Tom Brokaw: Boom! Voices Of The Sixties

By Noel Murray | January 10, 2008 | 8:42am

Aux Features Books

Perhaps realizing that World War II
vets aren't the only ones who buy books, former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw has
turned his loving gaze away from those vets (the subject of his books The
Greatest Generation
and The Greatest Generation Speaks) to focus a steelier glare on their ungrateful offspring. The
result is Boom! Voices Of The Sixties—Personal Reflections On The '60s
And Today, a
once-over-lightly look at the ideals of the baby boomers, and what became of
the cultural leaders who espoused them. Brokaw makes it clear from the outset
that he isn't a boomer himself. Born in 1940, he was part of that not-quite
generation of young people who kept their hair short, got jobs, and raised
families while the incoming freshmen at their alma maters smoked dope and
burned their draft cards. And it's clear that Brokaw still bears some grudges. Boom! contains some scattered
autobiographical interjections in which the veteran journalist—objective
to a fault—recalls how he felt as anti-war activists shut down campuses
and rock stars started throwing around the f-word. In typically measured tones,
he suggests they all went too far.

The problem with Boom! is that it doesn't go far enough.
Brokaw threads a compelling thesis throughout the book's brief profiles of the
era's media darlings: he and many of his interviewees contend that the excesses
of the '60s, coupled with the internal squabbles of emerging social movements,
effectively crippled the political efficacy of liberals in the U.S. from 1968
to now. And he argues that the same reaction-to-the-reactionaries phenomenon is
now eroding the broad public support for conservatism. The days when hard-right
Republicans could run as the everyman answer to the loony tax-and-spend left
fade further into the twilight every time a candidate says that he doesn't
believe in evolution, but he does support costly wars sponsored by think tanks.

And yet Brokaw doesn't really
confront these issues head-on. Rather, Boom! nibbles around the edges, offering
readable but shallow recapitulations of well-documented cultural battles, in
the words of those who waged them: Julian Bond, Gloria Steinem, Jann Wenner,
John McCain, Karl Rove, Kris Kristofferson, and the like. Brokaw alludes to the
failings in his subjects' personal lives, from drugs to infidelity, but he's
too cautious to confront these men and women directly, or to bluntly assert
that the boomers screwed up a golden opportunity through their own immaturity
and lack of impulse control. After all, he does still want their money.

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