It was a hard American winter
A tough time for Americans.
But out there, beneath the ice, something big was stirring.
An awakening of the unruly animal, American democracy.
This presidential election isn't like other elections.
Those of us who have lived here for decades
felt the first tremors of a political earthquake.
It's not only a war gone bad and an economy on the skids,
but a nationwide loss of faith in government
that has gnawed at the root of the republic
since the dismal aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
I promise you, I will lead America in the 21st century and make you proud.
I will restore your trust and confidence in government.
That's what their votes are saying.'
Help us to believe in the American future again.
MAN 1: Forty-four. MAN 2: Forty-five.
WOMAN: Forty-six. MAN: Forty-seven.
(PEOPLE CHEERING)
In Iowa, I saw citizens going to the polls in double the numbers
of the last election.
It's odd, in a country obsessed with the new,
that history, its epic figures, its great texts
is treated as a living, breathing thing.
OBAMA: We are not a collection of red states and blue states,
we are the United States of America.
And in this moment, in this election,
we are running to believe again.
Thank you, Iowa.
It's never been more alive than now.
Is there anyone in America who doesn't call this election historic?
A candidate who doesn't reach out to history?
I want to explore this haunting of the present by the past.
I want to follow America deep into the conflicts of its history
to understand what's at stake right now.
...standing up for the freedom of my people!
MAN ON MICROPHONE: Check one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
SCHAMA: It was a year before the election, a wartime election.
Which meant, as so many times before in American history,
the arguments about the price America was paying in blood and money
would be fierce, loud, unsparingly bitter.
But for one day, the grief was held in check.
Instead, America was gathered in the patriotic moment of remembrance.
(BAND PLAYING NATIONAL EMBLEM MARCH)
The world has got into the habit of thinking of America
as the tough-guy empire,
trigger-happy cowboys addicted to the rush of military power.
But that's not the way America sees itself.
America may be a country founded in revolution,
but we've never been a warrior culture.
We are a democracy, defended by volunteers.
We're a peaceful nation. At times in our history...
I sat there and thought, "Well, that's rich, coming from him."
But the fact is what the Vice President said
is what most Americans believe.
Yet these blessings alone have never been enough
to assure safety at home or peace in our world.
From the days of the founding fathers, right to this election,
how and where America fights to defend its freedom
has been the ultimate question in its politics.
The one that triggers rage and sorrow, the one that asks,
is the price of blood too dear for this cause?
We cannot wait to bring this war in Iraq to a close,
we cannot wait.
Or if it is to stay true to its convictions,
does America have no choice but to put its lives on the line?
We have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq.
It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal,
a stain on our character as a great nation
if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people.
The debate is at the heart of this election,
and as with great war elections of the past,
it forces America to dig deep and rediscover what it stands for.
Amidst the stones of Arlington, there's someone I knew.
Not just a name, but a face, a presence.
The son of a neighbour from my small town in New York state,
killed fighting in Afghanistan.
It's a classic American story, mother and father Korean,
first generation immigrant.
But I look at that and I don't just think of a kid I knew.
You think of someone whose story
could only have been an American story, actually,
because it's an immigrant story.
It's a story of complete selflessness and of a family bond.
And this is a place full of family bonds.
Kyu-Chay's grave is in Section 60,
where the fallen of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan lie buried.
To walk from this spot up the hill to Section 1,
where the earliest graves were dug, is to walk through the bones
of America's fallen all the way back to the Civil War.
And to one grave in particular.
This is the tomb of John Rodgers Meigs,
who was killed in 1864, aged just 22.
His father, General Montgomery Meigs, built this memorial to his son
and he created Arlington National Cemetery.
He did much more.
During the Civil War, Montgomery Meigs transformed the Union Army
from a few thousand men
into a military power the likes of which the world had never before seen.
For me, Meigs is the story of American war,
its steely obligations, its inevitable anguish.
In 1832, Montgomery Meigs enrolled as a cadet
in the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Much as they did in Meigs's day,
the cadets here still wear the smoke-grey uniforms and short haircuts.
MAN: Anaconda!
It was a style considered appropriate for the sons of the new republic.
