A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 1 DEBORAH LEFF: Good evening and welcome. I’m Deborah Leff. I’m director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of myself and John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, we are really happy to have you here and happy to have the people in the overflow theaters. I want to thank our Forum sponsors, Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute and Corcoran Jennison, Raytheon, the wonderful PT109 exhibit that we have. And our media sponsors: WBUR, The Boston Globe and boston.com. The Greatest Generation -- the men and women who came of age in World War II and built the country we have today, this is the generation honored and revealed by the wonderful words of this evening’s speaker, Tom Brokaw. Tonight’s Forum coincides with the opening of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s tribute to the generation, our new special exhibit, JFK in World War II. Lt. John Kennedy had a special role in World War II of course. As highlighted by the late Tonight Show host, Jack Parr, in a documentary that aired in 1962. Let’s watch. [VIDEO CLIP] Lt. Kennedy may have gone on to be President but he was only one of millions of men and women who fought to save this country and to protect A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 2 and enhance its values. Their stories are told compellingly by long-time NBC anchorman and the best selling The Greatest Generation. Mr. Brokaw was inspired to write the book by a trip he made to France in 1984 to mark the 40th anniversary of D-Day and the stories veterans told to him at that time. He enriches our lives by sharing their stories with us. And he enriches the Kennedy Library by his presence here tonight. Mr. Brokaw, as you know, was the anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 until he retired this past December. He is a consummate newsman at a time when some of us wonder whether there is a future profession in that. He has won every major news award, lots of Emmys, the Dupont Award, the Peabody Award. He was NBC’s White House Correspondent during Watergate, a floor reporter at the national party conventions, a reporter on civil rights, the anchor of The Today Show, and on the scene around the world bringing us the major news stories of our generation. What’s next for Mr. Brokaw we might hear tonight. He contemplated that question last December at the time of his retirement and told Outside magazine, “I was thinking of getting a big hog, growing a pony tail, and getting a tattoo.” We are waiting, Mr. Brokaw. Now, moderating tonight’s discussion, we planned to have with us NPR’s senior correspondent, Juan Williams. And the magic of radio is that people never quite look like what you think they are going to. So I’m going to A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 3 pretend I’m Juan Williams. Juan was caught on the runway in Washington, D.C. His plane has landed. He is on his way here. So we will do a switch. I’m sorry for the disruption in the middle of the Forum but we didn’t want to keep you waiting. We wanted to hear as much from Mr. Brokaw as possible. So please welcome Tom Brokaw. [APPLAUSE] LEFF: Mr. Brokaw, thank you for joining us. On the way over you mentioned to me that you had actually been to the Solomon Islands. TOM BROKAW: That was so evocative for me. I actually remember when Jack Parr did that documentary. And then he also had live on the program the surviving crew members from the PT109. And for the Olympics in Australia, I actually didn’t go back. I worked in other elements of it. But we sent a producer to the Solomons and we found the native who rescued John Kennedy. He was 80-some years old, chewing beetle nuts and spitting it out and sitting on the beach. And when John Kennedy said to him, “How are we going to get the message back,” he picked up the coconut half and said, “Why don’t you scratch something on this?” And Kennedy, according to the native said, “Jesus Christ, how did you think of that?” And it was very winning. And the A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 4 whole story with the Australian watchers off the coast were there and they, obviously, saved his life. So we ran it at great length during the Australian Olympics. And then I gave it to Caroline so that she could share it with her children so that they would know about their grandfather in another passage in his life and gave it to his brother as well, Senator Kennedy. And it was a very warm and, I think, probably emblematic story about the peril that so many people went through at that time, especially as they were scattered across the Pacific. And when John Kennedy came home, he came home not just a hero but he came home as a man who had matured a lot because of his war time experience. And what you saw with the crew of PT109 was typical of what happened across the services and across all the theaters of war, that they were bonded in a way that is just hard to describe for people who have not gone through combat together or life-threatening experiences. And that’s the story that keeps coming through on all these tales I tell about World War II. When I go back to the cemeteries in Normandy or in Belgium or in the Philippines for that matter, and see American servicemen, veterans there, walking from graveside to graveside, looking for their fallen friends and saying, “I have the life that he didn’t have. So I have felt that I have had to A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 5 live my life for him as well.” So there are lots of recurring themes in all these stories. And they come out, I think, in the PT109 story. LEFF: Is it that that makes stories of war so compelling? Why are we drawn to these stories? BROKAW: Well, I think on two different levels. One, on a cosmic level, World War II was a struggle between good and evil, the likes of which the world has never seen before. John Keagan, a British military historian has said in a way that I don’t think we had a full appreciation of it at the time, “It was the greatest event in the history of mankind.” Fifty million people perished in World War II, 50 million, civilians and uniformed people alike. It was fought on all but one of the continents. It was fought on all the seas. It was fought in all the skies around the world. And imperial Japan in the east, and Nazi Germany, the Third Reich in central Europe were determined to alter the world according to the vision of the despots who were running the countries at the time. If the United States and its allies, including Russia at the time, had not made the fight that they did, we would be living in a far different world today. So that’s the cosmic story of it. The day-to-day story -- and it’s not just the story of combat, it’s also the story of what happened at home, the sacrifices that were made in families, the ability, the inventive mind of America to change Detroit from producing automobiles to producing tanks and war planes and designing new weapons; A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 6 the ability of farmers to grow more food and civilians to eat less so the soldiers would have more. And then these stories of being on these ships or being in a combat outfit or being in a submarine or being in the Merchant Marine or being in a fighter plane and having these kind of primal experiences of life and death never leaves us. And they were doing it when they were 18, 19, 20 years of age. Ben Bradlee is from Boston, left Harvard in summer of 1942, graduated early, got his Navy uniform and went to sea. And he had been raised here in privilege, had a Harvard education in the classics. And I think he believes to this day that the greatest education he ever had was serving in World War II, that he learned more about life and about America and about what he was all about as a result of that experience. President George Bush the 41st, another son of privilege, went to Yale at the same time. Became one of the youngest Navy flyers. Talk about being an officer on a ship and reading the letters of the men that they would send home because he had to censor them. Officers had to look at enlisted men’s mail to make sure they weren’t giving away military secrets. And he said to me, after prodding him several times because he was reluctant to talk about it, that he learned things that he would not have known growing up in Greenwich. He learned about life in small town America or about the struggle to keep a marriage together or financial difficulties that people were having.