We all need Obama to step up to this presidential legacy

For my introduction to politics, few experiences can have been as seminal, in my delicate formative years, than seeing posters proclaiming the president of the United States a traitor to his nation.

Shocking sight for an impressionable 10-year old

Since he was assassinated the following day and, even at 10 years of age, I had grasped the fact that an only recently abolished tradition made the sentence for treason death, I could hardly fail to associate the poster with the execution. My parents were horrified but, even without their example, I think I would have been just as shocked myself.

Why am I talking about this now? Partly because we are in the middle of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, when that President, John Kennedy, stared done Kruschev and drove him to withdraw Soviet missiles from the island. He did that without firing a single shot or mobilising a single soldier.

It was one of the accusations on the poster: ‘Missile removal - Cuba’ appear among the examples of the ‘innumerable issues’ on which JFK had been wrong (or rather, WRONG). Funnily enough, most of us who lived through the crisis rather thought he’d got it right, and were grateful that he’d found a way out without precipitating a third world war.

Which brings me to the other reason why I’m talking about this now. Last Thursday Joe Biden and Paul Ryan met in the Vice Presidential debate for the 2012 US election. Among other things, Ryan criticised the Obama administration for having ‘called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people’. It’s not strictly true: Hillary Clinton said that people had regarded Assad as possibly a reformer, but that was rather a long time before he’d turned his guns on his people.

However, it isn’t Ryan’s mendacity that interests me here. It’s the implicit accusation that the Obama team is soft on Syria. He wants to get harder? He doesn’t feel that we’ve had about as many entanglements in the Middle East as we need? He thinks the other ones have worked out just dandy for us?

Perhaps he feels it’s time to be more supportive of the friends of the US and tougher on its enemies. That was a concern of the authors of that poster all those years ago: ‘He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).’

In particular, Ryan’s not keen on working through the United Nations or, as he put it on Thursday, ‘outsourcing our foreign policy to the UN.’ This reprises a theme he announced in August, when he pointed out that the ‘Obama foreign policy is to subjugate ourselves to the United Nations, which gives Russia and China a veto power at the Security Council’.

Curiously, the authors of the JFK poster wrote ‘he is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.’ It’s less fashionable than then to accuse people of communism, but in other respects the idea is the same.

All this is causing bells to jangle in my mind. Perhaps Ryan is a less extreme version of the men behind the ‘Treason’ poster, but his thinking’s very much the same. And I remember that Kennedy had the strength to stand by his position but also the strength to resist the siren calls of the hawks.

Just imagine if he hadn’t. The world might have seen the outbreak of a most disastrous war. And for what? Just over a quarter of a century later, the Soviet world collapsed anyway when the Berlin wall came down.

And look what happened when he didn’t resist hard enough: the US found itself embroiled in a long, bitter and bloody war in Vietnam which delivered his country its first defeat.

Today, in a world not much less dangerous than in 1962, I want more of the Kennedy who knew how to resist calls for military action over Cuba, less of the one who took the US deeper into the fighting in Indochina. And certainly nothing at all of the men who denounced him.

This evening Obama faces Romney for his second debate. Ryan has shown that his ticket belongs to the tainted tradition that in its time produced the ‘Treason’ poster. Obama has on more than one occasion shown the guts of a latter-day Kennedy.

I watched Obama in 2008 and he was inspirational. In his campaigning, he was already a worthy successor of JFK. But what happened at the last debate with Romney? Why didn’t Obama wipe the floor with him like Kennedy did with Nixon?

The Obama of 2008 didn’t show up then. He’d better be there tonight. Because I’ve known since I was ten that letting the other lot get anywhere near the levers of power is a recipe for catastrophe. For the US, of course; but for all the rest of us too.

Unforgettable moments

Certain moments are iconic. And it’s become a received expression to sum them up by saying ‘you’ll never forget where you were or what you were doing' when the event took place.

‘You’ll never forget what you were doing when Kennedy was shot.’ That was probably the moment that enshrined the saying in our culture. And indeed if you’ve been around long enough, the Kennedy assassination – the first one, John F.’s – is very much that kind of brutally unforgettable event. Followed within five years by Martin Luther King’s and the second Kennedy shooting, Bobby’s.

But this kind of event isn’t limited to bad news, or indeed to the United States. In 1989, there was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and little more than a year later, the release of Nelson Mandela. Who could forget those young people, perched on top of a symbol of division and death, chipping away at the concrete of the wall with their hammers? Who could forget that proud but jailworn figure walking down a driveway to freedom?

Glorious moments forever seared into our memories.

Now we’ve had another one.

I was saying to myself just the other day, ‘I’ll never forget what I was doing when I learned that Aung San Suu Kyi was released.’ That frail figure with the warm smile and the message of forgiveness and reconciliation. Just what the world needs in these times of terrible division and tension. A little Burmese grandmother carrying today’s torch of hope for better things – the best news we’ve had for ages. If only she’s allowed to carry on.

And yet. And yet. When it comes to the expression itself – can I really remember what I was doing when all those things happened?

The clearest memory I have of all of them is when I learned of the assassination of John Kennedy. I can picture the scene in detail, playing with my brother and being told by a visitor. Except that the memory is of a weekend morning and the event actually took place on a Friday and, by our time in Europe, in the evening. So I have a brilliantly clear memory which is completely wrong.

As for King and Bobby Kennedy – no idea what I was doing when I heard about their deaths. Even the Berlin Wall and Nelson Mandela: I remember watching the news coverage, I remember the excited discussions, but the precise moment when I first heard? No trace. Complete blank.

And I hardly dare admit it, but I can’t remember what I was doing when I learned that Aung San Suu Kyi was released, even though that was just a few days ago.

‘You’ll never forget what you were doing.’ Sadly, that doesn’t seem to apply to me. It may of course just be my memory. Or maybe it’s just another one of those received expressions that aren’t to be taken too literally, like ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ (I’ve had a few and, far worse, I’ve given a way a few, to people who have promised the earth in return and delivered nothing).

I suppose it isn’t the truth of the expression that matters so much as the truth of the thought behind it: it’s the events themselves that are burned into the memory. Certainly I won’t forget those devastating assassinations in the sixties. Equally, I’ll treasure those glorious moments of hope rekindled – after all, I need them as antidotes to the terrible killings.

As for where I was and what I was doing – well, frankly, who cares?