No knee britches, lace trim or powdered wigs here.
There are
four minutes
until assembly
for haircut inspection.
It may not look like it,
but for two centuries, West Point has been a war college
that's stood against, not for, a military cult.
A place sworn from its foundation to uphold civilian control of the Army,
a place where military dictatorship would be strangled at birth.
At any rate, that was what its founder, President Thomas Jefferson, wanted.
But then, he was the least likely founding father
to set his seal on a military college.
- All right, kids, I'm going to school. - Have a good day, Larry.
Jefferson was, in his marrow,
a Virginian gentleman farmer and philosopher.
He looked at Europe and its history and saw its standing armies
and its endless wars as the nursery of tyrants.
That was never going to happen in the democratic republic of America.
Jefferson knew that America had won its freedom thanks to bloody war,
but he consoled himself that this was truly different
from the wars of the Old World, fought by aristocratic officers
commanding mercenary scum.
Jefferson thought professional soldiers were bad for democracy.
Of course, Jefferson could feel that way about the fighting
because he'd done so little of it himself.
And his distance from the gun smoke meant he could allow himself the luxury
of a little fantasy that it had all been the victory of ordinary citizens,
farmers, storekeepers, salt-of-the-earth,
men who wouldn't have dreamt of grabbing a musket
unless it was to defend hearth and home
against bestial mercenaries in redcoats.
Not all the founding fathers shared this view.
Certainly not Jefferson's political enemy, Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton was a high-voltage powerhouse of ideas,
but even within his own party, there were those who feared
he might become an American Bonaparte.
Hamilton reckoned he really knew what made human beings tick,
money, lust, battle, power.
That went for Americans quite as much as for anybody else
Even if it didn't,
they'd better be prepared to deal with the dirty old dogs
of the rest of the world. Pursue peace, Hamilton said,
but do it by always being ready for war.
Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton had been a real soldier,
impetuous and brave, often at George Washington's side
in the thick of the fighting.
He knew that Jefferson's fantasy militia,
citizen-soldiers with dodgy muskets,
had been the weakest, not the strongest link in the war effort.
Without the help of professional soldiers,
the war would never have been won.
These dramatically opposite visions of the American future were put to the test
in the momentous election of 1800.
Jefferson's Democratic Republicans
were pitted against Hamilton's party of big power Federalists.
The question was this.'
Was America to be a republic that would have an army
as big as the continent it wanted to dominate
or would it be a citizen democracy
that would keep its military innocence intact?
Though Hamilton's vision endured, it was Jefferson who won the election.
And as President, he put his ideals about the military into effect.
In 1802, he created West Point,
not just as an academy for battle,
but as a school for democratic citizenship.
MAN: Brigades, attention.
Still got vacant seats, report to the boot camp to pick up floaters.
Take seats.
Jefferson never thought of its graduates as permanent soldiers,
more like tutors to the citizen militia in artillery, fortification
and engineering, the defensive arts.
And this sense of civic duty lives on
among these young men and women who would be just like students
at any other American college, except this is wartime.
I think one thing that makes it so real for us,
and why it's easy to stay focused on how serious everything we do here is,
is every now and then, we have an unfortunate event
and they announce a graduate who died.
SIMON: When was the last time you heard that awful thing to listen to?
It wasn't that long ago, it wasn't that long ago.
When they announce a graduate who's fallen,
it just becomes that much more real. You never really get to escape it.
I think other college students get to open the paper
and they get to read the sports page
and, oh yeah, we also have that thing in Iraq.
LARRY: I didn't join the army so I could go shoot someone up.
If me and my friends of my generation
are doing our best to stay on an ethical path
and if we're leading our army in that direction,
then we're going to be able to avoid all the negative feelings
that people have towards us.
SCHAMA: The struggle between Jefferson's and Hamilton's vision of how America
comes to terms with its wars is waged every day
in the hearts and minds of these cadets.
A big piece of them wants to say to the world, as Jefferson would have,
"Behind our uniforms, we're citizens first, soldiers second,
fighting only as a last resort to protect freedom."
