D-Day Overkill, and Ronald Reagan are Intertwined......read...

[mopaul]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2101752/

Under Ronald Reagan, however, the mood changed. It was Reagan who kicked off the D-Day mania when, in 1984, equipped with a backdrop chosen by Michael Deaver and a speech penned by Peggy Noonan, he lauded a band of aging U.S. Army Rangers in front of the very 130-foot rock face they had scaled with fire department grappling hooks and ladders 40 years before. Reagan spoke for a constituency that wanted to reclaim America's pride in its military strength. His farewell address in 1988 called for the revival of a feel-good history that would teach schoolchildren "who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those thirty seconds over Tokyo meant." If this rhetoric sounded fuzzy and nostalgic, it shouldn't have been surprising, since Reagan's vision of war came from Hollywood, where he had discharged his own service obligations as part of the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps. (At times Reagan even confused the real war with memories of films he acted in or watched, as when he "remembered" having liberated the Nazi camps.)