Since joining NBC News in 1966, he has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including the Emmy, the Peabody, and the duPont. The current anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw talked recently in Washington with Naval History Editor Fred L. Schultz about how and why he came to write The Greatest Generation, his tribute to the people who emerged from the Great Depression and World War II to build today's modern society.
Naval History: Since you've never served in the military, some people might wonder why you wrote a book like this.
Brokaw: I had grown up in military or quasi-military environments. During the war, my dad was working in southwestern South Dakota at an ordnance depot on an Army base that held a garrison of Italian prisoners of war. The Army was testing ammunition out on the prairie and storing it there. Those are my earliest memories of the military.
My father was drafted, but then the base commander called him back because my dad had been keeping the place going. He was one of the crew of men who built the roads and plowed them out in the wintertime. After that, he went to work on civilian projects for the Corps of Engineers, building dams in South Dakota. Those dams were built by guys who were fresh out of the service, engineers and construction laborers and heavy equipment operators, as my father was. So I was always surrounded by it. If you were born in 1940, the men who were your coaches and school teachers and people in your community had been in that war.
When I graduated from the University of South Dakota, I wanted to go into the Navy. So I applied to the OCS [officer candidate school] program. I was accepted, and I was looking forward to it. I didn't have a job and I needed one, among other things, and that's what I had always wanted to do. But I had flat feet. In the last station of the physical, they said, "We can't take you, you've got flat feet."
Naval History: Why did you want to go into the Navy?
Brokaw: I think a lot of people from the prairie have a calling to the sea. It's a kind of foreign environment for us and I think an unusually high incidence of people from that part of the country are drawn to it. I had grown up on boats on the Missouri River, and I wanted to go into the Navy and run boats.
Most of my father's brothers who went into the service went into the Navy, for example. So that's what I wanted to do, and I was really disappointed when I couldn't do it. The man who recruited me, and who had spent a long time doing it, said, "We can get you in if we can get some political intervention." But I said, "Why don't I find out where I stand in the draft first, with these feet."
I went to the draft board and volunteered, but the same regulation applied. It was crazy, but in 1962 Vietnam had not yet heated up, so they said, "You've got flat feet. We'll make you 1-Y." In the meantime, I would be out of a job. So I missed my opportunity. I think it would have been good for me, frankly.
Naval History: Why do you say that?
Brokaw: I think that one of the lessons in this book and one of the lessons of my own life is that discipline in military training is a helpful thing in those formative years. During my first couple of years in college I wasn't as focused as I needed to be. So maybe I could have used some military training.
A number of my oldest and closest friends are people who either made a career out of the military or who had memorable times in the military.
Naval History: Many of our legislators and business executives have no military experience. How important is the military?
Brokaw: Everyone ought to have some understanding that how we defend the country is vitally important. The military is in charge of national security. History is replete with examples in which this country survived because it had a strong military and a commitment to it. The relationship between the military and the political community has been in balance, by and large, which I think has been critical. The military people in this large and complex society always have known that they are subject to the political will of the people, broadly speaking, and to the Congress and to the Commander-in-Chief, all of whom are civilian.
So I think the military is vitally important. I do think that public people without the benefit of military experience have to work a little harder to understand what it is all about.
Naval History: Do you think some sort of mandatory national service would do the country any good?
Brokaw: You know, I've always believed in it, and I've always said it was a good idea. I think it should be both men and women, but then the costs become prohibitive. That's a big part of the problem.
I've thought about this a fair amount. I do think that it would be useful to have some kind of interim step, if you will—summer programs for young people who want to have some military experience. It may not have to be a full, uniformed experience. In between college years, there ought to be some program where young people can make contributions and learn about various aspects of American life, including the military.
Naval History: People in this country seem to be starving for heroes these days. How do you feel about that?
Brokaw: I think, especially right now, that three or four factors are feeding this. One is that we've been through the past year with no heroes on either side of this political scandal—or in any part of it. Nobody has emerged who is heroic—the prosecutor, the President, the women involved, the people on the Hill. All have seemed less than heroic to the American public.
