| ACTOR: December 7,
1941: A date which will live in infamy. The United States...
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: They've been having a splendid sendoff, the men
of World War II. Over the past couple of years, they have been celebrated
anew for their courage and endurance on the battlefields of Europe and
the Far East. We've seen pictures, news footage and movie footage, of
them when they were achingly young, skinny and scared and cocky, and
ready to do their country's bidding.
TOM HANKS: I'll see you on the beach.
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: From Steven Spielberg's war epic to Tom Brokaw's
book, the so-called "Greatest Generation" has, in effect,
been having an ongoing obituary as, in increasing numbers, they have
been laid to rest in the cemeteries and graveyards of America. 1,000
World War II veterans die every day now, a pageant of gratitude and
loss played out over and over. In many of these cemeteries, the person
who steps up to receive the folded flag, to give testament or offer
memorial words, is a midlife daughter. I know because two-and-a-half
years ago I did it for own my father, and now many of my friends are
doing it.
What a complicated, sometimes enraging, sometimes magical dance so
many of us did with our dads. It is fair to say that no more interesting
historical juncture exists than that between these larger-than-life
World War II- era fathers and the daughters they spawned. My own father
was a vet to his toes. He was in the Air Force, but an old knee injury
kept him out of combat. As an actor, he was conscripted into the big
air force wartime stage production of "Winged Victory," which
toured the country.
World War II: The era, the ethos, the uniform of stiff upper-lip masculinity,
defined everything about him. He expected to be in charge, to preside
over and provide for his family. These were the Father-Knows-Best dads
and we were their kittens. My friends and I, on the other hand, came
from the women's lib generation, entering our 20s in the late '60s/early
'70s, right smack dab in the middle of the feminist upheaval. We were
intent on making our own way, making our own mark, asserting our own
rights. In short, we were chips off the old paternal block. We'd seen
the '50s sitcom family choreography; lived it, and it was Dad we identified
with, Dad we imitated. We pushed, they pushed back. We wanted respect,
equality; they wanted their baby girls back.
It was an epic struggle, the defining one of many of our female lives,
played out again and again with husbands and lovers and bosses. They
watched us, our fathers, flail and demand and push our way towards equality
on all fronts: Tennis courts and law courts, and boardrooms and bedrooms,
specifically, and at bottom, pushing for equality with them, the nation's
heroes, and it wasn't easy. (Gunshots)
But a lot of these men made amazing journeys. I realize, looking around
now at all the tender-hearted, newfangled dads brandishing babies in
backpacks or coaching their daughters' soccer leagues, that my father
was of a transitional generation, raised in one world, pushed into another,
the key link in the evolutionary chain of dads. What an irony: That
these men of such wartime stature would turn out to be the first generation
of men in history who could expect their daughters to be as visibly
successful out there in the working world as they had been, if not more
so. So many turned up so proud, releasing us, their daughters, to turn
around and be proud back. A lot of anger and arm-wrestling and love
and, yes, therapy went into many a father and daughter reconciliation.
How is it possible? They were so young then, so brave, and we are now
burying them. How is it possible? It seems unimaginable looking at those
pictures, unimaginable to realize anew that on Father's Day you no longer
have a father. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.
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