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CNN This Morning

President & First Lady Meet with D-Day Veterans. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired June 06, 2024 - 06:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[06:30:39]

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 104 years ago.

JOE BIDEN, (D) U.S. PRESIDENT: I believe you, man.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 104.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ready? One, two, three. You got it. You got it.

BIDEN: Good man.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: 104 years old, standing up to shake the hand of his commander-in-chief, 80 years after he was part of storming the beaches at Normandy. We are marking, of course, the 80th anniversary of that day. We are awaiting President Biden.

He's going to deliver remarks at any moment at the Normandy American Cemetery in northern France on this, as we've noted, 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. About 73,000 U.S. troops took part in that invasion on June 6, 1944. Some 2,400 Americans died that day, and many of them are buried at the cemetery where the President is about to speak.

The White House releasing a presidential proclamation yesterday that read, in part, quote, "On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, may we thank these service members for their bravery and sacrifice. May we honor their heroism, which liberated a continent and saved the world. And may we recommit to the future that they fought and which many died for."

Our panel is back, and we are also joined by CNN Chief International Anchor, Christiane Amanpour. She is live for us in Normandy on this very solemn day. Christiane, good morning to you. Very grateful to have you and your perspective, your reflections on this day and what it means as we face a very uncertain future across the world?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Absolutely, Kasie. As you said, here are thousands and thousands of Americans who stormed those beaches on that day 80 years ago and in the other battles of World War II after D-Day are buried. This is the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, and there will be the joint American- Franco celebration and commemoration today.

So you will have President Biden. He will be welcoming the French president, given that this is the American cemetery. There will be a flyover, a flypast of C-130 aircraft. There will be the national anthems of both countries. The French President will make a short speech and deliver what's called the Legion d'Honneur. It's a particular honor, perhaps a little bit like the Medal of Freedom in the United States, to a number of surviving American vets.

President Biden will deliver remarks perhaps in about a half an hour from now. There will be the invocations. There will be, again, more flypasts, prayers, and taps, and the kinds of things that actually, you know, we've seen in so many of these years. This is -- I've been doing these commemorations since 1994, the 50th and then the 55th, the 60th, the 65th, and on and on.

And it's truly an amazing, amazing atmosphere to witness. I just spoke to a 101-year-old veteran, Jake Larson, who I spoke to five years ago, and he promised me five years ago that he would come back, and he did. He's still alive. Unbelievable. And he talked about the fear, the sheer fear of being disgorged onto that beach when 10,000 people in one day were either killed, wounded, or went missing. The most incredible endeavor.

And President Biden will talk about how this is the battle of a lifetime for democracy, to defend the democracy and freedom that they died for, but also to defend the one that is at stake right now in Europe. Who knew that there would be a raging war in Europe on the 80th anniversary of D-Day?

[06:35:14]

And so he's going to talk all about the stakes that we all face, the existential stakes, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine now entering its third year. And I'll just read a little bit from President Reagan's unbelievable speech that he made on the 40th Anniversary here in 1984. And he said, essentially, that liberation had come finally to Europe, that it had been prayed for. Here the allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history, and indeed unparalleled. It was called Operation Overlord.

They tricked and deceived the Nazis into, you know, coming aboard in a place where the Nazis thought they would not be. And they fought and did something absolutely heroic that no one could imagine even today was possible. And that's what's going to be celebrated and marked all throughout this day and through these ceremonies.

HUNT: A really remarkable moment. Christiane, you mentioned the ongoing land war in Europe. Noteworthy that we expect the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy's, presence here, and it was apparently requested that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, not appear. Of course, at the time, there was significant involvement from the Soviets at the time, and he has attended in the past, is my understanding, not welcome there today.

AMANPOUR: Well, let me put that into perspective as well. I was actually here, as I said, at the 70th anniversary, 2014, and, in fact, the main celebrations took place on the beach below where we are now. The queen of England was here, the German chancellor was here, obviously the president of the United States was here, Barack Obama, but also Vladimir Putin.

He had been invited in remembrance and in gratitude for what the Soviet troops actually did do. They came storming in through the, you know, up into the center of Europe, helped liberate Europe. They lost 20 million people, a huge sacrifice in World War II.

