A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of JFK's Presidency (2011 Kennedy Library Forum)

[Applause] good evening I'm Jill Conway vice-president of the board of the John F Kennedy Library Foundation and on behalf of the foundation my foundation colleagues and the library director Tom Putnam I'd like to thank you all for coming this evening to join in our celebration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's inauguration I'd like also to express particular thanks to the friends and institutions that make these forums possible Bank of America the lead sponsor of the Kennedy Library forum series Boston capital the Lowell Institute Raytheon and the Boston foundation along with our media sponsors the Boston Globe WBUR and NECN this forum will be broadcast in on WBUR and WGBH forum network today is a special day for us in this institution 50 years ago John F Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States there are many events in Boston Cambridge in Washington commemorating this anniversary today and I'm proud to represent the Kennedy Library in introducing our celebration of this historic day what better person to discuss and describe for us the shape and influence of the decade of the 1960's as well as our culture today then the veteran broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw and he will be helping us all understand JFK's influence on all those areas of our world mr. Brokaw was the anchor the managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and from 1983 until his retirement in December 2004 he covered every major story of the 1960s and has been on the scene ever since bringing us the most important news stories of our generation today his special correspondent for NBC News producing long-form documentaries and providing expertise during the election coverage in breaking news events he has received far too many awards to list them all but some include the Edward our moral Lifetime Achievement Award the Emmy Award for lifetime achievement a dozen Emmys two DuPont's and Peabody's he was inducted as a fellow into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the US Army has earned him with their highest award the George Catlett Marshall middle first ever to a journalist we're also very happy indeed to have Jane Pauley as a moderator this evening Jane Pauley was the co-host of The Today Show from 1976 to 1989 which catapulted to first place among the morning shows under her reign her first partner sharing the today desk by the way was Tom Brokaw after resigning from the Today Show she began a successful NBC weekly magazine series real life with Jane Pauley later renamed Dateline and was its host for over a decade in 2004 she had her own daytime program the Jane Pauley show she also substituted for Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News currently she's the host of your life calling a joint project with NBC and the AARP featuring stories about older Americans reinventing themselves she's been recognized with an Emmy and an American woman in radio and television award her memoir skywriting a life out of the blue was the New York Times best seller and is on sale in our museum store along with mr. broken spokes one piece of housekeeping due to the impending snow storm mr. Brokaw has to catch a plane this evening we will be talking taking written questions from the audience from 6:15 to 6:30 and then we'll conclude at that time and ask that you all in the audience remain in your seats while mr. Brokaw is escorted to his car please join me in welcoming to the stage two wonderful guests Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley back together again Jill thank you so much it is such an honor to be with you on this auspicious occasion of the little girl I used to be can't quite believe I'm included nor can I quite believe that Tom Brokaw's little sister who is me is here to talk about such important events Tom and I are our dear dear old friends Tom remembers everything my memoir could have been called I remember nothing but nor Efrain thought of it first Tom not only remembers everything he he was always paying attention so he is the appropriate person to be here Tom you are you are a great citizen you are a great journalist you are a sage and a and a historian so I think we should endeavour to interweave all of those threads into this conversation and in asking a question we're raising a topic we may hear from the citizen the sage the historian or the journalist we will find out first of all were you a voting age in the 1960 election cycle actually I was not yet because of those age I'd be 21 I was 20 and I remember a feeling denied in a way I've debated on behalf of 18 year olds getting the vote when I was in high school and doing what you did at Boise State Girls State I was a political junkie and I was very interested in that campaign because what President Kennedy represented to my generation was what I saw was a fresh beginning that it was when I look back on it now I think it was the invention of modern that campaign because he said the torch was passed to a new generation it was the generation that came out of the war and came back determined to take charge of this country and shape it in a way that reflected their own experiences and then you had the youthful dynamism of not only the candidate but his family and all of his friends as well and if you lived where I did in the working-class communities not on the great plains of America that was something to behold we seldom have seen that kind of glamour and romantic figures who would go sailing and skiing these were all alien sports to us in those days where we live now the world has changed a lot of people who do that kind of thing but the Kennedys burst on the screen full-blown I was first aware of them when Bobby was a council the labor racketeering committee and I would hear that distinctive New England clatter and chatter of his of his patois and like wow where did that come from you know we talked like