Waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates rarely got a chance to relive the lighter days of his youth. One such moment came on July 28, 2010—a day of celebration at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. The year marked the one-hundredth birthday of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), and Gates’s keynote address set the tone for a big patriotic show featuring flags, paratroopers, antiaircraft cannons firing blank shots, and a flyover of F-16 jets. Despite the jubilant occasion, the Pentagon chief had not come to spin campfire yarn. Amid the cheers of almost fifty thousand Scouts gathered at the army installation, Gates, an Eagle Scout from 1958, reaffirmed the movement’s intergenerational contract that promised a relationship of mutual allegiance between boys and men. “I believe that today, as for the past 100 years, there is no finer program for preparing American boys for citizenship and leadership than the Boy Scouts of America.” Reciting the themes of crisis, anxiety, and salvation that supporters of the nation’s foremost youth organization had evoked since its founding, Gates extolled scouting as the best remedy for an America “where the young are increasingly physically unfit and society as a whole languishes in ignoble moral ease.” While many youths had degenerated into “couch potatoes,” the BSA continued to make men and leaders, men of “integrity and decency … moral courage” and “strong character—the kind of person who built this country and made it into the greatest democracy and the greatest economic powerhouse in the history of the world.” More was at stake than the fate of the nation. “The future of the world itself,” said Gates, depended on the “kind of citizens our young people” would become. Only with the ...
