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Journalist compares the Iraq War to the Vietnam War. (1:09)
 

Tavis: Today, of course, Veterans Day, I'm pleased and honored to have Tom Brokaw on this program.

His award-winning career with "NBC News" spanned, of course, more than 35 years and included duties hosting "The Today Show" and, of course, the "NBC Nightly News." Along the way, he earned a slew of Emmy awards and two Peabodies. But he's also the bestselling author of "The Greatest Generation." His new book is a look at the turbulent sixties, called - I love the title - "Boom! Voices of the Sixties, Personal Reflections on the Sixties and Today," and on December 9th - no grass growing retired man's feet. (Laughter)

On December 9th, you can catch his new History Channel special called "1968 with Tom Brokaw." So, here now a sneak preview of "1968 with Tom Brokaw."

[Clip]

Tavis: Mr. Brokaw, good to have you on the program.

Brokaw: Good, Tavis, good to be with you.

Tavis: Good to see you. I was teasing you a moment ago. No grass under your feet. Man, you're supposed to be retired, dude.

Brokaw: Well, the idea was to shift down, not shift up. I seem to have into a higher gear. Never was going to retire; I just wanted to find more pace in my life and not have to be somewhere every night at 6:30 wherever I happened to be in the world. But it's hard to switch it off. That's what happened to me. I'm now determined to dial down after the book is out and a lot of things are kind of under control now.

Tavis: Before we move to the book and special, what makes it, in fact, so hard to switch off?

Brokaw: Well, I think when you've spent 45 years in the hunt all day, every day, covering the news there is a kind of conditioning. And it was the DNA of my life before I got into journalism; that's why I got into it. I have this enormous curiosity, I love to go places, and I had the opportunity to go there. So it's hard for me to say no.

But I really do have to bite down a little bit and be a little more contemplative than I have been in the past.

Tavis: I grew up in Indiana. I was just talking to some kids at a school the other day, and in a Q&A, somebody asked me how I ended up doing what I'm doing as a kid that grew up in Indiana in a cornfield. Literally, I'm in the classroom in junior high and high school where they're looking out at these cornfields. And for me, it was just trying to imagine what the world was like beyond this cornfield in Indiana.

Brokaw: That's exactly what motivated me.

Tavis: No, no. (Laughs)

Brokaw: It is, it is.

Tavis: You were in South Dakota, yeah.

Brokaw: But we had cornfields there, and we had the Great Prairie and the big, broad horizon. I lived in these wonderful small towns, but I was always wondering what's over the horizon. For me, a big adventure in those days would be a trip to Minneapolis or St. Paul, and I wanted to go beyond that and see bright lights, big city.

I had those opportunities to a far greater degree than I ever could have anticipated then. Now I find, when I go back to the prairie or go back to Montana, where I spend a lot of time, I'm kind of at peace. I love being able to return to my roots.

Tavis: From South Dakota, to see the world you took route of news. Why that route? Was that the only thing you ever wanted to do?

Brokaw: I think it probably was. Most of my friends who knew me growing up always thought that I would end up in journalism of some fashion. I lived in such small towns we didn't have role models. But I got to the big town of Yankton, South Dakota. They had a daily newspaper and two radio stations, and network news was beginning to hit its stride.

And I would watch faithfully Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and all those great correspondents - Chancellor, Vanocur, Frank McGee, and so on, and think, I can get paid for me to see the world. And then I'd realize sometimes I over-wished. I'd be on an overnight flight to Pakistan or to Baghdad or someplace like that and say, “What was I thinking?”

Tavis: I want to go to the book. There's so much to talk to you about, and I'm glad I've got the balance of the show to do just that. I want to start our conversation about the book, Tom, in an unlikely place, perhaps. I want to start our conversation at the end of the book. At the end of the book, you really get into the relevance of this period to today.

And for anybody watching right now who happened not to be around during this period, we get some so bombarded with this conversation all the time about this particular period of history. Why?

Brokaw: Well, it turned American convention on its head. We came out of World War II as a pretty homogenous country, in a lot of ways, but with a lot of issues that were off the radar screen that should have been on the radar screen. Suddenly, they were in play. Race was the primary example. That's where I began. The sixties start with the civil rights movement and the moral courage of Dr. King, and in his own quiet, eloquent way forcing this country to come to grips with the hypocrisy of saying all men are created equal and having legalized segregation, legalized bigotry. Not just de facto or cultural segregation. And from that, of course, we went to Vietnam.

That divided this country. The largest, best-educated generation in the history of mankind, the Boomers, began to push back against everything that their parents stood for - parental authority, institutions, the idea that you would raise your hand and go off to war if your country asked you to. They began to question the country.

So it was a tumultuous time, and I think it's a great tribute to the resilience of this country that by and large, we survived it as well as we did and were able to pretty much pick out what was worth keeping and then leave behind the other parts.

