The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  In the spring of 2010, I was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Iowa, an institution that was the backdrop for my own painful experience with failure a half century earlier.

  I’ve commented in other places about arriving at Iowa in the fall of 1958 with a whiz-kid reputation and the hopes of my hardworking parents tucked into a new Samsonite suitcase, a high school graduation gift to take me into the wider world.

  It was the beginning of a two-year spiral down into a sybaritic maze of too much alcohol, late nights, too many girls, too few classes, parties first and responsibilities last.

  As I told the class of 2010 at Iowa, “Woody Allen says ninety percent of life is showing up; I was in the other ten percent.”

  Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga and umpire Jim Joyce, the night after Joyce blew a call and cost Galarraga a perfect game; their emotional reunion was a lesson that went well beyond a baseball game. (Photo Credit 16.1)

  I also told the Iowa graduates that my freshman year and the year that followed is a metaphorical ankle bracelet I’ve worn every year since—that my early failure was a kind of house arrest, a reminder of how quickly and how deeply you can sink if you fail to honestly face up to mistakes and act on them swiftly.

  These are lessons to be constantly renewed for governments, institutions, faiths, and common interest groups.

  THE PAST

  Robert McNamara waited more than a quarter century before he acknowledged his mistakes in the prosecution of the Vietnam War, first in a book and then in Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary, Fog of War. An aged McNamara answered Morris’s offscreen questions and tried to explain the fog of war, the timeworn expression that should—but too seldom does not—remind us that war is not a mathematical or chemical exercise with a fixed outcome.

  It is a deadly mixture of anger, hubris, passion, culture, justification and vengeance, ignorance and delusion, patriotism and courage. McNamara’s recollection of the Cuban missile crisis, when President Kennedy and his civilian advisers chose a diplomatic chessboard move over military options in order to avoid a nuclear showdown, is at once instructive and infuriating.

  If McNamara got that, how could he be such an active agent in prosecuting the Vietnam War and staying silent when his doubts began to harden? In lectures, the Morris documentary, and his own book and writings, McNamara spent his last years trying to explain his actions, but he left behind more questions than answers, more anger than resolution. Nonetheless, he did at least leave cautionary lessons on war and the exercise of power:

  “If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.”

  “In the case of Vietnam we didn’t know them well enough to empathize. And there was a total misunderstanding as a result. We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as: a civil war.”

  At the end of his life McNamara went to Vietnam as part of his odyssey of self-examination. The former foreign minister of North Vietnam, McNamara recalled, said to him, “Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you’d know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. Don’t you know we’ve been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years? We were fighting for our independence and we would fight to the last man.”

  I knew Robert McNamara slightly during my Washington years, when he had moved on to the World Bank. By then he was a forlorn figure, sitting with his handsome wife, Margie, at Kennedy Center concerts or standing off to the side at big cocktail receptions.

  There was none of the bravura of the days of the New Frontier.

  When Margie, a woman widely admired in the capital, died, Robert began a giddy affair with a younger woman, raising other questions about his judgment. He was like a character in an Ibsen play, wandering around history’s landscape in search of himself as others looked on in bewilderment or still-seething anger.

  The last time I saw him was on a New York to Washington, D.C., shuttle flight. By chance we were going through security simultaneously and I said, “Bob, I thought Fog of War was very important, a real contribution.” He was wearing a long tan raincoat, and his signature slicked-back hair was down to a few strands. He looked at me briefly, nodded, and murmured a thank-you as he hurried on to the gate, no one else seeming to notice this onetime intellectual prodigy who was president of the Ford Motor Company by the time he was forty-six, a star in JFK’s Camelot, and a mastermind of a national tragedy.

  However sad and poignant his life had become, history will not forgive him for the terrible mistakes he made, for his failure to speak out publicly when he began to realize the execution and the expectation for the war in Vietnam were colossally wrong.

  Will Donald Rumsfeld, a principal architect of the war in Iraq, ever have a Robert McNamara epiphany, when he publicly acknowledges his exaggerated sense of certainty that he knew best how to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein?

  Credit must go to McNamara for parting words that are a worthy legacy for future decision makers in a world where a mighty military arsenal remains an important instrument for defending our national interests when it is used in concert with diplomatic and cultural offensives.

  Otherwise, as we have learned, it is an agent of provocation, capable of hardening anti-American attitudes while attempting to defeat or diminish real and perceived threats to our national security. No one understands that better than modern military commanders, most of whom these days have advanced degrees in political science or history or have spent a year as White House fellows or as fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations.

  They’re the front line in the fog of war and pay the heaviest price in the burden of responsibility for loss of life or debilitating wounds among their troops. They take the blame for policy failures that should be traced to civilian armchair generals, militant think tank theorists, and sunshine patriots.

  In Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s longest wars ever, our best and brightest Army generals were tasked with what proved to be a mission almost impossible: eliminate a terrorist sanctuary, create democratic rule, engender pluralism and a flourishing economy, and provide internal security in two Islamic nations where tribal authority and division is an essential part of the national DNA.

