Tom Brokaw Takes On the Baby Boom

When Tom Brokaw began talking with longtime friends and colleagues about writing a book about Baby Boomers, many of them responded with nervous laughter: “What are you going to call this one? The Worst Generation?”

The reference, of course, is to his best-selling The Greatest Generation, which celebrated all those Americans who came of age during the Great Depression and fought and won the “good war,” World War II, both at home and abroad. Brokaw also encountered more than a few boomers who insisted that they, not their parents, were the greatest generation: “After all, they said, they were the largest, the best educated, and the wealthiest generation in American history. More important, many believed they had stopped a war, changed American politics, and liberated the country from the inhibited—and inhibiting—sensibilities of their parents.”

It says a lot about the boomers that they so often think like that. Best or worst, but nothing in between. The highly esteemed journalist and former anchor for NBC News makes precisely this observation in the preface to his new book, Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today (Random House, 662 pages, $28.95). Part memoir, part history, the book is packed with engaging vignettes of leaders and trendsetters in government, business, politics, and entertainment with whom he crossed paths over the years. Each miniature biography is told from the vantage point of the author, who recalls where he was and what was happening in America when he first met the subject, and who projects the story forward to 2007 to let the reader know what became of these people in the years after the turbulent 1960s.

In pages that brim with admiration for the lions of the civil rights and antipoverty movements, Brokaw reveals himself to be more of a liberal than he was permitted to show in his days as a newsman. John Lewis, Andrew Young, and Julian Bond, leading figures in the black freedom struggle, enjoy special praise, as do Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta, two women who were deeply involved in the efforts of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers of America to secure economic justice for thousands of immigrant field hands. But he also has good things to say about Patrick Buchanan, the pugnacious conservative commentator and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and about Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House.

It’s a strength of Brokaw’s analysis that it departs from views that see the 1970s and 1980s as a repudiation of the 1960s or pit “good” boomers (liberals) against “bad” boomers (conservatives). In chapters that pair Gingrich and Bill Clinton, and Buchanan and Hillary Clinton, Brokaw emphasizes continuity. There is a certain boomer style, he suggests—a restlessness, an ideological flexibility, a sense of personal rights and personal consciousness—that makes the boomers of yesteryear fully recognizable to us in the present day, whatever their political outlook was then or is now.

If the cast of characters is a familiar one (informed readers won’t encounter too many new names), the stories are often surprising. We learn that in late 1969 H. R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s hard-nosed chief of staff, asked Brokaw to join the Nixon White House as press secretary. (Haldeman worked through an intermediary, but it was he who recognized in the handsome and genial reporter a sympathetic and potentially influential voice.) “I wanted to stay a journalist and not go into the political arena,” Brokaw remembers informing the Nixon team. “I didn’t add that my family of FDR and Harry Truman Democrats would never understand.” Years later, Brokaw bumped into Haldeman and was told, “Do you know how many times I’ve watched you on television and thought, ‘I could have put that young man in a position where he could have gotten into a lot of trouble!’”

One of the most fascinating vignettes in the book follows the career of Tom Turnipseed, a top political aide to former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace. A onetime grass-roots organizer for segregated private schools in South Carolina, Turnipseed joined Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign and became an indispensable adviser to the white-backlash candidate. “I liked him,” Turnipseed tells Brokaw. “He was standing up for the South.” If the story ended there, it wouldn’t be very interesting. But Turnipseed experienced a political conversion while on the campaign trail. The “raw hatred” he witnessed at Wallace rallies forced him to reappraise his values. “I knew what racism was because I’d been such a racist,” he explains, “and although I personally didn’t like violence, I knew violence and the threat of violence were what held the whole system in place.” In the years that followed, he remained active in politics and served in the South Carolina state senate but became a staunch advocate of racial and economic liberalism. Though he believes that “poor white people are getting screwed” by the status quo, he now views civil rights not as the cause of that screwing but as the solution. The “‘song of the South’ is still being sung and listened to across the region today,” Brokaw writes, in summation of Turnipseed’s views. “Divide the races by keeping poor whites thinking poor blacks are going to take over.” This year, Turnipseed is backing John Edwards for President.

Though he is too skillful a writer to wear his current political convictions on his sleeve, Brokaw invites his readers to think long and hard about Iraq in his chapters on Vietnam. A particularly telling chapter pairs Sen. Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat who served with distinction in Southeast Asia, and who now opposes the Iraq War, with James Fallows, a journalist and former speechwriter in the Carter administration who wrote a famous essay for Washington Monthly in the 1970s titled “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” Then as now, young working-class Americans like Webb fought America’s wars while middle-class folks like Fallows comfortably opted out of the sacrifices that come with military service. Brokaw notes that both men support affirmative action, but based on class as well as race.

Boom! reminds me why I miss Brokaw’s reassuring presence on television each evening. He tells the story of his own career and its many successes with self-effacing humor and modesty, readily admitting to a winning combination of luck and timing. When he accepted his first major TV job, in Atlanta, anchoring the evening news and freelancing for The Huntley-Brinkley Report, his “starting pay [was] around eleven thousand dollars a year. This was at a time when a well-known preppy clothing company ran ads for their suits that included the line, ‘For the young man who wants to make $10,000 a year before he’s 30.’ I was twenty-five.”

It’s clear from his book that Brokaw was, and is, grateful for the front-row seat he occupied in the turbulent decades after 1960. Written with insight and intelligence, Boom! allows the rest of us to see the show with a bird’s-eye view. That alone is worth the price of admission.