Tom Brokaw Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GENERATIONS

  THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES

  ORDINARY PEOPLE

  THOMAS AND EILEEN BRODERICK

  Chicago, Illinois • Insurance Agency Owner • 82nd Airborne

  CHARLES O. VAN GORDER, MD

  Andrews, North Carolina • Surgeon • 326th Medical Company, 101st Airborne

  WESLEY KO

  Falmouth, Massachusetts • Printing Business • 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne

  JAMES AND DOROTHY DOWLING

  Smithtown, New York • Highway Superintendent • Bombardier-Navigator, 8th Air Force

  REV. HARRY REGINALD “REG” HAMMOND

  Ventura, California • Anglican Orthodox Priest • First Lieutenant, U.S. Army

  LLOYD KILMER

  Omaha, Nebraska • County Clerk and Real Estate Executive • B-24 Pilot, 8th Air Force

  GORDON LARSEN

  Orofino, Idaho • Powerhouse Operator • U.S. Marine Corps

  The ROMEO Club—Retired Old Men Eating Out

  JOHN “LEFTY” CAULFIELD

  Cambridge, Massachusetts • School Principal • U.S. Navy

  HOME FRONT

  CHARLES BRISCOE

  Wichita, Kansas • Boeing Engineer • Developed the B-29

  DOROTHY HAENER

  Detroit, Michigan • UAW Organizer

  HEROES

  BOB BUSH

  Raymond, Washington • Lumber and Building Supply Business • U.S. Navy Medical Corpsman • Congressional Medal of Honor Winner

  JOE FOSS

  Scottsdale, Arizona • U.S. Marine Corps Pilot • Congressional Medal of Honor Winner

  LEONARD “BUD” LOMELL

  Toms River, New Jersey • Lawyer • U.S. Army, 2nd Ranger Battalion

  WOMEN IN UNIFORM AND OUT

  COLONEL MARY HALLAREN

  Arlington, Virginia • Colonel, U.S. Army, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps

  GENERAL JEANNE HOLM

  Edgewater, Maryland • General, U.S. Air Force

  THREE WOMEN AND HOW THEY SERVED

  Lawrence, Kansas • Teacher/Real Estate Agent • Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), Navy

  MARGARET RAY RINGENBERG

  Hoagland, Indiana • Women’s Air Force Service Pilot

  (WASPs), 2nd Ferrying Division

  MARY LOUISE ROBERTS WILSON

  Duncanville, Texas • U.S. Army Nurse Corps

  SHAME

  MARTHA SETTLE PUTNEY

  Washington, D.C. • History Professor • Women’s Auxiliary Corps

  JOHNNIE HOLMES

  Chicago, Illinois • Real Estate Investor • 761st Tank Battalion

  LUIS ARMIJO

  Fullerton, California • Schoolteacher • Communication Specialist, 20th Air Force

  NAO TAKASUGI

  Oxnard, California • California State Assemblyman

  NORMAN MINETA

  Edgewater, Maryland • California Congressman

  LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND COMMITMENT

  JOHN AND PEGGY ASSENZIO

  Westbury, New York • Salesman/Teacher • 118th Combat Engineers

  THE DUMBOS

  Yankton, South Dakota

  GAYLORD AND CARRIE LEE NELSON

  Kensington, Maryland • Governor and Senator • Captain, U.S. Army/Lieutenant, U.S. Army Nurse Corps

  JEANETTE GAGNE NORTON

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  DAPHNE CAVIN

  Lebanon, Indiana

  FAMOUS PEOPLE

  GEORGE BUSH

  Houston, Texas • President of the United States • Navy Air Corps

  BEN BRADLEE

  Washington, D.C. • Journalist • Lieutenant, J.G., U.S. Army

  ART BUCHWALD

  Washington, D.C. • Writer • U.S. Marine Corps

  ANDY ROONEY

  New York, New York • Journalist • U.S. Army

  JULIA CHILD

  Pasadena, California • Chef • Office of Strategic Services

  GERTRUDE BELLE “TRUDY” ELION

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina • Chemist • Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1988

  CHESTERFIELD SMITH

  Miami, Florida • Attorney, President of the American Bar Association • U.S. Infantry, 94th Division

  AL NEUHARTH

  Cocoa Beach, Florida • Founder, USA Today • U.S. Infantry, 86th Division

  MAURICE “HANK” GREENBERG

  New York, New York • CEO, American International Group • U.S. Army, Signal Corps, Army Rangers

  THE ARENA

  MARK HATFIELD

  Portland, Oregon • U.S. Senator • U.S. Navy

  BOB DOLE

  Russell, Kansas • U.S. Senator, Presidential Candidate • U.S. Army, 10th Mountain Division

  DANIEL INOUYE

  Honolulu, Hawaii • U.S. Senator • U.S. Army, 442nd Regimental Combat Team

  CASPAR WEINBERGER

  San Francisco, California • Secretary of Defense • U.S. Army

  LLOYD CUTLER

  Washington, D.C. • Counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton • U.S. Army, Combat Engineers

