The Time of Our Lives Read Free Page A

here.”
    THE PAST
    This was in the early months of his first term and he was casually confident, as yet untested and, oh, so young. He had just arrived from Cairo, where he had given a well-received speech to the Islamic world on the need to find a more peaceful path to the future. I had just come from Berlin, where, I told him, I had been the night the wall came down in 1989. He laughed and said, “I remember; I watched. I was in law school at the time.”
    What?
    Law school? And you’re now the president? I was about to be fifty when the Soviet Union collapsed; it was just yesterday in my life, and he was at Harvard, a student with a promising but unresolved future.
    After a moment or two of casual banter the president took his place and with his characteristic ease responded to questions about the Holocaust, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel, his great-uncle’s experience in World War II, and the moral character of the American people.
    That character, he suggested, has to be refreshed. “The biggest lesson we learned from World War II,” he said, “is America can do anything when it puts its mind to it, but we gotta exercise those muscles.”
    He went on, “I think they’ve atrophied a bit. We’re soft in ways that are profoundly dangerous to our long-term prosperity and security.” Here he hesitated slightly. “And, you know, we—we’ve gotta start working those—moral muscles and service muscles and sacrifice muscles a little more. That’s still in the American character, and I’m confident we’ll be seeing it in the years to come.”
    As he was leaving, I suggested he try to find a solitary moment the next day when he would be in Colleville-sur-Mer, the American cemetery on a bluff above Omaha Beach. “Walk through those headstones with just your thoughts,” I said, “and be prepared to have your knees buckle.”
    As I have learned in more than a half-dozen visits to that landscape of simple white tombstones, the initial response of first-time visitors to the American cemetery, and the beaches, is often tearful, but I was confident such a walk would generate more than an emotional reaction for the president.
    The lingering lesson of Omaha Beach is the deeply affecting value of common cause supported by uncommon valor against monstrous tyranny. It is a lesson that need not be reserved for great wars alone.
    Since my first visits to Normandy, Pearl Harbor, and other World War II battle sites, I’ve often been unduly agitated by petty feuds or tempted to abandon vexing problems that require more personal investment than I anticipated. Then I imagine being strafed in a surprise attack or wading off a Higgins boat into the face of withering fire and knowing that if I survive it is just the beginning of another year of hellish combat, lost buddies, and horrific sights. It is a useful perspective and, judging from the personal accounts of strangers who have approached me over the years to describe their visits to Normandy, it is a common reaction.
    In Dresden, the cloudy skies brightened and I took my place for the Today show transmission, which went smoothly.
    I’ve been in this line of work for almost half a century and while a presidential interview is always memorable, the following day you’re off to another development, in pursuit of another news maker, asking, “What’s next?”
    This time, however, the occasion, setting, circumstances, and subjects lingered. I wondered how this young president and all of us would be tested anew. The answers came swiftly enough, especially for President Obama. Following a triumphant tour, the president returned home to the realities of a severely broken American economy—one so shattered it had ignited a national dialogue about values and proportion, greed and appropriate reward, and the role of the government in the marketplace.
    Unemployment rose from 8.1 percent in March 2009 to a persistent 9.6 percent in the summer and fall of 2010 and then to