But then the Hamilton in them says,
"Grow up. There are enemies out there who wish America harm,
"who want to destroy its liberty,
"take the fight to them before it's too late."
Sometimes you start one way and end up the other.
That's what happened to Montgomery Meigs,
the idealistic Jeffersonian who'd have to turn Hamiltonian to save his nation.
Like all other West Point cadets, Meigs was trained in engineering.
Thomas Jefferson had wanted his graduates to do their best
for civilian America, not just to build forts, but bridges and roads.
So after excelling at the Academy,
Meigs's first job was to survey a section of the Mississippi River,
to find a way to protect the town of St Louis from flooding.
He worked with another young West Point star, Robert E Lee.
They became friends.
Captain Meigs quickly won a reputation as a man who got things done.
After building forts around America,
he was called to Washington to help rebuild the city.
In 1852, he settled here with his wife Louisa.
They had a son named John.
The boy was the apple of his father's eye, and it was clear early on
he would follow his father to West Point and on into the military.
Meigs thought of America as the new Rome,
and he was going to be its heroic engineer.
Mighty public buildings, aqueducts.
He was asked to supervise the construction of the new dome
for the Capitol building.
But he did something you do at your peril in Washington, DC.
He became the enemy of shady lobbyists and contractors,
got a name for himself as unreasonably honest.
1859 was an important year.
The dome was well on the way to completion
and his son John had been admitted to West Point.
He wanted to become an engineer like his father.
But America was on the brink of Civil War.
The South had decided to leave the Union
if that's what it took to protect slavery.
The North would go to war to stop it.
Meigs, who had family south as well as north,
was as torn up as the country by this division.
Meigs brooded darkly on the fate of his country.
For so much of his life he'd been a builder, not a destroyer,
an engineer of life, not of death.
He was in no rush to go to war, but if the price of the Union
was to destroy everything that made America America,
liberty, equality, then that price, he thought, was too steep.
If ever there was a war of last resort for Meigs, this was it.
He assumed that his West Point comrade-in-arms Robert E Lee
would see it the same way,
but when the moment of truth arrived,
Lee sided with the South as commander of the Confederate Army.
And then, in the midst of the crisis,
a presidential election.
Would the new leader be someone who might try to postpone the agony
or would he be someone who thought the time for evasion had finally run out?
The country elected Abraham Lincoln.
On March 4, 1861, Meigs witnessed
the new President, Abraham Lincoln, sworn in on the Capitol steps.
Like a lot of Americans, he didn't think that much of Lincoln,
backwoods provincial lawyer, undistinguished first-term congressman.
But then he heard Lincoln speak.
LINCOLN: We are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained,
it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory,
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart
and hearthstone all over this broad land
will yet swell the chorus of the Union,
when again touched, as surely they will be,
by the better angels of our nature.
Meigs was deeply moved
by Lincoln's instinctively noble feel for the tragedy of the moment,
his heartrending appeal for peace, his resolution to prosecute the war
to save the Union, should that be needed.
Though Meigs wanted a combat posting,
Lincoln insisted that he be his Quartermaster General,
supplying the Union Army with whatever it took to win the war.
Any illusions Montgomery Meigs might have had about a limited war,
reluctantly fought, disappeared in the nightmare
of carnage that swept over the country,
taking 620,000 lives
before its end.
And at the centre of it all,
feeding men, horses, guns, stretchers into the mouth of hell,
was Montgomery Meigs.
He saw the war as a vision of exploding ordnance, mutilated horses,
an immense, grim empire of human straining.
Something in which families, mothers, children, babies
were all caught up.
It was Meigs's talent for mobilisation
that eventually won the war for the Union,
for ultimately the North didn't outfight the South
so much as out-supply it.
Between July 1st and 3rd, 1863,
Quartermaster General Meigs's war machine met its greatest test
when it clashed with Robert E Lee's Confederate troops
in and around the town of Gettysburg.
There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular.
This is one of them, a terrible place, Gettysburg.
There's just awful silence here. It's so quiet.
You can hear the remorseless thunder of the guns,
the fierce landscape of hell.
27,000 people wounded.
