Quotes from Tom Brokaw

appropriately

His superiors in the Merchant Marine were astonished. Here he was, ready to go back to the security of the Merchant Marine Academy for another eighteen months of accelerated training, and he wanted to quit to join one of the most dangerous outfits in the service. His officer offered him a thirty-day furlough to think it over. Broderick said, "No, my mind's made up.

keeps him in her

established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld's Army coats with the major's insignia still attached, I remember thinking

Tom Broderick spent seventeen weeks in basic training for the infantry in Mineral Wells, Texas, before heading to Fort Benning, Georgia, to become a member of the 82nd Airborne. When he finished his training, a captain offered him an instructor's job and the rank of sergeant. Again Broderick refused the safer alternative, saying he wanted to stay with his outfit and go overseas. Broderick

immediately, the Battle of Arnhem. It was a joint mission of American and British paratroopers, and their objective was to take the Nijmegen bridge to help pave the Allies' way into Germany and to discourage any German counterattack. "We jumped at about five hundred feet because we wanted to be a low target. It was one-thirty in the afternoon. "The first

Then, just as there was a glimmer of economic recovery, war exploded across Europe and Asia. When Pearl Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, this generation was summoned to the parade ground and told to train for war. They left their ranches in Sully County, South Dakota, their jobs on the main street of Americus, Georgia, they gave up their place on the assembly lines in Detroit and in the ranks of Wall Street, they

coincidence they're there. They don't seem

Cancer of whatever flavour triggers a reflective gene: Just let me live and I will learn to be a better person.

Typically, everyone in the family went to work wherever they could. Young Lloyd sold newspapers, sacked groceries in the local market, and ran the projector at the movie theater. When he wanted to join the Boy Scouts, a county official lent him the fifty cents for the admission fee. He didn't wear shoes in the summer so that he could have a decent pair in the winter.

When Kilmer got back home he married Marie immediately and the Army arranged for medical and psychiatric treatment at a prisoner-of-war rehabilitation center in Miami Beach. He was eased back into a normal life in time to use the GI Bill and attend the fall term at Creighton University in Omaha in 1946. For a young man who was proud of his high school diploma just four years earlier, this was an unexpected opportunity.

Frank says of his dad, "He will brag about his involvement with the POWs and the VFW and the flag thing. But what I really appreciate about him is how he took care of my mother for ten years when she was really ill.

constitutional revision commission. Simultaneously, Smith was becoming more involved with his profession through the American Bar Association. He met and became close to Lewis Powell of Virginia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg of New York, future justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. He says, "Powell appointed me to a committee

number of friends I began to understand that this was a mother lode of material that deserved the permanence a book would represent. It was a daunting undertaking: because there are

One of his first acts was to challenge the established way of doing business by proposing that the legislators lose part of their salary, and pay a fine, if they didn't get the budget prepared on time. His

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the

While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.

Continuous coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf will resume in a moment.

Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.

My hope is that we would begin to have a dialogue in this country about the importance of civility. We can have strong differences, but it does seem to me that most of the country believes it's gone to critical mass in what I would call the professional class across the political spectrum - left and right.

Barack Obama's name will be the one on the peace prize, but his speech and his manner could become a gift for generations to come.

I had four compression fractures in my spine. They were repaired, but it cost me two inches of height.

I believe you make your own luck. My motto is 'It's always a mistake not to go.'

I've seen a lot of seasons, change in my time. It's been a very lucky life.