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Jewish World Review / June 30, 1998 / 6 Iyar, 5758
Paul Greenberg
IT TAKES A POTEMKIN VILLAGE to make a president appreciate
home. Before departing for the world's largest remaining
gulag, Bill Clinton allowed as how he was homesick and tired
and couldn't wait to get back to Arkansas.
Some of us here in Little Rock know just how he feels.
So hurry home, Mr. President, after your China Syndrome has
One day the whole world will know freedom, tyrants will
disappear and all mankind will stand erect, free of chains and
slavery of every kind. On that day, no one will fear secret
police and kangaroo courts; all will know they can speak and
write and worship freely, and enjoy the fruit of their own
labor without worrying about the ever-present eye and
all-grasping hand of The Leader, or The Party, or The State.
On that glorious day, Mr. President, there will be no more
whimpering apologists for oppression, and no more excuses
for those who would twist and distort life into some cramped
reflection of their own ideological tics. On that day, all will
speak their own minds and look their neighbors in the eye
when they do it, without fear or flattery. No one will cringe
before power or search for euphemisms to justify appeasing
it. On that day, Mr. President, all the world will be new, and
everyone, of whatever race or clime or nationality, will in one
sense be American, that is, free.
Yes, hurry home, Mr. President, where you belong, and
where you can breathe free again. Freer than even the most
cosseted and protected and high-ranking visitor to an
all-powerful state that nevertheless trembles at even the
barest mention of freedom.
Come home, Mr. President, for home is not just a place, it is a
state of mind. Just as America is more than a country.
Magnificent and majestic, lovely and pleasant, stark and
grand as this sweep of a continent is, America is far more than
a place. "When an American says that he loves his country,
he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the
prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the
great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an
inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a
man can draw a breath of self-respect." -- Adlai Stevenson,
August 27, 1952.
Mr. Stevenson may have said it best, for I have yet to come
across as good a definition of the American spirit, certainly
not lately. Adlai Stevenson was from Illinois, the land of
Lincoln, another distinctive state of the American union and
dream. And he knew of what he spoke in those heavy August
days of 1952, when another evil empire proclaimed that
liberty was only an artifact of a few national cultures and
bourgeois economies, and that The Party knew best -- and
would always know best.
Adlai Stevenson knew better. He knew that all men are
created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness. He did not bow and scrape when, in
his own measured voice, quietly and unforgettably, he
proclaimed his American truth. For he was an American and
felt no need either to make apologies for freedom or to pay
lip service to it, or carefully balance its interests with that of
tyranny and call it statesmanship. He was an American, and
freedom came naturally to him; he did not need to strain for
a relationship with it.
Adlai Stevenson did not pretend that evil was something other
than it is, or prettify his thoughts lest he offend tyrants. He
never accustomed himself to speaking tact to temporal
power; he was a man of the world, as well as an American,
and he knew how to do many things, but being a free man
from a free state, he could not ignore slavery or even say
polite things to it. As the Soviet delegate to the U.N.'s Security
Council discovered during the Cuban missile crisis, when
Ambassador Stevenson demolished one lie after another out
of Moscow.
Ambassador Stevenson knew something else, and he knew it
in his bones. You could hear it in his voice back in August of
1952, when Communism was still The Wave of the Future,
rather than what it is now: a crumpled giant, a paper tiger full
of holes held up only by brittle habit and a little help from the
gullible and fearful.
"Let us proclaim our faith in the future of man. Of good
heart and good cheer, faithful to ourselves and our traditions,
we can lift the cause of freedom, the cause of free men, so
high no power on earth can tear it down. We can pluck this
flower, safety, from this nettle, danger. Living, speaking, like
men -- like Americans -- we can lead the way."
We still can. There is no need to cower. For as Adlai
Stevenson told his listeners that day, "We are embarked on
a great adventure." We still are. Freedom is not won in a day
or a year, once and for all. It must be won anew every
ordinary day. It is not something fragile and rare to be rolled
out on special occasions, nor is it an embarrassment be
hidden away on state occasions. It is not some dutiful
platitude, but a call to action. It is not some curious American
folkway that stops at the water's edge or something to be
traded away when the price is right. It is the air we breathe,
the vision we see, the aspiration we cannot live without, lest
we become something other than ourselves, something low
and cringing.
Yes, come home, Mr. President. To America. To Freedom.
We'll keep the light
Hurry back, Mr. President -- to freedom
passed, and learn to breathe free again. It's a great feeling to
be back home -- the sight of Old Glory after seeing her only
in a foreign land, the new look of the familiar, the feel of
home and, for those first few blessed steps toward customs,
the knowledge that once again you stand on American soil.
It's wonderful to be back in a free country.
Even back then, when the world was a far more fearful place
and the light had not yet begun to break, Adlai Stevenson
could sense the emptiness of the tyranny that sought to cow
us, and foresee its dismal end, and feel the whole inflated
superstructure of Communism tremble at even a whisper,
even a thought, of freedom. For he concluded his address that
august day with these words, and this charge:
6/24/98: When Clinton follows Quayle's lead
6/22/98: Independence Day, 2002
6/18/98: Adventures in poli-speke
