ALVIN DERMAWAN
The trajectory of the twentieth century was forged in the crucible of immense, existential crises. To look back at that era from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century is to observe a society that, despite its profound flaws, deep domestic divisions, and systemic inequalities, was anchored by a certain collective solemnity. For nearly one hundred years, the global imagination was anchored by the American experiment—a civilization that equated material and technological progress with an underlying, discernible moral framework. Underlying this national project was what can be best described as a “working faith” in God and a providential national destiny, which served as a shared psychological and cultural vocabulary for millions of citizens.
Today, that foundational bedrock has vanished, replaced by a historically unprecedented condition of global anomie—the sociological state, first identified by Émile Durkheim, where a society’s collective moral standards, boundaries, and rules break down, leaving individuals spiritually adrift. This transition was not sudden, but structural. It can be traced clearly through the shifting nature of American political leadership, the transformation of industrial capitalism into a borderless, virtual technocracy, and the degradation of cultural exports from value-driven narratives into predatory, short-form algorithms. The story of modern global decline is the story of how a civilization traded a solemn, collective purpose for the atomized chaos of the attention economy.
The Navy Time of the White House: A Lineage of Solemn Service
For a significant portion of the mid-to-late twentieth century, the executive branch of the United States ran on what could metaphorically be called “Navy time.” This unique institutional character was deeply rooted in the biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Long before he served as Commander-in-Chief during World War II, a young FDR held the position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920. Obsessed with maritime history and naval warfare, FDR followed the exact political path of his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. As the civilian number-two boss of the Department of the Navy during World War I, FDR mastered global logistics, expanded shipyards, and bypassed bureaucratic inertia to construct the North Sea Mine Barrage to counter German U-boats.
When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the attack felt intensely personal to Roosevelt. It was an assault on the very fleet he had spent his youth procuring and his presidency quietly rebuilding through New Deal programs like the Public Works Administration. Eyewitness accounts from the White House described FDR in a state of concentrated, deadly fury. He personally edited the standard diplomatic language of his address to Congress, scratching out “a date which will live in world history” to insert the immortal phrase “a date which will live in infamy.” His personal investment in the Navy’s honor drove his relentless demand for immediate, retaliatory action, manifesting in the daring Doolittle Raid of April 1942 and eventually the high-level authorization of Operation Vengeance—the targeted interception and shoot-down of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto over the Solomon Islands in 1943.
FDR’s wartime leadership set the template for a continuous lineage of post-war presidents whose characters were forged in the uniform of the United States Navy during World War II. Following the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself the Supreme Allied Commander of the Army—the White House was occupied by five consecutive naval veterans: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, later punctuated by George H.W. Bush. These men, regardless of their political ideologies, shared a common understanding of duty, chain of command, and the gravity of state power born from witnessing mass tragedy firsthand.
John F. Kennedy entered active duty as an Ensign and achieved the combat rank of full Lieutenant in the South Pacific, famously commanding the torpedo boat PT-109. Lyndon B. Johnson, already a sitting U.S. Congressman from Texas when Pearl Harbor was attacked, immediately reported for active service as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, making him the first member of Congress to enter active service during the war. Sent by FDR on a fact-finding mission to the South Pacific in 1942, Johnson narrowly survived death when a fortunate bathroom break caused him to switch planes before a bombing run over New Guinea; the aircraft he was originally scheduled to board, The Wabash Cannonball, was shot down with no survivors, while his actual vessel, The Heckling Hare, survived severe enemy fire. For this single mission, General Douglas MacArthur awarded Johnson a highly controversial Silver Star for gallantry.
Richard Nixon completed this WWII naval trio, serving for fourteen months in the South Pacific with the Combat Air Transport Command. Operating as a logistics officer on Guadalcanal and Bougainville, Nixon kept transport planes loaded under the constant threat of Japanese air raids. He earned a reputation for efficiency, established “Nixon’s Snack Shack” to boost pilot morale, and famously mastered the game of poker, winning thousands of dollars from his fellow officers—capital that entirely financed his first successful run for Congress in 1946. Nixon left active duty as a lieutenant commander, matching LBJ’s rank.
Even the anomalies within this era reinforced the theme of combat-forged leadership. Harry S. Truman, who assumed the presidency in 1945, was a fiercely proud Army artillery officer from World War I. Having memorized the eye chart to bypass a severe hyperopia diagnosis, Truman commanded Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery during the brutal Meuse-Argonne Offensive. He won over a rowdy, undisciplined unit through sheer quiet toughness, famously using intense Missouri profanity to stop a panic during an artillery bombardment in the Vosges Mountains. Truman remained in the Army Reserves as a Colonel, and his experience on the ground shaped the pragmatic, decisive lens through which he later authorized the end of World War II.
Jimmy Carter, though a teenager during World War II, entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1943 and graduated in 1946. He became a career Cold War submariner, working directly under Admiral Hyman Rickover within the Navy’s pioneering nuclear submarine program before returning to his family’s Georgia farm in 1953. George H.W. Bush closed this extraordinary chapter. Enlisting on his eighteenth birthday following Pearl Harbor, Bush became one of the Navy’s youngest aviators, flying a TBM Avenger torpedo bomber and surviving being shot down by enemy fire over the Pacific in 1944. When Bush left office in January 1993, a forty-year era where American presidents viewed power through the solemn responsibility of personal military service came to an end.