Tavis: How does a country - you wrote the book, obviously - how does a country navigate these dual tracks, both tricky, for lack of a better word, at the same time? The book is really about Vietnam and race, no question about that. Both of those very, very tricky, to your point. Very tricky, very thorny issues, but a country having to wrestle with both of those tricky, thorny issues at the same time, and both larger than life, and to your point, somehow we got through it. But what do you make of how we did that, how we navigated that?

Brokaw: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the strength of the rule of law in this country, and the tradition that we have. That we had a foundation for dealing with it, and we had good people who hadn't thought about some of those issues carefully enough, and when they did think about them they were able to change their own minds or move in the right direction.

I often say that this immigrant nation is more than the sum of its parts, and that's the great strength of us. And it comes through during the 1960's. There was a lot of bitterness and there was a lot of division, and there's a lot of residual hostility from that time. But I always believed that it started with the rule of law. If you go to the South during the civil rights movement, for example, and you have the federal marshals or the 101st Airborne flying into - or the 82nd Airborne flying into Jackson, Mississippi, or to Oxford, Mississippi to enforce James Meredith going to the school in his own home state.

Those were the strengths that this country relied on for all the other divisions that existed.

Tavis: How does a White guy from South Dakota who's coming into his own during this period, who I suspect never had to deal with these kinds of race issues, certainly, in South Dakota, how do you navigate your own life through that kind of period?

Brokaw: Well, it was interesting, because in fact, I grew up in a pretty racist state. We had a large Native American population that at that time was not treated well. A lot of them - and this sounds like the cliché of the time, but in fact they were my friends because I was interested in the outdoors, interested in their culture, but I didn't think of race in the same way when I looked at the Indians.

But as a young White man with my nose pressed up against the glass of the wider world, I was fascinated by race when it came to what we called in those days Negros, and I think in part because my parents and my grandparents came form very humble beginnings and they were working class people. And they championed the oppressed, in a way.

My dad, I think a lot of people didn't expect that he would amount to much. He put together a great life for himself. He was not a sports fan, but his greatest heroes were Joe Lewis and Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson, because of their courage and what they stood for. He didn't know what their records were. He just went - when I was in the second grade and I thought Joe Lewis was getting beat by Jersey Joe Wolcott, I wept in my bedroom.

He was that big a hero in our family, in this little, tiny town in a remote part of South Dakota. And I've said since then I come from these modest circumstances, I didn't do particularly well at the beginning of college, and yet I had all those opportunities available to me when I decided to set out on this career.

If at that time my skin has been one shade darker, none of that would have happened. And that's always clear to me.

Tavis: Wow. Since you said that, I got to go back and get it right quick, particularly given the path that we have seen and read that you have navigated to uber-success. When you said your father, some thought wouldn't amount to anything, what did you mean by that?

Brokaw: Well, he was raised in a tough little town in northern South Dakota; he was the last of nine children. And when he was 10 years old he was effectively turned out into the streets. Everybody was just trying to - busy making a living. He was a tough kid. Farm kids would come to town and have to fight their way through my dad.

And he didn't have any education to speak of, but he was a remarkable man because he had these great mechanical skills. And it turns out that he had a vision for his life that none of us knew about until the year before he died. He sat down with a tape recorder, Tavis, and recorded his innermost thoughts for 24 hours, one after another, about how hard life was for him, and what people thought about him.

He described a story about going out to visit a farm with some friends of his when he was 8 or 9 years old to play with them. A terrible storm blew up. The farm family called the other children's' parents, and then they said to my dad, "Oh, we're not going to call anybody because nobody cares about where you are." And he lived with that, but he made himself into this very productive member of society.

One of the most popular figures in any town than that we ever lived in. And he was red haired, kind of larger than life, and I was very proud of him. And he kind of made me what I am today, I think, in a lot of ways, along with my mother.

Tavis: Wow. Vietnam - I want to go back to the book for a second. When you say that word, depending on what crowd you say it in or who you say it to, all hell can break loose -

Brokaw: It can.

Tavis: - even today. What do you make of that?

Brokaw: Well, Vietnam was the first time that we had a war in this country sine the Civil War, which deeply divided the country and more profoundly, obviously. But Vietnam was the first time in which the elites were not required to go. They could get deferments and stay in college. It was also a time when we learned the government wasn't telling us the truth and had made terrible miscalculations about why we were at war.

I believed in the Vietnam War, as a lot of my friends did at the very beginning, because John F. Kennedy said the domino theory is in play. If we don't make a stand in Vietnam, we'll lose all of Southeast Asia. Well, that premise quickly came apart and people went off to Vietnam and served honorably, a lot of them from the working class neighborhoods.

