America's "Greatest Generation" isn't born yet

President Lyndon B. Johnson in his final interview with Walter Cronkite, one week before he died in 1973

The legendary NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw wrote a best-selling book in 1998 that popularized the name “The Greatest Generation.” Brokaw’s thesis was that the generation of Americans raised in the Great Depression, and forged by the Second World War, was the “greatest generation any society has ever produced.” When Brokaw made the assertion the name would not have stuck if the American people did not agree. Twenty-five years ago, there was a great wave of national nostalgia, appreciation and awe over the achievements of this generation of Americans who were the older siblings of the silent generation, the parents of the baby boomers and the grand parents of Generation X. It was a moment where a great dam of silence was cracking and a reservoir of memories, stories and previously unknown accounts were shared by the men and women in their mid-70s who had returned from war and quietly went on with their lives. The brilliance of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and the 20 minutes of unprecedentedly vivid, realistic depiction of combat on the Dog Green Sector of Omaha Beach where elements of the 2nd Ranger Battalion fought, awed the nation.

Twenty-five years ago was a golden era unappreciated in its moment. America stood at the edge of a new millennium — triumphant, prosperous, and free. The Soviet Empire had fallen, democracy was ascendant, the internet era was beginning and optimism was the order of the day. The second-term president of the United States was a 52-year-old southerner who tantalized America with his tawdriness and recklessness, while presiding over the brief, happy, gilded era of Pax Americana during which liberty, freedom, pluralism, human rights and progress seemed pre-destined and irreversible.

Inherent in the Brokaw proposition was the notion that history had reached a type of endpoint where humanity had evolved beyond the titanic and existential competition and conflict that had killed more than 100 million human beings during the bloodiest hundred-year epoch of human history.

The question of generational greatness is beyond debate, but the expressions of greatness are embedded with a soft dogma that lacks imagination for what has not yet come. Mr. Brokaw’s label of 25 years ago pre-supposed that humanity’s greatest crisis was the apogee of crisis, as opposed to being the greatest crisis the world had yet faced. There should be no room in America for generational conflict and warfare. Each generation of Americans has produced greatness, and will continue to do so for as long as there is America. Each generation is trusted with the continuance of the American experiment, and each is morally obligated to perfect the union so that it may be stronger for the following generations.

What Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” refers to those who are now in their mid-90s. The 16 million-man US Armed Forces that won the war has less than 200,000 surviving veterans. Soon, they will all be gone, and with them, an ethic of responsibility, service and sacrifice from a momentous era that will forever become part of history, not human memory.

During the war against fascism, the US government recognized the profound moral hypocrisy of America’s segregated society in the south and its segregated military. Americans of every race, religion, background and nationality fought valorously, and played an enormous role in igniting the civil rights movement after the war. During the war the Double V campaign was popularized. It stood for “Victory Abroad and Victory at Home.” The heroism of military units like the 442nd RCT of Japanese Americans or the world-famous Tuskegee Airmen guaranteed the desegregation of the military by 1947 — the same year that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. A great explosion of civil rights progress in America happened approximately 100 years after the end of the Civil War in the mid-1960s, just a few short years before my birth.

Like Brokaw and everyone else, I was born into a specific time and place that shaped my perspective on everything. I lived in an overwhelmingly White town that bordered an overwhelmingly Black one.  My heroes were Reggie Jackson, Willie Randolph, Bucky Dent and Thurmond Munson. The games were on channel 11, and I thought nothing of Phil Rizuttto and Bill White calling a game together. I was completely oblivious about the epic role Bill White played in desegregating baseball just a few short years before my birth.

Looking back from the perspective of middle age, I think about the passage of time more than I once did, and have a greater appreciation for the reality that history did not begin at the moment that I entered the story. What came before matters, and what comes next, is not contingent on what happened last.

There is a great debate raging in America about race and the question over whether there is systemic racism in America. The short answer: there is. Want proof? Simple. A new Yale study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals a staggering health inequity when it comes to life expectancy between Black Americans and their White counterparts between 1999 and 2020. A data analysis found 1.63 million excess deaths in the Black population compared with White Americans. Case closed.

Among the greatest challenges facing America is being able to talk about race openly, honestly and realistically without fear of instant cultural annihilation and backlash. I thought about that as I watched an extraordinary interview unfold between Walter Cronkite and President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1973.

When watching it I was struck by two competing thoughts. The first was how old the video was. The second was the realization of how short the time between the interview and today actually was. Joe Biden was in the US Senate when this was filmed, and I had curly hair. The LBJ interviewed was different than my conception of him from the famous tapes of his politicking, phone calls, bluster and cajoling. His hair was longer and he was calm, contemplative and at peace in a strange and serene way. I have never heard a White American politician talk about race like this in my lifetime, and I thought, “What a shame.”

LBJ and Walter Cronkite had never been exposed to the rage industrial complex that would become modern journalism, so instead they had a very deep conversation. Fifty year later, the recording stands as a time capsule and a gift to the nation. Ten days later, LBJ would be dead. It was his last interview. Let’s watch:

These are remarkable words from a vice president of the United States 100 years on from the battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s famous reconsecration of American liberty and purpose. They are as searing and honest as are the words that acknowledge LBJ’s self-awareness as a southerner. Again, his honesty, directness and goodwill are extraordinary to watch from the vantage point of our current idiocracy. It is astonishing to think that there are laws being passed that criminalize books and could lick up school librarians 50 years later. LBJ became president, and used all of his power to advance civil rights and create — for the first time in American history — a society in which Black rights were protected fully under the law — at least on paper.

LBJ’s life’s journey changed and altered his perspectives. Can you imagine a White American politician talking about their life experiences like LBJ? Listen for the directness and honesty talking about race from the perspective of a white, Christian man who was born in Texas in 1908:

In the end, what all of this led towards were some of the greatest legislative accomplishments in American History. LBJ was the greatest legislator who ever became president. His approach to his job was “all in, all the time.” Consider his achievements:

Lastly, LBJ couldn’t have predicted the rise of a sociopathic demagogue like Trump or a miniaturized version preaching a gospel of racial demagoguery like DeSantis, but he was familiar with their arguments. There is no question that great progress has been made towards racial justice in America since 1973. It is also true that bigotry, prejudice, racism, antisemitism and homophobia are alive and well in 2023. There is intolerance everywhere. Listen to President Johnson talk about prejudice. He would be dead ten days later: 

I’ve been thinking lately about the greatest generation of Americans. I don’t think they’ve been born yet, with all due respect to my friend Mr. Brokaw, an icon of integrity, journalistic excellence, American patriotism and personal character. The World War II generation saved the world in the way the Civil War generation saved the republic.

The world will always need saving, and perhaps there will be many more generations of Americans who are called on to make stupendous sacrifices for the maintenance of our American way of life. The greatest generation though will be the one that finally creates what Winthrop imagined, and that Dr. King saw from the mountaintop. It is a just, harmonious, peaceful, beautiful “city upon a hill.” A place where there is no prejudice and hate. Truly, that accomplishment will suffice to establish for all time the “Greatest Generation.”