Different Ways of Remembering D-Day

All the eloquence about World War II comes from Americans too young to have experienced it--Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation," Steven Spielberg'a "Saving Private Ryan"--and now Barack Obama is memorializing D-Day along with Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown et al.

The survivors are in their eighties now, but age alone does not explain how inarticulate we all are about the transformative experience of our lives. As usual, reporters are interviewing veterans, but the quotes are the same as they have been for more than half a century--less the vivid impressions of participants than the dazed wonder of witnesses, whose bodies were doing what they were told but whose minds and hearts were watching from afar.

President Obama, born decades later, sees it as "the story of America...that always gives us hope" and finds a lesson for today:

"For as we face down the hardships and struggles of our time, and arrive at that hour for which we were born, we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore."

Tom Brokaw, of the generation between Obama and us, puts it even more strongly: "Their sacrifices at home and on the frontlines make our current difficulties look like a walk on the beach in comparison."

"Hardships," "struggles" and "sacrifices" put a rhetorical glaze over a nightmare of blood and body parts in which those who were there had little control over whether they lived or died.

Heroism was a matter of staying and doing what had to be done. That's a high enough bar to set for today's generations without glorifying their parents and grandparents who set that example in a time when doing anything else was unthinkable.

Enter Obama, Exit Brokaw

Today's Meet the Press was a scene of passage between the 21st century president-to-be and a media giant of the past, less striking for what was said than the display of intelligence and grace that has been so rare on the public stage for many years.

A month after his election and more than that before taking office, Barack Obama seems effortlessly presidential as he discusses the failing economy, corporate bailouts as well as military and diplomatic challenges in a dangerous world.

In his first months, Obama will face a balancing act--to jump-start the economy in ways consistent with "long-term, sustainable economic growth...investing in the largest infrastructure program--in roads and bridges and, and other traditional infrastructure--since the building of the federal highway system in the 1950s; rebuilding our schools and making sure that they're energy-efficient; making sure that we're investing in electronic medical records and other technologies that can drive down health care costs...down payments on the kind of long-term, sustainable growth that we need."

Doing that will take unprecedented leadership skills working with a Congress of competing interests and ideologies, but the new administration starts with a good deal of hope and good will aroused by a new president who can communicate with the public.

Seeing him interviewed by Brokaw, who took over Meet the Press when Tim Russert died suddenly in June, is a reminder of the media obligation to focus on what politicians are saying and doing and hold them to account with tough but fair questioning.

Both sides of the equation are in transition as David Gregory takes over the Sunday morning talkfest for a new era, but watching Obama with Brokaw was a reminder of how useful the process can be.

December 7, 1941

Each year there are fewer of us to remember and bear witness to the day the Japanese attack changed us from children of the Depression to what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation.

On the anniversary this year, Americans are thinking more about the hard times of the 1930s than World War II, but with the terror of Mumbai fresh in our minds, the shock of Pearl Harbor has resonance as well.

I was 17 that day, standing next to a young man with a dazed grin, staring through the picture window of a hospital nursery as a nurse in white mask held up a sleeping baby. A minute later, she drew the curtain.

Newborns were kept isolated then and, as a college student, my part-time job was to hand the new father a hospital gown and lead him to the window. The babies all looked alike. The real show was on our side of the glass: a man’s eyes flooding with pride, wonder and worry.

But then sudden death six thousand miles away shattered those tableaus of new life. Happy faces at mothers’ bedsides turned to stone, nurses and doctors looked lost behind their masks of composure.

The next day, I was in the Great Hall of City College of New York, my eyes on a huge mural, a black-robed graduate amid flying cherubs and, in togas, the figures of Wisdom, Discipline and Alma Mater pointing to a bright future.

From a loudspeaker the voice of the only President I could remember (FDR took office on my ninth birthday) was telling of a day that will live in infamy and saying we are at war.

There was no 24/7 news but every night at 8:55, the chilling radio voice of Elmer Davis told of battles in Europe and the Pacific. We saw and heard so little news then, but we never for a minute forgot that our young people were dying in distant places.

McCain's Last Stand

As Barack Obama was promising voters "We're not going to let George Bush pass the torch to John McCain," the GOP candidate himself was in, of all places, Waterloo (Iowa), trying to persuade Tom Brokaw and himself that, on the 41st anniversary of being shot down in Vietnam, his campaign for president was not going down in flames now.

As Brokaw fired off poll numbers, quotes about Sarah Palin's shortcomings and McCain's own words about Bush that evoked the answer, "So do we share a common philosophy of the Republican Party? Of course," the old warrior resolutely insisted on his own version of reality, often using air quotes to denote sarcasm about those who say otherwise and consider Obama preferable.

In this hermetically sealed world, the polls are all wrong except for Zogby (which insists on using a model that forces equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats into an outdated mold) and voters will wake up on November 4th and elect the maverick McCain of 2000.

In this Rip Van Winkle universe, McCain on the economy is FDR in the Great Depression and Harry Truman upsetting Tom Dewey in 1948.

Listening to all this must have been an out-of-body experience for Brokaw, who ended the ordeal with valedictory-like "hope this has been a better Sunday than it was 41 years ago," to which McCain responded, "I appreciate your many years of informing the American people. You've come a long way from South Dakota, but you never forgot where you came from."

So today's Meet the Press ended with an exchange of good wishes by two elderly gentlemen, one of whom will ease back into retirement from TV next year and the other into being the titular head of a minority opposition party from his seat in the US Senate.

