And on the Bright Side...

Fifty-two years ago today, on January 20, 1969, I marched in Washington, during President Richard M. Nixon’s first inauguration. And no, I was not demonstrating. I was a freshman cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy (a “doolie”), and our squadron (Squadron 22 out of 40), had won the honors of representing USAFA during a marching competition the month before. So we flew in from Colorado on a big Air Force cargo jet, slept on cots in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base, and surrendered our M1 rifles to Secret Service agents who removed all the firing pins before returning them to us for marching in the parade.

Nixon had been elected in the middle of a growing firestorm of public protest and conflict over the Vietnam War, a war which had led Lyndon Johnson to decline to run for a second full term. In addition to protests over the war and the draft, the civil rights movement was still bubbling, and women’s liberation was becoming a cause as well (the Academies, along with most Ivy League schools, were still all-male establishments). The evening news shows that played during the election year were consumed with stories of protesters burning their draft cards, and feminists still just trying to get the media to take women seriously. In addition, both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in 1968, which might have accounted for the Secret Service’s extra precautions. The whole decade of the 1960’s, but particularly 1968, was a very rough time for America, with domestic political tensions uncannily similar to the ones we have been facing recently.

During my time at the Academy, I became an ardent convert to the women’s movement, and actively campaigned for them to be allowed to attend service academies. In fact, as captain of the speech and debate team in my senior year I placed second in the nation with my ten-minute oratory in favor of women’s liberation (although perhaps my victory was partly attributable to the irony of a uniformed cadet from an all-male military academy advocating for women’s rights).

By 1973, when Nixon was inaugurated for his second term, I had graduated from the Academy and was allowed to attend Princeton on a two-year fellowship prior to taking up my first Air Force assignment. But the Vietnam War was still raging, and public sentiment had swung dramatically against it throughout the country. One of my Princeton professors, in fact, had accompanied Jane Fonda on her highly controversial trip to visit North Vietnam, where she met with its leaders in 1972. And I spent the 1973 summer working in Washington, D.C., as an intern for the State Department, while Congress conducted hearings into the Watergate break-in.

The school I attended at Princeton was called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, was one of our most liberal and forward-thinking presidents. In addition to overseeing the most progressive legislative agenda since the country was founded, he was one of the first and most enthusiastic proponents of the League of Nations, the precursor to the U.N. that was set up at the end of the First World War. Before becoming President, he had also been the Governor of New Jersey, and the president of Princeton University.

For all his liberal leanings, however, Wilson was also an overt racist and white supremacist. As President he implemented explicitly segregationist policies in both the hiring of Federal civil servants, and the promoting of officers in the military. Back in the 1970’s, my Princeton classmates and I were totally unaware of this. Not that it was some kind of secret, but no one even paid attention to that kind of stuff. In the wake of the George Floyd incident and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, however, Wilson’s name has now been removed from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs.

So why am I telling you all this? Because, as successful and fortunate as I have been in my own life, personally, it wasn’t solely due to perseverance and effort. Had I simply been born with a different skin color, or a different gender, there’s no doubt in my mind that I couldn’t have been nearly as successful as I have been. No doubt at all.

But I’m also telling you this because, for all the difficulties our country is going through today, and despite all the prejudice and intolerance we continue to exhibit, the “moral arc” of our nation’s ongoing struggle is still positive, on balance. Twelve years ago we elected an African-American president, and today we are inaugurating a female African-American as vice president. Without doubt, we are gradually becoming a more just and inclusive society.

We have much farther to go, of course. But we (all of us) should first simply recognize and acknowledge our actual past as a racist and sexist nation. There is no shame in our acknowledging this past. After all, no one can change the world they were born into.

But we should all aspire to change the world our children, and our children’s children, are born into.