Following is the text of an interview with Tom Brokaw that was conducted by SeniorNet volunteer Joan Pearson on July 26, 2000. The subject was his books, The Greatest Generation and The Greatest Generation Speaks. The questions arose out of a discussion of these books on SeniorNet's website.

JP: Tom, Robert Iadelucca, a WWII Veteran, and I have been leading an online discussion of both of your books since early April and continue to receive a moving, powerful response. We are awed on a daily basis by the humility and the humor of the WWII veterans and other members of this generation. We appreciate your taking the time to respond to some of our questions.

JP: Some of our online participants of this generation have trouble being referred to as "the greatest." Did you find such discomfort among those you interviewed for these books?

TB: The leading critic of the judgments of the name [of the book] was my friend Andy Rooney who said, "I don't know, Brokaw. I don't think we're so great. We just did what we had to do. I don't like that kind of acclamation." My answer to him, and to others who've challenged [the name of the book] is that 'that's my story, and I'm sticking by it!' I do think it's characteristic of their modesty and their ability that they would be either uncomfortable with the judgment that I made, or that they would reject it altogether.

JP: Some of those who contested it in the beginning are coming to refer to their generation as "the Greatest" now.

TB: (Laughs) I know. It's become part of the language.

JP: Did you receive any argument or resentment from younger people when you labeled the "Greatest Generation"? You mentioned something about that in the introduction to your book.

TB: I did. I've met a very few people [who argued the title], especially Baby Boomers. I always thought that the Baby Boomer generation was the one that was the most self-satisfied. But now that they've read about what their parents went through, first of all in the Depression and then in World War II, my impression is that many of them are coming around to my conclusion.

JP: We have online participants in the book discussion from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and other foreign-born Americans who have asked this question. When you refer to the Greatest Generation, are you including men and women from other countries?

TB: I really was confining it to the United States. I tried to make that clear, that this was a family portrait of this country, but I certainly wouldn't have any difficulty extending it -- especially to the British, who were so brave under difficult circumstances and those who resisted fascism, whether it was the Polish Underground or the French Underground; and the Dutch, who were overrun and made such heroic efforts to help the Allies.

JP: Do you think the experiences and values of the World War I generation contributed to the values of "the greatest"?

TB: I do. I think that they had wonderful mentors. When you think about Dwight Eisenhower, for example, and George C. Marshall and FDR -- people who came out of one generation earlier, and led them through this in such an astonishing way. Some of the big differences between the World War I generation and the World War II generation are the absence, in the World War I generation, of the active place of women and the unresolved coming to grips with the place of race in our lives. The World War II generation -- you take the long arc of their lives, from the deprivation of the Depression, the sacrifices during the war, and then the expansion of civil liberties and social rights like Medicare, for example, and the expansion of Social Security benefits, the Civil Rights bill. That too has to be added to their list.

JP: Do you believe that those who experienced the Depression and World War I expected another war or prepared their children for the realities of war and sacrifice? Did they talk about it?

TB: To the United States, World War I was not nearly as inclusive as World War II was. I mean, we got in toward the end. There were real sacrifices that were made, obviously. But it didn't have the total immersion quality that World War II did, in which we were fighting on two fronts, the Pacific as well as in Europe. The efforts that were required on the part of the United States, from a personal and political and economic point of view, were so much greater during World War II. [World War I] certainly did have an impact on Great Britain and some of the places that were at Ground Zero -- a greater impact than it had on this country.

JP: Did the World War II vets, and their families, prepare their children for the realities of the war in Vietnam.

TB: No, I don't think that they did. I think that the World War II vets, many of them, now understand that their World War II experience was in many ways unique. Some of them, who were outraged at the outset [of the Vietnam War] by the criticism on the part of young people in this country, or the resistance to the war, have in later years come to realize that the American military and political leaders were not as forthcoming or as honest as they ought to have been. So, I have discovered that many members of the Greatest Generation now have their own grave reservations about Vietnam, whereas when it was going on -- at the outset, at the beginning at least -- they were supporting it.

JP: Have you spoken to many Korean War vets, who returned home unheralded? Were their views changed about themselves as part of a Great Generation after this war?

TB: You know, it's interesting to me, because Korea certainly is the most forgotten war. The Vietnam veterans had a much better lobby in terms of making the country aware of what they'd gone through, getting the memorial built, many of them getting involved in Congress. I think what happened with Korea is that it just got caught in the backwash of World War II. People were so eager to get on with rebuilding this country and getting the economy going, and so exhausted by war, that they didn't pay enough attention to Korea. But what is striking to me about the Korea veterans is that they too are a humble group, and there's very little outrage on their part. It's just something that they've accepted in their lives.

JP: One of our posters, a World War II Vet, observed that "peace is never more than a period of sanity between wars for rebuilding and planning the next one." After talking to so many members of this generation, do you find they agree with this, or are they more optimistic that such a war won't happen again?