  To be sure, some of the military commanders in the combat theaters believed too deeply in their “can-do” training, seeing progress where it was temporary at best. To my eye, very often their perceptions were distorted by the lens of Western conditioning trained on Middle Eastern realities. In the West, we’re accustomed to a beginning, middle, and end of conversations, problems, and disputes. In the Middle East, there is a beginning, maybe a middle, and rarely an end.

  The best of the commanders understood that, one telling me as late as 2010, “We’re just now beginning to understand the Afghan culture.” Consequently, the roll call of generals who were retired without glory because they failed to complete that improbable mission is a little-remarked-upon consequence of our involvement. John Abizaid, Rick Sanchez, Dave McKernan, Stanley McChrystal: All are three- or four-star generals whose careers collided with the flawed strategies of their civilian bosses.

  Before he initiated his successful surge against continuing terror in Iraq, General David Petraeus spent a year at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, studying the problem of how to reverse the steady erosion of American power in Iraq and use the anger of Shiite chiefs against Sunni fighters.

  Astonishingly, he was not given that assignment until we were four years into the war.

  John Abizaid, a longtime student of the Middle East and fluent in Arabic, is known to be frustrated by the absence of a new, overarching U.S. strategy for the region. He has personal as well as professional reasons for his unhappiness. His son-in-law, an Army major, has been fighting there for ten years, and he’s been wounded twice. A decade later, Abizaid believes, we have more enemies in the region than friends.

  The absence of a national discussion of the policies, execution,
consequences, and future of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the midterm elections of 2010 was unsettling. In campaigns for seats in the Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, next to nothing was said about the wars that by that time had killed almost five thousand Americans, wounded more than thirty thousand others, and cost more than a trillion dollars.

  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan define the image of the United States in the Middle East and the subcontinent of Asia and will continue to do so for generations to come. They deserved a prominent place in the passionate debates about the economy, taxes, public debt, and the role of the federal government in our lives.

  Yet national security as an issue finished well behind heated arguments about same-sex marriage, the legalization of marijuana, and the real and overblown indiscretions of some candidates. That was a shameful commentary on the substance and nature of modern politics and campaigns.

  THE PROMISE

  We have another opportunity to raise the level of public discourse: The 2012 presidential election season promises to be one of the most spirited ideological clashes of the last fifty years, powered by the Tea Party’s tightly focused message of a greatly reduced federal government influence twinned with the hunger of traditional Republicans to recapture the White House. In defending his four-year stewardship, the president will have the considerable power of the White House bully pulpit to make his case for finishing an incomplete agenda without abandoning federalism as indispensible to the challenge. Citizens demanding a meaningful debate, or even a third party, could have a welcome role, especially if they speak up for a complete airing of military and diplomatic plans.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Grandparent Lode

  FACT: According to a study by Grandparents.com, by 2015, 59 percent of grandparents will be baby boomers, and they’re already changing the model of grandparenthood.

  As history’s most prosperous generation they’re inclined to indulge their grandchildren, spending $52 billion a year on goods and services for grandkids. They have also established a new naming pattern for their role.

  Contemporary grandchildren no longer see Grandma as the Betty Crocker type in the kitchen. Harvard, MIT, and Brown have grandmother-eligible women as presidents. We’re on our third female secretary of state. There are now three women on the U.S. Supreme Court.

  The most influential European leader during the economic downturn was Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany. Brazil has elected its first woman as president, Dilma Rousseff.

  In my family, we are dominated by the female sex. I have three daughters and four granddaughters. Male dominance, once taken for granted, is now in play and I fully expect that the twenty-first century will be the first in which women approach full parity.

  QUESTION: How do contemporary grandparents fit into this new reality and keep pace with the evolution of opportunity and expectation? Should there be a new model of grandparenting?

  THE PAST

  As I think back on my parents and grandparents, somehow they were always more mature than their ages and always active citizens. Or perhaps it was just expected of them, a condition of their time in the Great Depression and World War II. They went from their teenage wardrobes to suits and ties, sensible shoes, and grown-up dresses. Those who didn’t conform were likely to be thought of as not entirely trustworthy, inspiring comments such as “Oh, you know, Bill just doesn’t want to grow up.”

  Until John F. Kennedy came along, men in their twenties wore hats better suited to men in their forties. Jackie Kennedy, just thirty-one when her husband was elected, was a welcome change for young women who had come of age with their mothers looking more like Mamie Eisenhower than any of the Kennedy women.

  It went well beyond wardrobes. The Organization Man was expected to get in line and wait his turn. Women were expected to marry early, have babies early, and go gray in their late forties. Early marriage was part of the compact of a purposeful life.

  Me with grandparents Ethel and Jim Conley, Aunt Marcia, and my mother, Jean Brokaw, in 1941 (Photo Credit 17.1)

  THE PRESENT

  Fast-forward to the generational conceit of my age group: We think we’ll be forever young, with the latest running shoes, faded denims, leather jackets, and more toys than our kids.

