Rekindling Pride and Purpose

By Hugh Sidey

Ronald Reagan's European journey was an extraordinary history lesson written on prime time. All along the way, there were echoes of old struggles and triumphs, images of ancestors who fled the Continent and of their descendants who went back to fight. Time and time again the sound of bugles awakened memories that spoke of our closeness and common fate.

Reagan began the lesson by noting, in a radio broadcast to the folks back home, that not many steps away from where he was seated in the Versailles Palace, the rotund and wise Benjamin Franklin struck a deal with Louis XVI in 1778 that brought vital French help in the Revolution. "Now, I don't want to give you a history lesson," Reagan said, but of course he did just that. He summoned up images of the proud and stubborn Woodrow Wilson, who journeyed to Versailles after World War I, determined to forge a peace that could end all war, a hope that regrettably had little chance. The Versailles Treaty was signed on a June day 63 years ago.

Reagan's journey marked the 35th June since Secretary of State George Marshall talked at Harvard about an immense rehabilitation plan for Europe. It was also the 21st anniversary of John Kennedy's first summit venture, during which he became so intimidated by the imperious Charles de Gaulle that he began to study French when he got home so he could be on equal terms with the old statesman.

On June 6, Nancy Reagan helicoptered to Normandy and looked down on Omaha Beach. Exactly 38 years earlier, the roar from the world's greatest amphibious combat shook the sea and cliffs that last week heard only the shouts of children. Church bells up and down the coast tolled in those morning hours, and the story of the great invasion was recounted over and over. Nancy Reagan's party paused before a German bunker, preserved as a memorial, with the words of Franklin Roosevelt carved across its top: "We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees."

In Britain the President and Queen Elizabeth graciously joked about her forebear George III, who, she said, "played a seemingly disastrous role" in our affairs some 200 years back. When Reagan went to view the Berlin Wall, the gesture evoked more memories, this time of Kennedy, 19 Junes ago, when millions of besieged West Berliners cheered and wept as he drove through their midst and finally shouted his challenge, now etched deeply in history: "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

Surely one of the dividends of Reagan's trip was a rekindling of pride and purpose from the past. But something else emerged against this tapestry of memories. The importance of economic matters, of peaceful contention in the marketplaces instead of war along the beaches, loomed larger than it ever has. Even when war news from the Middle East and the Falklands intruded into the discussions, and when Reagan felt he had to emphasize the need for military strength, the concern about high interest rates and unemployment would not be turned aside. Perhaps the most provocative proposal of the ten days on the road was made by French President Francois Mitterrand, who urged the industrial nations to better foresee and harness new technology. Within that idea is a glimmer of the immense reality that the free world can defeat Communism only with economic vitality, not arms.

In Kennedy's time, the U.S. could arrange the economic landscape the way it wanted to. Presidents went to summits to talk about how to fight wars, from nuclear to jungle. Events in the world may now be forcing the allies into a truly cooperative economic consortium, much as military threats originally shaped NATO. The thin but sustainable hope is that some future President can stand at a crumbling vestige of the Berlin Wall and recall that years before, President Ronald Reagan had gone there and predicted the Wall's decay.

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