Debriefing Obama

You can measure the toughness of Tom Brokaw's Meet the Press interview with the Democratic nominee today by the multiple times Obama said "Right, right," "but, but" and "look, look."

They were numerous as Brokaw pressed him on not being willing to admit the Surge has worked, on oversimplifying the politics of Pakistan and answering the charge that his Berlin speech was a Disney version of "optimism without reality."

Taped in London last night, the interview was a test for the bone-weary candidate after a week of media adulation, and a testament to Brokaw's unimpaired skills as he questioned Obama, not with Tim Russert's cordial aggressiveness, but a cool insistence on getting to the core of issues.

At 68, Brokaw is of John McCain's generation and a suitable surrogate for 20th century journalists who kept their distance from politicians rather than basking in the spotlight as fellow media stars.

On Obama's part, the experience will surely be useful in honing presidential skills that go beyond cheering crowds and fawning interviewers.

Tomorrow, he will be back down to earth, meeting with his economic advisers to focus on gas prices, mortgage bailouts and other worries that voters will want straight answers about from now to November.

Going for Brokaw

NBC's decision to replace Tim Russert with their anchor emeritus through the November elections seems wise after today's weak effort by Brian Williams to deal with the verbal calisthenics of the presidential hopefuls' surrogates.

Sens. Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham traded standard campaign patter over their candidates' flip-flopping (Obama on public financing, McCain on almost everything since 2000) without be brought into some larger context by Williams' moderating.

What Tom Brokaw will give "Meet the Press," perhaps even more than Russert did, is a perspective beyond the tactical jousting and prompt interviewees toward the larger issues of 2008, which go far beyond offshore drilling for oil which, along with Obama's public financing pledge, occupied most of today's time.

"Meet the Press," like its Sunday morning counterparts, offers voters a chance to go past the sound bites that make up most of the week's news by pinning down politicians on the issues behind them.

It's nice to know that Biden isn't "interested" in being VP but would do it if Obama asked, but that doesn't help us understand anything important about the economy or ending the war in Iraq.

Tim Russert's Wake

"Meet the Press" is, by its nature, an hour of posturing, lies and evasions, but today it was filled with genuine feeling--tears, laughter and even a few home movies. (Who could resist Doris Kearns Goodwin in a blonde wig with a feather boa popping out of a cake to a do a Marilyn Monroe-JFK bit for Tim's 50th birthday?)

Tom Brokaw, presiding over the mourning, was in tears at one point, while political toughie Mary Matalin clenched a soggy Kleenex, but the prevailing mood was love and laughter, a hell of a good wake for a good life, even without alcohol.

By now, everything that could be said about Tim Russert has been said and oversaid, but it's hard to resist one final observation about the sources of his success, beyond Buffalo, Big Russ and his old-pol Irish genes.

He had the good sense or good fortune or perhaps both to get a start in politics before switching to journalism with two of the twentieth century's best people in public life--Pat Moynihan and Mario Cuomo.

From the Senator-scholar who deplored the trend of "Defining Deviancy Down" and the best president we never had who redefined Reagan's "shining city on a hill" at the 1984 Democratic convention, a young Russert learned that politics was a serious business for serious people.

For all his fascination with the down and dirty of it all, Tim Russert never forgot those lessons. When all the eulogies are over, his successors would do well to remember them for the future.

Mixed Feelings About the Sixties

Suddenly we are back in the 1960s with Hillary Clinton citing virtues for what she did back then, Barack Obama claiming he is of a new generation above the divisiveness of those days and Tom Brokaw, as usual, writing a book to explain it all.

At her alma mater, Wellesley, this week, Clinton said, "I need your help to make the calls and knock on the doors and talk to your friends and family. That's what I did back in 1968 when a group of my dear friends and I jumped in a car…and would drive from Wellesley to Manchester, New Hampshire, stuffing envelopes and walking precincts for Eugene McCarthy. He was running for president on a platform of ending the Vietnam War. I am running for president on part of a platform of ending the war in Iraq."

In Iowa, Obama is telling voters, "Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done. And I think that's what people hunger for."

Politicians hype everything about themselves, including the accident of when they were born, but the 1960s were formative years for today's America, exposing fault lines in our national life that still divide us.

From my ancient perspective, what happened back then goes too deep for glib generalizations and political pandering.

On the one hand, the first generation of Americans not entirely driven to outdo their parents materially turned to moral superiority--about war, race, gender. In the 1950s movie, "The Wild One," biker Marlon Brando, asked what he's rebelling against, answers, "What have you got?"

There was awakening from complacency to challenge injustice and try to create a better society. But there was also self-righteous and self-serving acting out by draft-card burners, culminating in the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention where anti-war protesters and delegates, including me, were tear-gassed.

We started the decade with JFK's "Ask what you can do for your country" and ended up with Richard Nixon and his dirty tricksters in the White House.

The culture wars began. People Nixon called "The Silent Majority" were appalled by privileged kids publicly trashing their traditional values at Woodstock and elsewhere, paving the way for Reagan's revival a decade later of the fictional feel-good America he lived in as an actor in 1940s movies.

In looking ahead to 2008, it would be a mistake to overuse the 1960s as a template. America was going through social and political growing pains back then that are not quite parallel to what we face now, but at the same time, there is no virtue in dismissing all that and assuming we can just turn to a blank new page in our history.

If Republicans are living in a nostalgic past, Democrats can't just push ahead to a fantasy future. There are enough questions to answer about what we do now in today's world.