Chapter One
A Loss of Innocence
I felt everyone else wanted to be in our world. We were the last generation to
be cooler than our kids.
-Tom McGuane
There’s a big “what if” over the Sixties…. Who knows what would have
happened if King and Kennedy were alive?
-Tom Hayden
In 1968 America was deeply divided by a war in Southeast Asia and it was
preparing to vote in a presidential election in which the choices were starkly
different. The country was in the midst of a cultural upheaval unlike anything
experienced since the Roaring Twenties. Everyone wondered whether America could
regain its balance.
Forty years later, another war, this one in the Middle East, was deeply dividing
the United States. Republican and Democratic candidates for president were
laying out starkly different scenarios for the country’s future. The place of
America in the world was hotly debated. The popular culture was again an issue.
The eve of 2008 was not exactly the Sixties all over again, but we still have a
lot to learn from that memorable, stimulating, dangerous, and maddening time in
American life forty years ago.
I arrived in Los Angeles to join NBC News in 1966, and by then, Charles
Dickens’s opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities had never seemed so prophetic.
Were these the best or the worst of times? I wish I could say I felt the tremors
of seismic change beginning and spreading out across the political and cultural
landscape, but I was mostly trying to find my way. I was a twenty-six-year-old
pilgrim from the prairie heartland, raised with the sensibilities of a Fifties
working-class family. I was the father of a toddler with another child on the
way.
I fit the prototype of the typical young white male of the time. I had been a
crew-cut apostle of the Boy Scouts, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the
flag, attending Sunday school and church, drinking too much beer in college but
never smoking dope; marijuana in the Fifties and early Sixties was the stuff of
jazz musicians and hoodlums in faraway places.
Before I married the love of my life, my high school classmate Meredith, we had
never spent a night together. In those days, parked cars and curfews were the
defining limits of courtship.
We were married in 1962, when Meredith was twenty-one and I was twenty-two, in a
traditional Episcopal church wedding with a reception at our hometown country
club. We left the next day with all our worldly possessions, including the five
table cigarette lighters we had received as wedding presents, in the backseat of
the no-frills Chevrolet compact car her father had given us as a wedding
present.
We were eager to see a wider world, but only one step at a time. California was
still four years away. Our first stop was Omaha, Nebraska, which then was an
unimaginative and conservative midsize city a half day’s drive down the Missouri
River from our hometown. We could barely afford ninety dollars a month to rent a
furnished apartment, but when we went looking, in the stifling heat of a Great
Plains August, I was dressed in a jacket and tie, and Meredith was wearing part
of her honeymoon trousseau, including a girdle and hose. Five years later, I
rarely wore a tie except on television, and Meredith was freed not only of
girdles but also of hose and brassieres on California weekends.
In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter’s job at an Omaha television station. I
had bargained to get a salary of one hundred dollars a week, because I didn’t
feel I could tell Meredith’s doctor father I was making less. Meredith, who had
a superior college record, couldn’t find any work because, as one personnel
director after another told her, “You’re a young bride. If we hire you, you’ll
just get pregnant before long and want maternity leave.”
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early Sixties seems
both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the
Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not
yet an American war. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was confronting racism in the
South and getting a good deal of exposure on The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC
and The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the two primary network
newscasts, each just fifteen minutes long.
In the fall of 1963, first CBS and then, shortly after, NBC expanded those
signature news broadcasts to a half hour. As a sign of the importance of the
expansion, Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley were granted lengthy exclusive
interviews with President Kennedy. ABC wouldn’t be a player in the news major
leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and
programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports. Kennedy, America’s first
truly telegenic president, was a master of the medium, fully appreciating its
power to reach into the living rooms of America from sea to shining sea.
During our time in Omaha, John F. Kennedy was not a local favorite. The city’s
deeply conservative culture remained immune to Kennedy’s charms and to his
arguments for social changes, such as civil rights and the introduction of
government-subsidized medical care for the elderly. I’m sure many of my
conservative friends at the time thought I was a card short of being a member of
the Communist Party because I regularly championed the need for enforced racial
equality and Medicare.
