Tom Brokaw

by The Greatest Generation

  Despite his lovably rumpled appearance, Buchwald also maintains certain habits he learned at Parris Island. He keeps his personal effects neatly arranged, just as he did in his footlocker during basic training. His shoes are always shined to a high gloss. He always has an extra pair of socks, just as the Marines taught him.

  During the Vietnam War, he was caught between conflicting emotions. He was against the war, yet when the Marine Corps asked him to record some radio commercials for their recruiting efforts he happily complied. He was flattered, in fact; after all, he was a Marine. He realized that his old loyalties and his current thinking were in conflict only when friends began to point out the inconsistencies of his behavior. He stopped recording the commercials.

  Buchwald has written about his Marine Corps experience so often that fellow leathernecks often approach him to compare notes, inevitably saying, “You think your drill instructor was tough. Mine was the toughest in the Corps.” Buchwald never concedes. He knows Pete Bonardi was the toughest.

  In 1965, Life magazine asked Buchwald to return to Parris Island for a week of basic training, to recall the old days. He agreed, if he could take along his old drill instructor, Pete Bonardi.

  He found Bonardi working as a security guard at the World’s Fair in New York and arranged for him to get the time off work. Bonardi remembered Buchwald from basic training, saying, “I was sure you’d get killed,” adding warmly, “You were a real shitbird.”

  In his book, Buchwald recalls that they had a nostalgic week at Parris Island and that nothing much had changed. He may have been famous, but he was still a klutz. On the obstacle course, Bonardi was still yelling things like “Twenty-five years ago I would have hung your testicles from that tree.” At the end of the week, they shook hands and parted friends.

  A quarter century later, Buchwald received a call from a mutual friend telling him Bonardi was gravely ill with cancer. Buchwald telephoned his old drill instructor, whose voice was weak as he told Buchwald he didn’t think he could make this obstacle course.

  In Leaving Home, Buchwald describes taking a photo from their Life layout and sending it to Bonardi with the inscription “To Pete Bonardi, who made a man out of me. I’ll never forget you.” Bonardi’s wife later told Buchwald that the old D.I. had put the picture up in his hospital room so everyone could read it.

  Bonardi also had one final request. That autographed picture from the shitbird, the screw-up Marine he was sure would be killed, little Artie, the guy he called “Brooklyn” as he tried to make a leatherneck out of him? Corporal Bonardi, the toughest guy Buchwald ever met, asked that the picture be placed in his casket when he was buried.

  I confess that I weep almost every time I read that account, for it so encapsulates the bonds within that generation that last a lifetime. For all of their differences, Art Buchwald and Pete Bonardi were joined in a noble cause and an elite corps, each in his own way enriching the life of the other. Their common ground went well beyond the obstacle course at Parris Island.

  ANDY ROONEY

  “For the first time I knew that any peace is not better than any war.”

  ANDY ROONEY, the resident curmudgeon of 60 Minutes, might have difficulty with the sweep of my conclusion. Indeed, he’s challenged my premise that his was the greatest generation any society could hope to produce. He believes the character of the current generation is just as strong; it’s just that his generation had a Depression, World War II, and a Cold War against which to test their character. When I counter that his generation didn’t fumble those historic challenges, that they prevailed, often against great odds, and moved quietly to the next challenge, he listens but I am not persuaded I’ve won him over.

  I wanted to talk to Rooney because his splendid book My War is a compelling personal account of his odyssey from a privileged background in Albany, New York, through a phase of pacificism as a student at Colgate, to his years as an adventurous sergeant working as a correspondent for the Army’s newspaper Stars and Stripes. Beyond Rooney’s book, one of the lasting impressions I have of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day is Rooney’s reporting on the CBS Morning News. He had covered Normandy for Stars and Stripes, and a half century later he was back in Normandy, conveying to CBS viewers what it had been like during that muddy June in 1944. As he led the camera through the hedgerows where the fighting had been so fierce, he seemed to be walking and talking ever faster, trying to stay ahead of his emotions. He talked about the young American troops—just boys, really—who had such a terrible time there, about how so many died and how the fighting was at close quarters.

  Andy Rooney, wartime portrait

  Rooney was drafted out of college at Colgate, where he played football and wrestled some after a comfortable upbringing and a private prep school education in Albany. His disdain for convention and authority, now so familiar to viewers of 60 Minutes, was already well established by the time he arrived at basic training with an infantry outfit.

  Regimentation was not his favorite way of life. Besides, during college he had had an infatuation with journalism, so he applied to become a reporter with Stars and Stripes. This was the Army’s enterprising newspaper that kept troops in the field informed and entertained with dispatches from the front lines, gossip, and Bill Mauldin’s incomparable cartoons of the lives of the dogfaces, the combat infantrymen.

  Rooney was a daring and resourceful young reporter, writing first about the exploits of the crews of the 8th Air Force flying B-17s and B-24s in bombing raids out of England, across the Channel, and into the heart of enemy territory. When he went on one of the raids for a firsthand account, his plane was shot up and Rooney helped save the life of a crew member. This incident got him a page 1 byline in Stars and Stripes and a glowing testimonial in his hometown newspaper, The Albany Times Union.