Another factor is that at the end of the 20th century, people are reviewing what this nation has been through, what they've personally been through. And when they look back on World War II, they think, "My God, look at all we have accomplished, at home and abroad." It really is breathtaking when you think about it—the scope, the mobilization, the retooling of American industry to produce armaments, the training that went on in a short time, yet was done so skillfully. Look at the magnitude of the military challenges set before these people: the terrible blow at Pearl Harbor, for example. But they recovered from it and prevailed, east and west, and came back and built the country.
I think that there often is a longing for simpler times. The World War II generation will tell you that no one should want to go back to those times because they were so hard. The Depression was an era of great deprivation. The war was a horror, with separation and death and maiming and great sacrifice and great anxiety. What these people say is that they've made it possible for this current generation to create its own era, which is what I believe.
Naval History: In publishing, as I'm sure it is in television, you always take a gamble when you use superlatives and absolutes. How did you arrive at your title, The Greatest Generation?
Brokaw: Well, I thought about it; it wasn't just a whim. I said to Tim Russert on the Today show during the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, "I think that this is the greatest generation any society ever produced." Then I went back through it and argued with some contemporaries of mine, older historians and others. I must say, I have not found a great deal of resistance to it. And I have measured this generation against others in this country.
Our founding fathers were part of a great generation. But there were people who sided with the Brits at that time. And, although the example we set here was one of democracy and the age of enlightenment, it didn't have a ripple effect around the world. We didn't export it in our own way.
The Civil War generation was an astonishing one. We went to war against each other and then healed the nation in a common way. But, you know, we really didn't deal with institutionalized racism. There were still deep divisions in this country along racial lines.
Naval History: There still are.
Brokaw: Yes, and there still are. And that experience is confined largely to this country.
This "greatest" generation lived through great economic deprivations. Expectations were low because of the hardships they were experiencing in getting jobs, keeping farms and businesses, of going to college and trying to pay for it. Just when they began to have some hope, they were lifted up out of their small communities or off city streets, and sent thousands of miles across the Pacific, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, to fight wars in the most primitive conditions for years at a time. Then they came back, rebuilt their enemies, built this country into the most powerful industrial economy in the history of civilization, stared down communism, took advantage of the GI Bill, spread out across America and built communities and families and schools, and never whined, never whimpered, and never asked for attention.
So those are the markers for me in terms of determining that this was the greatest generation.
Naval History: Often in your book you say that the people who saw combat generally didn't want to talk about it much. How did you get them to open up?
Brokaw: I think they opened up in part because they are now in the mortality zone and they want people to know what they went through. And they want the rest of society to understand the lessons of that.
This book had many beginnings in my mind. One of them came when I was at my little house in the far northwestern corner of Connecticut in a wonderful little town called Litchfield, a real picturesque Yankee community that goes back to the early 1700s.
I read an obituary in the paper one day about a man who had been the first citizen of Litchfield. He was a lawyer and the first selectman, which is the equivalent of the mayor. He had been active in his church and school and in the town's cultural affairs, and he was widely regarded. But no one knew about his war experience. He had been diagnosed, as I remember now, with brain cancer, and he was going to die. He knew that. As the paper recounted it later in his obituary, about three months into his diagnosis he said to his wife, "There are some parts of my life I've never talked about. You should hear them." He was a real heroic figure. He had done great brave things and had been instrumental in operations to liberate Europe. How many stories are out there just like this one? How many of these people have never told their stories? We had better get them down on paper before they die.
On the 50th Anniversary of D-Day I remember telling my wife to ask these guys where they were that day. Almost uniformly, their response was, "Oh, I was at Omaha, but I didn't do anything more than anybody else did." Then we would say, "We understand that. But what did you do that day?" We finally got them to talk about it. These were kids 18 to 22 years of age in the greatest military invasion in the history of mankind. They faced withering fire from Germans dug in along that coastline. And they walked into a storm front of 88-mm and small-arms fire and grenades and bombs and land mines and obstacles of all kinds. And they were determined to liberate Europe. It still takes my breath away.
Naval History: What about the Pacific landings and invasions?
Brokaw: I wrote about those, as well. I do think that there's been almost an undue concentration on Europe. Obviously, the Marines and the Navy in the Pacific were equally important.
