Brokaw’s ‘Boom’ looks at life in ‘60s
“Boom!”
by Tom Brokaw (Random House, 688 pages, $28.95)
Almost a decade ago, Tom Brokaw, the former NBC News anchor, helped steer the nation to an appreciation of what he called “the greatest generation” – those Americans who came of age during the Depression, won World War II and then went to work building a new America in the postwar years.
His 1998 book by that title profiled members of that generation ranging from the unknown to the famous.
Now, in “Boom!” Brokaw looks at those who lived through the 1960s, the tumultuous era that saw four major assassinations, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the rise of the drug culture, the sexual revolution, Woodstock and widespread college-campus turmoil.
Brokaw takes the same approach as he did with “The Greatest Generation,” page after page of profiles of people who came of age in the 1960s.
To name just a few, Brokaw’s subjects include Vice President Dick Cheney; Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.; antiwar organizer Sam Brown; and Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador.
How the events of the 1960s formed the opinions of such current-day movers and shakers as Cheney, Gingrich, Bill and Hillary Clinton and others is important and worthy of telling, even though some of them may not have been as involved in the critical events of the time as Young (who was with Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn., when he was killed).
But, as was the case with “The Greatest Generation,” the book casts too wide a net and sometimes the stories border on the banal. For example, the 10 paragraphs devoted to singer-songwriter Don McLean, who wrote “American Pie,” seem pointless.
By including the likes of Gingrich, Cheney and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Brokaw tries to balance out his treatment of an era we tend to think of as belonging to hippies, antiwar protesters and rock musicians.
While he lets the conservatives speak their piece, however, it’s obvious that Brokaw takes a more positive view of the liberalizing trends of the era. Part of the legacy of the 1960s, he says, is better opportunity for racial minorities and women, and greater attention to the environment.
Brokaw was born in 1940, so he had little connection to the era he wrote about in “The Greatest Generation.” As a television newsman, however, he was witness to many of the big events of the 1960s. That firsthand knowledge makes “Boom!” a much more interesting read.
He admits that the 1960s changed his life, from the way he dresses when he’s not on the job, to the opportunities provided to his working wife and their three daughters. But he is still trying to – in Hillary Clinton’s words – “crack the code” of that era.
“The meaning of that amazing decade is still emerging,” Brokaw writes, adding that for the rest of his life, when his mind wanders back to that period, he will probably think: “What was that all about?”