The Greatest Generation
Brokaw, Tom
Like a Brokaw Record: The Most Banal Generalizations The Greatest Generation Tom Brokaw Random House /412 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Florence King 0 nce upon a time, the human race was divided...
...Bonardi kept the picture in his hospital room during his final illness, and at his request it was buried with him...
...Today, writes Brokaw in all innocence, Van Corder "laments" bureaucratic control of medicine...
...Charles Van Gorder, who liberated a train full of American POWs and operated on the D-Day wounded for 36 straight hours until he collapsed into an opened abdomen...
...That's all there is to it...
...Brokaw, like television, skims the surface but never digs deeply enough to find the conflicts in his statements...
...A civilian maintenance worker at an army air base in South Dakota, "Red" Brokaw was drafted, but the base commander pulled strings to get him back, reasoning that Red, a mechanical genius who could fix anything, was more valuable where he was...
...It has played and continues to play a role way beyond its size and its population...
...Retaliation by Israel, the destruction of major Arab cities, and millions of Arab casualties, would not deter the Muslim fanatics from pursuing their goal...
...Other networks and newspapers covered the story in a similar fashion...
...The most vivid story in the book is Art Buchwald's sojourn in the Marines, but it owes nothing to Brokaw, who put it together from Buchwald's war memoir, Leaving Home...
...Box 655, Mt...
...everything, except perThe Six-Day War resulted "By its pious insistence on Ills- haps Tel Aviv and its sub-in a complete rout of theurbs...
...I urge my colleagues to go back and read their statements and watch how they said them, with no facts, based on nothing more than a desire to politically destroy a colleague...
...the many myths propagated by the Arabs Why does the world focus on the spuriare that there is such a thing as a "Palestin- ous claims of the "Palestinians”, an artifiian nation" (it's a concept that is not more cially created nationality that never in than 40 years old...
...about the Tibetans...
...N" Gingrich has declined to speak to reporters about the IRS report...
...A survivor of Guadalcanal who returned his Sioux foster son to the reservation after the boy tried to burn down the house: "This is not an unusual occurrence when white families try to raise young Indians...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...Baby Boomers...
...It would be Israeli arms that will be suit of the peace process, by an emphatic "NO", studied in war colleges fomenting and profiting because the very exisfor centuries to come.tence of Israel, in whatfrom the buildup of weapons of Unable to vanquish ever reduced territory, Israel on the battlefield, mass destruction solely destined is an intolerable the Arabs launched a pro- for the destruction of Israel, insult to the Muslim paganda war that hasArabs, for whom the world actively promotes this been very successful,„ must be rubbed and which the Jews second Holocaust...
...a member of the 'Dist Paratroopers who saw action on D-Day...
...His explanation of why he was inspired to write it churns with the urgent superlatives and drumbeat repetitions of a Special Report...
...Martin's...
...VI"?j'1-R...
...W hether from laziness or lack of imagination, Brokaw does not even try to penetrate the stories he tells...
...and so many others...
...And the evening newscasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC—which together had devoted hours of coverage to the question of Gingrich's ethics—did not report the story at all...
...When the news was announced, he issued a brief statement...
...To finance it, he applied for federal Hill-Burton funds and soon found himself spending most of his time filling out forms...
...They made breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences...
...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: VCAFRM L J The American Spectator - April 1999 77...
...They gave the world new art and literature...
...These overwrought hosannas to the greatest generation are the hallmark of the book and crop up on nearly every page...
...The Times ran an equally brief story on page 23...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...cliche-ridden narrative about common men of uncommon valor winning hearts and minds amid the chilling effect of the cancer of racism...
...But there is a very real possibility that, within a time not too long from now, Israel will be destroyed in a Holocaust even more terrible than that which killed six million Jews...
...He retired in 1996, giving Brokaw another crack at the Boomers: Some of the newer Republican senators, with their strict conservative dogmas, may never understand a man like Mark Hatfield, but then they've never shuttled Marines ashore under heavy fire at Iwo Jima or Okinawa...
