May 27, 2004 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President when I was born. The Great Depression was beginning to ease but the dark clouds carried on the winds of war were beginning to gather. The confidence and optimism in the face of adversity exemplified in his declaration that, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” was to sustain the nation as it emerged from economic depression only to be asked to unite in sacrifice to persevere in a world at war. I was three when the tropical skies rained death at Pearl Harbor. That President, defiant in his disability, with a jaunty air and jutting chin gave the nation that image of resolve and strength and the leadership to vanquish our fears and march in step toward the confident future he would not live to realize.

I was just turned seven when his successor made the awful decision to employ mankind’s most fearful weapon against the Japanese industrial centers at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harry Truman knew what responsibility was and did not shrink from it. He was the last President to be able to walk the streets of Washington while his bodyguard from the Secret Service scrambled to keep up. They were two men, one a patrician with a silver spoon birthright, the other a plebeian whose cradle rocked on a Missouri front porch, but they were one in the capacity to press forward with fearless confidence and resolve and America was the better for having known them.

I was twenty-two when a lace-curtain Irish son of wealth caught his moment in history and called the nation to service and I was twenty-five when I and the rest of the nation saw his son salute his casket as it was borne from the Capitol to commence its journey to Arlington and the eternal flame. I still hear the drums beat the doleful cadence for that procession and America was the better for those thousand days of Camelot.

I am sixty-six and facing that uncertain future that comes to us all at a certain age. I shade my eyes peering toward tomorrow and bend my ear listening for a clarion call but I hear only an uncertain trumpet sounding alarm after alarm and see only a world painted in hues of orange and yellow. Where once our leaders spoke with clear voices to vanquish and drive away our fears today’s President prefers to enflame them with carefully crafted warnings that we exist under an imminent threat of disaster.

He calls us not to a unity of sacrifice to meet real enemies and the undoubted challenge of our troubled times but rather to observe as spectacle his choreographed wrestling match with shadows. He calls upon our darker demons and baser spirits ignoring our bright angels and soaring principles while denying all responsibility for creating the gauntlet that we must, as a people, run to our peril. He has made of our fears a potent tool employed to maintain his hold on political power. He calls on us to be fearful rather than resolute appealing to cowardice rather than confidence as he creates in this new century an America we hardly recognize. It is of that, at sixty-six, I am afraid – very afraid.