The Time of Our Lives Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Tom Brokaw

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Text permissions and photo credits can be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brokaw, Tom.

  The time of our lives / Tom Brokaw.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64392-0

  1. United States—Social conditions—1980– 2. United States—Politics and

  government—1989– 3. Social problems—United States. 4. National characteristics,

  American. 5. Brokaw, Tom. 6. Television news anchors—United States—Biography.

  7. Television journalists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E839.B69 2011

  973.927—dc23 2011022825

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: The Boland Design Company

  Jacket photograph: Audrey Hall

  v3.1_r1

  PREFACE

  What happened to the America I thought I knew? Have we simply wandered off course, but only temporarily? Or have we allowed ourselves to be so divided that we’re easy prey for hijackers who could steer us onto a path to a crash landing?

  These were not questions I was asking in August 1962, when I was a newlywed and a rookie journalist. America was investing in a new generation of leadership and promise. John F. Kennedy was in the White House. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was on the march in the South. Astronauts with the right stuff pointed their aspirations toward the heavens. Women were stepping out from behind their aprons and questioning their assigned roles. Young artists were giving new voice to music, film, and literature.

  I couldn’t wait to be a part of it all.

  A half century later it is a much different world, and I am a weathered survivor of the rearranged American landscape, a familiar territory for me in my personal and professional life. Wherever I go I am asked, “What has happened to us? Have we lost our way?”

  One often repeated question is the most troubling of all, because it challenges an American belief so fundamental it might as well be carved in stone on a Washington monument: “Will our children and grandchildren have better lives than us?”

  Is that essential part of the American Dream disappearing? There are no simple, reassuring answers, and as a citizen, father, and grandfather, I am not immune to the worries that prompt the question. I believe it is time for an American conversation about legacy and destiny.

  I am not a sociologist or a psychologist. I am a journalist, an observer, and a synthesizer—a man who has explored a lot of the world and been a witness to recent history. I have seen what enlightened leadership can accomplish, whether it is on a family, community, national, or world level. I’ve also been astonished by our capacity to make the same mistakes in one form or another again and again.

  I have made my own share of mistakes, as we all have. They’ve yet to invent a GPS system for the best road to a secure and worthwhile future, but I do have some thoughts, original and inspired by others, for our journey into the heart of a new century. To begin, isn’t it time to reflect on where we have been and how we are going to move forward together, and to do it with more listening and less shouting?

  There is a good deal of debate these days about American exceptionalism—about who believes in it and who may have doubts. I have no doubts. But I also believe that the unique character of America is very much like my definition of patriotism: Love your country but always believe it can be improved.

  That was the unspoken way I was raised by a family of patriots and mentors who represented a broad spectrum of political and cultural notions but shared a common belief in the American Dream and a determination to constantly renew America’s promise. Those indelible lessons from family and friends are still with me, and I hope you will find them familiar and worth renewing as they play out across the chapters that follow.

  What I know for sure is that many feel America is adrift, and the time to build the future is now. We will be judged not simply by the cacophony of those on the left and right with access to a cable system or a blog but rather by the tangible legacy we leave behind.

  This immigrant nation—this destination for those looking for economic opportunity, political freedom, and the realization of dreams—has confronted great trials in the past and prevailed. We can draw on those experiences and find new ways to address the challenges that await us now.

  As I learned in the first decade of this new century, there are daring new ideas being tested in the laboratories of everyday life by bold and unconventional thinkers and doers. You’ll hear their voices and learn their ideas in the pages that follow.

  Academics tell us that centuries and decades are imperfect ways to measure the long curve of history. Perhaps, but for me every decade of my life, beginning with the forties, had a bold punctuation mark, so I had more than a little curiosity about what a new century might mean to us. The defining events of the first sixty years of my life were about to recede. What should we all expect next?

  What follows are the observations, hopes, memories, and suggestions of a child of the twentieth century who had big dreams fulfilled beyond his boyhood fantasies. I am now a man of the twenty-first century, with some observations on how we might realize the great promise of a future that would benefit us all.

  It was a New Year’s Eve unlike any other in my lifetime, and possibly yours.

  On December 31, 1999, I stood on the top-floor terrace of the Renaissance Hotel, high above Times Square in New York City, looking down on the revelers jammed onto every square millimeter of sidewalk, curb, gutter, and street—an estimated two million who were giddily anticipating the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. We were part of a vast global gathering witnessing the turn of the clock from the momentous events of the twentieth century—what had been called the American century—to the unknown events of a new calendar. There was a rolling wave of euphoria about the moment and apprehension about the unknown as the clock struck midnight around the world.