It was the rise, for example, of the integrated military in this country for the first time, but a lot of people who chose not to go could seek sanctuary in college campuses or in alternative service of some kind. That deeply divided America. And at the same time, Lyndon Johnson was determined to have guns and butter, as they described it.

He didn't ask anything of those staying at home - no sacrifices were really being made. Fifty-seven thousand people died, including a very good friend of mine. My brother was there as a Marine. He came home, thank God. It was a corrosive time, and it's still with us. In the book, a number of people say to me - Bill Daley of Chicago, for example, and Bob Carey and others say I don't know whether we'll get past Vietnam in our lifetime. I hope we can.

Tavis: Two things you said now I want to go back and get. One, you talked about your friend who died. I saw you talking to Russert - Tim - on "Meet the Press" about this when the book first hit, and if I was watching closely enough, and I tend to try to watch and pay attention, you got emotional, a little choked up talking about your friend, even after all these many years.

Brokaw: Well, and in an unexpected way, because just the week before I had been back in South Dakota shooting the History Channel documentary, and I went out to his gravesite. And I looked down at it and I thought about the life that I've had and the life he didn't get to have, and how cruel and unfair that was in so many ways, and how I kind of missed him, I suppose, looking at that.

And then I remembered, it was a flashback to the day that we buried him, and it was 1968, in the fall. It was a beautiful autumnal day in South Dakota. A Marine squadron flew overhead, the missing man plane took off, and I was in a rage because I was living in California and we were living here on the edge and at the epicenter, really, of the antiwar movement.

But in South Dakota, there was a stoicism about it. They were patriots, and the grief was much more muted. So all that came back to me, and then when Tim raised it, I did get a little emotional. I talked to my friend Gene's wife, who had been my wife's college roommate, and she's remarried and had a wonderful life and her children are doing fine and everything. And he was a singular guy, and it was a loss. There were a lot of losses - 57,000 others, as well.

Tavis: You mentioned earlier some of the people you spoke to in the writing of the text. When you're talking to a Colin Powell or Dick Cheney, and you talked to both for this book, we talked a moment ago about the division that still exists, the divide around the issue of Vietnam. Are there some things that you found universal amongst those who had viewpoints about Vietnam, even though they may have been on different sides of the question back then? Viewpoints that are pretty universal?

Brokaw: I think most people feel is that we treat our veterans much more honorably now than we did then. That was a terrible wound in the psyche of this country, is that too many young people, I think, blamed the veterans for the war, and when the veterans came home after having served honorably, they were told when they got to San Francisco, get out of your class fours or out of your military uniform and get into civilian clothes, because they'll spit on you in San Francisco, or harass you in some fashion.

And there's a lot of evidence that that happened. Chuck Hagel, the senator from Nebraska, got out of the Bay Area as quickly as he possibly could. So I think that we're there on that. There are still debates among the Vietnam veterans about how we make these decisions to go to war. Jim Webb, who defended why he was in Vietnam, served there heroically as a Marine, is one of the most outspoken critics of the war in Iraq, for example.

John McCain believes that we're serving honorably in Iraq and that the cause is noble. These are not issues that are easily resolved. People think about the sixties, Tavis, and the parts of it, and they get these kind of stereotypical prisms through which they see it. They see flower children and the music of James Taylor on the one hand.

On the other hand they look at that and they think it's repugnant, the behavior that was going on, if they happened to be to the right of center. It was a collage. It was a mix of all of those things, and some of them ran together, some of them butted up against each other, but the end effect of it was that we became polarized as a country, because people went to the far corners and didn't want to meet in the middle ground anymore.

Tavis: A lot of the players in the body politic, as you well know, have taken to making comparisons to drawing parallels between, to your last point, Iraq and Vietnam. After having written the book, do you see any?

Brokaw: I do. I think that we're in a war against an insurgency and in a country where we're not exactly welcome by everyone. The premises of the war and the promises that were made have not been fulfilled. And again, we have people who can choose not to go to war. This is now a voluntary army, and so when I go through Walter Reed on my personal visits, I always look at the hometowns.

They're almost always towns you've never heard of before. Small towns in the rural South or in New England or in Indiana or the Great Plains, or in the barrios of East Los Angeles, for that matter. They volunteered to do that. The rest of us, again, are not being asked to make any sacrifices. We're not paying any more taxes or higher prices for things. So I think yeah, there are a lot of echoes for it, and the debate is increasingly bitter.

Tavis: As I sit and listen to you talk, Tom, now about all of these issues that you've covered in your career and lived through in your life, I always thought that as a newsman, you, Tom Brokaw, kept your feelings, kept your politics out of what you - I know on paper you have to do that or you don't have a job.

Brokaw: Hard. It's hard.

Tavis: How do you do that all these years?

