the americans made to liberate them. we have an american cemetery in the netherlands. every memorial day, every grave is adopted by a dutch citizen. they are adorned with flowers, 4 or 5,000 people show up for the memorial day service. they love america they think we are great and appreciate everything we have done. burt, it s heart-warming for an american to do that that it s still remembered today. why did you feel like the flag needed to come back to america? well, it s a piece of cultural heritage from the united states. you know, it was at auction. everybody could have bought it. i bought it. and, you know, i did it for the right reasons. i feel that i m temporary custodian of the flag. it doesn t long in the netherlands it belongs in the country where the heroes came from. the heroes came from the united states to free europe. it needs to be here. it needs to be in an institution to tell the story about the liberation and the sacrifices made for
neither alans pete hoekstra. burt, let me start with you. you purchased this flag at auction big amount of money. you were motivated to do so. why? well, when i saw it at first i was amazed at this piece of american history what s coming for sale given my emotions with liberation and the fact that we lost family members during the bombing raids and the liberation of europe. i knew i wanted to possess and it safeguard it for the future. steve: absolutely. there is even german bullet holes in this flag. when you see someone from another country, from another continent still today remembering the sacrifices of those men and what they did, how does it resonate with you. it s phenomenal. my parents were liberated by allied troops. they lived in the northern part of holland allies and
mr. president, first lady, vice president, 70 years ago on the normandy coast, the allied forces, including thousands of american soldiers started the liberation of europe. beach by beach. street by street. city by city. they recaptured our freedom at a terrible cost. many of those men gave their lives so that today we can list our lives in freedom and peace. we will be forever grateful to them. when we hear the stories of those that survived, we can barely imagine what they must have gone through. landing on those normandy beaches, plowing through the cold water and the thick mud
i thought how low can a president get? and that s not a partisan statement. i mean, ronald reagan in 1984 gave those incredible speeches at omaha beach about the u.s. army second rangers, about liberation of europe. donald trump s teleprompter speech was fine today, but to sit with a backdrop of the graves of our fallen heros and to act like a used car salesman doing tweet games with nancy pelosi s new nickname and calling bob mueller a fool, the fool was the president who disappointed all of our armed forces and veterans by acting that way. you said listen, i wanted to i don t want to give the president short shrift on his speech, because the speech, he did rise to the occasion. he did. but then that is, as you said, scripted trump, correct. exactly. and that s happened before where he says something scripted and you say, well, that was
because it teaches, it teaches our current leaders. some of the facts of today are just astounding when you think about what june 6 represented, beginning with d-day, the liberation of europe, 338 days is how long the allies advanced. more than 700 miles, liberating tens of millions. then think about the survivors, the veterans. according to rick atkinson who wrote a wonderful book, part of his trip glogy, he talks about there were more than 16 million americans who were in uniform during the second world war. by 2024 that number is expected to dip below 100,000. so there aren t that many presidents who are going to be able to see large numbers of veterans of d-day to understand the lessons of history, to understand the sacrifice to something greater than themselves and to understand the alliance that it represented