Like Charles Kurault, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw is an outstanding broadcast journalist and a fine writer. In this stunning book, he goes out into America, to tell the story of America's citizen heroes and heroines, men and women whose values, and everyday lives of honor, courage, perseverance, and vision, created the America we know.
The greatest generation learned resourcefulness in adversity early -- the Depression -- and then they went to war against two of the greatest military machines ever created. They won the war, they saved their enemies (through the Marshall Plan, etc.), and then they came home to re-create America -- its communities, roads, businesses, government, arts, and sciences. And they never complained, and they never told their stories. Brokaw believes this is because in a deep sense they didn't think that what they were doing was that special, because everyone else was doing it too.
In this book you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the middle of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his home town. You'll hear George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of his assignments was to read the mail of the enlisted men under him, to be sure no sensitive military information would be compromised. And so, Bush says, "I learned about life".