8,000 bodies, American against American,
absolute dead-on horrifying slaughter.
Insanely deluded ideas of chivalry,
Confederate infantrymen and horses charging,
gun emplacements up there, up there.
Carnage, limbs off, people screaming, ridiculous military bands
fifing and drumming their way in and out of bloodshed.
It's farmland, it's farmland, it's the heart of America.
You walk along here, you squish the mud
and you feel that bones are going to pop up.
Even the boulders, they feel like burial mounds,
but all these stones seem to be heaps of men.
Men who'd been farmers and tanners and blacksmiths and storekeepers
and shopkeepers and dry goods clerks and lawyers just turned into bodies
to try and save America.
The butchery was a brutal education for the man who engineered the victory.
Before the war began,
Meigs had predicted that it would be conducted humanely.
But this hadn't happened.
Instead, the country had been drowned in blood.
America had lost its military innocence.
Confronted with all this slaughter,
wagon after wagon of mutilated bodies arriving back in Washington,
something snapped in the iron Monty right here,
in the shadow of the home of his old friend turned unforgivable traitor,
Robert E Lee.
Where were the Union dead going to find their resting place?
Well, why not right here? In Mrs Lee's rose garden.
The Lee family would never come home again.
By the end of the war,
16,000 Union dead had been buried on their estate.
Their garden would be a charnel house.
Why did Meigs want this so badly? Because it was his own home,
his own family, that had been torn asunder.
His son John, like his father before him,
an army engineer, had been killed,
Meigs believed murdered in cold blood, by a band of Confederate irregulars.
It was as though Meigs held Lee
and all the other West Point traitors personally responsible
for the death of his son.
So when he came to commission this bronze,
he made the boy seem like a child,
as though standing in for the murdered innocence of all America.
But Meigs could not deny his own part in this,
as the man who'd armed the Union
and transformed the Army in the way Hamilton had advocated
and Jefferson had instinctively resisted.
So in creating Arlington National Cemetery,
Meigs was responding to a personal need
to imbue the sacrifice of the war with meaning.
And he gave his country a place to which Americans come again and again
to measure the cost of war.
For a while, the flag-draped coffins from Iraq and Afghanistan
were hidden from the American people,
but now everyone hears the muffled drums,
every small town has its young casualties,
and more than ever in this election, the demand to know why is heard.
And I am ready to end this war in Iraq,
end this era of cowboy diplomacy.
We will never surrender, they will. I promise you that. They will.
If it had been up to me, we would have never been in this war.
It was because of George Bush
with an assist from Hillary Clinton and John McCain
that we entered into this war,
a war that should have never been authorised,
a war that should have never been waged.
In 1900, there was a presidential election
which triggered a debate about the rights and wrongs
of an American war.
Hard-fought and bitter,
it revealed how the embattled visions of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson
would march on into the 20th century,
as the United States underwent a trial by fire
on its way to world power status.
At stake then and ever since
has been America's credibility and integrity,
as the carrier of democracy to nations fighting for their independence.
The debate was over a war with Spain,
in which American soldiers fought in Cuba and the Philippines.
Would the United States stay true to its founding idealism
and act as the enemy of empires or was it about to create its own?
(INAUDIBLE)
The antagonists in this debate were two of America's most famous men,
Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain.
The most popular writer of his time
matched against a man whose ragtime rhetoric
aimed to rouse a whole generation to action.
Teddy Roosevelt had made it in politics
by presenting himself as a man of the modern age.
As far as Roosevelt was concerned,
the reality of the new century was not wishy-washy idealism
but raw power.
This is his home, Sagamore Hill on Long Island.
It's a monument to the man who had made himself into an all-American hero.
Roosevelt had been a sickly boy with poor eyesight,
who through his own formidably precocious will,
turned himself into a specimen of American masculinity,
fighting Indians and outlaws out west,
riding and hunting, the bigger the game the better.
When he looked in the mirror or at the trophies mounted on his walls,
Teddy felt the need to convert his restless personal drive
into a greater public purpose.
As with the animal kingdom, so with great powers,
you are either the hunter or the hunted.
To seize the future, you had to fight for it.
