Boom!: Talking About the Sixties: What Happened, How It Shaped Today, Lessons for Tomorrow - Softcover

Brokaw, Tom

 
9780812975116: Boom!: Talking About the Sixties: What Happened, How It Shaped Today, Lessons for Tomorrow
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812975111 ISBN 13: 9780812975116
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In Boom!, Tom Brokaw, one of America’s premier journalists and the acclaimed author of The Greatest Generation, gives us an epic portrait of another defining era in America: the tumultuous Sixties. The voices and stories of both famous people and ordinary citizens come together in this “virtual reunion” as Brokaw takes us on a memorable journey through a remarkable time, exploring how individuals and the national mood were affected by a controversial era and showing how the aftershocks of the Sixties continue to resound in our lives today. In the reflections of a generation, Brokaw also discovers lessons that might guide us in the years ahead. Race, politics, war, feminism, popular culture, and music are all delved into here. Brokaw explores how members of this generation have gone on to bring activism and a Sixties mindset into individual entrepreneurship , as we hear stories of how this formative decade has shaped our perspectives on business, the environment, politics, family, and our national existence. Remarkable in its insights, wonderfully written and reported, this revealing book lets us join in these frank conversations about America then, now, and tomorrow.


Praise for Boom!

“Tom Brokaw does an excellent job of capturing an exciting, controversial period in American history and Boom! is a worthy addition to his growing canon.”–New York Post

“[Tom Brokaw] approaches this magnum opus with warmth, curiosity and conviction, the same attributes that worked so well for his Greatest Generation.”
–The New York Times

“[A] verbal scrapbook of the Sixties . . . [Boom! shows] that the era’s core issues–racism, women’s rights, a nation-dividing war–remain central today, and that the values boomers championed haven’t yet gone bust.”
–People (four stars)

“Packed with memorable people, places, events . . . A ‘virtual reunion’ of 1960s folks telling what they did back then, where they’ve been since and how they assess that tumultuous decade.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Genuinely fascinating recollections . . . plenty of memorable anecdotes.”
–The Wall Street Journal

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tom Brokaw is the author of seven bestsellers: The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks, An Album of Memories, Boom!, The Time of Our Lives,A Long Way from Home, and A Lucky Life Interrupted. A native of South Dakota, he graduated from the University of South Dakota, and began his journalism career in Omaha and Atlanta before joining NBC News in 1966. Brokaw was the White House correspondent for NBC News during Watergate, and from 1976 to 1981 he anchored Today on NBC. He was the sole anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 to 2005. He continues to report for NBC News, producing long-form documentaries and providing expertise during breaking news events. Brokaw has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including two DuPonts, three Peabody Awards, and several Emmys, including one for lifetime achievement. In 2014, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lives in New York and Montana.

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Chapter 1

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...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812975111
ISBN 13 
9780812975116
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
688
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Purmerul LTD
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