Tom Brokaw's Big Ideas: Tom Brokaw at TEDxPortland

Sorry, I had to finish a message before I could get out here. Thank you very much to all. If there is an oxymoron in American life, he is humble anchorman. We just don't exist, but I have to tell you that I attend a lot of conferences. across the country on many different topics and this has really been a very enriching day for me and very rewarding in many ways. All of these speakers have had original

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that have challenged us all and I hope I am worthy of your attention. Another big concern is that in this audience right now someone is tweeting Brokaw speaking at the Ted conference in Portland with the hashtag "old friend." I can live with that.

What really worries me is that someone is tweeting Rokha speaking at the Ted conference in Portland with the hashtag "Old Dick" after listening. this morning I don't want to go there uh first of all I think I have to explain my wardrobe uh most of you see me on television coat and tie a nice suit the whole thing my granddaughters are here when they came of age that's how I They saw me forever, they don't call me Grandpa, they call me Tom because they've seen me on TV all these years, but that's how they really see me and I was thinking about this wardrobe and my choices recently when I heard Jerry Seinfeld say that men choose their wardrobe to reflect the styles of the best year of your life now my wardrobe really is a composite because I have not had a bad year in my life khakis college 1958 to 1962. running shoes a game changer there in the NBC archives a brought a photo of me in a very serious suit on the floor of a convention suit and tie headphones interviewing a key delegate panoramic I'm wearing a pair of Nike running shoes and I did it all over the world The Patagonia jacket freed us from trench coats and safari jackets around the world.

You could crumple them up, put them in your suit bag, go to Somalia, go to a rock, go to a war zone somewhere and not only be fashionable, but completely comfortable. and then, finally, a very expensive Italian cotton shirt left over from the days when NBC gave me a very generous wardrobe allowance and a baseball cap for my high school days, this is who I am and this is how it is as I introduce myself to you today, someone who at this stage of my life has won the American lottery in every sense of the word where I grew up the type of parents I had, truly working class, I met the love of my life when I was 15 years, although it took her seven years to realize it.

That's outside of the extraordinary children we have and their descendants, two of whom are here with us today, the opportunities I've had professionally as well, not only at NBC News, but also the opportunity to write a book called The Greatest Generation That It really launched a completely different form of journalism in me, writing books about the American way in American history and now I'm at a stage in my life where I get invited to conferences like this and be the last speaker, so the pressure is on. really high. have something to say and I have been thinking a lot about my own life, not only about the good fortune I have, but also about where we are in the American dream in the long and extraordinary journey this country has taken since its early days, The 20th century was rightly known as the American century, but how will the 21st century be known well at this time?

If you took the measure of the 21st century and our place in it, you'd be pretty ambivalent about the conclusions you might come to. I've been doing this for half a century, American political reporter on every presidential election, really since 1964 and '68, and since so I have watched the rise and fall of our political culture. I was a target. House correspondent during Watergate, the greatest constitutional crisis in America and when the American people and the Supreme Court understood what Richard Nixon had done, the rule of law prevailed and we moved forward, so we have a remarkable system that It is very resilient but it is being tested at the moment and it is being tested, I think by small

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that divide us, so I have been thinking about my life and the big ideas that have brought us together and I would like that Would you join me if you want to travel in time today, the test is: What if the first great idea of ​​my life was born in 1940?

I'm an old man before World War II started. Many people don't realize that in 1939 the United States was the 16th largest military power in the world. White Eisenhower in 1938 still was. a lieutenant colonel who had never heard a shot fired in anger, but the free world was at stake. hitler had already invaded poland at that time, not long after, he was marching into the lowlands and advancing into scandinavia, taking on the russians and taking over france and we were going to have to get involved in the war, but there was a huge sense of isolationism here at home and then the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor and we had to go to war in the Pacific and also in the Atlantic against the German Nazis. empire the largest war in the history of humanity the world we know today was at stake in that war before it was over 50 million people had perished it was fought on six of the seven continents and all the skies and all the seas in the seas and under the seas as well and came to an end in a reasonably short period of time, but if it hadn't been for that great idea of ​​how we prepared for that war by shutting down all civilian vehicle production in the United States and converting new types of trucks and weapons.

Aircraft plants in the United States no longer produced civilian aircraft. They were dedicated to long-range fighter aircraft and bombers in the state of Oregon. Mark Hatfield, a deeply religious Christian, was a pacifist until the Japanese attacked the pearl. port and enlisted the next day and led a landing craft off the beaches of Iwo Jima in 1944. That's what happened to the United States, it was a great idea that happened suddenly and before the war was over, when we were deeply in debt in America was trying to finance this war because remember the greatest generation was first formed by the great depression they experienced every day of their lives, hardships and sacrifices and not much optimism that the next day would be better and fair when that was coming to an end.

