Commentary - Steve Adams: Bennett tome serves as a reminder that America is world’s best hope

How refreshing to read a popular American history without the typical spin of the United States as the epicenter of all the world’s bad.

Rather, Bill Bennett, former secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, reminds us of a time not so long ago when America was viewed as “all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages” with the fall of Europe in World War II.

It was a time when 60,000 Brits perished under the German Luftwaffe assaults. “Upon this battle,” Bennett quotes Churchill regarding the impending Battle of Britain, “depends the survival of Christian civilization.”

That, of course, was Winston, not Ward Churchill — the radical Colorado professor who famously called America’s 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns” and condemned the “militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Actually, Bennett writes, “There was never any thought that the atomic bomb would not be used.”

The Pacific victories were hard-fought and costly — nearly 6,000 Marines killed at Iwo Jima, twice that number of sailors and Marines lost at Okinawa, along with 763 aircraft. This war needed to be ended.

Such numbers are staggering to 21st-century Americans, who seem to consider virtually any casualties unacceptable. But in World War I, as Bennett points out, 100,000 Americans died — 400,000 in World War II.

Yet, in 1940, the year before World War II began, only one in 14 Americans favored going to war with Germany. Apparently, the Axis powers were surprised by the turnaround. Bennett quotes a Japanese admiral: “They said the Americans would never come. [They told us the Americans] would not fight in the jungle, that they were not the kind of people who could stand warfare.”

The unspoken question is what kind of people are Americans today when no less an epochal struggle is upon us. The book is named from a Reagan speech when the “great communicator” reflected on America’s role in that earlier struggle. “We are … today the last best hope of man on earth,” Reagan said.

Reagan was a huge influence on Bennett, and the book especially shines here. Bennett, a lifelong Democrat, changed parties only after working for some time in the Reagan administration and witnessing distasteful events such as the Democratic Congress voting to deny aid to the Nicaraguan contras.

Especially in contrast with the author’s withering depiction of the malaise-ridden administration of Jimmy Carter — a man pathetically devoid of leadership qualities — Reagan, popularly derided as an “amiable dunce,” stands out in Bennett’s account as a giant.

It was against the advice, for example, of the State Department and National Security Council — and even his own secretary of state — that Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

And the rest is history. Thank you, Bill Bennett, for giving us this refreshing — and inspiring — account.

Steve Adams is assistant editor of Citizen Magazine, published by Focus on the Family, and author of “The Middle East Conflict.”