Tom Brokaw

Over the years, as I've shared stories of my South Dakota boyhood and family history, friends have often said, "When are you going to write that in a book?", an idea I have successfully resisted until now. I worried that such a book could be seen as simply an exercise in vanity, rather than as what I hoped it would be, an attempt to document the manner in which I was raised in the America of the post-World War II years. I wanted to get beyond an anchorman's inflated sense of self-importance (an oxymoron?) and express my gratitude to the people who raised me, and to the character of life in the American heartland from which I have drawn so much. In any case, this is a book about my life until the age of twenty-two, when I left South Dakota.

One of the perils of embarking on such a book is that the prism through which you have looked back on your own life gives off a certain rosy tint. I have tried to avoid that, but it is also true that I grew up as a congenital optimist at a time when everything seemed possible in America, especially for a white male, and among people accustomed to difficult challenges, hard work, and productive results. I am also aware that I happened to be born in the right place at the right time, and to the right set of parents, who did not limit my dreams of a different kind of life.

If we are to heed the past to prepare for the future, we should listen to these voices of a generation that speaks to us of duty and honor, sacrifice and accomplishment. I hope more of their stories will be preserved and cherished as reminders of all that we owe them and all that we can learn from them.

On those trips back to the Great Plains I always try to imagine the land before it was touched by rails and plows, fences and roads. I can still drive off the pavement of South Dakota highways, find a slight elevation in the prairie flatness, and look to a distant horizon, across untilled grassland, and with no barbed wire or telephone poles or dwellings to break the plane of earth and sky. It is at once majestic and intimidating. More than a century after the first white settlers began to arrive, the old Dakota Territory remains a place where nature rules.

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 their 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.

It is not lost on me that all of my good fortune in life and my career would have been neutralized at the outset if my skin had been a few shades darker. I would not have gotten that first job in Omaha or the second one in Atlanta two and a half years later. There were no people of color working in the newsrooms of either city in the early and mid-1960s. In the network newsrooms, where the battle for civil rights was the defining issue in the early days of Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, racial diversity was at best a notion.

When America first began to seriously confront racial inequalities in the sixties, mobilized by the courage and eloquence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his equally brave and determined followers, I naively believed we would cure the cancerous effects of racism in my lifetime. I now know that is not true. Race remains a central issue in the evolution of our political, economic, and cultural environment. It continues to haunt me personally; I am grateful that my formative years in the mostly white environment of the upper Midwest sharpened my sensibilities about the inequities and complexities of race for the rest of my life.

My favorite reaction to The Greatest Generation, however, is expressed to me in unexpected moments- on a ski slope, in the airport, on a street in New York, in the Pentagon. Men about my age- cops, business executives, military men, construction workers- grab my hand, look me in the eye, and say, "I read your book. Thank you for helping me understand my father." Then they turn and walk away.

Any journalist would be flattered to have his or her work become a catalyst for reflection and examination, but I have no illusion about my personal role in all this. I was merely the reporter, the vehicle for people's stories and the lessons they contained. So many veterans said of their service during the war, "It was an honor," and I feel in turn it was an honor to have written about the people in that book.

When I sent this book to my mother for her comments and corrections, she wrote back to say, "In some parts your ego is showing, bu mostly it's fine." Forty years after I left home for the last time, she still has my number.

So Weinberger reported to MacArthur's headquarters in Brisbane, where he was a very junior officer on the staff of the legendary general. Nonetheless, he saw enough to have a full appreciation of MacArthur's brilliance. "I saw the plans for the invasion of Japan," Weinberger says. "The breadth and scope of MacArthur's brilliance. With very few troops, a couple of understrength divisions, and some Australian militia forces, he accomplished an enormous amount in the Pacific." The young intelligence officer also learned directly from MacArthur about judgment and decision making. Weinberger was on duty one night as American forces were moving on a small island, lightly occupied by the Japanese, to take it for a radio base. Suddenly, there were reports of a Japanese ship and Japanese aircraft in the vicinity. Weinberger thought he'd better take this information directly to MacArthur. "So I walked two blocks to his hotel," Weinberger remembers. "I got through the various security and gave him the message. He came out in his bathrobe, looking just as erect and imposing as he did in full uniform, that magnificent posture, deep voice. He looked the message over carefully and said, 'Well, Lieutenant, what do you think?' I said, 'General, I think it's a coincidence that they're there. They don't seem to have hostile intent. I would go ahead with the landing.' General MacArthur said, 'That's what I think, too. Good night.'" Weinberger walked back through the night to his post "in fear and trembling — to see if I was wrong or not. Fortunately, it worked out."

There it is again, the selfless response so characteristic of members of this generation, now coming into their twilight years. To be sure, they have gotten used to the better life, including the so-called entitlements such as Medicare, Social Security cost-of-living increases, and senior-citizen discounts- but they retain at the core of their being a strong sense of self-reliance and gratitude.

There is a common theme of pride in all that they've accomplished for themselves, their families, and their country, and so little clamor for attention, given all they've done. The women and members of ethnic groups who were the objects of acute discrimination even as they served their country remember the hurt, but they have not allowed it to cripple them, nor have they invoked it as a claim for special treatment now. They're much more likely to talk about the gains that have been achieved rather than the pain they suffered.

They have given the succeeding generations the opportunity to accumulate great economic wealth, political muscle, and the freedom from foreign oppression to make whatever choices they like. For those generations, the challenges are much different, but equally important.

The world in which I work and live is a long way from home, but the early bearings I took as a child on the prairie, surrounded by working people and the communities they established, often in difficult circumstances, have been a steadying and reassuring presence. They are familiar markers and sentinels, useful and reliable even now, forty years after I left the land and the people that launched me.

In 1962, I put my home state of South Dakota in a rearview mirror and drove away. I was uncertain of my final destinatin but determined to get well beyond the slow rhythms of life in the small towns and rural culture of the Great Plains. I thought that the influences of the people, the land, and the time during my first twenty-two years of life were part of the past. But gradually I came to know how much they meant to my future, and so I have returned often as part of a long pilgrimage of renewal.

When I do return, my wardrobe and home address are New York, my job is high-profile, and my bank account is secure, but when I enter a South Dakota cafe or stop for gas, I am just someone who grew up around here, left a while back, and never really answers when he's asked, "When you gonna move back home?" I am caught in that place all too familiar to small-state natives who have moved on to a rewarding life in larger arenas: I don't want to move back, but in a way I never want to leave. I am nourished by every visit.

To the men and women of the greatest generation with gratitude and admiration