  I was fifty-nine years old, a long way from my heartland roots, immersed in journalism, successful in my marriage and professional life, and a relatively new grandfather. I had reported on most of the major events of the previous four decades, from the triumphs, tragedies, and turmoil of the sixties in America through the resignation of a U.S. president, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of China as a political and economic force, wars in the Middle East and Central America, the birth of twenty-four-hour cable news, the still-evolving and transformative effect of cyberspace, and, at the time, a cheerful celebration of prosperity in ever more layers of American life.

  While I tried to offer our audience some perspective on what this new, twenty-first century might bring, it was, in retrospect, a modest effort.

  My friend and competitor Peter Jennings was across the way, anchoring an impressive and much more ambitious ABC News production on the turn of the century, as he demonstrated one of the marvels of our new age: communication by satellite and via Internet, which allowed him to instantly call up colleagues in China, Australia, Africa, and elsewhere, and bring the global party to his glassy studio in midtown Manhattan.

  The airwaves that night were filled with commentators in every language on every medium, grasping for the phrase that might put two thousand years in perspective and prepare their audience for the next two thousand.

  The biggest concern at the time was Y2K, shorthand for the year 2000. Would all the computers that formed the central ne
rvous system of the world’s financial markets, transportation systems, and communication networks—and were vital to commerce, medicine, law enforcement, and even entertainment—recognize the changeover from years beginning with “19” to “20”?

  They did, and the dancing in the streets continued uninterrupted.

  A few exceptionally prescient flags were raised. Writing in The New York Times, Louis Uchitelle warned about the likely possibility of a big downturn in an economy so dependent on a booming stock market. He cited the “wealth effect,” when a rising market encourages consumers to spend more and borrow more. “A market sell-off,” he wrote, “would throw the effect into reverse. The spenders would pull way back. Companies would, too, in response. Job growth would halt; the unemployment rate would rise and incomes would fall. But debt would not.”

  Eight years later that warning became reality as the sharpest, longest downturn in the American economy since the Great Depression knocked over our house of cards and spread around the world. It was nothing less than a Great Recession, a deeply painful time and a cautionary tale, the lessons of which should be attached to every birth certificate and all new citizenship papers for the next century.

  That 1999 New York Times analysis laid out with commonsense clarity the inherent structural weaknesses of America’s spending and debt binge. It was one of the few exceptions to the otherwise conventional wisdom dispensed during the millennium festivities. But on such an occasion, who noticed?

  I admit that I didn’t. Nor could I fully grasp the personal effect of moving past middle age and becoming a grandparent. My wife, Meredith, is now known as Nan, and I am Grandpa Tom, or sometimes just Tom. Beyond the nomenclature, grandparenthood brought with it wonders and worries about the world my descendants will inherit. Will their future be defined more by constraints than by expansion? No one that New Year’s Eve foresaw the attacks of 9/11 on America or their monumental consequences, including the two longest wars in our history.

  What to make of all this? Of the time gone by, of the America that my parents’ generation and my generation knew, and of America’s present and future—its promise for our children and grandchildren? My ideas about the times my family lived through and the lessons we can take from them were still unformed that night, when the chime of history’s clock signaled that the twenty-first century had begun.

  Another kind of clock is a fixture in our family and in my memory of a time gone by. It’s a grandfather clock with a simple yet elegant face of black Roman numerals against a white background framed by polished fluted brass. The pendulum, a highly polished brass orb the size of a serving platter, is connected to the clockwork by nine alternating brass and lead rods, and it swings with a slow-dance grace.

  The clock was a prominent feature in the lobby of the weathered wooden frame hotel founded by my great-grandfather in Bristol, South Dakota. The Brokaw House, as it was called, catered to the workers and passengers of the booming railroads chugging across the grasslands.

  The clock is part of my earliest memories of family and place. It has made its way through four generations of the Brokaw family, from the Dakota Territory to California, Washington, D.C., and New York City. The clock now presides over the rustic dining room in our century-old ranch house on the edge of the Montana wilderness. When my mother visits we always remark on how it has been more than a timepiece. It is, in its own way, a witness to our lives and to all the changes we have experienced.

  Almost every family has a piece of furniture or photograph or favorite place that represents a connection between the past, the present, and the future. We count on them to bind us together, and we cling to them as familiar icons when the future begins to challenge THE PAST.

  The Brokaw timepiece.

