STUART BROTMAN: Eisenhower’s D-Day Lesson for America at 250: Make the Problem Bigger.
This month, American moviegoers will watch Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in “Pressure,” alone in a storm-lashed Portsmouth headquarters in June 1944, weighing weather reports, casualty estimates, and the fate of the free world. The film’s power lies in what Eisenhower refuses to do: Narrow the decision, delegate the doubt, or pretend the problem is smaller than it is.
Eighty-two years later, as America approaches its 250th birthday, we are doing precisely the opposite.
In Philadelphia this spring, interpretive panels describing the enslaved people who labored in George Washington’s President’s House were quietly removed, then partially restored, then contested again. A few blocks away, a school group’s history tour was canceled after parents on both sides objected to what their children might hear. In Washington, D.C., two federal commissions, each claiming authority over the semiquincentennial, are issuing competing guidance on how the nation should commemorate its 250th birthday.
A republic anchored in the First Amendment cannot agree on how to talk about itself.
The instinct, on every side, is to make the argument smaller: Strip the panel, cancel the tour, narrow the commission, silence the other camp. Eisenhower would have recognized the impulse and rejected it. “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve,” he told his staff. “I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”
Eisenhower’s enlargement principle has never been systematically applied to free expression. It should be.
Indeed. And do read the whole thing.