In the end they were asked to travel thousands of miles across the Pacific and fight the largest military machines ever assembled, while at home farmers grew more food so the troops would have what they needed. The wives went to work. factories and drove big trucks, I lived on a military base when I was three years old and my first image of women was in dungarees, bandanas, carrying lunch boxes and driving eight by eight trucks through the artillery pass where we worked, it was a great idea and In 1944, when we knew that the war would come to an end, at some point, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress created the gi bill so that when these veterans returned home they could go to college or a training school. technology and could be prepared for the post-war period. the war economy and no laws of the 20th century transformed America as much economically and in terms of the promise of its future as the gi bill they returned home they lived in crowded student housing they became lawyers, engineers, scientists, educators, doctors and public officials.

Servants, that was an enormously great idea, what if we hadn't had the gi bill? That's something I think about every day and when the war ended, African Americans also returned home, having served heroically and nobly in all theaters of war. Almost always dressed in segregated costumes, some of them later received the medal of honor for their pure heroism, especially in Italy and Europe, and yet they returned to a country where they were treated not only as second-class citizens, but also too often as third class. Citizens, for those of you who have not seen it yet, I highly recommend the movie 42, the story of Jackie Robinson, the greatest hero of my youth, because my parents told me that the Dodgers hired a black man to be the first of his race in playing. the major leagues and we are going to be for the dodgers and I lived every day and every night for the exploits of the dodgers and especially of jackie robinson it was 1948 when they signed him he was already 28 years old he had been a three-time sports lawyer at Ucla and he had been an official of commission in the war and you can't believe the tests he went through that first year, even from his own teammates.

This is 1948. The Tuskegee Airmen returned as one of the most decorated fighter squadrons in the European theater, an all-black team flying P-51s, and after the war they went to an officers' club in Georgia and were expelled. ​because blacks were not allowed, but white southern officers entertained themselves in that same black officers' club. white german war officers who had been imprisoned nearby were their guests they had been our enemy 24 hours earlier they were now the guests in the officers club and the tuskegee airmen when they sat in that club they were court-martialed and se It took several years for that to be reversed, so these African Americans returned home and were determined to make their place the next big idea in America.

What if Dr. Martin Luther King had not come and led this country on an extraordinary crusade based on two fundamental principles of confidence in the rule of law that all men and women in America are created equal and have equal rights to vote to go to school wherever they want to buy whatever they want in whatever store they decide to go into and sleep wherever they want they decided to do it and the other fundamental principle was to advance that because people in a non-violent way often ask me about the most memorable parts of my career and i say easy, i was in the south in the 1960s and i was in a place like georgia usa or hayneyville alabama or any of the other hellish places where young civil rights workers faced attack dogs and highway patrolmen with truncheons or city police or rednecks emerging from the woods who got into the fetal position took the hits, got up and walked. again and transformed us, we are who we are today in large part because of the civil rights law, it is still an unresolved journey, even with the election of an African American president, race remains one of the great points of tension in America , but we are making steady progress, that was a great idea.

John F Kennedy was elected in 1960 and of course we all know that he said ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, but then he said that when he took office, we're going to go to the Moon within 10 years, we will free ourselves from the bonds of the Earth and place a man on the lunar surface. What if John F. Kennedy didn't have that great idea? That great idea unleashed science, technology and engineering. rekindled the American spirit of advancing the boundaries of who we are, that was a very, very big idea, the 1960s were uneven and great ideas, but there were two big ideas that came out of the 1960s, the guitar that preceded me, obviously, it is the daughter of one of those ideas and that is the environmental movement in 1968 gaylor nelson a senator from wisconsin said that we should celebrate earth day and what happened throughout america is that a new generation of americans began to rise to the lines and say that we have to have the principles of conservation as an everyday and important value in our lives meredith and I lived in those days in southern California she arrived there in May in August at the end of August she looked out our window and He said oh my gosh, there's a mountain range there that had been completely obscured by smog for the last six months those are the conditions we lived in when I was a kid living in the black hills of south dakota they warned us not to We went to some streams because they were so toxic from the runoff from the gold mine in your home state that you couldn't go near them for fear of what would happen to you, so that movement started, that was a great idea, the other great idea that emerged in the '60s, of course, is that women not only have the right but we now have a proactive movement to get them into whatever place in American life they choose and as a result of what started in the '60s, honestly I think that great idea will mean that this century will be the 21st century at the end.

