December 14, 1998

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

'The Greatest Generation': They Made Mistakes, But They Saved the World

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

THE GREATEST GENERATION By Tom Brokaw. Illustrated. 390 pages. Random House. $24.95.

p to a point, you can sympathize with what Tom Brokaw is saying in "The Greatest Generation": that the American men and women who were born around 1920, who came of age in the Great Depression, who fought in World War II and who rebuilt the postwar world and passed the results on to succeeding generations, were extraordinary.

"It is a generation," Brokaw writes, "that, by and large, made no demands of homage from those who followed and prospered economically, politically and culturally because of its sacrifices." He continues, "It is a generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order."

It is a generation, he argues, that makes you think of all those words that Hemingway once said you couldn't use anymore: duty, honor, country, flag, family, church, faith, loyalty, self-sacrifice, purpose, modesty, responsibility.

Sure, the generation made mistakes, Brokaw admits: racism, sex discrimination, anti-communist hysteria, Vietnam.

Or as he puts it, somewhat cloudily: "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 difference between their war and the one in Vietnam."

Still, he concludes, "This is the greatest generation any society has produced."

Brokaw's motives in writing the book seem heartfelt. Walking the beaches in Normandy in 1984 with American veterans while preparing an NBC television documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, he "underwent a life-changing experience," he reports.

"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 though and what they had accomplished." So his book is a tribute to his parents and their friends, as well as to their conduct.

And the stories he tells of them are diverting enough, occasionally even inspiring. Chronicling some 50 lives, he offers examples of the many virtues he is celebrating: people who distinguished themselves both in battle and on the home front, men who built careers despite being disabled by the war, women who overcame the obstacles that were stacked against them, minorities who used adversity to improve their people's lives.

Some are individuals whom Brokaw met while researching D-Day. Others he came to know while growing up in South Dakota. Some are obscure and consider their achievements ordinary. Others were vaulted to fame by their wartime experiences: George Bush, Ben Bradlee, Bob Dole, Caspar Weinberger, among others.

NBC News/ Random House

Tom Brokaw

All stand as a rebuke to certain excesses in the contemporary culture: the desire to place one's own interests first, the habit of regarding the truth as the most recent words to pass one's teeth, the refusal to take responsibility for one's behavior, the tendency to view the births of one's children as random events to which one has little connection, the inclination to measure one's worth by how much money one has. In short, almost everything exemplified these days by many professional athletes, a few talk-show hosts and a certain president of the United States.

But enough is as good as a feast, and what Brokaw offers here is far more than enough. Three stories would suffice to make his point; 50 are a surfeit causing the eyes to glaze over, especially when they repeat one another's point and lack sharp individual focus.

Nor are they particularly well told, rambling as they are and replete with cliches. (The three times the word "seminal" is used, it refers to a woman's work, as in "Betty Friedan's seminal book on the place of modern women, 'The Feminine Mystique."') Such is the predictability of Brokaw's prose that you can read every fourth sentence of it and get the idea.

This is too bad, because the question of why patriotism waxes and wanes during a nation's history is a significant one worth deeper exploration than Brokaw has given it.

Among the many people he talked with, only Andy Rooney challenged his thesis that the generation in question was a superior one, arguing, as Brokaw puts it, that "the character of the current generation is just as strong; it's just that his generation had a Depression, World War II and a Cold War against which to test their character."

The story that "The Greatest Generation" tells too repeatedly makes you suspect that Rooney is right: First came the challenges, then the heroic responses. Equally you suspect that somewhere in the United States today are people facing challenges nearly as daunting as Brokaw's wartime generation did -- challenges of poverty, of prejudice, of cultural displacement -- and facing them as heroically as Brokaw's subjects did.

They may not represent an entire generation, but they will be heard from somewhere down the road. Dare one hope in these feckless times that they may someday be in charge of the show?