Voices of the 60's

by Neil Pond
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Television viewers know Tom Brokaw as an award-winning, groundbreaking network journalist who anchored NBC Nightly News for 21 years and received some of the industry’s loftiest accolades for his work in front of the camera.

His most recent project, however, adds to his growing list of achievements in another field entirely—as a best-selling author.

Brokaw’s latest book, Boom! (Random House, 665 pages, $28.95) looks at one of America’s most turbulent—and significant—periods, the ’60s.

“I lived through the ’60s as a father, a husband and a citizen,” he says. “I was in my mid- to late-20s during that time, so it had a big impact on my professional and personal life. I’ve always been intrigued by how we got through it, survived it and what we learned from it. I wanted to go back and see what other people thought.”

For Boom!, subtitled “Voices of the Sixties,” Brokaw, 68, re-examines the era by re-connecting with dozens of individuals who lived it, shaped it and were in turn shaped by it. His list of subjects—among them actor Warren Beatty, Sen. Hillary Clinton, singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, Gen. Colin Powell, feminist icon Gloria Steinem and Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner—includes musicians, politicians, social activists, actors, military veterans and former hawks, doves and hippies whose first-hand perspectives illuminate the cultural, political and social importance of the times.

“When you try to look at the ’60s in some kind of objective fashion,” Brokaw says, “most people conjure up an image of a flower child dancing in Golden Gate Park with gossamer scarves and the soundtrack of Bob Dylan in the background, and somebody smoking a big joint off to the side. But the ’60s were also about people who raised their hands and went to Viet Nam. And people who put on hard hats and carried lunch boxes to construction jobs every day. And people who didn’t get to go to college. And people who didn’t do any of that.

Boom! is Brokaw’s fifth book, following his critically acclaimed look at the men and women who lived during World War II, The Greatest Generation; its follow-up, The Greatest Generation Speaks; An Album of Memories; and A Long Way From Home, about growing up in America in the 1950s.

As a Special Correspondent for NBC News, he continues to produce documentary programs and provide his reporting expertise to various news events for the network. His next project is hosting a television special on one of the towering figures of the ’60s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for the History Channel. Timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of his assassination, King will air April 6 and repeat April 12.

Researching, interviewing and writing about the ’60s for Boom!, he says, fortified what he already felt about the decade.

“It reinforced for me that we’re a pretty resilient society,” he says, “and that the country always moves forward when we find some accommodation with each other.”