Fargo the movie this is a whole lot of this this did get my attention you talk like all the anchors cuz all the anchors come from the Midwest like me you were not an ordinary boy you did not have an ordinary childhood growing up on on the plains and you've made the point that family was very different from from yours and yet in notes you gave me you said that the Kennedys were the family you wished would adopt you I did I have a confession to make 1960 was a very exciting and important milestone for America it was one of the worst years of my life I had come out of high school as Jane knows the story as the whiz kid great expectations of from everyone and I went seriously off the rails the first two years of college and by the fall of 1960 I had actually dropped out of college and was I guess I was trying to find my way the professor who encouraged me to do that was a legendary political science chair at the University of South Dakota who had turned out governors and rode scholars and senators and federal judges and I was supposed to be his next best prospect and he said I think he better go out and get all the wine women and song out of here so he and then come back here when you can do with some good it did give me the opportunity because I have a lot of time on my hands to watch this campaign in a way and I it was a life-changing experience for me and I'll jump to the conclusion of that on election night you'll remember how long that election night went on until 8 o'clock in the morning I sent in my parents whom I was kind of in between jobs at the time trying to think what I was going to do and watched all night long the coverage by then I was already working at a television station of part-time as a newsman and doing announcing duties and I had been a writer for the newspapers around the area and I watched this from 8 o'clock at night simple time until 8 o'clock in the morning and at the end of that 12-hour period I thought that's what I want to do with my life I want to be a political correspondent and I had already figured out I may get to cover Teddy as the president because I thought there would be a kind of line of succession that first John Kennedy would be elected and then probably Bobby or Bobby would manage Teddy's campaign I can get the one Teddy's the President of the United States and it did get me back on track I was back in school the next semester I had repaired my academic record and as Janos I more importantly repaired my relationship with my wife Meredith who had written me off and sent me on my way and and one of the few lapses of judgment she decided to take me back and I I must say that uh so the beginning of the Kennedy administration was the beginning for me of my own real life as well Thomas well-known at NBC over the years is Duncan the Wonder horse because he could work from 8 o'clock at night and 8:00 in the morning and I didn't know that you had already had some practice at that as a younger man senator Humphrey carried South Dakota in the primary and Nixon carried South Dakota in the general election why so cold well it's South Dakota is a an odd state politically it switches back and forth from populist Democrats John Kennedy's very good friend George McGovern South Dakota was the senator from there and he lost that election he became the director of food for peace but later was elected senator is settled by a lot of Eastern Europeans and Central European Germans and Norwegians who came over with socialist inclinations but they live in scattered rural communities they're very conservative they were very self-reliant and I must say they're very Protestant for the most part and they were very skeptical of the Catholicism of John Kennedy and also the wealth there was a great I think suspicion about electing a somebody as young be somebody who is Catholic and see somebody who is so rich how can he know a lot of us I was one of the few kind of out writers and our area going around saying oh my god was the most exciting thing I've ever seen the idea that we could have somebody like John Kennedy as president my family because of their experiences in the depression which would then really very very trying for them they lost my mother's family lost the farm and and it was very little hope my dad came from extremely difficult circumstances they were lifelong Democrats they worshiped it's a feat of FDR so there was no question in their minds they were not going to vote for Nixon there but they I remember mothers saying to me and she was a keen student of American politics I don't know this very young man that family the way she suggested it seems to have a sense of the tile work and that that probably blood she voted for Kennedy and and then of course like so many others she was quickly and raptured by what was going on my parents never knowingly voted for a Democrat in their lives my father ended vertically got me my first job out of college working for the Democrats but that's another story considering the state of the economy at the time of that election unemployment in the last year of the Eisenhower presidency was 7% whisper AHA the gross domestic product the growth in the last year of his presidency was 1% it does make you wonder why it was so hard for a Democrat to win presidency under those economic circumstances well you know it is reflective and reminds me of the situation that another young president and the not-too-distant past inherited he didn't President Obama didn't have the Cold War this president did John Kennedy and the Cold War at that point was at swords point and Castro had taken over Cuba not long before that and great alarms about what they meant and Khrushchev was this very canny very roguish peasant with a keen intellect and we couldn't quite tell what he had in mind and then the domestic economy was flat and was on a very uncertain path then there was other something else that was going on it was quite remarkable that turned out to be one of the great transformative events of our lifetime of American history