The US president will on Friday echo one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, who in 1984 traveled to a clifftop 100 feet high known as Pointe du Hoc, which was scaled in a daring raid by US Army Rangers on D-Day. Despite heavy losses, the Rangers seized German artillery pieces that could have caused even greater carnage on the Omaha and Utah invasion beaches.
Reagan stood in front of a stone memorial shaped into the Rangers' emblem, with his back to the Channel, surrounded by surviving veterans of the raid, and gave one of the greatest presidential speeches.
"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war," Reagan said. He later confessed to his diary that he was so moved it was tough to get the words out.
The speech came at a particularly contentious moment in the Cold War with tensions high between Washington and the Soviet Union. But Reagan's clarion call for freedom may have had an impact. Less than a year later, Mikhail Gorbachev became secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party and set in motion reforms and nuclear arms negotiations that led to the end of the Cold War.
Biden, like the 40th president, is facing concerns about his age in his reelection year. And on Friday he will visit the same clifftop to make a similar call to save democracy. Reagan's Pointe du Hoc speech is not just remarkable for its poetry. Forty years on, it's stunningly relevant to a new political era. And it's equally striking how far the Republican Party has traveled from the man who once personified it to the anti-democratic America Firstism of its current hero.
"We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost," Reagan said. "We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent."
He went on: "We are bound today by what bound us 40 years ago, the same loyalties, traditions, and beliefs. We're bound by reality. The strength of America's allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe's democracies. We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny."
In 1984, Reagan could offer that promise without fear of contradiction. Biden cannot do the same in 2024.
