The sappiest generation

My cantankerous father and my own better judgment won't let me get sentimental about WWII veterans.

By Sean Elder

Jul 31, 2000 | The weekend before July Fourth found World War II being fought all over again on the New York Times bestsellers list. Tom Brokaw's book "The Greatest Generation" and its sequel, "The Greatest Generation Speaks," held the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively, flanked by James Bradley's "Flags of Our Fathers" at No. 1 and Bob Greene's "Duty" at No. 9. While the preponderance of titles relating to the war and its veterans constitutes an obvious trend (sales doubtless reflected a recent spate of Father's Day gift giving), "The Greatest Generation" is the real phenomenon. The book has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for more than 80 weeks now and shows no signs of flagging.

If you are recovering from severe head trauma, or have been overseas for the past year and a half, you may not know that Brokaw's book is a celebration of the generation of Americans who survived the Depression and fought the Second World War -- my parents' generation. As the title implies, "The Greatest Generation" is a straightforward, largely unironic appreciation of the (mostly) men and women who served. The NBC anchor interviewed scores of veterans and their kin to come up with the 50-odd sketches that make up the book. (The sequel is drawn from the voluminous responses he first received.) There are famous people and unknowns chronicled here, men who escaped the conflict unscathed and others who paid dearly.

To Brokaw, all are united by a certain stoicism and bravery. "They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest," reads a typical quote, and they didn't quit when they made the world safe for democracy, either. "They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy in history," Brokaw writes. "They made breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences. They gave the world new art and literature. They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation. They gave America Medicare."

All of which sounds too good to be true.

"I keep saying, 'They weren't perfect, they made mistakes, there were failures,'" Brokaw told me in April. "There are even accounts of those failures in the books."

But the fact that those shortcomings don't register with readers says a lot about who is buying the book: veterans of the war -- now in their 70s and 80s, many of whom have formed Greatest Generation clubs and held Greatest Generation reunions -- and their children, some of whom are finally ready to listen to their parents' war stories.

Mortality certainly has something to do with it: Approximately 32,000 WWII vets die every month, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs -- a little over a thousand per day. For many men of that generation, war was the defining experience of their young lives, just as the absence of war and, in some cases, resistance to the war in Vietnam were the defining experience of many young men of my generation. Those are a lot of the people buying Brokaw's book, trying to make peace with their fathers before they die and, perhaps, close what newsmen like Brokaw used to call the generation gap.

But closure is one of those overrated concepts in American culture today. It's as if our recent history were an episode of "Oprah" and everyone is supposed to cry and hug before the credits roll. There is a reason there are so few rough edges in Brokaw's books: It is considered almost as much in bad form to speak ill of the dying as it is to speak ill of the dead, and the same sort of sentimentality we mocked and loathed in the '60s is making a comeback now, at least when it comes to our own parents. "The Greatest Generation," as the title implies, is a valentine and, for some of those grown children buying it for their parents, a peace offering. But peace is not always so easy.

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