Role Models

By R.Z. Sheppard

Anchors aweigh! A few weeks ago it was ABC's Peter Jennings with The Century, a stately, pre-millennium cruise through the past 100 years. This week NBC's Tom Brokaw launches The Greatest Generation (Random House; 390 pages; $24.95), an effusive tribute to the men and women who, tempered by the Depression and World War II, went on to build the prosperous society that their children and grandchildren take for granted.

Brokaw, 58, begins his story close to home, honoring his father Anthony ("Red") Brokaw, who was posted to an Army ordnance depot in Igloo, S.D. Moving farther afield, he profiles Bob Bush, a Washington State businessman who won a Congressional Medal of Honor for his service as a Navy medic on Okinawa. Bush's modesty is typical of many ordinary men who selflessly threw themselves into the most dangerous places.

On balance, though, Brokaw's parade is a little heavy on big-shot veterans like former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and Washington lawyer Lloyd Cutler. They tend to upstage the little-known people who are the subjects of Brokaw's strongest feelings. Still, who would not want to know that Art Buchwald was a bumbling Marine who failed to get a laugh when he dropped a bomb he was loading onto a Corsair? Or that 6-ft. 2-in. Julia Child served with the OSS in India after the WAVES rejected her because she was too tall?

If not the greatest, all Brokaw's heroes--tall and short, famous and obscure--are part of the great generation that turned the old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" into a blessing.

--By R.Z. Sheppard