...Even now, at the age of eighty-two, he inhales life in big, energetic drafts...
...Morris, IL 61054-8084 1-800-524-3469 IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...
...He never actually condemns Boomers outright—that would imply a flaw in their parents—but he never misses a chance to work them into his narrative...
...They were "a generation birthmarked for greatness, a generation of Americans that would take its place in American history with the generations that had converted the North American wilderness into the United States and infused the new nation with self-determination embodied first in the Declaration of Independence and then in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...
...How hundreds of times in the Jewish Bible...
...Its usual path is between a network news human-interest feature and a Sunday-supplement advice column...
...They didn't want to miss out...
...My age group, which preceded the Baby Boomers, retained that attitude, but it did begin to unravel...
...By its pious insistence on "justice for the Palestinians" and pursuit of the "peace process", by fomenting and profiting from the buildup of weapons of mass destruction solely destined for the destruction of Israel, the world actively promotes this second Holocaust...
...Why then does the world insist birth, six Arab armies invaded the newborn that Israel make itself so utterly vulnerastate...
...Having painted himself into this corner, Brokaw is forced to conclude that if his WWII vets are the heroes, there must be a demographic villain someplace, ergo it must be the Baby Boomers...
...At my fortieth high school reunion, second marriages were not unusual and there were a number of third marriages...
...Among sacrifices to be brought...
...Gingrich/York (Continued from page 33) into an ugly situation, and he had to get out," says Eisenach...
...But waiting for a talker to analyze what he writes is futile: Godot will show up first...
...B rokaw's historical method is a study in unconscious irony...
...A spokesman for John Lewis said simply, "The congressman has no comment on the matter...
...War stories, like childbirth stories, eventually start to sound alike, and even Brokaw seems to realize it...
...Like a Brokaw Record: The Most Banal Generalizations The Greatest Generation Tom Brokaw Random House /412 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Florence King 0 nce upon a time, the human race was divided into writers and talkers, a sensible arrangement that, like so many other sensible arrangements, America has completely demolished...
...If that were on a movie sound track we would hear a sonorous gong or an eerie minor chord played on a zither...
...Not a word...
...The defeats Nixon suffered in 1960 and 1962 were far more damaging than Gingrich's abandoning the speaker's chair to atone for Republican midterm election losses," Broder wrote in a column last r 1 MOVING...
...It was pragmatism over principle...
...His passionately stated premise that the WWII generation is the finest America has ever produced begs the question of what has happened to us since and sets up a generational war in the name of the war that "brought us together...
...It cannot be said that Brokaw's prose runs the gamut between fallen archness and irony deficiency because he never strives for either...
...However sincere his admiration may be, we can't help sensing that Brokaw is obsessed with World War II, and we begin to wonder why...
...There are also hints that he is self-conscious about falling between the generational slats...
...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...
...For them, it would be a small price to pay...
...Deep down inside, does the world really want the Jews to live or to disappear...
...Both put a premium on manners, formality, hierarchy, ritual, custom, and all things old...
...On January 18, 1997, the day after Cole presented his report to the Ethics Committee, the Washington Post's front-page banner headline was "Gingrich Actions `Intentional' or 'Reckless': Counsel Concludes That Speaker's Course Funding Was 'Clear Violation' of Tax Laws...
...These being asked to dismember their tiny and other myths are what fuel the insis- country, less than half of the size of tence of the Arabs, of most of the world, San Bernardino County in California...
...Since the Boomers sprang from the loins of the greatest generation that ever lived, it behooves him to explain how the apple came to fall so far from the tree...
...no one who accused the speaker of wrongdoing has publicly expressed any second thoughts after the IRS decision...
...government was shipping their families off to internment camps...
...Why did the greatest generation produce this type...
...From its implacable enemies, if it were to divest very beginning, Israel was surrounded by itself of the Jordan Valley, of the "West mortal enemies,single-mindedly obsessed Bank", of the Gaza Strip, and of the Golan with its destruction...