there was a young african-american as we called him in those days Negro president in the South who was beginning to create a movement based on the nonviolent tenants of Mahatma Gandhi and he was one of the most eloquent citizens that any of us had ever heard and he had a great great moral claws that he was pursuing and there was already the manifestations of the violence that later came to to find that moreover it was something else that was unique this is playing out on television for the first time all of us the campaign the Cold War what was going on in the economy John Kennedy being inaugurated on television and so all of America was knit together in a way that it had not been before wherever you live in America the most remote reaches you could see what was going on in the south you could see the excitement and the energy that the new president brought to Washington DC you could hear about what was going on with the strike in the steel industry for example and what was what was happening there so citizenry took on a new form people were much closer to the issues and the problems of the day than they had ever been and that - I think defined was the beginning of the modern age in which were now living if you introduced the civil rights and dr. Martin Luther King on the way over here I mentioned it Tom that having no brothers and the cousin who was a 4f and no boyfriend Vietnam was not the formative issue for me the civil rights was my living room war and that probably was the formative for me but in the in the early 60s there seems to have been oh there was a paradox of President Kennedy wanted to address the issue of civil rights but legislatively did not want to it couldn't surrender the reality that to be aggressive in civil rights might threaten a political agenda he was right about that but was he right well I would but I thought about both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy is that that is an area which you saw enormous growth and what you saw was the raised consciousness that they had about what was going on in the south you know most people in this country who were not people of color deliberately or otherwise were oblivious to the indignities and the violations of the fundamental rights of black citizens I mean I grew up in the industrial nor or in the agricultural north and then in the industrial north I worked in Omaha for example my first job Omaha has a very significant black population while people are not aware of that it had a big race riot in 1964 or 65 later there were no Negro clerks downtown in any of the department stores or at the bank or any place where you did business in the center of the city and certainly in the suburbs where we lived they were confined to their neighborhoods I had a friend who was a black Parks Recreation Director for the City of Omaha we've got to be thousand I always had this great curiosity about racing the effect on people and I wanted to talk to them about what the community was like and he said you wouldn't be comfortable going to one of my places I wouldn't be comfortable going to one of your places let's ride around so we did one night in Omaha and he said what we don't understand here is why the local television station spends so much time on what's going on in the south and we have the same thing going on in our and that to me was a revelation but I couldn't move my station I went in and argued with my boss about covering more about what was going on and then I moved to the south President Kennedy had so many issues on his agenda obviously and also the most powerful members of his party in the Congress were Southern Democrats and so the Kennedys were nothing if not pragmatic when they looked at an issue politically and they were slow to ramp up they had Harris Wofford and and other people pushing him harder Arthur Schlesinger and finally the moral weight of what was going on and the outrageous behavior of the southern governors and the police and the state authorities pushed them over the edge John Kennedy's call to Coretta King when dr. King was in the room am Jill had a big impact on the campaign Andrew Young once told me you know Kennedy we didn't we didn't know from the Kennedys we knew about Nelson Rockefeller he was our friend Nelson Rockefeller had been a great patron to the civil rights movement early on I when I was living in Atlanta 1965 he came down and gave a new organ to the ebony xur Baptist Church and for dr. King and for Andrew Young and for a lot of those lieutenants their big hero in the north from a dynastic family was Nelson Rockefeller they were skeptical about the Kennedys but then the Kennedy administration put the full force of law and the American military behind the enforcement of the admission of james Meredith and the katzenback who I think was another great heroes of the time Bobby Kennedy Justice Department stood in the schoolhouse door and confronted George Wallace and the marshals were mobilized in Mississippi and President was forced to call out 101st airborne to make sure that a citizen of Mississippi who've been an Air Force veteran could enroll in that school so it was a it was a very vibrant and volatile time and both the president and his Attorney General I know based on conversations with people close to him at the time of what historians have been able to learn were nervous about the political impact of it on their other agenda but finally they got it and then I knew no greater champion later of civil rights and Bobby that is of all the national politicians I've covered I've never seen as much growth and one of them as I did and Bobby Kennedy from the time of his brother's assassination and when he was murdered in 1968 and loving I'm from Indianapolis and I was in Indianapolis when dr. King was assassinated and Bobby gave one of the most important speeches of the 20th for 20th century extemporaneously speaking of of great speeches asked not I'd like to just read a section from that speech and just length let it hang in the ether of