  GEORGE SHULTZ

  Palo Alto, California • Cabinet Member • U.S. Marines

  ARTHUR SCHLESINGER

  New York, New York • Historian • Office of War Information, Office of Strategic Services

  ED GUTHMAN

  Pacific Palisades, California • Journalist, Press Secretary to Robert F. Kennedy • Lieutenant, U.S. Infantry, 85th Division

  THE TWILIGHT OF THEIR LIVES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  For Meredith, of course,

  and her parents,

  Vivian and Merritt Auld,

  and my parents,

  Jean and Anthony “Red” Brokaw

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I first came to fully understand what effect members of the World War II generation had on my life and the world we occupy today, I quickly resolved to tell their stories as a small gesture of personal appreciation. As I did that on television, at dinner parties, and in commencement speeches, it had the effect of a chain letter that no one wanted to disrupt. Everyone seemed to want to share their own stories of parents, other family members, or acquaintances who were charter members of this remarkable generation.

  It rapidly became a kind of extended family, and with the encouragement of a number of friends I began to understand that this was a mother lode of material that deserved the permanence a book would represent. It was a daunting undertaking: because there are so many stories to tell and because the lives of these people are so special I didn’t want to do anything in a book that would not live up to their deeds, heroic and otherwise.

  If I have failed them, it is entirely my fault.

  In the course of gathering this material, interviewing the subjects, and collecting the photographs, I had invaluable assistance from the best and brightest of a new generation, young women and young men in their twenties and thirties who came to care about these subjects as passionately as I did.

  Elizabeth Bowyer, now a law student at the University of Virginia, and Phil Napoli, a newly minted Ph.D. in history from Columbia, teamed up with Julie Huang, my research assistant at NBC News, to work tirelessly and brilliantly to provide me with an unending supply of stories, facts, insights, and ideas. I am more grateful to them than they’ll ever know. I’d also like to thank Tammy Fine, who helped get the project started before moving to Washington and a new assignment on the Today show.

  Through it all, Erin O’Connor, who runs my NBC life with the organizational and mission-oriented skills of a battlefield commander, was
simply peerless in her ability to juggle all of the needs of this book, my NBC News duties, and the considerable logistical demands of both. Metaphorically, if I go into any battle, I want Erin at my side.

  Other friends who initially encouraged me to expand my thoughts on the World War II generation into a book include Stephen Ambrose, Ellen Levine of Good Housekeeping, and William Styron. I was further encouraged in the effort by reading the works of William Manchester, Paul Fussell, Ben Bradlee, Andy Rooney, and Art Buchwald.

  So many ideas came from so many places, but I would be remiss not to single out my pal Mike Barnicle, the best newspaper columnist Boston has ever had; Bob Karolevitz, a fine writer in my hometown who wrote of his generation for the local newspaper, The Yankton Press and Dakotan; the astute observations of my friends Kurt Andersen and Frank Gannon; and my NBC colleagues, who offered to share notes and enthusiasm and tolerated my fits of frustration, distraction, and emotion.

  Special thanks go to Craig Leake and Andrea Malin, my colleagues on the NBC documentary also called The Greatest Generation. They were simultaneously able to get some of these stories on screen while also helping me get them on the pages of this book. I could not be more proud to be associated with both of them on both projects.

  Also, since a book is about more than writing it and publishing it, I am deeply grateful for the counsel and expertise of my business manager, Kenneth Starr. (No, not that Ken Starr. This is a New Yorker with an altogether different line of work.)

  And what can I say of the keen eye, the great heart, and the indomitable spirit of the woman who has been commander in chief on this project, Kate Medina, my editor at Random House? Her enthusiasm for the subject, coolness under fire when the schedule was shattered by events in Washington and elsewhere, and, most of all, her friendship through it all will live in my heart forever. For all that she managed during the last twelve months, Kate deserves her own chapter in this book. And special thanks to the team at Random House who helped produce this book: Meaghan Rady, Benjamin Dreyer, Richard Elman, and Carole Lowenstein.

  As always, I’m grateful for the love, encouragement, and tolerance of the women who have made all the difference in my life: Meredith, my wife; Jean, my mother; Jennifer, Andrea, and Sarah, our daughters.

  Finally, to the men and women whose stories I did not get to, I am genuinely sorry, for I have loved them all. I hope you will tell them in your own way. To those families and friends of other members of the greatest generation, may I suggest you now begin to ask the questions and hear the stories that have been locked in memory for too long.

  Tom Brokaw, Igloo, South Dakota, U.S. Army Ordnance Depot, 1944

  GENERATIONS

  In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. I was well prepared with research on the planning for the invasion—the numbers of men, ships, airplanes, and other weapons involved; the tactical and strategic errors of the Germans; and the names of the Normandy villages that in the midst of battle provided critical support to the invaders. What I was not prepared for was how this experience would affect me emotionally.