Roosevelt despised Thomas Jefferson as a weakling in matters of war and peace,
but he revered Alexander Hamilton for his unapologetic determination
to make the United States a player on the world scene,
admired and feared for its military prowess.
So it was no accident that it was at The Hamilton Club in Chicago
that Roosevelt gave what was, even by his own standards,
an astonishing performance.
ROOSEVELT: The 20th century looms before us big
with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by,
if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace,
if we shrink from the hard contests
where men must win at hazard of their lives
and at the risk of all they hold dear,
then bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by
and will win for themselves the domination of the world.
On the 15th of February, 1898,
the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor.
266 American sailors died in the explosion
and much of the country howled for revenge against Spain,
Cuba's imperial overlord.
Theodore Roosevelt resigned from his position
as Assistant Secretary of the Navy
to lead a regiment of willing patriots known as the Rough Riders,
who were captured on camera in training before they left for Cuba.
Also caught on camera was the burial of the victims of the Maine.
In fact, it was the media that for the first but not the last time
would stir up patriotic fury.
Once the war began, millions of people in the Nickelodeon cinemas
saw with their own eyes recreations of the fighting
filmed in back lots in New Jersey.
News of the war travelled round the world, all the way to Vienna,
where America's most revered writer, Mark Twain, was on a lecture tour.
When news of the Spanish-American War reached Vienna,
Twain's friends turned on him
and on the bully boy government in Washington.
To them, the war was just naked imperialism
dressed up with sanctimonious guff about liberation.
But Twain shot back indignantly.
TWAIN: I have never enjoyed a war as I am enjoying this one.
It is a worthy thing to fight for one's own freedom.
It is another sight finer to fight for another man's.
And I think this is the first time this has been done.
SCHAMA: The Spanish-American War was quickly and conclusively won
and the American Navy returned triumphant to New York,
having destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Philippines.
The Filipinos expected America
to liberate them from their Spanish oppressors
in the same way as it had already liberated the Cubans.
After all, hadn't America's President McKinley
said that to annex the Philippines would be an act of criminal aggression?
But that was then.
There was an election coming up. McKinley did a whistle-stop tour,
sniffed the air of the country and found it thick with patriotic jingo.
He started to have second thoughts about the freedom of the Filipinos.
McKinley was re-elected.
And Teddy Roosevelt joined him as Vice President.
American troops would stay in the Philippines.
But a fierce Filipino insurgency began.
And America, having won a quick victory against Spain,
found itself waging an ugly, painful war against the Filipino guerrillas.
The conversion of the Philippines War
from a liberal crusade into an imperial adventure
won McKinley the election of 1900.
But it turned Mark Twain into a merciless critic of American imperialism
and the whole shallow cult of battle.
On the 15th of October, 1900, Mark Twain returned to America.
Hordes of reporters greeted him at the dockside.
They all wanted to know the answer to one question,
what did he think about the war in the Philippines?
Twain had already made his views on that subject crystal clear.
TWAIN: We were to relieve them from tyranny
to enable them to set up a government of their own
and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial,
that would have been a worthy mission for the United States.
SCHAMA: What Twain said next
has a resonance for those who have lived through Vietnam and Iraq.
TWAIN: Why, we have got into a mess,
a quagmire from which each fresh step
renders the difficulty of extraction immensely greater.
I wish I could see what we were getting out of it
and all it means to us as a nation.
SCHAMA: As the most influential anti-imperialist in America,
Mark Twain threw himself under the hard-riding charge
of the country's most ardent empire builder, Teddy Roosevelt,
who, after McKinley's assassination, became president.
Some time later, Mark Twain went to Yale to receive an honorary degree.
As it happens, Teddy Roosevelt was there, too.
The President let it be known
that he rather wanted "the likes of Mark Twain" to be "skinned alive".
And Twain let it be known
that he thought the President was insane in several ways.
TWAIN: Insanest upon war and its supreme glories.
SCHAMA: But Twain's words were no match for the might of presidential power.
More than 4,000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Filipinos
would die before the war ground to an end.
And it wasn't just the President who proved more than a match for Twain.