  He went ashore at Normandy shortly after the invasion and stayed close to the advancing American infantry and armored units as they fought their way from hedgerow to hedgerow and village to village. He went into Paris with French forces the day the City of Light was liberated, finding himself beside Ernest Hemingway at one point as the remaining German forces tried to slow the entry with artillery fire.

  For Rooney, August 25, 1944, the day Paris was liberated, “was the most dramatic I’d ever lived through.” When he returns to Paris even now, he rents a car and drives the same triumphal route. Rooney, who is not given to emotional gestures, says simply, “It thrills me still.”

  He crossed the Rhine with the first American troops and unwittingly took a prisoner of war when a hapless German soldier insisted on surrendering. He still has the German’s pistol. He went to Buchenwald to see for himself what had been only rumors as the Americans advanced across Europe. When he arrived, he was stunned by what he encountered, and embarrassed. “I was ashamed of myself for ever having considered refusing to serve in the Army,” he wrote. “For the first time I knew that any peace is not better than any war.”

  All the while, he was working alongside some of the most gifted names in journalism: Ernie Pyle, the peerless war correspondent who was later killed in the Pacific, the legendary Homer Bigart of The New York Times, and Edward R. Murrow, the godfather of broadcast journalism. One of his colleagues became a lifelong friend and a coworker at CBS News: Walter Cronkite, at the time a correspondent for United Press. As Rooney says now, “It was a three-year graduate course in journalism I couldn’t have duplicated in twenty years without the war.”

  As you might expect, Rooney is not an emotional romantic about the war and what came later. He regularly gets in trouble with veterans of armored units for his caustic comments about the place of tanks in the war. He took a lot of flak from old bombardiers when he wrote that their job didn’t require much skill. He said they just dropped the bombs when they were told to and often they missed their targets.

  Rooney is willing to take on the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, pointing out that most veterans belong to neither organization. He says t
he Legion and the VFW expect too much. In Rooney’s view, the only veterans deserving of special treatment are those who were disabled or seriously wounded.

  He figures about 90 percent of the men in uniform didn’t get anywhere near the fighting, so he doesn’t believe the country owes them anything extra. “I’m not sure I even like the word veteran,” he says.

  That is not to say that Rooney is cold-hearted about the war and the men who fought on the front line or in the cockpits of the B-17s and B-24s on their daring and dangerous bombing raids. He relishes his own adventures across the European battlefields and, briefly, in India and China when it appeared the war would go on longer there. Obviously, Rooney’s wartime experience served him well once he returned home and turned to writing for a living.

  Oram “Bud” Hutton, Charles Kiley, Andy Rooney

  His wartime experiences nurtured his youthful skepticism and disdain for authority, two of the refreshing characteristics of the Rooney voice on 60 Minutes and in his newspaper column. He says now he believes the U.S. Army was successful in part because officers and men weren’t afraid to question authority. “They often improvised, they came up with their own plan, they reacted to what was happening in the field instead of just blindly following orders like the Germans. That’s one of the reasons the Germans lost.”

  Nonetheless, despite his challenges to the premise of this book and his inherent resistance to any thought on the sunny side of skepticism, I think Sergeant Rooney carries more of the war with him than he lets us know. He told me that when he returns to France now he always goes to Normandy, to drive the back roads between the hedgerows, taking a different route each time, remembering when he was there a long time ago.

  In My War, Rooney describes how he has been to Omaha Beach and the nearby cemetery five times. “On each visit I’ve wept,” he writes. “It’s almost impossible to keep back the tears as you look across the rows of crosses and think of the boys under them who died that day. Even if you didn’t know anyone who died, the heart knows something the brain does not—and you weep.”

  Exactly.

  JULIA CHILD

  “I didn’t have anything but an eagerness to help.”

  ANOTHER FAMILIAR FIGURE on American television had the course of her life changed by World War II. More than anyone else, Julia Child brought the idea of French cuisine onto the American table through her television shows and her popular cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Anyone who has seen her on television, all six-foot-two of her, a formidable and commanding figure, may be surprised to learn that during the war she was a sort of spy. She worked for the Office of Strategic Services—the OSS—the precursor to the CIA.

  It was an unlikely turn in the life of this product of a comfortable home in Pasadena, California, who after graduating from Smith College in 1934 worked in New York as an advertising copywriter. When the war started, she went to Washington and tried to enlist in the WAVES, the women’s branch of the Navy, but she was rejected because of her height. How that could have affected the duties of a WAVE is not clear.

  She was so eager to serve that she signed up as a clerk typist, one of an army of women who came to the capital from across America to help with the daily mountains of paperwork generated by the war in those precomputer days. Child hated the job. It was drudgery. “All I did was type little white cards,” she says. “Finally, through some friends, I managed to get into the OSS.”

  She quickly became a senior clerk, supervising forty people, securing office equipment, hiring other clerks, setting up office financial systems and security. This was a big step for her: “I had no training for anything whatsoever. In the mid-thirties a woman was expected to become a teacher or a housewife, take care of the children, and do the laundry. I didn’t have anything but an eagerness to help.”