  The D-Day fortieth-anniversary project awakened my earliest memories. Between the ages of three and five I lived on an Army base in western South Dakota and spent a good deal of my time outdoors in a tiny helmet, shooting stick guns at imaginary German and Japanese soldiers. My father, Red Brokaw, then in his early thirties, was an all-purpose Mr. Fix-It and operator of snow-plows and construction machinery, part of a crew that kept the base functioning. When he was drafted, the base commander called him back, reasoning he was more valuable in the job he had. When Dad returned home, it was the first time I saw my mother cry. These were powerful images for an impressionable youngster.

  The war effort was all around us. Ammunition was tested on the South Dakota sagebrush prairie before being shipped out to battlefront positions. I seem to remember that one Fourth of July the base commander staged a particularly large firing exercise as a wartime substitute for fireworks. Neighbors always seemed to be going to or coming home from the war. My grandfather Jim Conley followed the war’s progress in Time magazine and on his maps. There was even a stockade of Italian prisoners of war on the edge of the base. They were often free to wander around the base in their distinctive, baggy POW uniforms, chattering happily in Italian, a curious Mediterranean presence in that barren corner of the Great Plains.

  At the same time, my future wife, Meredith Auld, was starting life in Yankton, South Dakota, the Missouri River community that later became the Brokaw family home as well. She saw her father only once during her first five years. He was a front-line doctor with the Army’s 34th Regiment and was in the thick of battle from North Africa all the way through Italy. When he returned home, he established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld’s Army coats with the major’s insignia still attached, I remember thinking, “God, Doc Auld was a big deal in the war.”

  Yet when I arrived in Normandy, those memories had receded, replaced by days of innocence in the fifties, my life as a journalist covering the political turmoil brought on by Vietnam, the social upheaval of the sixties, and Watergate in the seventies. I was much more concerned about the prospects of the Cold War than the lessons of the war of my early years.

  I was simply looking forward to what I thought would be an interesting assignment in a part of France celebrated for its hospitality, its seafood, and its Calvados, the local brandy made from apples.

  Instead, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had landed there and now returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories in the cafés and inns, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me as I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished. These men and women came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over the land like a plague. They had watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day at a time. Then, just as there was a glimmer of economic recovery, war exploded across Europe and Asia. When Pearl Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, this generation was summoned to the parade ground and told to train for war. They left their ranches in Sully County, South Dakota, their jobs on the main street of Americus, Georgia, they gave up their place on the assembly lines in Detroit and in the ranks of Wall Street, they quit school or went from cap and gown directly into uniform.

  They answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.

  They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible, across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria. They fought their way up a necklace of South Pacific islands few had ever heard of before and made them a fixed part of American history—islands with names like Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. They were in the air every day, in skies filled with terror, and they went to sea on hostile waters far removed from the shores of their homeland.

  New branches of the services were formed to get women into uniform, working at tasks that would free more men for combat. Other women went to work in the laboratories and in the factories, developing new medicines, building ships, planes, and tanks, and raising the families that had been left behind.
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  America’s preeminent physicists were engaged in a secret race to build a new bomb before Germany figured out how to harness the atom as a weapon. Without their efforts and sacrifices our world would be a far different place today.

  When the war was over, the men and women who had been involved, in uniform and in civilian capacities, joined in joyous and short-lived celebrations, then immediately began the task of rebuilding their lives and the world they wanted. They were mature beyond their years, tempered by what they had been through, disciplined by their military training and sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.

  They became part of the greatest investment in higher education that any society ever made, a generous tribute from a grateful nation. The GI Bill, providing veterans tuition and spending money for education, was a brilliant and enduring commitment to the nation’s future. Campus classrooms and housing were overflowing with young men in their mid-twenties, many of whom had never expected to get a college education. They left those campuses with degrees and a determination to make up for lost time. They were a new kind of army now, moving onto the landscapes of industry, science, art, public policy, all the fields of American life, bringing to them the same passions and discipline that had served them so well during the war.

  They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy in history. They made breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences. They gave the world new art and literature. They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation. They gave America Medicare.

  They helped rebuild the economies and political institutions of their former enemies, and they stood fast against the totalitarianism of their former allies, the Russians. They were rocked by the social and political upheaval of the sixties. Many of them hated the long hair, the free love, and, especially, what they saw as the desecration of the flag. But they didn’t give up on the new generation.

  They weren’t perfect. They made mistakes. They allowed McCarthyism and racism to go unchallenged for too long. Women of the World War II generation, who had demonstrated so convincingly that they had so much more to offer beyond their traditional work, were the underpinning for the liberation of their gender, even as many of their husbands resisted the idea. When a new war broke out, many of the veterans initially failed to recognize the differences between their war and the one in Vietnam.