Presidents and fathers: Fighting our battles, together

Memorial Day had us reflecting on all of those brave men and women who have laid down their lives for this country. Neither of our fathers lost their lives in war, but each of our fathers did heed the call to fight in World War II — one in the European Theater, participating in the liberating invasion of Normandy, and the other in the Pacific Theatre, fighting in the sweltering jungles of New Guinea. While both survived the horrors of war, they each, in their own way, carried the war home with them.

In our fathers’ era, mobilization extended well beyond the troops being deployed overseas. Their loved ones, and all Americans on the home front, were called upon to make hard sacrifices that they, in turn, viewed as their personal contributions to the war effort. There was a true sense that their sacrifices were for the common good. In his 21st “Fireside Chat” on April 28, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of the status of the many battlefields. Then he added:

“But there is one front and one battle where everyone in the United States — every man, woman, and child — is in action, and will be privileged to remain in action throughout this war. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, in our daily tasks. Here at home everyone will have the privilege of making whatever self-denial is necessary, not only to supply our fighting men, but to keep the economic structure of our country fortified and secure during the war and after the war.

“This will require, of course, the abandonment not only of luxuries but of many other creature comforts.

“Every loyal American is aware of his individual responsibility. Whenever I hear anyone saying, ‘The American people are complacent — they need to be aroused,’ I feel like asking him to come to Washington to read the mail that floods into the White House and into all departments of this Government. The one question that recurs through all these thousands of letters and messages is, ‘What more can I do to help my country in winning this war?’”

Americans truly were in that fight together. And there is much for which we can be proud.

This country has been involved in many wars since WWII, not all fought on a battleground. We also have risen to the ongoing challenges of fighting wars on drugs, on poverty, and on racism. Several weeks after claiming that today’s coronavirus would just “disappear,” our president declared COVID-19 to be “our big war” and, in his own words, viewed himself as a “wartime president.” Yet, rather than immediately rallying the nation as a whole, our president was tweeting that “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power … to inflame the Coronavirus situation.”

One of our fathers lost a father to the Spanish Influenza when he was an infant; one of our fathers lost a man who would have become his brother-in-law, if he had survived that same pandemic. So the behavior of our nation during today’s presidentially-declared war on disease hits very close to home.

As Chris Lu, senior fellow at the Miller Center, has said, one of any president’s most important functions is as “comforter in chief,” and great presidents in the past have been distinguished by their ability to set aside partisanship in times of tragedy to speak words that comfort a nation and remind us that, despite our differences, we are all, in the end, Americans.

We need our president to bring us together to understand the sacrifices we must make so that we don’t endure a brutal second wave of this disease, as happened in 1918.

We need to be appalled that we have a president who is encouraging protests of his administration’s own guidelines so that people are not inconvenienced by this war. We need to put a halt to the sense of entitlement and, indeed, of ageism so that we may all live through this and face the fight together, as one American people.

We should harken back to what President Roosevelt, the seminal leader of our fathers’ generation, so famously said: “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

On behalf of our fathers, we certainly hope that is true.

Gregory F. Treverton chaired the U.S. National Intelligence Council from 2014 to January 2017.  He is now professor of the Practice of International Relations and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California and chairman of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum. He is the author of numerous books including “Dividing Divided States” (2014), “National Intelligence and Science: Beyond the Great Divide in Analysis and Policy” (2015) and “Intelligence for an Age of Terror” (2011).   

Karen Treverton is former Special Assistant to the President of RAND, and manager of the RAND Terrorism Database.