TB: I think that they're more and more optimistic that a World War won't happen again, but they all feel very strongly that war in any form is the worst way to resolve our differences. At the D-Day Museum dedication this year, Bud Lomell, about whom I write in the book, one of the Rangers who landed on D-Day, was asked to get up and share with us, as it were, his experiences. He said, "It's not complicated. It's fairly simple. War is a horror, and there has to be a better way for people and nations to resolve their differences. We cannot have this kind of sacrifice." And for his simple eloquence he got an enormous ovation, because that is the essential truth of the consequences of war.

JP: We watched the opening of the D-Day Museum on TV. Will you also be involved with the Pacific exhibit being planned for that museum?

TB: Yes, well, once it gets done. And you know Stephen Ambrose's next book is going to be about Iwo Jima.

JP: Some of our online participants are sending their Pacific accounts for possible inclusion in his new book too. You stated in The Greatest Generation that you underwent a life-changing experience. Can you tell us some ways that writing these books has changed your life?

TB: I feel like I have an extended family, the people that I wrote about and the other members of that generation. I now have a relationship with and continuing obligation to them. And it has, at this stage in my life (I'm sixty, I was born in 1940, and I've always been very close to my parents; my mother's my sole surviving parent, and I've always been very close to her) --it's expanded the radius, I suppose, of my connection to that generation. It's also prompted me to think, both in a personal way and in a professional way, about my own values and what counts. From a professional point of view, for all the years that I've been on television and all the big events that I've covered, I've done nothing that means as much to me, or seems to have touched as many lives, as these two books.

JP: You write of the Fifties, when you were growing up, as days of innocence? Will you expand on this?

TB: I think that there might have been some artifice attached to the innocence, in part because the United States had a boom economy going on. Germany and Western Europe -- the other industrial heartland -- had been destroyed and Japan couldn't compete economically, so we had it all our way. It was pre-television. Families were still, by and large, nuclear -- sometimes at great expense to the couples -- I'll acknowledge that. Films didn't have the kind of outrageous, violent component that they do now. So, there was this feeling in the land that anything was possible, and that we were prosperous. Working-class families were making the best wages they had ever earned. There was no external threat except as Russia began to build it. So there was this brief, shining moment while we were living during a time of great innocence. Now, there are those that say there was an artificiality about that, that in fact we paid the consequences later on. I think to some degree that that's true. But for me, as a child of working-class parents in the Great Plains, I just felt like I could do anything coming out of that time. You know, I was going to college -- the first member of my family to go to college -- and opportunities seemed to be as broad as the horizon in South Dakota.

JP: You wrote in The Greatest Generation, "By 1994, I felt a kind of missionary zeal for the men and women of World War II." Can you speak more about what caused this depth of emotion?

TB: Going all the way back to Normandy [where I got the idea for the book]-- you know, I'm a journalist; this is what I do -- and when I looked at these stories individually and collectively, I realized what a huge debt we owed that generation, in every conceivable way. They saved the world during World War II. It would be a far different place if Japan and Germany had prevailed. They came back. They built the country that we have today. They acknowledged the need to expand social welfare. The GI Bill of Rights made all of them so much more conscious of the place of education in society. And then by 1994 I realized that we were about to lose this generation. They were getting older; they were dying at a faster rate. It seemed to me that as a nation, World War II had been such an enormous undertaking -- a historic event of such magnitude -- that we needed the distance of forty or fifty years to have a full appreciation of it. And what I wanted to do was to make sure that we didn't, in any way, compromise that appreciation or miss the opportunity to acknowledge it.

JP: When writing The Greatest Generation, did you have a specific readership in mind?

TB: People have asked me that in the past, and I suppose I was writing to them directly, but it was a labor of love for me, and as a journalist, what you do is write about those things that mean the most to you. I certainly was doing that, and hoping that it would find an audience. I've been so gratified that it meant so much to that generation, but especially to their children and even their grandchildren.

JP: Were you writing it for them so that their children and grandchildren would remember what they went through?

TB: No, I think as much as anything, I was just trying to document this astonishing group of people within our society and let other people make their own judgments about it.

JP: Tom, have you read Studs Terkel's book, "The Good War"?

TB: Yes, I have. I'm a big fan of his, and I thought it was a very good book, and I think that there are good wars. I think that you have to say that if we had not gone to war, that Hitler might have prevailed, and imperial Japan might have prevailed, so there was a goodness in standing up to them. There are times that you have to do that.

JP: We're going to take these responses back to the SeniorNet book discussion of the Greatest Generation, and we'd be happy to share some of the responses of the participants and the memories posted there with you.

TB: I'd love to see them.

JP: Oh, that's wonderful! Just knowing that you are interested in reading them would bring forth an even greater outpouring of precious memories from this "Greatest Generation." Thank you so much and thank you for your thoughtful responses to our questions.

TB: My pleasure.