate our strengths and tend to see our democracy’s strengths, the slowness of our responses as weaknesses. The most recent example of that is from Osama bin Laden who was quoted in an interview with the writer Peter Bergen as saying that his battle with America was easier than with the Russians, whose men were more courageous, and above all more patient. Men like that believe, wrongly, I think, that what I consider to be our strength is a certain kind of decadence, because we are slow to act, and we are rarely on a wartime footing.
I have a different view: I think it is easy to underestimate the strengths and resilience of America, that we are, because of our geography, different from other countries, more self-sufficient, more isolated, and therefore slower to act—getting America to change directions and attitudes from one era to another sometimes must seem like trying to change directions in an aircraft carrier while trailing your hand behind it in the water. But our strengths, when summoned and focused, when the body politic is aroused and connects to the top of the political process, are never to be underestimated.
I think this is going to be a difficult period. We are being led by a young man who was elected precisely because he was not interested in the rest of the world. Now, that young man, surrounded by men senior to him, who served his father in another time, is having to learn under what are virtual combat conditions, how to be a wartime president. I retain a certain faith that this country will respond well, but I think it will be a more difficult road than most of my countrymen think, that the military part will be a smaller part of the entire equation, and I believe we are far behind where we should have been in getting our intelligence and security systems up to speed. But in this country we tend to stumble at first, and we are rarely quick in our responses to new challenges—we forget today that the first American troops who fought in North Africa fared poorly, and the British soldiers, much more experienced by then, were contemptuous of their fighting ability in the beginning. We forget as well that we were well behind the Soviets in rocketry when Sputnik orbited in 1957. But somehow, gradually and awkwardly, we turned the full force of our enormous energies to the proper subject, and after muddling through, we got there. As I suspect we will again.