Like other Americans, my wife and I were traumatized by the events of September 11, 2001. We were in a small village in the south of France, and for several hours we could get no word from or about our younger son, whose office was close by the fallen towers. Hours passed before we learned that he was unharmed and on his way to donate blood. We were among the lucky ones.
In our agony for those who had not escaped we were sustained by an outpouring of affection and sympathy from the French people. There was the parking attendant at the Carcassonne castle who waved me by, refusing my money: "You will park free here; you are an American." And at noon on the Saturday after the attack we and our friends stood on the veranda of the village cafe, silently holding hands. All of Europe was silent at that moment in grieving memory of those who had lost their lives.
The great welling up of European empathy sprang not only from the very human reaction to the atrocity but also from the respect and deeply-rooted affection of Europeans for the United States. Polls taken in 1999 and 2000 showed that our country was viewed favorably by 83 percent of the British; 78 percent of the Germans; 76 percent of the Italians; 62 percent of the French; and (just after the attack), 61 percent of the Russians. Then, in the wake of September 11, those figures rose, and not just in Europe but in Africa, Asia and the Western Hemisphere as well.
We returned to the same French village in June of 2003. By then it seemed almost as though we were a pariah nation. "Viewed favorably" figures had fallen everywhere -- in France to 43 percent; in Germany to 45 percent; and in Russia to 36 percent. Britain and Italy still turned in majority favorable results, but with smaller margins that seemed to shrink almost daily. In other parts of the world we were hard pressed to find those who viewed us favorably: Brazil, 34 percent; Indonesia, 15 percent; Morocco, 27 percent (down from 77 percent); Turkey, 15 percent; and Pakistan, 13 percent.
But again we were greeted by the villagers with familiar affection. The popular warning from home to be wary of French people hostile to Americans seemed baseless. It was our leadership that they feared and mistrusted. Just as we did.
That leadership's mendacity is now catching up with it, and awareness of tragically unnecessary death and destruction is spreading at home. We Americans are finally having to face something of what our former friends, now our critics, have seen all along. Our president's approval rating stands in the latest polls at 52 percent, down from the seemingly impervious highs of two years ago. As it continues its decline in the months ahead and as the expectations of regime change in 2004 grow stronger, let us hope that we may find an honorable and effective way of confronting the myriad dangers that face us --- both those thrust upon us and those our leadership has spawned --- and perhaps a return of the "viewed favorably" results from our estranged friends.
(Paul Gaston is Professor Emeritus of Southern and Civil Rights History.)
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