The famed speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen, spoke at the New School University commencement the other day, and proclaimed, “Future historians studying the decline and fall of America will mark this as the time the tide began to turn — toward a mean-spirited mediocrity in place of a noble beacon.” He said, “The stain on our credibility, our reputation for decency and integrity, will not quickly wash away.” His complaints, to judge from his speech, relate to the Bush administration’s conduct of the Battle of Iraq and of the war on terrorism here at home. He said,”We have not lost either war we chose or lost too much of our wealth. But we have lost something worse — our good name for truth and justice.” America, said the man whom President Carter wanted to elevate to be director of central intelligence, “is in the deepest trouble of my lifetime.”

The graduates must have been scratching their heads. Mr. Sorensen’s lifetime, after all, included Nixon’s Watergate scandal and resignation, the impeachment of President Clinton over his affair with a White House intern, Mr. Carter’s failed effort to rescue the Iranian hostages, the American defeat in Vietnam, the Los Angeles and Detroit riots, the plague of racist lynchings in the South, and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Mr. Sorensen is caviling about a war in which a coalition that America led toppled a dictatorship in a country of 24 million persons at the cost in American lives of fewer than 1,000 troops in the first year and has given democracy its first hope in the Arab world. We chalk it up to that most forgivable of sins, an old man romanticizing the past. What a contrast to the kind of leadership we remember this week as we mourn the death of President Reagan.