New Age Barack Obama Is No Harry Truman

by Jeff Jacoby, The Patriot Post: Barack Obama had ample reason to recall the Berlin Airlift of 1948 during his dramatic speech in the German capital last week. The airlift was an early and critical success for the West in the Cold War, with clear relevance to our own time, the war in Iraq, and the free world’s conflict with radical Islam. But having reached back 60 years to that pivotal hour of American leadership, Obama proceeded to draw from it exactly the wrong lessons.

The Soviet Union had blockaded western Berlin on June 24, 1948, choking off access to the city by land and water and threatening 2.5 million people with starvation. Moscow was determined to force the United States and its allies out of Berlin. To capitulate to Soviet pressure, as Obama rightly noted, ‘would have allowed Communism to march across Europe.’ Yet many in the West advocated retreat, fearing that the only way to keep the city open was to use the atomic bomb—and launch World War III. For President Truman, retreat was unthinkable. ‘We stay in Berlin, period,’ he decreed. Overriding the doubts of senior advisers... Truman ordered the Armed Forces to begin supplying Berlin by air. Military planners initially thought that with a ‘very big operation,’ they might be able to get 700 tons of food to Berlin. Within weeks, the Air Force was flying in twice that amount every day, as well as supplies of coal. ... It would take nearly a year and more than 277,000 flights. But in the end it was the Soviets who backed down. On May 12, 1949, the blockade ended—a triumph of American prowess and perseverance, and a momentous vindication for Truman.

But not once in his Berlin speech did Obama acknowledge Truman’s fortitude, or even mention his name. Nor did he mention the US Air Force, or the 31 American pilots who died during the airlift. Indeed, Obama seemed to go out of his way not to say plainly that what saved Berlin in that dark time was America’s military might. Save for a solitary reference to ‘the first American plane,’ he never described one of the greatest American operations of the postwar period as an American operation at all. He spoke only of ‘the airlift,’ ‘the planes,’ ‘those pilots.’ Perhaps their American identity wasn’t something he cared to stress amid all his ‘people of the world’ salutations and talk of ‘global citizenship.’... Sixty years later, it is a very different kind of Democrat who is running for president. Obama may have wowed ‘em in Berlin, but he’s no Harry Truman.” [Full article: Missing From That Berlin Speech]