The Time of Our Lives Read Free

of cancer, from buying a multibillion-dollar corporation to starting a revolution.
    How, then, should we use this technology to create a national dialogue on what we want for our grandchildren—mine, Claire, Meredith, Vivian, and Charlotte, or yours—and those who may be yet to come? How will those future generations think of us? What personal values and public citizenship commitments will we leave them? How will we respond, now and going forward, to the manifest challenges facing all of us in the brief time we have on this precious planet?
    Long after I am gone, with some gentle care, the Brokaw clock should still be in the family, its rhythmic cadence measuring the passage of new generations and reminding them of what has gone before.
    What do we have to offer those who will be examining our time and accomplishments?
    To begin, a suggestion to remind us of our most fundamental obligation: It is time to reenlist as citizens.
    Tick, tock.



CHAPTER 1
 
Generations
FACT: In every century of America’s history we have been the beneficiaries of sacrifice and selflessness in the face of great odds to build a stronger country: The Founding Fathers of the eighteenth century fought a bloody revolution for freedom. The great losses of the Civil War were necessary to preserve the union. The pioneers who pushed west endured countless hardships as they opened the rest of the continent. The generation that came of age in the Great Depression helped save the world in World War II and gave us modern America.
QUESTION: A hundred years from now, what will be our indelible and measureable legacy? What will our grandchildren say of us? Of our country? Historians will not judge our time by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or the Tea Party alone. We’re all in the dock.
    T his book really began when I found myself at the intersection of history and my life while on assignment in Europe. It was June 5, 2009, a cloudy day with intermittent rain showers, and I was standing on the terrace of the Royal Palace in Dresden, Germany, awaiting the arrival of the young president of the United States, Barack Obama, for a Today show and Nightly News interview.
    Mentally, I reviewed the loose ends of my appointment: What should I ask about his upcoming visit to the notorious Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald? How would he compare his challenges as president with those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression and World War II? What did he plan for his speech the next morning, at the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion?
    In several personal trips to that stretch of Norman beach and the windblown headlands, on solitary walks through the simple white headstones at Colleville-sur-Mer, the American cemetery where so many young Americans are buried, I have come to see the invasion as what should have been a template for our modern world. It represented political cooperation and vision; military genius; and courage, sacrifice, and shared determination to defeat a great unambiguous evil. It was a distillation of all the heroic efforts to roll back the darkness of fascism and make the world, if not perfect, then more just.
    Now I was with a young American president who would face his own tests of vision, courage, and political acumen in the twenty-first century. For the moment my more prosaic considerations were dictated by the imperatives of broadcast news. Was the Today show ready to take in the video feed, edit the interview, and get it in shape for that morning’s telecast? Given the subject and the setting, these are the occasions when great thoughts should prevail, but they would have to be deferred until the logistics were satisfied.
    President Obama arrived right on schedule, surrounded by his posse of top aides. He strolled with his easy athletic gait along the walkway of the magnificent Baroque building, past the priceless porcelain vases collected by Saxony kings, and gave me a soft shout-out. “Hey, Brokaw—we’re