  We can spend now and catch up later, for as Fats Domino sang, “Let the Good Times Roll.”

  Together Meredith and I intellectually understood that when our daughters married they’d have children and we’d become grandparents, but I don’t think we saw ourselves as “Grandma and Grandpa,” an old, white-haired couple in tweeds wearing only sensible shoes.

  When we became grandparents we were determined, I think, to carry that attitude forward, to give that role fresh meaning, however surprised we may have been by the fact of grandparenthood itself. We felt we were still young and on the come line of life, and that would connect us to our grandchildren in a new manner.

  First, there was the naming thing. What would be we called? Meredith immediately said she wanted to be called Nan, the endearing name of her beloved maternal grandmother. I didn’t have a family reference. My grandparents were, in fact, Grandma and Grandpa.

  I remember the reaction of Robert Redford when he became a grandfather to two energetic munchkins. We were walking out of a restaurant after a day of skiing. Bob was every inch the Sundance Kid, lean and athletic in boots, blue jeans, and a buckskin jacket. Bystanders gave him the long, admiring stares reserved only for the biggest stars.

  Suddenly his red-haired toddler grandkids came running after him, calling out, “Grandpa Bob, Grandpa Bob!” Bob turned and scooped them up, laughing, realizing he’d been busted. Loud enough for his fans to hear, he said, “Not in public, kids. Not in public.”

  Informally I surveyed friends and others who were also entering this new, welcome, and yet unaccustomed place in life. A dashing airline pilot I met at a Jackson Hole cocktail party said with a self-aggrandizing air, “I’ve told my grandson to call me Sport.”

  I preferred the mischievous response of my friend Peter Osnos, the book publisher. “I have them call me Elvis,” he said. “What do they know?”

  A longtime friend in South Dakota, Larry Piersol, a federal judge, was plainly pleased when his grandchild spotted him wearing a large hat at the family farm and immediately began calling him Cowboy. A New York neighbor, a distinguished psychiatrist, is a Belgian native, so he came up with Le Grand Papa.

  Another new grandfather about my age had recently married a younger woman and insisted that his grandson call him by his first name, Ben. And so he did, and the two of them became very close. When Ben visited his grandson’s preschool on grandparents’ day the child looked up and said, “Ben! What are you doing here?” Ben replied, “It’s grandparents’ day. I’m your grandfather.” The child’s eyes widened and he said, “You are?”

  THE PROMISE

  Some of what I’ve already discovered is that my generation has to race to keep up with the world of our grandchildren. By the time they’re six or seven, they’re into the dazzling world of information technology, sitting at computer terminals with their own log-ins and favorite sites, playing video games that are much more engaging than the Dick and Jane books of our youth.

  The small screen, I’ve discovered, can be a mutually rewarding meeting place for grandparents and their grandchildren. Email, Skype, and Facebook are happy new forms of communication across generational lines. The latest arresting image on YouTube or a virtual tour of a location in the news may not completely replace “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go,” but they can be an agreeable conduit between generations widely separated by age. That electronic connection is still very much a work in progress, but it has infinite possibilities.

  This new generation is also growing up on a palette in which the colors are much more vivid than they were for most of us my age. Their world reflects the steady rise in ethnic integration, from classrooms to after-school activities, t
elevision shows and commercials, movies and public life. Well before Barack Obama became the first African American president, there were black, Latino, and Asian school administrators, mayors, and members of Congress and city councils.

  When NBC broadcast a retrospective of my journalism career it included coverage of the civil rights movement out of Atlanta in the sixties. Our San Francisco granddaughters, Claire and Meredith, at the time eight and six years old, were stunned and upset by the images of black people being sprayed with fire hoses and beaten as they marched for their rights. “What was that all about?” they demanded to know of their mother. It was entirely alien to their experience.

  They had a similar reaction when in the winter of 2010 I did a lengthy report during the Vancouver Olympics on Gander, Newfoundland, which became a safe port in the storm of uncertainty during the 9/11 attacks. Thirty-seven transatlantic flights and their seven thousand passengers headed to the United States were ordered to land at Gander as part of the airspace shutdown.

  The generous and matter-of-fact manner in which the Gander community took in all those strangers on such short notice—fed them, comforted them, and provided beds and even clothing, all at no cost—was so inspiring I suggested to my son-in-law Allen and daughter Jennifer that they watch with Claire and Meredith, by then thirteen and eleven years old.

  It didn’t occur to me or to their parents that the 9/11 attacks, which are so vivid for us, occurred when they were just four and two. As a result they had no clear memory of that awful time and so they rushed to Google to learn more.

  For my part, I realized that America has been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq during most of their lives, but because they have no family members or friends involved, that, too, is not part of their active consciousness. The tedious security procedures at airports are for them routine; they’ve never known any other way to board a plane.