And at that time, Russia was meant to be an ally. Now, of course, it did come some two months after Putin had annexed Crimea, the beginning of Putin's land grab in Europe that, at the time, the leaders hoped would stop at Crimea and actually be repelled.

And so I remember them taking him off into some, you know, fancy lunch and trying to have a peace gathering whereby they tried to bring, you know, the beginnings of the Minsk Accords, so to speak, which was meant to deliver peace between Russia and Ukraine. Obviously, it didn't work out, and it failed, and we saw what happened with the full-scale invasion some two years ago, now into its third year.

So Putin did not come five years ago because, again, in the full throes of his invasion of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and he certainly was not welcome this year.

But, again, to go back to Ronald Reagan in 1984, then at the height of the Cold War, in that phenomenal speech he delivered from Pointe du Hoc, which is the top of the massive cliff that the Army Rangers, the American Army Rangers, scaled and, you know, they were just mowed down by German Nazi fire, and yet they kept going.

And, anyway, Reagan went back and gave the speech there to commemorate, and at that speech he talked about the Soviet troops who had helped liberate Europe but who, as he said, stayed in Central Europe and never went back, unwanted, uninvited. And he talked about the countries of Eastern Europe at that time that were still, after World War I, were then swept up into what they called the Soviet bloc, the Warsaw Pact, all those countries which are now free and want to become part of NATO, and many of them are part of NATO.

There's so much resonance. And even at that time, at that speech 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan said that we have to have peace through strength and that he was looking for a sign from the Soviet Union that they, too, would want some kind of peace.

And it's really remarkable that at the end of Reagan's second term, he found that partner for peace in Mikhail Gorbachev, the last of the Soviet Union presidents and leaders. And then, for a period of years, there was a rapprochement, obviously, between what became Russia and the West, and then Vladimir Putin came to power and showed that his philosophy, his politics, was aggression, was imperialism, was, again, trying to dominate parts of the world, of this continent, that he believed were rightly his or rightly belonged to Russia. And that's where we are today.

[06:40:00]

HUNT: Really remarkable way to lay out the stage and the stakes of all of this. Our Christiane Amanpour, always incredibly grateful to have you and your perspective on this historic day. Thank you very much.

Coming up next here, President Biden in France for the 80th anniversary of D-Day. We are going to make sure we bring you his speech live. You are looking, of course, at some of the last surviving veterans of that day.

But coming up here, we're going to get some unique historical context on Normandy, the events of D-Day, when we are joined by award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns.

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PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed. But we shall return again and again.

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[06:45:19]

HUNT: Welcome back to CNN This Morning as we mark the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion of France that began the liberation of that country and of Europe and the world from Nazi tyranny.

Joining us live from Walpole, New Hampshire to reflect on this momentous day is the award-winning director and filmmaker Ken Burns, who of course produced "The War." It's simply called "The War," the definitive documentary outlining what happened in the course of World War II.

Ken, I'm so grateful to have you on the program. I'd just like to start with your reflections as we see what are really our final remaining veterans, those courageous men who stormed the beach that day.

KEN BURNS, DIRECTOR, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER: You know, Kasie, thanks for having me. This is one of the most important days in American history. It's certainly one of the most important days in world history. This is the greatest cataclysm in the history of the world. More than 60 million people were killed. This is the greatest invasion in the history of that, and we began our film at the end of the 90s to air in 2007 because we were learning that we were losing 1,000 veterans of the Second World War a day in America.

I am sorry to say that that number is way, way down, and there are only a handful of people who have that direct memory, and we wanted to find out what it was like this day. You cannot imagine the scope. It is beyond our kind of comprehension, and the thing that matters to me most is that we were there not for empire. We weren't there to acquire territory. The farm boy from Nebraska is not there to get something. He's there for an idea, which is to liberate people from authoritarianism, to liberate people from tyranny, the people who had taken over Europe.

And it's one of the most magnificent moments in human history, and what happened that day is beyond comprehension. There are three phases. You know, first, the airborne gets dropped behind, the 101st and the 82nd. Then there are over 11,000 bombers that are supposed to soften up German targets. Then there's going to be in phase three, five, beach landing. The British are going to take gold and sword.