the 21st century the new frontier I speak of is not a set of promises it is a set of challenges it sums up not what I intend to offer the American people but what I intend to ask of them can you imagine an American politician saying I'm not offering you something I'm asking you and I have actually said to others I always thought that was an important part of the president obviously those rings those words will bring in the minds of not only this generation but history that's not what your country can do for you I wear every John Kennedy appeared during his campaigns he would invoke that sentiment and that charge and I actually in a casual conversation with the president that we now have I reminded him that wherever President Kennedy went as a campaigner and as a president he said in effect I need your help I can't do this on my own a snot is another way of stating that and we've lost that in American life now I have been using it recently and lectures and in moderating the base when I have not to California in the fall to moderate the final Jerry Brown Meg Whitman debate they'd been through a lot of the issues so I opened the debate by reminding them it was the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of John Kennedy ask not and I said look into the camera and say to the citizens of California ask them what they should be doing on behalf of their estate not what the state can do for them and the two candidates were flummox because they had not been thinking in that fashion and we need to reignite it seems to me that spirit people are willing to be called to a higher station and there I think having gone through what we just did that they're waiting to be called of that but no one has been able to do it quite as well as John Kennedy did you describe the the inaugural festivities as your word electrifying and understandably but how quickly the speeches and the glamour and khalaq collides with the reality of of the very events that get in the way of a president's agenda Khrushchev Bay of Pigs wish you want do you want to talk about the summit in Vienna being bullied by Cousteau yeah that's fascinating because let him I got to Washington for a number of senior correspondents who had been on that trip and they were still talking about President Kennedy you know at the top of his agenda what are we gonna do about the Cold War what are we gonna do about the Russians here we are have two nuclear powers with missiles pointed at each other Castro taking power just off our shores this is a huge huge issue for not just for the administration for the country and for mankind for that matter so the 43 year old president war hero a product of Boston politics was a very strong family tradition of politics and can do take charge goes to Vienna and Khrushchev verbally beats him up for two days just batters him around and it has a huge effect on the president he's just he's furious with himself for not standing up to him and not being prepared for this I have later heard from other correspondents who were on the trip that President came out to get on Air Force One and one of the correspondence billboards later of ABC News took him off to the side he was supposed to be representing all the reporters but he kept us beat for himself he said how did it go and the president what canvas city it was brutal and Lawrence should have shared that with the roasting White House press but he didn't I can't understand why that's pretty good quote Scotty Rustin a lot of you will remember him he had a private session with him and the president just sat down he was exasperated and furious with himself and a lot of people trace the Soviet missiles going into Cuba as we trace it back to that meeting that Khrushchev took the measure of him and said this guy won't stand I can go do what I want to do and it was kind of welcome to the NFL mr. president what we're dealing with but by the same token the Cuban Missile Crisis it was probably about the President Kennedy's mind as well here is my chance it was not just that but it was also Berlin Khrushchev people forget this Khrushchev said we're taking Berlin back you're not going to have access to West Berlin through the Western corridors and that was another kind of volatile flashpoint moment and Kennedy said this won't stand you know and they sent general clay over there and they got him you know with this convoy on the road Lyndon Johnson was in and out of there as well it's a very good book by Richard Reeves about the Berlin Airlift that went on earlier but then he deals with what happened during the Kennedy years so we were at flashpoint in a number of areas around the world and it was beginning to bubble up at that time in Southeast Asia and Laos and because no one understood what China was up to and everyone was terrified about what the Soviet Union was up to you know they were had already launched Sputnik at that point the the I suppose what you would call the vacancy of their economic system was not yet as apparent as it later became during the years when Gorbachev was forced to give up on it so that was a difficult time I mean it was we weren't quite diving under our desk then that had happened earlier in the 50s but everybody was aware about what would happen in case we had a nuclear attack we had missiles all over the western United States including my home state of South Dakota and no Strategic Air Command I was working in Omaha that was where the bombers run what they called Looking Glass missions they were flying 24/7 so they could be in the air in case something happened they could launch the Counter Strike dr. Strangelove I was completely convinced that the Indianapolis 500 two and a half mile oval was a bull's-eye target yeah well you Indiana would think that yeah [Laughter] after the Cuban Missile Crisis President Kennedy's approval rating went up a lot it went up to 77 percent but what surprises me is that it had been 66 percent before it went up it you know his father as I remember Joe Kennedy said to him go tell the