Brokaw: It's hard. Well, I believe that fundamentally my reputation as a journalist would depend on my integrity and as a reliable place to go and get as much of the facts as you possibly can. Truth is pretty elusive, as you know. It's got a lot of dimensions to it. So over the years, I always tried to be the one person wherever I was working that would give a fair representation of what was happening, and then I hoped a reasonable and intelligent analysis or insight into why it was happening. And I've been comforted over the years that people on the far left and people on the far right have said to me, "What party are you in, anyway? I have never been able to figure it out." (Laughter) And I'd say, "That's exactly the reaction I want you to have."

Tavis: This special you have coming up December 9th on the History Channel, "1968," I don't know that we have ever had a year quite like it. I suspect that's probably why you chose it. I think, and my viewers know, I've said many times I regard, personally, Dr. King as the greatest American we've ever produced. That's my own personal point of view. But you think about '68, you think about King's assassination, to say nothing of Bobby Kennedy. What made that year so uniquely different than any other year in our history?

Brokaw: It was a perfect storm. So many things came into play. It began with Lyndon Johnson being forced from office, the sitting president who won just four years earlier, by a landslide proportion; the Tet offensive with the Viet Cong scoring a big psychological victory. Dr. King, and I quite agree with you, that 500 years from now historians will look back and say, "Was there ever a more important figure in American history than Dr. King, in so many ways?"

He is cruelly shot down in Memphis, Tennessee. Bobby Kennedy is shot down, the Chicago riots happen. The Russians invade Czechoslovakia in August, and the students are in the streets of Paris, and they're in the streets of London. Richard Nixon resurrects himself. He had taken himself out of American politics in 1962. Now he's back and he's the Republican candidate.

And George Wallace runs for president, and between them, Nixon and Wallace get 60 percent of the vote. People have to remember that. And then at the end of the year, Apollo 8 goes the Moon and circumnavigates it, and when the astronauts come out the back side, there it is - Earth. In an inky void, this precious planet. Filigree of clouds, deep blue of the oceans. Sands, the conifers in the wilderness areas. And as Jim Lovell said, "That's our spaceship, for all of us." And I realized that we're all in this together. So it was a remarkable time.

Tavis: The perfect storm suggests that those kinds of things don't happen, of course, every day.

Brokaw: No, no.

Tavis: And thankfully, some of them don't happen every day, given what happened in '68.

Brokaw: Right, thank God.

Tavis: What are the lessons, though? What's the abiding lesson to be learned?

Brokaw: I think the abiding lesson is that I hope the last line of the book - which I'm not going to give away the absolute last line - I think the last line is that when we're in periods of turmoil, we need to take a breath and look to each other to see where common cause can be found and how we get through this together, rather than drive each other into far corners and get so whetted to our most narrow visions of what needs to be done that we can't move forward together.

Any society, and not just this one, but any society that has democratic principles requires good will at some point and some common idea, some vision of what's in the best interests of the country. And occasionally, that means you've got to dial down some of your own interests to move forward.

Tavis: Of course, the challenge to that now, Tom, that did not exist in 1968 in the same way is that this is the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever. It ain't just Black and White no more, and that -

Brokaw: No, I think it's tougher now. I honestly think it's tougher now. I say in the book, Tavis, that one of the failures that we have in our society is that we have no common language for dealing with some of these issues. I talk about we don't have a good language for dealing with race anymore. The Don Imus affair made that very clear.

It was all broken up. Everybody had a different interpretation of what was going on here and how we were going to talk about it, and who would talk about it. So we need to get back to that again, and you're right - we are much more multicultural. If you take women, they've made enormous strides since the 1960s.

Now, however, they're facing the very tough choices of the money track. More than 50 percent of our students in medical school and in law school are women. So they come out, they begin their practice. Age 33, 34, they want to go off and have a child. That's understandable. That's how societies also propagate and move forward.

But it's not easy for them to go back to their practice three years later, or certainly to go back into corporations or in financial services, or even in this business. So we have to think about that, too.

Tavis: Let me offer this as an exit question; I don't want to color it any more than what I'm about to say, which is whether or not, after all that you have seen and written about and endured and lived, whether or not you are still hopeful about this place we call America?

Brokaw: You're sitting where you're sitting; I'm sitting where I'm sitting. Given where we come from, who could not be hopeful? Who can not see, in the last 25, 30, 40 years the enormous strides that we've made? And the model that you present - and I like to think in my own small way as well when I go back to the Midwest or out to Montana or into the inner city that people say, "Hey, it can still happen."

Tavis: A true American icon. How fortunate and blessed, quite frankly, I have been to have Tom Brokaw on this program for the full half-hour. The new book by Mr. Brokaw is "Boom! Voice of the Sixties, Personal Reflections on the Sixties and Today." What an honor to have you here.

Brokaw: Great to be here. Thank you.

Tavis: Thank you, sir, for your time.