One of the most popular speakers to come through Omaha in those days was a
familiar figure from my childhood, when kids in small towns on the Great Plains
spent Saturday afternoons in movie theaters watching westerns. Ronald Reagan
looked just like he did on the big screen. He was kind of a local boy who had
made good, starting out as a radio star next door in Iowa and moving on to
Hollywood, before becoming a television fixture as host of General Electric
Theater.
Reagan’s Omaha appearances were part of his arrangement with GE, which allowed
him to be an old-fashioned circuit-riding preacher, warning against the evils of
big government and communism, while praising the virtues of big business and the
free market. He was every inch a star, impeccably dressed and groomed. But those
of us who shared his Midwestern roots were a bit surprised to find that although
he was completely cordial, he was not noticeably warm. That part of his
personality remained an enigma even to his closest friends and advisers
throughout his historically successful political career.
In Omaha the only time he lightened up in my presence was when I noticed he was
wearing contact lenses and I asked him about them. He got genuinely excited as
he described how they were a new soft model, not like the hard ones that could
irritate the eyes. He even wrote down the name of his California optometrist so
Meredith could order a pair for herself. (Later, when he became president, I
often thought, “He’s not only a great politician, he’s a helluva contact lens
salesman.”)
President Kennedy also passed through Omaha, but only for a brief stop at the
Strategic Air Command headquarters there. In those days, SAC was an instantly
recognized acronym because the bombers it comprised-some of which we could see
because they were always in the air ready to respond in case of an attack-were a
central component of America’s Cold War military strategy.
More memorable for me was a visit to SAC by the president’s brother Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy. The younger Kennedy was a striking contrast to the
president, who had been smiling and chatty with the local press and even more
impressive in person than on television. Unlike the president, who was always
meticulously and elegantly dressed, the attorney general was wearing a rumpled
suit, and the collar on his blue button-down shirt was frayed. He was plainly
impatient, and his mood did not improve when I asked for a reaction to Alabama
governor George Wallace’s demand that JFK resign the presidency because of his
stance on school desegregation. Bobby fixed those icy blue eyes on me and said,
as if I were to blame for the governor’s statement, “I have no comment on
anything Governor Wallace has to say.”
I was on duty in the newsroom a few weeks later when the United Press
International wire-service machine began to sound its bulletin bells. I walked
over casually and began to read a series of sentences breaking in staccato
fashion down the page:
three shots were fired at president kennedy’s motorcade in downtown dallas …
flash-kennedy seriously wounded, perhaps fatally by assassin’s bullet …
president john f. kennedy died at approximately 1:00 pm (cst).
John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the
rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment.
In ways we could not have known then, the gunshots in Dealey Plaza triggered a
series of historic changes: the quagmire of Vietnam that led to the fall of
Lyndon Johnson as president; the death of Robert Kennedy in pursuit of the
presidency; and the comeback, presidency, and subsequent disgrace of Richard
Nixon.
On that beautiful late autumn November morning, however, my immediate concern
was to get this story on the air. I rushed the news onto our noon broadcast, and
as I was running back to the newsroom, one of the station’s Kennedy haters said,
“What’s up?”
I responded, “Kennedy’s been shot.”
He said, “It’s about time someone got the son of a bitch.”
Given the gauzy shades of popular memory, the invocations of Camelot and JFK as
our nation’s prince, it may be surprising to younger Americans to know that
President Kennedy was not universally beloved.
Now Kennedy was gone, and this man was glad. I lunged toward him, but another
coworker pulled me away.
The rest of the day is mostly a blur except for one riveting memory. As I was
speeding out toward SAC headquarters to see what restrictions they were putting
on the base, I began to talk aloud to myself. “This doesn’t happen in America,”
I said, still a child of the innocence of the Fifties. And then I distinctly
remember thinking, “This will change us. I don’t know how, but this will change
us.” And of course it did.