truth and he did he acknowledged what was going on after the Bay of Pigs and after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the country began to have new faith in him in his ability to stand up to these problems we're seeing that again in this country President Obama's ratings have just gone up in part in large part because of his demeanor during Tucson and the speech that he made that night and also his demonstrable willingness to reach across party lines and some of the vexing taxes attacking issues that we have in economics in this country the country you know I've been doing this a long time and the country is not as deeply divided as what I call the political prose would have you believe on the left on the right most of the countries out there just like the rest of us trying to make things work every day and they understand that to do that you kind of have to work with somebody who may be a little disagreeable al Simpson has this great line he said I've been in this town a long time you got to deal with guys that got bad breath and body odor he they got dandruff falling off their shoulders you have to just get beyond that learn the world and that's because that's where the country is yeah this is kind of jumping around I I don't have a linear mind I'm actually losing my mind I think but in the preparation for the Vienna summit with Khrushchev was the occasion that President Kennedy was the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris right and I I think it has to be observed that this glorious woman young woman he married was something far more significant in the world scene than than eye candy she she was a foreign policy advantage card he played very well but don't you yeah that was as close to royalty as we've had in my lifetime you know the Reagan's had their own form of it but Jack and Jackie when she arrived in Paris speaking perfect French and she was 31 or may in turn 32 at that point think about that how stunning that was this beautiful woman who didn't play overplay her role she it was pitch perfect and her kind of quiet confidence that she would demonstrate and then you would have the black-and-white photographs of the two of them and they could have been on the cover of any magazine and centerfold anytime politics is a lot of our symbols what does this say to the world this is this incredible vibrant accomplished couple what does it say about the United States I tell you what it says is that you know we have to remember this was right after World War two we had just been the leading country in the Allied effort to bring down Nazi Germany we were a colossus in our own way in the world because we had the only real economy that had survived Japan economy had been destroyed a lot of Central Europe had been destroyed the United States was this vibrant place all those veterans had come back from the war going to college and record numbers gave us new industry gave us new art gave us new science I got married in record numbers so you know the United States was on the move at that point and to see this couple at the head of the American parade could not have been more fitting in its own way the power of that symbolism is just hard to overstate when you go around the world and the French obviously when they were in Paris for somebody like Jack Kennedy and and Jackie Kennedy and then to have the president say I'm a man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris you know he completely captivated them that's often the case when you have an American president come in and the rest of the world is always looking to us what's going on in America who are these people and we do have this wonderful combination of pure politics and the theater of politics that we that we put together in a way that other countries are not able to and Jackie was dazzling and she was a hugely important part as well of this invention of modern America up until then we had first ladies who were very bright and committed Eleanor Roosevelt know this but they're always seen clutching their handbag to a sensible little hat sign you didn't see that anymore Oh [Music] history would go on and fill in some of the details that were not reported at the time about personal life and medical history and this may be heresy to ask of a journalist but do you think Tom that the world might have been better off and safer for none of that being brought out if what if none of the details of well the president's medical history for instance medical condition because I mean they're journalists would would require demand all and I'm asking was the world safer that we didn't know how ill our president was I imagine I doubt if he could have been elected if we know the full extent of his medical history you know it was more far-ranging than anyone appreciated at the time and when you read the accounts now it's pretty astonishing and it's especially astonishing that he looked as fit as he did as much as he did when he was in public and was that was testimony to how carefully they managed it all and then of course his other personal life which everyone is read about and knows about now and as it was part of the that out of sense hello that could could exist now you know I've talked to a lot of the reporters who were around in those days and I said how much did you know they said well we knew a little bit we didn't know it was that much ben bradlee claims he was one of his closest friends that he didn't know about it at all that could very well have been the case although I keep saying Benji are you sure so it was it was it was a different time they you know in the Roosevelt years he had his own companion and they ran practically a boarding house at the White House you know Harry Hopkins staying there and Churchill coming in saying for a couple of weeks it was just a different time and I would hope that we would get back to some measure of proportion in terms of our fascination and the importance of this I do think medical records are important I really do look you had a