...Period...
...These were the children of the Depression, with fresh memories of deprivation, and the postwar years were abundant with opportunities to make real money...
...Born in 1940, too young to be a Depression baby, too old to be a Boomer, a member of a gener74 April 1999 • The American Spectator You deserve a factual look at...
...Sam Gibbons (D-Fla...
...Your tax-deductible 63 contribution allows us to publish these important messages...
...Tom Brokaw, NBC's boyish basso profund° of the video prompter, has anchored a book...
...The dual message of the 1930's also eludes him in his story of Dr...
...The scenario, best expressed in a column by the Washington Post's David Broder, is the following: Gingrich is down and seemingly out now, but so was Richard Nixon after his losses in the 196o presidential race and 1962 California governor's race...
...that clamor that the French and Spanish give Jerusalem is Islam's "third holiest city" (it's an independent country to their Basque never once mentioned in the Koran, but minorities...
...For the first time in my life," he told Brokaw, "I danced with a white girl...
...It is fruitless to expect him to tell us because his skill at avoiding insight, which I will come to presently, is another of the book's hallmarks, but we learn enough to guess...
...With Israel dismembered, with five or six Arab states poised to attack with weapons of mass destruction, can anybody really doubt that a second Holocaust, even more terrible than the first one, is just about upon us...
...Is it possible that men who have enjoyed four years of freedom from women, children, and the tedium of domesticity would seek in the working world, which was then largely masculine, a replication of the exclusively masculine world of war...
...Paragraph...
...They gave America Medicare...
...The stories are quite effective in spoken form, but to meet them in print is to know with Socratic certainty that unexamined words are not worth reading...
...As the book goes on he gives the war shorter and shorter shrift, concentrating on the post-war and present-day activities of his veterans, especially those who went into politics, larding his accounts with turgid interjections on the evils of racism and sexism...
...All Victimized by Arab Myths...
...Positing that most members of Gen-WWII were born around 1920, he credits them with blanket self-sufficiency and attributes it to their having come of age during the Depression...
...Brokaw describes his mother bursting into tears of relief at her husband's reprieve, but his early memories of growing up on a stateside army base—"The war effort was all around us" — evoke a picture of a little boy whose father was in the Army, yet wasn't...
...Another database search reveals a few more than ioo references to the IRS report...
...Buchwald agreed, and gave him an autographed picture: "To Pete Bonardi, who made a man out of me...
...They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation...
...How about the Kurds...
...This, Brokaw intones earnestly, "was a reflection of the racial schizophrenia loose in America...
...The identification is total and relentless, a convert's zeal turned on history, replete with comparisons that betray a subconscious fear of falling from grace, as when he venerates the WWII generation as the last to disapprove of divorce...
...We grow rice and worship our ancestors...
...THE NIXf-JN SC EN.:-VR 10 Had the IRS ruled against Gingrich—had it found him guilty of tax fraud—it is safe to say that any future political plans Newt Gingrich might have been cherishing would have been effectively destroyed...
...A walking disaster who dropped a bomb on the tarmac as he was loading it onto a plane, Buchwald was reunited after the war with his Parris Island drill instructor, Pete Bonardi, who told him: "I was sure you'd get killed...
...I may have missed the greatest one, but reading this book makes me a veteran of the War of Brokaw's Ear...
...Typical is his chapter on (former) Rep...
...Life without Israel is almost unimaginable...
...A tribute to the Americans who fought World War II, The Greatest Generation is a collection of the wartime experiences of obscure people, famous people, and some big fish in little ponds, chiefly those dappling Brokaw's native South Dakota and Upper Midwest...
...Here we have a subject in desperate need of some original thought, but Brokaw gives it only droning boilerplate: In the service they had learned the importance of identifying an objective and pursuing it until the mission was accomplished...
...But wait, there's more...
...Israel was founded fifty years ago...
