Features > September 8, 2006
The Good War on Terror
How the Greatest Generation helped pave the road to Baghdad
By Christopher Hayes
U.S. Marines salute behind memorials to their fallen comrades at a service memorializing those killed in Iraq.
On September 11, 2001, George W. Bush wrote the following impression in his diary: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” He wasn’t alone in this assessment. In the days after the attacks, editorialists, pundits and citizens reached with impressive unanimity for this single historical precedent. The Sept. 12 New York Times alone contained 13 articles mentioning Pearl Harbor.
Five years after 9/11 we are still living with the legacy of this hastily drawn analogy. Whatever the natural similarities between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, the association of the two has led us to convert—first in rhetoric, later in fact—a battle against a small band of clever, murderous fundamentalists into a worldwide war of epic scale.
The toll has been steep: more than $1 trillion will be spent for the ongoing combat and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq; 2,900 dead American soldiers, 20,000 wounded, and somewhere between 50,000 to 150,000 dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians. We have detained hundreds of “enemy combatants” in Guantánamo, denying them due process, and until recently, habeas corpus. The terms “black sites” and “extraordinary rendition” have entered our lexicon, respective euphemisms for secret U.S. prisons abroad where torture occurs and for the practice of transferring prisoners to other countries that employ torture. Polls show international opinion of the United States at record lows.
How did we get here?
The best place to look for the answer is not in the days after the attacks, but in the years before. Examining the cultural mood of the late ’90s allows us to separate the natural reaction to a national trauma from any underlying predispositions. During that period, the country was in the grip of a strange, prolonged obsession with World War II and the generation that had fought it.
The pining for the glory days of the Good War has now been largely forgotten, but to sift through the cultural detritus of that era is to discover a deep longing for the kind of epic struggle the War on Terror would later provide. The standard view of 9/11 is that it “changed everything.” But in its rhetoric and symbolism, the WWII nostalgia laid the conceptual groundwork for what was to come—the strange brew of nationalism, militarism and maudlin sentimentality that constitutes post-9/11 culture.
To fully understand what has gone wrong since 9/11, it is necessary to rewind the tape to that moment just before.
Before the storm
The late ’90s was a strange time in American history. With the Cold War over, the country faced no overarching enemy for the first time in decades. The United States seemed possessed of no greater national purpose than making money through IPOs and an ever-expanding Dow. Our politics were dominated by the petty and trivial: from school uniforms to the president’s sex life.
Memories of former glory rushed in to fill this vacuum. In 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day prompted both an NBC special commemoration hosted by Tom Brokaw and the publication of historian Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day June 6, 1994: The Climactic Battle of World War II, which would go on to sell 800,000 copies. The book attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg—a man with a preternatural sense of the zeitgeist—who would launch the pop cultural phenomenon in all its excess in 1998 with Saving Private Ryan, which opened to rave reviews and grossed $433 million.
An explosion of associated products came on the heels of Saving Private Ryan’s commercial success: Brokaw’s three “Greatest Generation” books (which sold 5 million copies), a book about veterans of the Pacific Theater called Flags of Our Fathers (a film adaptation produced by Spielberg and directed by Clint Eastwood will be released this fall), and a clunking Bruce Willis vehicle called Hart’s War. With such an irresistible financial incentive, Ambrose would generate 10 more books between 1994 and 2001, including a distilled history of the war for “young readers” called The Good Fight. Tom Hanks, who starred in Saving Private Ryan, became a kind of WWII commemoration crusader, cutting a series of radio ads that advocated for a World War II memorial to be built on the Mall. After a seven-year-campaign, it was dedicated in 2004.
Nostalgia quickly descended into kitsch: In 1999, People named “The World War II Soldier” one of its “25 Most Intriguing People,” right next to Ricky Martin and Ashley Judd. But unlike so many pop culture phenomena, this one had legs, extending into the new millennium when Hollywood released the summer blockbuster Pearl Harbor in May 2001. Months later, HBO broadcast with great fanfare “Band of Brothers,” a miniseries based on Ambrose’s eponymous book about the exploits of the famed “E Company” as it fought its way across Europe. Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, the series debuted on Sept. 9, 2001.
The flag of our fathers
Explaining why he made Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg told an interviewer, “The most important thing about this picture is that I got to make a movie about a time that my dad flourished in.” During the Vietnam War, Spielberg explained, he resented people like his father who were proud to be American and displayed the flag. “Only when I became older did I begin to understand my dad’s generation,” Spielberg said. “I went from resenting the American flag to thanking it.”