  It has been in our family for a hundred years. (Photo Credit prf.1)

  With my mother at my side I looked at the family clock with a fresh appreciation of all we’d been through and how far we’d come, and I tried to imagine what a new day will bring. When Mother returned to California after her last visit, I looked up at that fixed sight in the farmhouse and thought about our family, about other families, and about America, past, present, future—the time of our lives in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

  The clock has been such a constant that I’d taken it for granted as just another decorative piece in our living quarters, until that moment. Perhaps because of my own acute awareness of time left, of having our grandchildren visit here with their parents and my mother—four generations under one roof—I watched the magisterial sweep of the second hand and the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour passage registered on its stately face with a new appreciation of all that it has witnessed: generations past and present of the Brokaw family, and by extension, the American family.

  The clock has a soft tick tock, tick tock that has measured so much change, large and small.

  Tick, tock. The arrival of electricity and telephones to the remote reaches of rural America, places still untamed no more than 120 years ago.

  Tick, tock. Steel mills and railroads, automobiles and airplanes, oil fields and amber waves of grain, new cities and new industries beginning to fulfill the promise of the twentieth century as the time America came of age.

  Tick, tock. World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the soaring stock market and its sickening crash, the Great Depression and a landscape of despair.

  Tick, tock. The rise of Adolf Hitler and his maniacal followers, the spreading stain across Mother Russia where a revolution in the name of workers’ rights gave way to brutal oppression on a historic scale.

  Tick, tock. Pearl Harbor and the end of American innocence about its fortress invulnerability. World War II, fought on six of the seven continents, in the skies above and the seas below. More than fifty million people perish. The world is introduced to a new form of madness, the Holocaust. The beginning of the nuclear age and the Cold War between one colossus in the east and another in the west.

  Tick, tock. An unparalleled prosperity sweeps across America, giving rise to a middle class that anchors an economy of home ownership, good wages, college education, and the expectation that every generation will enjoy more than the last.

  Tick, tock. The race to space in the heavens and the chaos of generational upheaval on the planet below. Vietnam opens wounds still not entirely healed. America confronts the shameful realties of two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. A president brings the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis before he is forced to resign.

  Tick, tock. The dissolution of the Soviet empire, the rise of a new China, and the enterprise of Pan-Asia. Islamic rage and more wars. Personal computers, the Internet, and a wired and wireless world. Medical miracles and environmental anxieties. An African American president is elected, and a severe economic recession shatters confidence in long-held assumptions on the fundamentals of American security.

  The family clock keeps on ticking, requiring from time to time a winding up or some delicate maintenance. Our children and grandchildren pass by, glancing at its hands to measure the time of an appointment or the hours left in the long daylight of Montana summer days. In their digital world it must seem to be a curiosity or a useful relic, but perhaps one day they, too, will use it as a calibrator of great, wrenching change.

  As a journalist and a fully engaged citizen, I am both excited and more than a little unnerved by the magnitude of the changes we have seen and the prospect of those yet to come. We are swept up in a cosmic storm of new technologies that are at once unifying, liberating, and terrifying. We are living through “the Second Big Bang”: A new universe is being formed in cyberspace and we’re trying to determine which of these new “planets” will support life and which are merely distractions; which will drift too close to the sun and burn up and which will flourish. Will we master this astonishing technology or become hostage to it?

  These are not unique questions. Every new technology frontier generates concerns about wise use an
d societal impact. Steamships and flight; automobiles, electricity, and telephones; antibiotics and X-rays; nuclear power and space travel: All prompted speculation about benefits and penalties.

  But nothing has changed the world as swiftly or as dramatically as the power of cyber technology and its capability of retrieving, sharing, and acting on information about everything from a good cup of coffee to the best treatment for a rare form of cancer, from buying a multibillion-dollar corporation to starting a revolution.

  How, then, should we use this technology to create a national dialogue on what we want for our grandchildren—mine, Claire, Meredith, Vivian, and Charlotte, or yours—and those who may be yet to come? How will those future generations think of us? What personal values and public citizenship commitments will we leave them? How will we respond, now and going forward, to the manifest challenges facing all of us in the brief time we have on this precious planet?

  Long after I am gone, with some gentle care, the Brokaw clock should still be in the family, its rhythmic cadence measuring the passage of new generations and reminding them of what has gone before.

  What do we have to offer those who will be examining our time and accomplishments?

  To begin, a suggestion to remind us of our most fundamental obligation: It is time to reenlist as citizens.

  Tick, tock.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  PART ONE

  Getting the Fundamentals Right

  CHAPTER 1 Generations

  CHAPTER 2 One Nation, Indivisible

  CHAPTER 3 K Through Twelve and the Hazards Along the Way

  CHAPTER 4 Old School Ties and New World Requirements

  CHAPTER 5 Don’t Know Much About Geometry

  CHAPTER 6 Church of Thrift

  CHAPTER 7 Survivors