Drift

Reagan’s future vice president enlisted right out of high school, against his own father’s advice. But when the Air Corps fell short of the enlistment quota for its most notoriously dangerous assignment, rear gunner, Arnold turned to Jack Warner and Fum-Poo to help him invest that job with “some romantic appeal.”

The result was a twenty-six-minute short film, Rear Gunner, starring Burgess Meredith as milquetoast Kansas farm boy Pee Wee Williams and Ronald Reagan as an eagle-eye lieutenant who thought Private Pee Wee might have bigger things in store for him than aircraft maintenance. “Pee Wee,” Reagan asks, “how’d you like to go to gunnery school?” In short order, Pee Wee would be molded into an ice-veined, steel-eyed warrior—“one of aviation’s mightiest little men… a Galahad of gunnery”—and then shipped off to the Pacific to serve on the flight crew headed by that same eagle-eyed lieutenant. By the time the film ended, Pee Wee had won the Distinguished Service Medal, and potential recruits had been reminded that “the fire from your guns is the fire of freedom.”

Rear Gunner worked on a variety of levels. American audiences knew nothing of Reagan’s trepidation about actual flying, but they’d seen his previous turns as a hero pilot in movies such as Secret Service of the Air, International Squadron, and Desperate Journey. And publicity for Rear Gunner noted that both Meredith and Reagan were active-duty lieutenants: “Perhaps they were more than acting their parts in the film—perhaps they were living them.”

Reagan really never did more than act the part of a combat soldier. He spent his entire war at that Culver City back lot, with Hollywood’s once and future stars, directors, and producers, helping the 1,200-man-strong motion-picture unit churn out more than four hundred training, recruiting, or booster films. He never busted out to fly combat missions like Clark Gable or Jimmy Stewart; he never got a chance to fight the Japs like his actor friend Eddie Albert did. But Reagan took pride in the fact that he’d done what was asked of him, and he’d taken to heart one of Fum-Poo’s central missions: to keep reminding the folks at home (the ones who could buy the war bonds, for instance) that the United States and its military power was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of Adolf Hitler and his Japanese allies. Nearly forty years later, he’d hauled himself into the White House by reminding the folks at home that US military might was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of the Soviets and their energetic and ruthless agent in the Western Hemisphere, Fidel Castro.

By the time Reagan became president he’d long since come to understand that good enemies (even welfare queens and tinhorn dictators) make good politics. The two previous Oval Office inhabitants had made plenty of hay with war metaphors, but they never really set up suitably threatening or concrete antagonists. Gerald Ford had declared war on the high cost of living (“Whip Inflation Now!”)… and lost the presidency. His successor, Jimmy Carter, had declared war on our national dependence on foreign oil. Carter’s renowned 1979 “malaise speech”— the one in which he never uttered the word “malaise”—is little remembered as what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation’s dire energy future. “Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never,” President Carter said in his nationally televised address to the nation. “The generation- long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one- half by the end of the next decade.” Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power and alternative fuel, and—drum-roll, please—“a bold conservation program” where “every act of energy conservation… is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism.” He tried to make it all sound as martial as possible: “Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war…. We must deal with the energy problem on a war footing… the moral equivalent of war… a fundamental threat to American democracy… the threat… the crisis… threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America… a clear and present danger to our nation.” Name-checking the world wars repeatedly, Carter declared that “energy… can also be the standard around which we rally!”

But somehow Carter’s “battlefield of energy” never really filled up with eager American combatants. It just never felt like anybody was going to be draped in glory for taking public transportation, or carpooling, or turning down the thermostat and wearing a cardigan.

Lost in President Carter’s ten-car pileup of war metaphors was a line that probably should have been his headline that night: that America was “a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world.” But Jimmy Carter did not try to sell that; instead, he declared a “war” on the energy crisis… and lost the presidency.

The founders were onto something with their cautions about that whole military vainglory thing. There really is nothing that approaches war’s political potency. Carter proved this point in failure—shouting into the void that something other than a war, if maybe you called it a war, “can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose.” No, it can’t. Or at least, no, it hasn’t.

In 1895, at a time when America had enjoyed peace for more than a generation, a fifty-five-year-old Massachusetts judge named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. delivered a Memorial Day speech called “A Soldier’s Faith” that, as well as anything before or since, described Americans’ attraction to war. It’s not just the mistake of kings—even in a government that is by, for, and of the people, the people’s own understandable, emotional inclination to war can make it hard for a country to remain peaceable.

“War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine…. In this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed streaming of the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger.” Thousands of citizens had assembled to hear Holmes’s Memorial Day oration, but the judge was speaking mainly for the benefit of the stooped and grizzled old soldiers in the crowd that day.

More than thirty years earlier, Holmes had fought in the Civil War, in what remain, to this day, America’s most terrifying and costly battles. He was shot through the neck and left to die at Antietam, where nearly twenty thousand of his countrymen were killed or wounded in a single afternoon. Nearly two years later, he was still up and in the fight. In the Wilderness campaign, he saw a man instantaneously decapitated by flying shrapnel and noted in his diary the carnage at the Bloody Angle: “the dead of both sides lay piled in the trenches 5 or 6 deep— wounded often writhing under the superincumbent dead.” And only then, aged twenty-three years and two months, did Holmes finally choke on the blood. He walked away from that war before the outcome was decided, with little concern for which side won or lost. “I have felt for sometime,” he wrote to his parents in May 1864, “that I didn’t any longer believe in this being a duty.”

But as he delivered “A Soldier’s Faith” thirty years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes had been enveloped by the practiced amnesia of a willful romantic. “It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds,” he said that day. “Sooner or later we fall, but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can.” After walking away from his own war when he lost his sense of its purpose, decades later, Holmes made that purpose war itself; war, regardless of its cause, as its own reward, its own sublime virtue, an inevitable consequence simply of life as man, and man’s need for a reason to need one another. He continued:

As long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle. I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use….

Perhaps it is not vain for us to tell the new generation what we learned in our day, and what we still believe. That the joy of life is living, is to put out all one’s powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacles overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier’s faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battlefield, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory more than the temptations of wallowing ease….

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its