The Canadians are going to take Juno and have a pretty hard time of it. Utah, Americans are there. Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., with just a cane, marches ashore. It's Omaha that's the big problem. It's a wide beach. It's the biggest beach. The tanks that are set off just go right to the bottom of the sea. A lot of the LSTs are swamped. I mean, the heroism of the people that then, in the face of withering fire, get up on that beach and begin to move.

Someone just said, you know, Americans began to improvise that day. The ships were ordered to stay out at a certain length so they wouldn't run aground. They moved in so that their guns could break up the German emplacements.

Enlisted soldiers and officers alike began to take matters into their own hands. Somebody said, look, we're getting murdered down here. Let's go up there and get murdered. And it opened up a beachhead. And the thing -- it is -- you cannot overstate. And all you have to do is look at all those crosses, all of the Americans that were left there to understand the significance of this moment and this day.

The fact that the chances are that there'll be anyone left in a few years who was there, who can remember it, is a sad moment and I think forces us now to invest even more energy as forces of authoritarianism are again on the eastern borders of Europe, again threatening us.

HUNT: It is a remarkable way to think about it. In fact, I actually, just this week, lost my 98-year-old grandfather. He was not in Europe. He actually fought in the Philippines. He earned a Purple Heart there. And I think I was struck both personally when our family went through this loss, but also now looking at these men here, that people who are my age, you know, I'm not yet 40, are going to be the only ones that really have, we're going to be the last ones that have the opportunity to have a personal connection to people who were there that day.

And I'm just interested to know your reflections on what that means for how we need to talk to the upcoming generations that are not going to have the opportunity to understand just what those stakes were, just what these men and women, some of them, went through and fought for in this just absolutely momentous, cataclysmic world event. It seems like a really significant loss.

[06:50:14] BURNS: It is indeed. And I think we live in perilous times, not just because of the rise of authoritarianism, Kasie, but also because we are all now, with social media, kind of independent, free agents. And the thing that we practiced in the Depression and then perfected in World War II was shared sacrifice.

And that's what those men, those old men now, who can need help, some in wheelchairs, some, you know, with canes, they were 19 years old. I've got a 19-year-old daughter right now, and I want her to understand that at 19, people were risking their lives. There were 5,300 boats in that armada. There were 176,000 soldiers. There were 2,000 landing boats. And the sheer scope of this thing is so important to understand and then to personalize, to say it isn't just arrows on a map, but their individual lives, like your grandfather, like my father, like other people who were involved in these things, and that we have so few of these great patriots.

I mean, this is the moment when the greatest generation's reputation is cemented. They had survived the Depression and all the hardships. And that practice permitted them to say, it's not about me. It's about us. And, you know, us is the tiny, lowercase, two-letter, plural pronoun that also, when it's capitalized, is the U.S. And that's what my entire professional life has been about. And in that space, in that sacred space, is the story of the better angels of humanity.

And I can't think of anything than what it would be for a 19-year-old kid to get off a landing boat and make it up there and eliminate that pillbox, destroy those guns, and make an inroad into Europe, so that on June 6, by the end of August, you are in Paris, and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. There's not a better story in the history of the world than this one.

HUNT: Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. Ken, we went back to see how this was being written about from a leadership perspective at the time. And back in 1944, just a month or so after this invasion, in Foreign Affairs, they wrote about the differences between among the European and American leaders at the time. And they say that it has repeatedly been pointed out France was far less fortunate than Great Britain or the United States in her political leadership. The men who were patriots first and politicians second were rare, almost non- existent again in France.

The salvation of Great Britain and the United States has been that at critical moments in their history, a benign political providence has provided leaders who were not only intelligent, but courageous. Courageous. How important is that kind of courage on the world stage today?

BURNS: Oh, it's hugely important. We see almost in a daily, hourly fashion the way in which partisanship and the idea of my way or the highway rules most of our discussions. And we applaud now as a rare event when people set aside the label R or D and do something together when this is entirely what happened here.

Franklin Roosevelt went to the industrialists who were angry at him because he had promoted all these social classes that were lifting people out of the Depression. And he said, I need you to make 50,000 planes. And they said, we can't do more than 2,000. He said, I need 50,000. He got 50,000 planes that year. And so there was a sense of cooperation, a sense of in it together.