One of the subjects in the book was a Pacific war veteran from my hometown. After one Halloween, he was complaining about the high school kids the night before. My mother said to him—kind of in a jocular way, because he was a guy who was well-known for his sense of humor—"Oh, come on, Gordon. Where were you when you were 17?" He looked at her and said, "I was landing on Guadalcanal." That's as good a sound bite as I've ever heard, by the way.
It's now been probably 45 years since my mother came home from the post office that day and told me that story. So I found Gordon Larsen. He landed at Guadalcanal and at Bougainville and at Okinawa. He lost his brother at Bougainville, saw him killed in front of him. He went through all that and had the canteen shot off his hip. He was a Browning automatic rifleman, in the thick of it all the time. And he had never, ever talked about it.
Naval History: How do you switch gears from talking and writing about the moral high ground of World War II veterans to reporting on events in Washington on the nightly news?
Brokaw: I have to do that all that time. It's not just unique to this current experience. You have to come home from Beirut, or the Persian Gulf War, or the earthquake in Armenia, or Tianenman Square, and get on with your life, deal with it. Journalists are famous for being able to compartmentalize.
What this book did, when I was preparing and finishing it in the midst of the current scandal, was to remind me once again that history is long-curve. It's not short-term. You know, these people came back from the war, and we had McCarthyism. That was another chilling scandal, of a different kind, but the psychological and emotional scars still remain for a lot of people.
It was a politically perilous time. We had expended a tremendous amount of effort and lives defending against such repression, but McCarthy was running rampant, falsely calling people communist and demanding investigations of the Defense and State departments.
So these veterans reminded me, either directly or indirectly, that this country has been through a lot and that good people prevail—if they get involved.
Naval History: I count ten Navy and Marine Corps veterans whose stories are in your book. What might set them apart from the rest? Did you see any common thread among them?
Brokaw: I think that the Marines I wrote about are like Marines everywhere. My youngest brother was a Marine, and my closest friend was a Marine killed in Vietnam. And—you can print this—they had bigger balls than anybody I knew. The Navy people were quite heroic as well. I wrote about a man by the name of Hack Hagen, who was a gunnery officer on the cruiser USS Salt Lake City. Then I went back and read what Samuel Eliot Morison had to say about the Salt Lake City in the North Pacific. It was a hell of a fight, and Hack was in the thick of it the entire time. I had never heard him talk about that before.
Naval History: What differences do you see in today's armed services, compared to the time you started in television?
Brokaw: They're much more educated. Volunteer services make a big difference. People really want to be there, and so for the most part you get the best and the brightest. Certainly, the people I met in the Gulf and those I meet when I speak before colleges—I've been to the Army War College at Carlisle and I've been to the Naval War College at Newport on a couple of occasions—are like the rest of society. The educational level and technology skills are much higher.
I guess the one concern I have is that, not so much in the Navy, but maybe more in the Marine Corps and the Army—and there's no way of quantifying this—I worry that it attracts, at the lower levels, the people who want to learn not how to defend their country but how to become skilled in killing techniques for their own purposes. So I think the screening process is pretty important these days when you have a volunteer service.
Naval History: What impact do you hope your book will have?
Brokaw: Well, I was mostly eager to tell the stories because I think these people are due the homage that may come out of this book, that their children and grandchildren and other family members, and the nation for that matter, will stop and reflect for a moment on all that they did.
I also did it for selfish reasons, because I came to care about these people. I think that most of them have a fair amount of pride in the fact that they are in the book.
And I wanted to remind myself and everyone else about what the country can do when it decides that it should take collective action about something, that we can find common ground. It doesn't have to be a war. There are other things that we can do as well. The postwar years were a lesson in that.
It's a combination, really. I'm a journalist, so mostly I wanted to tell the stories that interested me and moved me. And I thought that others would possibly be interested and moved as well. I'm trying to do the right thing by that generation, and I hope that the veterans who read the book, and the people who subscribe to your magazine, will begin to put down on paper or in oral recordings their own experiences and what they learned, not just about the horrors of the time, but the greater lessons that came out of it. That was my real objective.
'It Still Takes My Breath Away'
The anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News looks at the World War II generation and the current insatiable appetite for heroes.
An Interview with Tom Brokaw