It was the media.
He was branded a lily-livered pacifist and traitor by the flag-waving press.
For the first time in his life, Mark Twain found himself censored.
His anti-war articles went unpublished.
"Free speech," lamented Twain, "is confined to the dead."
Six years later, Twain was dead
and Roosevelt prepared to run once again for the White House.
But Twain's example in allowing no war to go uncontested,
morally unexamined, whatever the cost to reputation,
lived on after him and became a great American tradition in itself,
from the pen to print to the blog to the hustings.
What was at stake in the unsparing debate between Twain and Roosevelt,
the moral underpinnings of American force,
is still at issue in this election.
As the campaign gathered pace, I flew into San Antonio, Texas.
The city has one of the highest populations
of veterans and serving soldiers in the USA.
Its nickname is Military City.
I went to the Drop Zone,
a diner popular with the city's veteran paratroopers.
San Antonio is a place where the cost and purpose of American war
resonates in the lives of almost every voter.
This is a mostly Hispanic community,
who have been part of the story of America's wars
generation after generation.
I met the retired General Freddie Valenzuela,
once the highest ranking Hispanic officer in the army.
I was a poor, young kid in the west side of San Antonio.
And the Army offered me probably
the only opportunity I would've gotten otherwise.
So I went into the army initially, came back to college
and then went in as an officer and stayed 33 years.
There's a tendency for one to label a military person as somewhat hawkish,
somewhat on the Republican side.
If you're a general officer,
we're pretty much in line with what we call independence,
we stay independent
until the time we make a decision as to which way we're gonna lean.
I'd be lying to you if I told you I'm not leaning,
Senator McCain.
I think it's premature to say we'll be out in six months, one year.
The minute the terrorists know that we're coming out
we're gonna be a shooting target, I mean, we're gonna be had.
Having said that,
we need an exit strategy and need it quick, with no date label.
But I think the American public, although they want to come out of war,
I don't think they know why we're in the war to start out with,
don't know what's going on,
they realise that the war has affected our economy
because a lot of the money has been put into the war.
But I don't think
that we fully understand as a country what we're truly involved in.
But I think we're gonna have to really politically make some tough choices,
but we're making them in an election year.
I am looking at you in the eye, my veteran friends,
at all of you and tell you
I will follow him to the gates of hell if necessary,
but I will get Osama Bin Laden and I will bring him to justice
and I will get it done and I know how to do it.
SCHAMA: Republican candidate and Vietnam war hero John McCain
may seem like the obvious vote for this town's military constituency.
But across town at the Obama campaign office,
I met two veterans with very different views.
How would you both like to see military power used,
if not in the way in which it's being used in Iraq?
Well, I think the message that we need to deliver to the world
is that our military is not primarily set up to do other people harm.
Because what's happened in the world,
especially since George Bush came to power,
is that there is fear.
Are we going to be the next country that's on the axis of evil list?
And we need to communicate to the world that our military is for our defence
and the defence of our close friends.
And that we're not going to tell people how to run their country,
partly because that's not our role.
- PLYLAR: Good morning. - Good morning.
- Are you Arturo, by any chance? - Actually, I am.
David Plylar. Good to you see you, buddy.
We're veterans and we're out campaigning for Barack Obama.
And we've got a real problem with George Bush's policies on the war.
And the promise by the Republican candidate, John McCain,
that he's going to continue the war, if necessary, for a hundred more years.
He looks mean.
PLYLAR: This campaign reminds me of 1968.
1968, young people came out,
they said we're finished with this war in Vietnam, we need change,
they were supporting McCarthy, they were supporting Bobby Kennedy.
Back then in '68, during the Vietnam War,
well, we're not having the riots and demonstrations
and the draft-card burning.
Young America can make a change like they did back then.
SCHAMA: I can see why David and Richard think
there are parallels between 1968 and this election.
Then, as now, an American war
destroyed the popularity ratings of a sitting president.
Some have asked
what the gallantry of these Marines and airmen accomplished?
Why did we choose to pay the price to defend those very hills?
SCHAMA: Then, as now, returning veterans joined the anti-war movement.
