Wrong Time, Wrong Place
Bacevich, A. J.
Wrong Time, Wrong Place by A. J. Bacevich PICKING THROUGH THE DROPPINGS of theWashington Post’s campaign on behalf of Bob Woodward’s new book The Choice, the strangest tidbit you will find...
...In a deeply ironic commentary on our age, Walker Percy once observed that “war is better than Monday morning...
...For Mr...
...As was the case in 1945, the legacy of victory in the Cold War has not been unmixed...
...Disregard such considerations and focus instead on what Clinton’s remark tells us about his ability—or willingness—to serve the particular nation he was elected to govern—as opposed to some other notional country that exists in his imagination...
...Doing so effectively requires a brand of political leadership less interested in recapturing the spirit of some Great Crusade than in sorting out the mess left in its wake...
...The pathologies afflicting our culture today provide one measure of the price paid to overcome the adversary...
...The good guys won big in 1945...
...What Does Bill Clinton’s World War II nostalgia tell us about his ability to serve in his own age...
...Ticked off at the nation’s refusal to rally to his banner, Clinton grumpily complained that “I would have much preferred being president during World War II...
...Others bend themselves to the task of becoming adults...
...Shortly after the debacle of the November 1994 congressional elections, the president (according to Woodward) let it slip to friends that “I’m a person out of my time...
...Set aside for a moment the incongruity of this supreme exemplar of the coddled Baby Boomer generation waxing nostalgic for an era of epic savagery and untold suffering—when tens of millions were enslaved by or died at the hands of monstrous totalitarian regimes that were overthrown only at the cost of several hundred thousand Americans lives...
...But if he finds himself in the wrong time, surely he is in the wrong place as well...
...In order to prevail, Americans shouldered a heavy burden, military, economic, and political...
...Some give in to that temptation...
...Wrong Time, Wrong Place by A. J. Bacevich PICKING THROUGH THE DROPPINGS of theWashington Post’s campaign on behalf of Bob Woodward’s new book The Choice, the strangest tidbit you will find concerns not the first lady’s creepy cadre of New Age spiritual advisers but the commander in chief himself...
...He would do well to consider vacating the premises...
...Clinton, World War II presumably signifies an era unlike our own in that bold presidential leadership was automatically rewarded with widespread and enthusiastic national support...
...Disregard as well the febrile hankering for a “simpler time” implicit in the president’s wish...
...In contrast to the complexities of the present, World War II may represent for Clinton a time when the choices facing national leaders were morally unambiguous— such as, for instance, whether to make common cause with Josef Stalin or whether to vaporize Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the hopes of obviating the need for a massive and bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands...
...Like it or not, the world in which we live and that we’ll inhabit for the foreseeable future is a world of Monday mornings...
...Percy understood the allure of the Great Cause for those battered by the disorienting and spiritually enervating circumstances of life in postmodern America...
...For many conservatives—perhaps for a majority of Americans—addressing those pathologies describes the proper focus of politics after the Cold War...
...Bill Clinton discovered that he was meant to live in that age, an age more respectful of the endeavors of Great Leaders and better suited to underwrite heroic political achievement...
...We may now fairly ask into which category the president of the United States falls...
...Hillary might want to check with Eleanor about the abuse heaped on FDR for supporting Great Britain in its darkest hour...
...Hillary Clinton may have talked to people from a different age...
...One of the central truths of our age is that the days of the Great Cause are about over...
...However risky the enterprise, however impermanent the escape, the prospect of slipping loose from the burdens of everyday existence in favor of something more exhilarating exerts a powerful temptation to which few of us are completely immune...
...They won again even more decisively in 1989, bringing to a successful conclusion an honorable crusade in which a younger Clinton chose not to serve...
...Bill Clinton may well be right...
...This triumph does not mean an end to politics any more than it has meant the end of history...
...Perhaps he is a person out of his time...
...But it almost certainly means that the requirements of political leadership and the definition of political vision and courage are in the process of being revised...
...A. J. Bacevich is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C...
Vol. 1 • July 1996 • No. 42
