More Reflections On John McCain

I never liked the generational analysis of American History.  X Generation was this way. Y Generation was that way. The Generation that lived through the Great Depression and won World War II were "The Greatest Generation." Thanks, Tom Brokaw, but maybe they weren't greater than all the others.

And yet.....

Last week the presidential historian Jon Meacham had an interesting thought about John McCain.

John McCain, he observed, was one of the last members of the World War II Generation.

If that's so, it explains a lot. It also means that I am also of the World War II Generation. In fact, John McCain and I received our Navy commissions on the same day in May of 1958. He flew airplanes and I drove ships, but it was the same navy.

John McCain was about eight months older than me. He was five years old when the Japanese attacked, I was four. Neither of us was surprised that war had started, because we had witnessed our fathers preparing for war.

My father had just returned to Tallahassee from the Carolina Maneuvers on December 5th. Earlier in the year, he was away at the Louisiana Maneuvers, a massive trial and demonstration of new military tactics. I had seen with my own eyes the two-lane US highways across the South clogged with enormous military convoys.

On that day of infamy in December of 1941, my dad grabbed his B-4 bag (always packed to go to war) and went to the air base. John McCain watched the staff car drive up to his house in New London and take his father away.He doesn't remember seeing his father again until after Japan surrendered.

If John McCain was the last of the World War II Generation, then so am I.

My head is filled with the sound track of World War II. Go into any cafe, and juke boxes were filled with tunes by Glen Miller, the Dorsey Brothers, Woodie Guthrie, Harry James and others. There were singles like "Praise the Lord and Pass The Ammunition," "Coming in On a Wing And a Prayer," nostalgic tunes like "I'll be Home For Christmas (if only in my dreams").

The war had not yet started when we heard ominous warnings that Democracies were weak and would not be able to stand up to the authoritarian dictatorships taking over the countries of Europe and Asia.

I didn't follow those discussions closely, but movie newsreels painted an ominous picture of the perilous state of affairs for the democracies.

Then, without much fanfare, Great Britain and the United States on August 14, 1941 signed the Atlantic Charter. Looking back on that event, I think it is not an exaggeration to say that that piece of paper laid the foundation for victory.

The eight principal points of the Charter were:

1. no territorial gains were to be sought by the United States or the United Kingdom;
2. territorial adjustments must be in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned;
3. all people had a right to self-determination;
4. trade barriers were to be lowered;
5. there was to be global economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare;
6. the participants would work for a world free of want and fear;
7. the participants would work for freedom of the seas;
8. there was to be disarmament of aggressor nations, and a common disarmament after the war.

The truth is, the Charter sounded much like Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points of 1917. It proved to be a powerful incentive for other nations to join in a grand and eventually victorious alliance. As in 1917, the goal was to make the world safe for democracy, but also safe for commerce and prosperity.

The World War II generation did not accept authoritarian dictatorships. We did not accept the idea of a "Master Race."

To be sure, many Americans believed in White Supremacy. But the World War II generation changed all that. It was our proudest accomplishment.