...Some of Brokaw's veterans turned into the classic absentee father of the 1950's, the emotionally distant, workaholic striver and Organization Man whose childrenrarely saw him because they were always in bed when he got home...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...Two or three nuclear weapons would wipe Israel off the map once and for all...
...Remember the more than 10,000 references to the Gingrich ethics fight at its most heated moments...
...If you prefer that your name not be rented, please check here...
...The GI Bill, providing veterans tuition and spending money for education, was a brilliant and enduring commitment to the nation's future....They were a new kind of army now, moving onto the landscapes of industry, science, art, public policy...
...His inviolable subject goes a long way toward saving Private Brokaw from critical reviews, but in truth The Greatest Generation is an overwritten, underanalyzed, frequently obtuse, unintentionally funny, FLORENCE KING'S most recent book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...and much more...
...Accepting hardship and fighting for survival were "just the way they were raised," he writes, ignoring the fact that people who came of age during the Depression also came of age during the New Deal and spent their formative years watching Franklin D. Roosevelt give the store away...
...the concept of "settlements" (with its con- Nobody cares...
...Box 590359 ^ San Francisco, CA FLAME is a 501(c)(3) educational institution...
...On television, Dan Rather began the "CBS Evening News" by telling viewers that "only now is the evidence of Newt Gingrich's ethics violations and tax problems being disclosed in detail...
...1. Please write your new address in the space provided...
...that the Israelis (Jews) recorded history had an identity or are "occupiers" (if they were, who would be country of their own...
...The Washington Post ran a brief story on page five...
...Miraculously, the invading hordes ble...
...Everybody knows tice for the Palestinians' and purArabs, and a victory for, answer...
...I'll never forget you...
...ate" them...
...If any Democrats followed Gingrich's advice, they kept it to themselves...
...This story needs nothing else, but unfortunately Brokaw adds a comment: "I confess that I weep almost every time I read that account, for it so encapsulates the bonds within that generation that last a lifetime...
...But the intensity of their coverage was noticeably absent when the IRS report was released...
...As the heroine of Hamilton Basso's novel of South Carolina, The View from Pompey's Head, put it: "We're like the Japanese...
...Subscriber Service P.O...
...The So-Called "Peace Process" Does it lead down the road to another Holocaust...
...Unless you have just returned from a Tibetan retreat you are already familiar with its contents because Brokaw has been telling stories from it, quoting himself in almost word-for-word approximations of the text, on every talk show that will have him—which is to say, all of them...
...That same day, the New York Times ran eleven stories on the Gingrich matter, four of them on the front page (one inside story was headlined, "Report Describes How Gingrich Used Taxpayers' Money for Partisan Politics...
...The Arab countries (and Iran) are frantically arming themselves with the most dreadful weapons of mass destruction...
...That's not a surprise...
...Yes, it's entirely possible, but it's not exactly the greatest thing to say, so forget it...
...This is the closest he comes to surprising us...
...Describing the writer's instinct, Mau-passant spoke of "looking for the underside of things, even if it means turning over a rock...
...Why is there no the sovereign that they displaced...
...The very day of its Heights...
...Describing the family of Lloyd Kilmer, who survived two German POW camps, he tells us: "Their first son, Lloyd Jr., was born in 1950, and Frank followed four years later...
...This ad has been published and paid for by FL AME Facts and Logic about the Middle East P.O...
...A former South Dakota governor and Medal of Honor winner: "No one would ever accuse Joe Foss of slowing down...
...When an author gets this carried away it's a dead cert that an anti-climax is coming, and Brokaw delivers a beaut: They became part of the greatest investment in higher education that any society ever made, a generous tribute from a grateful nation...
...By contrast, at WWII reunions "almost all the veterans show up with their first wives...
...After the war, Van Corder, wishing to go where he could do the most good, opened a practice in an Appalachian town that had never had its own doctor...
...O Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$34.95) CI Payment enclosed 0 Bill me later CI At various times TAS rents its subscriber lists to other organizations...
