Preface

Browsing in a used book store in Los Angeles, I came across a dusty black book called The March of Freedom: A Layman’s History of the American People. I opened it and read the story of “one man’s hunt for what he felt he needed most to bring home to himself.” That man was William Harlan Hale—a journalist, classicist, broadcaster of the Voice of America, and, as I later found out, trusted adviser to President Harry Truman. But his credentials interested me far less than his prose. Writing in 1947, when America had emerged as the most powerful victor of World War II, he seemed to feel exactly as I do today, that the America he loved was turning into a country he no longer recognized.

Hale saw the looming forces of “greed, bigotry, and inertia.” He saw a country with an atomic bomb capable of destroying anything on earth. He saw a country “accused of being overbearing and imperialistic,” a country “so crisscrossed by our own divisions” that we were stuck fast, incapable of living up to our own ideal. Hale was not despondent, however, but determined. He turned to our past to find the energy and principles to spur renewed action. Across the decades, his account of those principles continues to inspire.

Today, America has emerged as the undisputed victor of the Cold War, and U.S. power and wealth are unparalleled. But when I read the papers in the morning, I often feel that I am in the midst of a bad dream. American soldiers and Iraqi civilians are dying daily in Iraq, in a war we rushed into under false pretenses and now can’t get out of. We are so hated in many parts of the world that any policy initiative with our name on it is dead on arrival. Even the citizens of our fellow democracies see us as morally bankrupt, and not without reason.

Our Congress would allow the president to imprison any “enemy combatant” for life with no possibility of challenging his detention in court. We have denounced many of the international institutions that we worked so hard to build after 1945. We stand isolated in the world community, voting with countries like Libya, Yemen, and North Korea against all other NATO members and virtually all our other allies on issues like the establishment of a U.N. Human Rights Council. We have lost the diplomatic clout even to persuade a majority of Latin American countries to support our candidate for president of the Organization of American States. Worst of all, in large parts of the world, the image of America is not the Statue of Liberty, but rather the image of a hooded figure standing on a box with an electric cord trailing from under his gown. Yet rather than support efforts by leaders in Congress to reject and erase this image, our own vice president has insisted that our Central Intelligence Agency officers must be allowed to torture their captives.

I too have turned back to our past to help find the way forward. We can recover. We can regain our identity, our values, and our pride. Thirty years ago, millions of people around the world equated the United States with the picture of the naked little girl running down the road in Vietnam, fleeing a napalm attack. But this image then gave way to other images in the nation’s and the world’s consciousness: Ronald Reagan standing in Berlin and asking Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” and later joyous and unbelieving East Germans dancing on top of that same wall in 1989; the United States at the head of a global coalition under a U.N. flag driving Iraq back out of Kuwait; U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke insisting at the United Nations that AIDS in Africa be treated as a global security issue; the Dayton Peace Agreement ending the war in Bosnia and later the NATO intervention in Kosovo to stop Slobodan Milosevic from one more horrific and bloody round of ethnic cleansing; and the unforgettable image of the Twin Towers burning on September 11, with all the world standing with us in shock and grief. More than five years after 9/11, we remember the horror of that indelible day. But in the intervening years of war and conflict, of unilateralism at home and anti-Americanism abroad, we have largely forgotten that all-too-brief moment of global solidarity, the opportunity to unite almost all nations in a fight against terrorism and its deeper causes. President Bush told our friends and our sympathizers and even the would-be neutrals that they had to be either with us or against us. Today, regardless of what their governments say, the people of almost every nation are against us.

We have lost our way in the world. To find it again, we must ask ourselves, and openly debate, a key question: What role should America play in the world?