Brokaw - The greatest generation speaks: letters and reflections

CONTENTS

To the men and women

of the greatest generation

with gratitude and admiration

THE GREATEST GENERATION SPEAKS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a book crafted by many memories, youthful insights, and the wisdom that come with seasons of despair and triumph. It is, most of all, another tribute to the men and women who rode the treacherous currents and sailed with the fair winds of most of the twentieth century.

It would not have been possible to have produced this book without the tireless and enthusiastic assistance of a remarkable group of young women who are making their own mark of greatness at an early age:

Elizabeth Bowyer, who was indispensable in assisting me with The Greatest Generation, reenlisted for this book, working late nights and odd hours while she held down a summer job at a prestigious New York law firm and studied at Columbia Law School. I am in awe of her ability to do so many tasks so well simultaneously. I am also grateful for her personal passion about this subject.

Catherine Balsam-Schwaber and Tara Pepper of NBC News were invaluable in their roles as readers, researchers, and organizers. No matter how large the stack of new mail or how difficult the research project, they went about their assignments with quiet efficiency and good cheer.

My friend Frank Gannon read the manuscript (as he did the manuscript of The Greatest Generation) and made several helpful suggestions for which I am very grateful.

As she did with The Greatest Generation, Erin OConnor managed to keep my NBC News responsibilities, authors role, and personal life in balance and mostly on schedule. She knows when to say yes and how to say no without offending anyone, including me (although she is wisely trying to get me to say no more often). I am forever in your debt, Erin.

At Random House, my peerless editor and great friend, Kate Medina, cheered me on while gently and thoughtfully steering the book from start to finish. She is a brave and brilliant inspiration.

Her assistant, Meaghan Rady, has an editors eye and the cool of an air-traffic controller. She kept The Greatest Generation Speaks from crash-landing on any number of occasions. She also makes me laugh with her impish sense of humor.

The other members of the Random House team who performed so gracefully under the enormous pressure of looming deadlines are Benjamin Dreyer, Carole Lowenstein, Jolanta Benal, Evan Stone, Maria Massey, Andy Carpenter, and Richard Elman. Thank you all.

The real authors of this book deserve the greatest accolades: the men and women, young and old, who shared their stories, their tears, their gentle criticisms, and their quiet pride in lives lived well. There is no single American voice, but the chorus is thrilling.

The stories that you will read here have been edited and they are reprinted with the permission of the authors. We have attempted to verify all of the factual information, but in some cases these are memories and impressions more than a half-century old.

The selection process was difficult because there were so many letters and memoirs. I am deeply grateful to all who wrote, and I treasure each of the stories. They widen and enrich the family portrait I wanted to present in The GreatestGeneration.

To be sure, there are stories that I missed, and for that I accept full responsibility. I hope they will find audiences in family gatherings, schools, community celebrations, barrooms, and churches. They are too important, too instructive, and too entertaining to be cloistered forever.

INTRODUCTION

I am a child of the American men and women who grew up in the Great Depression, who came of age in World War II and then devoted their adult years to the building of modern Americathe remarkable people I wrote about in The Greatest Generation. As I walked the beaches of Normandy on the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day, I first began to fully realize how they had shaped my life. They were my parents and the parents of my friends, teachers, ministers, physicians, and hometown merchants, the men and women who showed me the way through their own exacting standards of hard work, sacrifice, and personal responsibility. I began to understand how much I owed them.

As a son of working-class parents who were deeply rooted in the harsh economic realities of the Depression and the common challenges of the war, I reflected on the good fortune of my generation and the world we inherited. So many of us were the first in our families to attend college and to find that good jobs were plentiful. My generation and those that followed took their place in a world of broader horizons and expanded rights for women and ethnic minorities.

It wasnt a perfect world, of course.

Far too many of my contemporaries died in Vietnam, but others gave birth to long-overdue political and social change. The excesses of youthful rebellion in the sixties and seventies were painful, even destructive in some aspects, but the foundation of the country and its complex culture withstood the onslaught and remained secure. Moreover, my generation and those that followed were not judged by their excesses alone; indeed, we were given more opportunities in more arenas than our parents had dared to dream.

A few years ago, when I thought about my own good fortune in life and career, somehow it seemed inadequate to thank just my parents, even though their help was irreplaceable and enduring. There were so many people in the fabric of my life as I grew up who influenced meteachers and ministers, coaches and merchants, the mothers and fathers of my friendsall men and women who had experienced great hardship during the Depression and the war years.

When I set out to write The Greatest Generation, I was inspired by these people and by the realization that my world of endless possibilities, despite all its imperfections, was the work of these men and women. By writing their stories, I had finally found a way to say thank you. I wanted that book to be my gift to them, an expression of admiration and gratitude for all they had achieved, and for the legacy they passed on to future generations.