...That this just might have something to do with "They gave America Medicare" seems not to occur to him...
...out regardless of the have clearly lost...
...The report has given new momentum to a comeback scenario that has been circulating among Newt-watchers...
...But one might expect a more thoughtful reaction from the other players in the Gingrich affair—the journalists who followed events closely and reported them to the nation...
...Israel is the concerned know well that Israel would be only country in the world whose "right to utterly indefensible, at the mercy of its exist", has always been questioned...
...A liberal Republican whose anti-Vietnam stance landed him on Nixon's enemies list, Hatfield was called soft on Communism by GOP regulars, who virtually shunned him when he later came out against the invasion of Grenada and Desert Storm...
...ation with no name, rank, or serial number who was the wrong age for every war of his time, he seems compelled to atone for his ambivalent chronology by identifying with the first generation he can remember...
...World War II was "the greatest war the world has seen," brought forth "the greatest national mobilization of resources and spirit the country had ever known," was fought by "the greatest generation any society has ever produced," indeed, by "the greatest generation any society could hope to produce...
...He saves his most unabashed liberal bias for the story of former Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, who saw action on Okinawa and served with MacArthur in the occupation of Japan...
...The cultural differences often become too great to be successfully managed, but Gordon still feels disappointed that it came to a bad end...
...But that is no longer a worry, and it may turn out that the IRS clearance was the first step of Gingrich's political recovery...
...At other times he simply hints of something bleak...
...In 1994, writes Brokaw, "When a well-organized class of GOP Baby Boomers took control of the House, determined to deconstruct many of the policies put in place by Democrats," Gibbons was so incensed when they cut off debate on Medicare reforms that he grabbed a Boomer congressman by the necktie and bellowed, "You're a bunch of dictators...
...I had to fight you guys fifty years ago...
...if they're with a new mate, it's because the first one died...
...TAS Address Changes Made Easy...
...Has life in television left him so overscriptedthat he can't figure out how much Southerners and Asians have in common...
...Having no real grasp of either literary style or brilliant conversation, we assume that introspective writers can yak it up on television, and expect the sound-bitten to turn subtle and reflective on paper the moment they are alone with their thoughts...
...Also, they felt they had to make up for lost time...
...Eventually he had so many patients that he decided to build his own hospital...
...As the world knows, it is for one purpose only—namely the destruction of Israel...
...Over and out...
...I consider this a full and complete vindication," he wrote...
...The Magnolia State was the epicenter of discrimination against black citizens, treating them as little more than paid slaves, and yet it made the extra effort for Japanese-American soldiers at the same time the U.S...
...how could they possibly benefit by admitting that Newt Gingrich was right and they were wrong...
...What are the facts...
...Palestinians", or any of the Arabs, would In 1967, the same aggressors launched anoth- be appeased, even if Israel were to yield er attack against Israel...
...Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye worried about racism when he learned that his Japanese-American unit would train at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, but to his surprise, he and his comrades were inundated in Southern hospitality and treated royally...
...Does anybody really believe that the were defeated by the ragtag Israeli army...
...Members of the liberal media are not supposed to criticize the sixties, but if Paris was worth a Mass to the theologically flexible Henri IV, WWII is worth a heresy to the generationally obsessed Brokaw...
...In fact, Gingrich has not suffered nearly as much...
...His father went to war, yet didn't...
...and, yes, also of the United States, that Israel allow itself to be dismembered...
...They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy in history...
...You were a real stbird...
...Nobody wants to "libernotation of illegality...
...It's only the Jews who are Israel — Utterly Vulnerable...
...They've never looked 76 April 1999 • The American Spectator out on the unworldly landscape of nuclear devastation and shared their lunch with a starving Japanese child...
...No doubt he calls this "letting them speak for themselves," but it's more a matter of letting them languish on the page while he rounds them off with one of his inanities or goes on to something else...
...David Bonior's office did not return five calls seeking comment...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
