NBC's Tom Brokaw assigns healing to younger generation

"It still is America the beautiful, but it is also America the vulnerable,'' the news anchor says in a Palm Harbor speech.

By KATHERINE GAZELLA, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 28, 2002

PALM HARBOR -- Tom Brokaw, the chronicler of The Greatest Generation, said Saturday night that younger generations are witnessing a war unlike previous wars and must face challenges unlike any the world has ever seen.

"We saw only sunny skies" before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Brokaw said. Afterward, he said, "we were back to steering by the stars."

Young people today can take a lesson from the World War II generation, which returned from war and discovered public service and selflessness, he said.

Brokaw recounted meeting a young firefighter on a recent day in New York. The firefighter had attended yet another funeral that day, and vowed to the NBC Nightly News anchor: "Mr. Brokaw, you watch my generation now."

"It still is America the beautiful, but it is also America the vulnerable," Brokaw said to a sold-out crowd of 800 people at the Westin Innisbrook Resort. "It will take another generation to bind up the wounds."

Brokaw, 62, was the keynote speaker at the Morton Plant Mease Foundation's fundraiser, at which more than $100,000 was raised toward construction of a new women's and children's facility at Mease Countryside Hospital.

Brokaw has had a front-row seat to the terrorism aftermath, most notably when his office received an anthrax-tainted letter. That letter likely was "the work of one demented man who probably did not have a connection with al-Qaida," he said.

The letter caused a chaos in his world that still prevents him from getting back most of the contents of his office, which had to be irradiated.

Brokaw came to Palm Harbor by way of Amman, Jordan, and Baghdad. He traveled there last week and had to argue with Iraqis about letting his cameramen into the country. Only one was allowed to go with him.

The journey took him along the Jordan-Iraq border, a trip that was like going to a University of Florida-Florida State game, he said.

"You wanted to be very sure which side you were talking to at any given time," Brokaw said. "It's not that Saddam Hussein is not in the Steve Spurrier school of personality, I want to make that clear," he said to applause and laughter.

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