We want our brothers and sisters home and safe,
we want that war to come to an end.
And hopefully our country will have a high standing in the world again.
SCHAMA: David must be hoping that these parallels are not prophetic.
Because in 1968, the Republicans won in a landslide.
Obama! Obama!
PLYLAR: Hola, San Antonio!
My name is David Plylar. I'm an Air Force vet.
As a veteran, I can tell you that one of the things we're looking for
is a new commander-in-chief.
Six years ago,
when the President of the United States wanted to take us to war,
a few people said wrong war, wrong time,
in fact, it was a dumb war.
And that person was Barack Obama.
So there is no doubt in my mind
that you know the person that is going to be the leader,
that will bring good judgment to the role of commander-in-chief,
restore the Constitution.
That person is here with us tonight.
I'd like to introduce the next President of the United States, Barack Obama.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: Hello, San Antonio!
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
SCHAMA: In 1938, survivors of the Battle of Gettysburg
from both the Union and Confederate sides
came together to hear President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
commemorate the 75th anniversary of the battle.
The possibility of war was very much on Roosevelt's mind.
So he reached back to the Civil War, to this place,
to remind Americans about moments in their history
when just wars had to be fought.
A year after he had spoken, war did break out in Europe.
FDR knew that for the democracies it would be a war of last resort,
but an inevitable one, for it was truly waged for the survival of liberty.
And like the soldiers of Gettysburg, the veterans of World War II
have become an emblem of the good American war.
Like thousands of young men,
Epifanio Salazar signed up after Pearl Harbor.
At 17, he was too young but he lied about his age.
Salazar trained as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne division.
WOMAN: There.
SCHAMA: Two days after D-Day, he made his first jump,
behind German lines in Normandy.
No one doubts that if ordinary Americans like Salazar
had not made that jump into the fire,
the world might now be a very different place.
SALAZAR: We land in some fields.
They were waiting for us.
They had a machine gun nest and everything.
I got shot, you know, by a German, in the knee and here in the shoulder.
It feels awful. Real bad.
SCHAMA: Did your buddies get you out of there?
I mean, how long were you there?
No, not too long because there were two guys in a Jeep, medics,
and they picked me up.
SCHAMA: Wow, you had one hell of a tough war.
- Oh, I was to hell and back. - Yeah.
That's what happened to me.
You forget after years, but you never forget completely.
- It's on your mind all the time. - Yeah.
What do you think?
I mean, do you think about the wars that America's in now
and compare it...
I think the war in Iraq is not too good.
- It's a political war is what I think. - Yeah.
Because in World War II it took us five years to win.
I mean win, completely win.
And now they've been there five years and they haven't done anything.
Salazar had invited me to join him at a gala
to honour him and his fellow veterans.
I guess I had assumed that the atmosphere of shared ordeals,
remembered wounds and deaths would preclude any hint of debate.
But I was wrong.
General Ricardo Sanchez,
who had served as Commander of American Forces in Iraq, gave a speech.
SANCHEZ: Thank you all very much.
I was expecting him to deliver a call to arms.
Instead, we got something more authentically American.
A call to vote.
We are now into year six of Iraq
and if we disagree with the policies,
then there are mechanisms for us to express that.
When you're in a time of leadership crisis,
what better time for you to mobilise yourselves and make a statement
than during a presidential election year?
Whether you support
a Republican candidate or a Democratic candidate is irrelevant.
The point that I'd like to leave with you
is that the entire American community must mobilise itself,
get involved in this tremendously critical year
and make a statement.
We have to send a message to Washington
because the future of our country is at stake.
I propose a toast to our beautiful ladies.
ALL: To our ladies.
Thank you, gentlemen. The music will continue.
This was hardly a gathering of gunslingers.
It was just a meeting of men who reckon there are times
when the bill for freedom gets paid in blood
and the sorrow of their loved ones.
But if that's going to be the case,
America had better make sure the threat is real and the cause just.
Or the war can never be an American war.
Ever since the founding of the republic this has happened.
When the bugle has sounded, so has the voice of shared conscience,
the noise of the gun
answered by the irrepressible sound of free debate.