By John Griffin

This Independence Day weekend again finds America entering a political season in a time of war. So it's a good moment to think about how dissent and protest fit in — as American as apple pie, tacos and musubi.

President Bush is already out there campaigning and amassing a record-high campaign coffer while Democrats scramble to find a viable contender and face tough issues. Fair enough.

Bush may have proclaimed victory in the Iraq War in his aircraft-carrier address, but the peace is proving a lot more violent than Americans expected. Polls show support for the war down, which could spread to Bush's still-high popularity.

It's premature to proclaim any Vietnam-type quagmire, and nobody should want one. Still, people are asking questions that could carry over and be magnified in the 2004 election year. These include the continuing casualties and how much the Bush administration exaggerated or lied about weapons of mass destruction.

I still doubt the war has been worth it, although I also hope I'm wrong and meaningful democracy takes root in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is found and eliminated. At least we are giving Iraqis a chance for something better, and the administration will boast of a spinoff in the Israel-Palestine conflict if continuing progress is made there.

Meanwhile, our war on terror continues, with its mixture of necessary restrictions, inadequate funding from Washington, unnecessary abuses of civil rights under Attorney General John Ashcroft, and the hunt for master terrorist Osama Bin Laden (remember him?).

All this is going to be part of our lives in coming months and years — which is why I found perspective and some comfort in a speech on protest and patriotism by Pulitzer-prize winning historian and social critic Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

In his graduation address to Washington's Whitman College (www.whitman.edu), Schlesinger noted how Americans feel a new and personal vulnerability post-9-11. He added:

"The idea is spreading that, when mortal danger threatens, we must suspend discussion and debate, rally 'round the flag and allow the president to be the unquestioned voice of the nation."

He asked three questions: Do a democratic people have a moral obligation to cease debate and dissent in times of war? Did our ancestors abstain from those in past wars? What is the true nature of patriotism?

"The answer to the first question," Schlesinger said, "is that going to war does not abrogate freedom of conscience, thought and speech. War does not abolish the Bill of Rights. Even when the republic faces more dangers, the First Amendment is still there.

"In the midst of the greatest war in American history, the Supreme Court ... held that compelling kids in public schools to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance violated the First Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional... The decision was handed down on Flag Day 1943 ... and was generally applauded."

Schlesinger noted how protest and dissent were practiced before and during every American war, starting with our revolution, when perhaps a third of colonists opposed the drive toward independence. He quoted:

• Theodore Roosevelt in 1918, during the First World War: "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

• Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, another Republican and the conservative of his time, after Pearl Harbor:

"Criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government... Too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think it will give some comfort to the enemy.... If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it... because the maintenance of the right to criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy."

• Philosopher William James, in 1900, about our war to subjugate insurgents opposing U.S. colonization of the Philippines: "Our conduct there has been one protracted infamy toward the islanders, and one protracted lie towards ourselves."

• Mark Twain proposed a revision of the American flag with "the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones."

• President John F. Kennedy, 42 years ago at the University of Washington: "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only 6 percent of the world's population, that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

Schlesinger attacked President Bush's proclaimed new doctrine of 'anticipatory self-defense' ("a fancy term for preventative war"), saying in part: "The policy of anticipatory self-defense is the policy that imperial Japan employed in its attack on Pearl Harbor, on a date, as an earlier American president said, that would live in infamy.

"Franklin D. Roosevelt was right when he said this, and today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of fear and hatred of American arrogance."

But my point here is not to argue against Bush policies or point out the degree America is disliked abroad. It is to defend any people's right to dissent without being labeled unpatriotic, especially in a political season that is sure to intensify.

Which brings us to Schlesinger's third question:

"True patriotism, I propose, consists of living up to the nation's highest ideals. Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who became an influential figure in 19th-century America, defined the true meaning of patriotism when he said:

" 'Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.'"