That American flag receives loving treatment in Saving Private Ryan’s opening moments, when it stiffly, proudly flutters across the screen. In fact, the flag, which had become a legendary culture war symbol after being torched during Vietnam protests, enjoys an earnest revival throughout the literature of the WWII nostalgia. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley writes that the image of his father and his fellow soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima “transported many thousands of anxious, grieving, and war-weary Americans into a radiant state of mind: a kind of sacred realm, where faith, patriotism, mythic history, and the simple capacity to hope intermingled.”
In The Greatest Generation, Brokaw also celebrates this simple, old-fashioned patriotism. “They love life and love their country,” Brokaw writes of his subjects, before adding, “and they are not ashamed to say just that.”
“If there’s a common lament of this generation,” he notes later, it is “where is the old-fashioned patriotism that got them through so much heartache and sacrifice?”
It’s not just patriotism, though, that distinguishes “the Greatest Generation any society has ever produced.” According to Brokaw, members of it share “a sense of duty to their country” that is not “much in fashion anymore.” Due to the “military training and discipline” they received during the war, they are models of self-control, and complain that, “the way you’re told to raise your kids now, there’s no discipline.” They are allergic to conspicuous consumption, humble and stoic, “refusing to talk about [the war] unless questioned and then only reluctantly.” They are “self-sufficient,” and characterized by “a sense of personal responsibility and a commitment to honesty.”
If this litany of values seems familiar, it’s because in the oppositional vocabulary of the culture war, they are virtues that, like the flag itself, conservatives claim as their own. In conservative mythology, it was the baby boomers—undisciplined, self-indulgent, unpatriotic—who unmoored the country from the traditional values of their forebears. Because the right has spent the better part of three decades pillorying the cultural legacy of the ’60s, it’s impossible for any work that celebrates the WWII generation not to serve a tacit culture war function.
Even before 9/11, Karl Rove understood this all too well. In his essay “Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror and the Uses of Historical Memory,” David Hoogland Noon, a history professor at the University of Alaska, Southeast, writes that even in his first campaign George W. Bush “consistently referenced World War II not simply to justify his own policy aims, but more importantly as a cultural project as well as an ongoing gesture of self-making,” positioning himself as “an heir to the reputed greatest generation of American leaders.”
“In the world of our fathers, we have seen how America should conduct itself,” Bush said in a 1999 speech at the Citadel. Now, the moment had come “to show that a new generation can renew America’s purpose.” Throughout both his campaigns, Bush would go out of his way to criticize the dominant ethos of “If it feels good, do it,” instead calling for a “culture in which each of us understands we’re responsible for the decisions we make.”
Bush’s allusions to the Greatest Generation were so persistent that the press came to see him—a Boomer child of privilege known for his youthful carousing—as a kind of throwback. Reporting on Bush’s first inaugural address, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas wrote that “Bush wants the White House to recover some of its dignity, to rise above baby-boomer self-indulgence and aspire to the order and self-discipline prized by the Greatest Generation.”
After 9/11 it seemed as if the entire country was ready to adopt the Greatest Generation values that Bush had so assiduously claimed as his own. We celebrated the manly heroism of the cops and firefighters who sacrificed their lives to save people. Editorials proclaimed the “death of irony” and a return to earnest patriotism. The flag that Spielberg had once resented and later come to love seemingly now hung from every home.
Bush, then, emerged as a kind of prophet. Because his image-makers had already portrayed him as having abandoned Boomer frivolity for Greatest Generation discipline, he seemed the natural choice to lead the country through its trials. In 2002, after congressional Democrats suffered losses in the mid-terms despite heavy campaigning from Bill Clinton, Time’s Margaret Carlson concluded this was due to a post 9/11 “shift in the culture,” in which “Clinton-era values are no longer America’s.”
“Though a baby boomer,” Carlson observed, “Bush rejects the instant-gratification ethic embraced by Clinton, the nation’s first baby boomer President. … [Bush] often laments not being one of the Greatest Generation he so admires. …Whereas Clinton liked going on MTV with 18-year-olds, Bush urges them and their parents to return to an ‘era of responsibility.’ “
The new militarism
It is impossible to separate the values celebrated in the Greatest Generation nostalgia from the experience of war itself, for the soldiers’ experiences formed the core of the entire liturgy.
Stephen Ambrose, whose work serves as the foundation for the canon, documents the minutest details of soldiers’ battle experience, expressing “awe” at what they were able to endure. When Ambrose’s account was dramatized in Saving Private Ryan, critics hailed its unvarnished look at the mayhem of battle. Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times summed up the consensus. While “the combat film has disintegrated into a showcase for swagger, cynicism, obscenely overblown violence and hollow, self-serving victories,” she wrote, Spielberg’s film “simply looks at war as if war had not been looked at before.” This description suffices for the film’s opening sequence, but when applied to the film’s overall meaning, it obscures much more than it reveals.
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