It will be judged in many ways, but the only thing I am sure of is that historians will look back and say that was the century of women and that was when women began to take their place. I just wrote something for Sheryl Sandberg's blog. When I was a young man coming from Age and race were a very important part of my professional calling. I couldn't have imaginedat first that there would be a statue of Dr. King in Statuary Hall or that an African-American president shortly after the turn of the century would have been elected to office. second term as president, so I tried to project what will happen at the beginning of the next century after all women, in many ways, are much more advanced now than Americans were then, more than half of the presidents of the Ivy League are women, the leader of the old original.

The white boy establishment IBM is now a woman President Obama just named a new head of the Secret Service, a woman. Now they have 20 percent of the women in America and, by the way, they have their own group where they do much more than the whites in war more than half of those enrolled in medical school and law school They are women, that doesn't mean they have an easy path as fathers of three daughters and four granddaughters. I know the challenges that await them in balancing all the parts of their lives that they want to have but we need everyone on deck and pulling the oars and women are going to be a critically important part of that we know about their place on the supreme court I'm not going to enter into names that don't I don't want you to read any of this. we are going to have a woman as president before the end of the century I just returned from South America woman president of Argentina woman president of Brazil the most effective woman in the recent history of Chile a woman the most powerful woman in europe angela merkel the head of the international monetary fund, christine lagarde, the only woman that everyone celebrated around the world, no matter how uneven her record may have been, was margaret thatcher, who was the figure most powerful and defining in many ways of his time, this is embedded in our history, that's a great idea richard nixon had a lot of great bad ideas he had a great idea in 1972 he said to henry kissinger i want you to go to beijing and open a relationship with china now some of you don't remember this because "You're too young, but before that happened China might as well have been one of those blank spots on the map that said beyond here there are snakes, we didn't really know what was happening in that country of eight or nine hundred million, yes we knew it.

I don't know how many people they had at the time, but Nixon, a man of conflicted reputation in terms of his brilliant ability to see the world, but the darkness that would overtake his personal conduct, were constantly conflicted, but he told Dr. Kissinger: We don't share the values, we don't preside over their political system, they have two thousand years of civilization and they will re-emerge at some point in our time and we need to have open lines so we can talk to them and they understand. who we are and we have a better understanding of who they are and, as a result, we are in a much better situation today than we would have been if we had continued to treat them as we were then, as a simple communist Chinese, unrelated. a great idea ronald reagan came to power determined to confront the soviet union it was the deadliest war in human history the cold war in fact now given the state of foreign maps in which we have stateless enemies in the middle east especially in all the changes that are happening in north and south korea and in the subcontinent we must remember that in those days it was really a world bifurcated between east and west as we describe it the united states against the soviet union the soviet union against The United States and both countries were aiming at each other enough firepower to eliminate life on Earth as we know it at extraordinarily conflicting value systems, economic systems and political systems, and Reagan was determined to confront that, thankfully he somehow had a partner on the other side mikhail gorbachev a new generational leader in that country who understood that their system could not be sustained due to past practices and challenges coming from other places in the world, so they started a dialogue and it was difficult and the conditions a They were often uncertain in terms of where they were going. end but they found a way to resolve those differences and Gorbachev began to dismantle the Soviet Union although he did believe that he could hold on to communism and that was one of the few defects he had in leadership and that war came to an end. finish without a shot being fired without a tank rolling I was in Berlin the night the Berlin Wall fell that was the final punctuation mark I have the good fortune to be the only correspondent there with live satellite capabilities my competitors give and Peter were back.

There was no one at home from the BBC or even CNN in those days, so I was out there, lurking in the story, able to tell the world what was happening now. Some of you might be wondering what you're thinking at that moment because it was so chaotic at the Brandenburg Gate that I couldn't even hear myself think and I really only had one thought: I knew I was going to have to improvise for the next two hours about what we were seeing. behind me. My only thought was: don't do it. ruin this thing broke, it will be there forever and I'll tell you another thing after having given the reference I made to my wardrobe earlier, I had brought some kind of beat up Patagonia jacket like I often did and I looked down, it was quite loud looking at that point and I looked around and one of my correspondents had just arrived from London and bought a spectacular new coat.