And so freedom, Kasie, at the end of the day, that's what you're talking about, is that freedom is not just what I want. It's what we need. And sometimes they're in conflict with one another. That Iowa or Nebraska farm boy does not need to be at Omaha Beach that morning 80 years ago. But that's what we needed. And that kid was able to do that.

And so many lost their lives. To see that sea of crosses is to understand the essence. I'm working right now on a history of the American Revolution where all of these things first began to coalesce, the idea that we weren't just separate, but we could be one thing.

And that's, you know, if there's ever a sterling example of one thing, something we need desperately today, not just in the United States, but in the world, is the forces of democracy to come up and say, this is how you do it.

[06:55:11]

Authoritarians always get the first jump. And then it takes a little bit longer for the unwieldy democratic processes to work. But when they work, there is not a force in the world that can resist them.

That is the lesson of D-Day. And that is the lesson for us to take back to our own lives and our own actions and to begin to realize there are things bigger than my political beliefs. There are things bigger than, you know, what I want. There are things that we need. And right now we need to celebrate democracy and the overthrow of authoritarian rule.

HUNT: Really, just really remarkable way to put it. Ken Burns, do please stay with me. I'd like to give you the last word in just a few moments as we approach the top of the hour. But our panel is also here. Cedric Leighton, I know you had family members who were involved in this war effort. Your final reflections as we wrap up here.

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (Ret.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Yeah, Kasie, one of the things, my dad was involved on the intelligence side. He was an army intelligence NCO at the time. And one of the things that he noted was how quickly the radio traffic blossomed and all the networks came up in terms of the logistical networks on the German side, on the French side, on the British side.

And everybody was talking about D-Day. As soon as all of these things happened, all of the movements occurred with the flotilla of ships, over 7,000 ships that showed up, the over 14,000 airplanes. All of that became part of a major logistical movement.

And as Ken was mentioning, there are so many different aspects to this. This was a major logistical feat, major intelligence feat. And we actually had insights on the intelligence side that gave us the plans of what the Germans were going to do and gave us the plans for their fortifications. And that made a huge difference.

HUNT: It made a big difference to many of those men that we're seeing now who were there that day. Isaac Duver, you cover President Biden so closely. Again, as we wrap up here, the sticks for him?

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, look, remember, the portrait in the Oval Office that Biden put there in the center spot is of FDR. He sees a lot of connection to him, both in terms of the fight for democracy and in terms of the economic programs that he's won, the new New Deal, essentially, in his mind.

But the points have been made by Ken, by you, and by your grandfather. These -- these people, this is not a theoretical exercise for them. This is the way -- the fading memories of World War II and of the Holocaust, we see things that are coming back now in ways that reflect that we are starting to forget about it. A lot of people have not had that direct experience. Go back to, you know, Hannah Arendt talking about the banality of evil. This is what happened then happened. It's real. It happened with human beings.

Human beings haven't changed that much. And it's one of the things that we are facing as a country and as a world is whether we're going to repeat, whether, as Biden says, history just rhymes, right, quoting that Irish poem. What we're going up against here in this moment for America and the world is something that we all need to grapple with because that is not -- it's only 80 years ago. It's really not that long. And here we are again.

HUNT: Now, again, I only just lost someone in my life who was able to participate and he was -- who fought for us. Stephen, your -- we're going to go back to Ken Burns here. So briefly, your reflections on this day.

STEPHEN COLLINSON, CNN POLITICAL SENIOR REPORTER: I think to Isaac's point, when the witness of history fade away, it's easier for the malevolent forces to pervert history. And while history seems like linear, D-Day was not always assured to be a success. Dwight Eisenhower carried a message in his wallet that said that he would deliver in the event of a retreat, which said, if there is any blame, it's all basically on me. And that kind of leadership is, I think, what we've been somewhat lacking in recent years.

HUNT: Very interesting. All right. Ken Burns, like I said, I want to give you the last word here as someone who has devoted a significant portion of their life to helping us all remember these days. What would you leave us with?

BURNS: So I'll leave you with that day Americans woke up, found out what was going on, and that night President Roosevelt gave this prayer. "Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

'Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. 'They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph."

[07:00:16]

HUNT: Yeah, really remarkable moment, Ken. And actually, I'm so glad that you brought us there. Thank you for your time today. We actually have that prayer that he offered on that day, and we're going to leave you with that this morning.

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ROOSEVELT: Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

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