  Julia Child, wartime

  Julia Child

  She also had ambition. She’d been a clerk about a year and a half when she heard the OSS was going to send people to the Far East. As she recalls, “I knew that someday I would get to Paris and Europe, but not to the Far East.” She signed up and, with a dozen other women from the home office, headed for the unknown in Asia.

  They sailed on a troopship for India. Child says, “The trip was quite jolly. There were not very many women and lots of boys.” They arrived in Bombay just as another ship caught fire and drifted into a nearby ammunition ship, causing a tremendous explosion. Child was a long way from typing little white cards in a Washington office.

  As it did for so many women, the war liberated Julia Child. Before going to work for the OSS and setting off for exotic locations, she had no plans for her life. “I wasn’t thinking in career terms,” she says. “There weren’t many careers to have. There wasn’t anything really open.”

  If there had been no war, what would have become of Julia Child?

  She’s in her late eighties now, but she hasn’t lost her sense of the plain thought. She answers, “Who knows? I might have ended up an alcoholic, since there wasn’t anything to do.”

  Gertrude B. Elion and George Hitchings, Tuckahoe, New York, 1948

  GERTRUDE BELLE “TRUDY” ELION

  “She’s improved the human condition. . . . Trudy was a role model for women but she was a role model for men, too.”

  THE MANPOWER DEMANDS of the war effort created opportunities for women that were unexpected. For example, America’s scientific community, which was almost exclusively a male domain, was desperate for qualified people of either gender once the shooting got under way. Gertrude Belle “Trudy” Elion was a major beneficiary and, in the end, so were the rest of us.

  She had graduated from high school at fifteen and college at nineteen, summa cum laude, with a major in chemistry. She had a goal: the death of her grandfather made her determined to find a cure for cancer. She went on to earn a master’s degree and set out to find laboratory work. It was a discouraging process. “They told me,” she said, “they didn’t want a woman in the lab. They said, ‘We think it would be a distraction.’ ”

  Trudy refused to give up, but to earn a living she would have to teach high school chemistry. There were no other jobs for a woman with her credentials. Then came Pearl Harbor, and America was at war. More than a million men would go into uniform immediately, including many from the scientific laboratories of the country.

  Trudy started getting calls from panicked personnel officers looking for someone with her credentials. Her first job was with the big supermarket chain A&P as a quality-control officer. “I tested the acidity of the pickles, the mold in the frozen strawberries; I checked the color of the egg yolk going into the mayonnaise. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind but it was a step in the right direction.”

  She got out of the egg yolk business and into what she wanted when Johnson & Johnson opened a small research laboratory. That lab didn’t survive, but it did give Trudy the opening she’d been waiting for: she was hired as a research assistant for the distinguished scientist Dr. George Hitchings at Burroughs Wellcome, the giant pharmaceutical company.

  At the time Elion was hired, Hitchings was Burroughs Well-come’s lone biochemist, and he said later that even though Trudy didn’t have a PhD she was far and away the most knowledgeable and intelligent of the prospects. She was hired for fifty dollars a week. It was one of the most fortuitous pairings in the history of modern medical research.

  Hitchings and Elion began a forty-year collaboration that was at once astonishingly prolific and inventive. Before he died a few years ago, Hitchings told the Los Angeles Times, “When we started, it was all trial and error. You’d develop a compound and then take some kind of target—usually a mouse—plug it in, and see what it did or didn’t do.” Hitchings and Elion began to rewrite the how-to manual for medical research.

  Simply put, they developed a scientific rational approach to the problem of understanding how a disease affects the human body. They started with how cells reproduce in their various stages. The differences i
n what is called nucleic acid metabolism led Hitchings and Elion to develop a series of drugs that blocked the growth and reproduction of cancerous cells and other harmful organisms, without destroying the normal human cells. It is difficult to overstate the lasting impact of their new approach in medical research. It is at the heart of cancer and antiviral research today.

  Over the years, they developed drugs that were effective in fighting childhood leukemia, the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, gout, and kidney stones. Trudy’s research in the antiviral area also led to the development of the most effective treatment for herpesvirus infections. So the range of her work with Dr. Hitchings was impressive—from life-threatening diseases to socially embarrassing and physically painful cold sores. Moreover, their approach led to the development of the most effective early AIDS treatment, the drug AZT (azidothymidine).

  As their joint projects broke through one scientific barrier after another they remained laboratory partners in every sense of the phrase. They shared credit equally, and they were jointly dedicated to the idea of work, work, work.

  They stayed on at Burroughs Wellcome when it moved from New York to the Research Triangle in North Carolina outside of Raleigh–Durham in 1970. It was later bought by the British pharmaceutical giant, Glaxo. By then they were established stars and had a research staff of fifteen hundred. Trudy Elion was a department head and a mentor to a new generation of scientists, including many women.

  Karen Brion, who now heads the department of virology at Glaxo Wellcome, says, “I learned so much from her because she was a leader—an excellent scientific mentor, and not just a role model for women. In one sense Trudy is atypical because she didn’t marry or have a family, but she made such a difference just by being a woman and showing she could assume the level of responsibility, be an effective manager and scientific leader, and have the credibility she does in the scientific world.”