case in Massachusetts of Paul Tsongas was running for president doing very well and he was dying of cancer at the time and you know we didn't know the full extent of how ill he was so this is a this is a tricky issue but President Kennedy had a lot of issues medically a lot of it's quite so I was just rereading some of the histories again and it kind of takes your breath away the big picture were 50 years out we always say you know history will judge well here we are in well 50 years out the fact that you and I are here talking about him as this live where you coming from Indiana meet Kinsella that's pretty astonishing that means that the American Dream is really alive [Laughter] and we are too I I think that we are the product of our history I believe that strongly and I was reinforced obviously after I wrote The Greatest Generation and I am a product of the Kennedy era there was just no question about that I that helped imprint who I became not just as a journalist but it's a citizen of what my aspirations were professionally and also personally about how I wanted to live my life how you know be adventurous you know have high energy don't be afraid to take something on in a way because what you saw there and then also surround yourself with the best and brightest the best and brightest made some pretty critical errors later but at the time I was in college honest to god I knew sub cabinet secretaries because it was that exciting to know what was happening and who they were and where they came from I remember Roswell field Patrick and side Vance was Secretary of the army at the time we knew who all these people were and you were reading about him every night and watching the interplay that was going on and they came you know from our best institutions and they had demonstrated real skills in other areas and they were so young my oldest Tucker is over how the President Kennedy was when he was elected and I just find that astonishing where she's good-looking too she'd be a very good president but it's they were so young and they had such energy and most of all they saw such possibilities for the country why did they choose why did the the best and the brightest choose government service well it was part of that that generations obligation got to remember that the war formed a lot of who they were they'd all been in uniform or they had been involved in the war effort in some fashion and almost to a man and a woman they came out of that experience saying I am going to help take control of our destiny our national destiny and that means I'm going to go to Washington if necessary Nick katzenback was you know a rising star and he didn't know any of the Kennedys he'd been a prisoner of war in World War two and he was a at that point he was not teaching his in a law firm and he was on a sabbatical and Switzerland life was very good he came back here and and and crawled into the Kennedy administration he tried to find a way he fought his way into it that's been lost I say now to audiences where I go around the country you know it was a time not so long ago when the very best lawyers in New York would be happy to take a job as a number three guy in the Commerce Department or in the Justice Department because they felt it's their obligation they don't go there as a lifer they come back after a while this city has provided so much of that over the years you find it in the younger ranks of our generations but then they're not encouraged to stay or they find the environment when they get there to stola fiying to rigidly broken up into special interest or partisan lines in those days people who went to Washington and wanted to be a part of it and when the Sun went down they would get together Republicans and Democrats alike and have good times and that's that's been lost now they run home they gather around each other here's a perfect example just to to tell you what the environment is like two of them actually two years ago I was in Washington and two bright young men came up from Senator Kennedy I guess with four years ago senator Kennedy had sponsored something for the International Rescue Committee these two bright young guys can look for me typical young men who come from across the country to work in Washington and they said which broke off we want to ask you about the old days and I think that they came in 1996 one of them said to me I'm a Democrat he's a Republican he's my best friend we go to war at a Georgetown every night we argue politics his boss a congressman won't talk to my boss what was it always like that and I tried to walk him through that I was telling this story to my friend Bob Schieffer in CBS and Bob said you're not going to believe what I want to tell you he said I had a very prominent Republican leader of the United States Senate coming on Face the Nation and I had a Democrat as well and the Republican leaders staff called and said we don't want our guy to be in the same green room which is a little preparation when we have off to the side with the Democrat Bob said bill those are not the rules here you come here you play by our rules but that's what's going on down and it was not in those days they had very strong feelings that were there were strong partisan lines but they knew how to talk to each other I mean one of my very favorite memories of being a Washington correspondent is going to a State Department dinner one night when Nelson Rockefeller was the vice president and Hubert Humphrey had just come back to the Senate and they embraced like fraternity brothers who had won the Yale Harvard football game I mean they were just all over each other laughing and conferring notes and going on and asking about family members you don't see that any you don't see that anymore and during the Kennedy administration there were all these exchanges that were going on because they had Doug Dylan in there in their cabinet for example the prominent Republican and they knew how to talk across party lines in the early days when they were both in the House Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon had a pretty good relationship I find it very hard to imagine but they did Tom I've got to some questions in my hand and and some some of you have handwriting that is a lot like mine so we'll go with the one I can read the best first what's the molarity if any do you see between 1960 and 2011 with regard to the political climate well I have another young president and we have an entirely new set of challenges but they are in their own way transcended challenges so we're coming to a very very severe economic downturn we have global competition that is different now but it is profound the difference between when we came out of the Reagan administration recession in this one is in those days we didn't have China and India as powerful as they are now so you can make the match up Russia China India and what was going on beginning to happen in the Middle East you've got a deeply deeply divided Congress of the United States that's one of the differences those are kind of not just a polarization but if you will a calcification at the national level of these party lines and they just are stuck where they are and they're determined not to talk to each other in those days they still would work out each other and every president learns no matter how skillfully they have campaign or how bright they may be and what kind of scores the head of the Harvard Law School it's a toughest job in the world you know you hit the White House and think you're prepared for it and then 24/7 all these problems come in all day long every day and now there is an accelerant out there and it's the internet people are pushing them around constantly on the internet you know and commenting on and that's that's one of the differences yes um after President Kennedy's election he issued a call to service with the nation's youth they responded coming to Washington DC and things like the Peace Corps I will say my son Tom would have asked a similar question asking why why you think today is generation is so notwithstanding the anger on the right but basically the political passivity why then yes why now not well I've actually writing about this and I have a book coming out of the phone one of the pieces of it is that I am proposing in a fairly significant way the establishment of public service academies across America and postgraduate work but they don't have to be coming out of traditional institutions you can have postgraduate work for example in third world construction and development in terms of housing and and having making it a public-private partnership you have a Johnson & Johnson fellow in third-world medicine for example a caterpillar effective fellow in third-world agriculture of GE fellow and third-world water systems development and you work it out with the federal government and a sharing or some tax breaks both for the for the public servants and for the companies and then they come back after three years either from a domestic or an international assignment and they go to work for those companies for three years and they've got a whole skill set that they wouldn't have had otherwise there's a longing to do public service the apparatus is kind of run down at the hills at the moment and no one is asking enough of them just very briefly I'll tell you that I'm I have to leave tonight because I'm going off to Chicago and I don't trust New England snowstorms in the moon Bob Woodward and I have been pressing over to do more about military families in America and she has agreed to do a show we're going out to take that with mrs. Obama because public service in America now is pretty much confined in the in terms of magnitude to the working-class families who put on uniforms less than 1% of our country doing 100% of the fighting and nothing is after the rest of us and that's inappropriate and identify and I see today that Veterans Affairs was on the proposed chopping block I mean something's got to go but that did get my attention Tom what might be the one most memorable aspect of the JFK administration for you in the 60s and Beyond and the most lasting impact of his presidency well I think the the can-do spirit the sense of energy that he brought to the job and the idea that he would be a magnet for people all over the country to come to Washington who would be inspired by his call to service and that we can be more than the sum of our parts and that's always the secret to the Simurgh run Nathan and I was always struck by this dashing young man who could have been anything he want her to be in life given the power of the wealth of his family and he chose the public arena and I am still in all of that and I've covered Bobby and he didn't need to step back into the arena after he lost his brother in such a brutal fashion and it has such an impact on him but he did and he told the truth on the campaign trail at a very difficult time so this is something to remember and to come to this institution is frankly a privilege for someone in my generation why didn't you choose politics yourself yes yeah well I I think you had been governor oof I was governor personally them before like uh well I didn't want me to go Jane was also governor of girls say didn't yeah that was the casting pool for the Today Show I actually loved it and thought about it at one I think at a lot of my friends than when I was growing up in South Dakota thought that I would probably get into politics but I found in journalism and I think that journalism that isn't a hugely important component of public service in American public policy of shaping and I've worked very hard at trying to keep the right issues before the country and I'm at a stage now where people have more tolerance for what I have to say so I'm kind of an out writer and I find it very gratifying and I when I go around the country I've it's tough love I say to audiences 100 years from now they're going to look back and aren't going to judge this time not just by President Obama but by all of us did we step