It was November 22, 1963, and it was, in effect, the beginning of what we now
call the Sixties. Kennedy’s death was stunning not just because he was
president. He was such a young president, and his election just three years
before had kindled the dreams and aspirations of the young generation he
embodied and inspired. His death seemed to rob us of all that was youthful and
elegant, cool and smart, hopeful and idealistic. Who now would stir our
generation by suggesting we ask “not what your country can do for you, but what
you can do for your country”?
No political pundit or opposition strategist could have anticipated how JFK’s
death would be the beginning of the unraveling of the Democratic coalition that
had been forged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 and had formed the party’s
electoral base ever since. When Lyndon Johnson emerged from Air Force One as the
new president after the flight back from Dallas and stood somberly in the glare
of the television lights at Andrews Air Force Base, he was already a familiar
figure to most Americans. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to JFK
than LBJ, the large, ambitious Texan with the thick drawl and the great thirst
for whiskey, women, and power. Now he seemed humbled and earnest as he looked
into the cameras and said, “I ask for your help-and God’s.”
With LBJ we were back to business as usual with the old backroom pols, the men
who wore hats and had spreading waistlines. To be sure, there was a lot about
Kennedy we had not known then or had ignored- such as his chronic illnesses, his
reckless ways with women, his Cold Warrior inclinations toward Vietnam, and his
temporizing approach to the civil rights struggle.
In June 2007, when the Central Intelligence Agency opened many of its files to
the public-those known as “the family jewels”-there were pages devoted to JFK’s
enthusiastic authorization of a CIA surveillance campaign against a well-known
New York Times military affairs reporter who had published stories involving
classified material. When Richard Nixon became president and authorized a
similar leak-plugging operation, it was seen as the first step toward Watergate.
But in the wake of President Kennedy’s violent death, America was in a state of
shock, and the flaws or failings that were known to us only seemed to make him
more human and his loss more deeply felt.
He became the prince of Camelot who left behind a widow whose beauty could not
be compromised by grief, a woman not yet forty years old who would remain a part
of our lives, in admiration and controversy, until she died in the closing days
of the century. And their children, Caroline and John, Jr., now belonged to the
nation as surely as the offspring of royalty.
Slowly, the rest of us went back to our ordinary lives, trying to absorb and
understand the deep wounds we had sustained and the unimaginable loss we had
suffered-and blissfully unaware of all the tragedy and tumult that lay not far
ahead. My wife, Meredith, finally found a job teaching English at Central High
School in Omaha. We rented a better apartment; this one even had access to a
swimming pool, which seemed to us the height of luxury. We watched The Dick Van
Dyke Show and Gunsmoke on our new black-and-white television. We bought our
first set of furniture-sofa and matching chair, coffee table, dining room table
and chairs, and two lamps-for four hundred dollars.
In the summer of 1964, we drove east to visit Washington, D.C., and New York
City on vacation, a couple of Midwesterners curious about life over the horizon
from the Great Plains. In Washington, as luck would have it, we were in the
press gallery when the House passed the historic Civil Rights Act, outlawing
discrimination in jobs and public accommodations. Reporters were shouting into
telephones and banging away at typewriters. We saw Roger Mudd, the CBS news
correspondent who had been tracking the legislation nightly on the CBS Evening
News, and Bob Abernethy of NBC News on the phone filing a radio report. I felt
like a kid from the sticks who somehow managed to wander into Yankee Stadium
while the World Series was under way.
We were thrilled, but a friend who worked for the congressman from Omaha was
not; his boss had voted against the act. Another conservative friend from the
Midwest insisted, “You can’t legislate morality.”
Huh? “What about murder?” I asked. “It’s immoral to kill someone. If I’m not
mistaken, we’ve passed laws to deal with that.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Boom!
by Tom Brokaw
Copyright © 2007 by Tom Brokaw.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2007
Tom Brokaw
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6457-1
