David M. Shribman

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Dear Dad,

It’s Father’s Day weekend, and as a dad yourself, you know that phone lines are buzzing as children get in touch with their fathers, offering them greetings and professions of love. I’ll almost certainly hear from my girls — your grandkids! — and they’ll bring me up to date on their activities, noble and nefarious both.

But what I really am aching for on this holiday, coming 22 years since you left us, is the chance to make one of those calls myself, to give you a briefing on the family that mourned you, the country that nurtured you, and the world you, your brother and the 16.4 million others who served in American forces in the Second World War helped save from slavery, cruelty and tyranny.

This is a world you wouldn’t recognize. Nearly every day I say to myself: How would I explain this to Dad?

You remembered seeing Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades, and for you an encounter with a veteran of the Spanish-American War was thoroughly unremarkable. Today, fewer than 1% of the veterans of your war are still alive, and none from the First World War. Automobiles and trucks move through the streets without drivers. The Bell System Picturephones we saw together at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair have arrived. We keep them in our pockets now. Hardly anyone uses cash these days.

College athletes are paid, and women’s basketball is thriving. The country is still reeling from the aftershocks of a pandemic like the one that raged across the country shortly before you were born. The frozen tundra of the Arctic isn’t always frozen anymore. People eat foods with names sounding as if they belong in the periodic table of the elements. (Sometimes I wonder: How many protons does the nucleus of kale have?)

I’m not sure you’d like what you see. I’m not sure I like it myself. Except this: One of your granddaughters, unmarried, is by her own brave choice a mother of two splendid children.

I remember the tensions of the Vietnam years, the friendships torn apart by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Today those divisions, real at the time, seem faint, almost quaint. Now public opinion polls show that members of the two political parties believe their rival partisans aren’t just wrong, they’re evil. About three-quarters of Republicans regard Democrats as immoral, with two-thirds of Democrats feeling that way about Republicans.

You preached moderation in all things. The ethos today is that there is no room for moderation. Moderation today is for wimps, or for the people who can’t make up their minds.

I have no doubt that your wartime efforts, which you almost never talked about, were worthwhile, but I also feel, here in America in 2026, that we have largely been unworthy of your sacrifice and of the death of your brother.

A half-dozen veterans of your war have been presidents; even with their many faults, even their occasional crimes, they seem as giants compared to those who have followed. The notion Herbert Hoover shared a month after your third birthday, that the eradication of poverty was within our grasp, turned out to be beyond our reach. The institutions America helped create after your war — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NATO — are in disrepute; nobody remembers what they were for, only that they are not for now.

Today the world seems coarser, less welcoming to the kind of outsiders we Americans all once were. Immigrants are scorned, or worse. Harry Truman, Johnson and Nixon hurled obscenities in private; the current president dishes them out in public, calls his rivals losers and failures, regards his opponents as vermin. His predecessors comforted the nation in difficult times. He lacks the ability, even the inclination, to be parson to the nation, preferring to be its prime pugilist.

Now celebrating our 250th anniversary, we’re a different country than the one that marked its 150th only a dozen days after your first birthday.

When you married Mom, a Canadian, you couldn’t imagine that the two countries could ever be at odds. Now the president says we don’t need anything from Canada, that Canadians are rapacious, self-interested, more antagonists than allies. If there’s Kentucky bourbon in Canada anymore, it’s because it was sneaked in — the reverse of how Canadian whisky was smuggled into the U.S. during the Prohibition of your youth. The difference: No one in Canada wants American liquor, or for that matter American anything; the resentment of the U.S. is so severe that Canadians search juice labels to assure the oranges come from Brazil, not Florida.

I hardly dare tell you that the days when you made us drink polio vaccine like lemonade are gone. I wish you could tell Bobby Kennedy’s son, now running the country’s health establishment, about how you and I were in the hospital at the same time, in the year of RFK Jr.’s birth — me in the neonatal unit, you in the polio ward. Today thousands aren’t vaccinated for childhood diseases. Measles is back.

You were determined that your children have a college education, seeing the privilege of college as an invitation to read, to ponder the great questions, to grow, to learn about beauty and truth. Today, small colleges are in peril. The liberal arts often are regarded as a waste of time, suitable mostly for dilettantes. Campuses are denigrated as hellscapes of intellectual coercion and moral corruption. Of all the changes in this new world, this might aggrieve you the most.

You never gave a moment’s thought to a line I heard in a country song this week: “When you pass on, what you gonna pass down?” In this, there’s good news. Your four children are in intact first marriages, your eight grandchildren are thriving, and you have eight remarkable great-grandchildren. People still love their country, even as it projects some unlovely aspects.

When I wrote you a letter like this some years ago, I shared the one great constant of your life and mine. It still holds true. Our Red Sox are in last place.

We all miss you, and not only on the third Sunday of June, though most especially then. There’s so much to tell you, so much that I find inexplicable myself. But this may be enough: Love endures. We lean on its power every day. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Love, Dave

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.