up were we the next Greatest Generation did we measure up to what we as baby boomers and those of us who are just a little bit older promise the world that we could do and if we take the full measure of where we are and where we need to go I think there's work to be done and so I have a certain amount of credibility based on my professional life I guess and I'm determined to spend it well you are as a conical or of your time are the greatest generation and then boom the story of my generation the baby boomers we we're still basically around we are going to be around for a long time we're never going away but demographers talk about something called the health health expectancy so we're not only going to live longer but we're going to live longer healthier why don't you why don't you charge my generation to attend those public service academies why don't we first build them and why don't we become the first graduates and why don't we spend the next 10 20 30 years of our lives answering the call to service that John Kennedy first issued when we were young well I don't put you into service academies but I do put you in public service because you have at this stage in your life real skills real wisdom and real experience and so I do think that that is a way to kickstart the baby boomer generation at the end and you're going to have to stay in touch with the next generation because there could be paying for everything that you're doing in Medicare and Social Security and everything else yeah I do think that that's that's a very important part of that and I am writing about that the next book my book is more or less somatically a letter to my grandchildren owes my eldest daughter jane doe's as an emergency room physician it takes no prisoners she said I don't want some sappy Hallmark card if I grant my daughters about you waiting through the snow to go to school and having to work and I thought I said no it won't be that cool but it is about the world that they're going to inherit and what the places of the various generations along the way who are the beneficiaries of all that has gone before well what was the last time you saw John Kennedy you never met him I saw him at Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha and I later David stopped there from time to time and I couldn't figure out why but then I realized that a employees in those days had to refuel more than you know so they were always stopping there and he came out to inspect the headquarters and it's not just the tricks in my memory but he was almost a mythical figure out there on a flat son of the Nebraska Prairie standing there this dashing guy he had a huge impact in wardrobe for people of my generation we got rid of all of our button-down shirts they even were drew's candidates came along afterwards very hard we get off an airplane and fix this tie the same way John Kennedy did for example and it was quite dazzling about three weeks later Bobby came and it was on a day when John George Wallace had said that President Kennedy should resign because of his policies on civil rights and I'm the only reporter out there and there was Bobby getting off a plane with those steel blue eyes and he looked quite exhausted I don't think he was real happy about having to deal with this 23 year old reporter out in Omaha and I asked and I know this first of all that is shirt with a little bit frayed I told me about that later and she said well we should write they also intelligent something horrible anyhow I said you know with all the bravado that I had today the governor of Alabama George Wallace mr. attorney general suggestions that your brother resigned the presidency because of the Civil Rights Act you have any reaction to that he looked at me for about 30 seconds and I got to be about a millimeter tall angle and then he said to me I have nothing to say about anything that the Alabama governor has to say and turn walked away I was simultaneously thrilled and terrified about what I just didn't he know who you were going to be do you know I'm looking at the clock you got to be on that plane one more the day of President Kennedy the one and only time he ever came to South Dakota was the happiest day of your life August 17th 1962 the ink and press in Dakotan of which there are still some copies around front page President Kennedy visits South Dakota for the first time turn to the society pages Tom Brokaw and Meredith all United and ceremonies Pryce Episcopal Church when I became a White House correspondent it came back to this library for the rededication of it and presided at it the White House press came as well and I have made reference to that and I said I would have invited the president for a reception but in fact I already knew about the habits of the White House press corps we couldn't afford to feed them or provide enough booze for them at the reception so we're unable to so that was our little connection to them and you know it's been a part of my life I've come to know all the members of the family over the years and have had some grand times in the last I walked in here tonight and realize the last time I was at the library was was down in the atrium of doing our coverage of the the Teddy procession from here in Boston down to Arlington that went on for a long long time but it was a labor of love and coming back and being reminded about the possibilities of this country in these institutions or I think is really important well you're a great spokesman for your in every generation time and and if you don't leave right now you're not going to make that plane to appear on The Oprah Show tomorrow and we need you there would you all stay seated let's thank Tom for being here take Travis

Channel: JFK Library

Views: 922

Rating: 4.2941175 out of 5

Keywords: John, F., Kennedy, Presidential, Library, and, Musuem, tom, brokaw, jane, pauley, american, history, white, house, politics, policy

Id: 28oLRxCsrPg

Length: 58min 19sec (3499 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 06 2018