I knew this videotape I was about to appear on would be around forever and I said. You'd better give me your coat so I'll be very well dressed at least for that night, but it came and Margaret Thatcher, on the wrong side of history, said that we should never allow Germany to be united again by then, Ronald Reagan was. and his successor was his vice president, george bush 41, who wisely said yes, we have to have a united germany, we put that civilization back together, those were great ideas that served us extremely well, the next great idea is one that we have been talking.

There's a lot here today, it's a great idea that we're still in the seminal stages of. We heard Steve Jobs and probably the best commencement speech ever given about who he was and how he had the vision and motivation to give us the gift. That did it, but there were others too. In the late 1980s and 1990s there were men working in garages and in New Mexico, Jeff Bezos was driving around the country with an idea that he had that was the beginning of what we now call silicon. Valley cut off the digital age, that was a great idea, there has never been a technology as transformative as that technology in the history of humanity and we are all beneficiaries of it and as I say we are still fighting for the best and smartest use of One of my conclusions is that we haven't had enough dialogue yet about how to best use it to pursue that technology and that is driving us in such a way that we need to have a greater say in the best use of it in my opinion, but that was an idea very, very big, it changed the way we communicate with each other, have relationships with each other, how we research and trade, how we broadcast, how we absolutely end conflicts in many places and also because we can bring people together virtually if necessary, so It was a great idea and it got me thinking about what's next and there's kind of a generational intersection of that technology and the reality that we've been living with for the last 10 years in the first place.

A whole new generation of young people is emerging and their lives are intertwined with this new technology, the social relationships of which we are all aware, the games they play and how they lead their lives, not only academic or business or how they determine the direction they want to take, but how they talk to each other on a daily basis, well that is happening, other young members of that generation go to recruiting offices, raise their hands and volunteer for military service and they have fought the two for the longest time. wars in the history of our country and I dare say that very few people in this room probably have a family member who has served in uniform there because it is less than one percent of the population and less than one percent has paid a terrible price physically and emotionally and not only is it unfair that a democratic society allows this to continue where we put the entire burden of being in danger on volunteers alone.

Well, nothing is asked of the rest of us, not a diamond, not taxes, not any sacrifice we have made. We wouldn't have to think about war if we chose to, and when they began to return home, a banner at the airport was the best they could hope for. That's starting to change, but it's complex, so I think we have a common obligation to think about our next big idea, what it should be, I think it should be, we ask ourselves what would happen if we could design a new model for public service in the United States. and here's my hail mary we created six public service academies across the United States in land grant schools the state of Oregon is a land -grant school berkeley is actually a land grant school in the state of Cornell, Oklahoma, there are many excellent land grants why land grant schools because they not only teach humanities and social sciences, but they also teach the hard sciences of engineering and agriculture, and many of them also have top tier medical schools , here's the trick, this is what I would do with a new form of public service, I would make it public and private.

I think you could have, for example, Johnson and Johnson Fellows in medicine, from advanced degrees in From infectious diseases to nurse practitioners to medical technologists, you could have Caterpillar in building everything from operating engineers to people who absolutely know how to design the best water systems in the world or how to build a new road in a hostile part of the world. The opportunities are unlimited. You could have Nike folks spread around the world developing educational programs that have to do with physical fitness and competitive sports, but I wouldn't just assign them internationally like diplomatic task forces, that's what I call it.

I would also have him working at the national level. Here's why when Katrina hit, I was floating in the 4th Ward of New Orleans with the most effective rescue team at the time, it was the 82nd Airborne, and an older young man and I were on a boat together for two days . running around and they were getting more than anyone else and I said, aren't you supposed to go to Afghanistan? It's a setback to my training two weeks when it happened Joplin Missouri when a terrible tornado ripped through there what happened the Missouri National Guard was called in Many of those units had already been on two or three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan when Hurricane Sandy devastated the coast this.

First answer: get the national guard there. We have to complement that first response with highly trained people who can learn a new set of skills while feeling a commitment to serve their country, so I think this is an unparalleled opportunity for us to address many of the problems that plague us. Today, we are too divided, we are too determined. each other red state blue state tea party uh older generation versus younger generation the so-called millennial generation is extraordinarily suspicious of the institutions of American life that most of us have taken for granted when you talk to them about why they're moving.

At home after graduating from college they will say I have a 25,000 death, there are no jobs there and by the way my dad worked for a corporation for 30 years and he got laid off last week, why do I want to go? work for a large American corporation, so they are looking for another way to invest their lives in their own well-being but also in the common well-being of this country and what I tell young people who spend a lot of their time in that digital universe . There is another way to connect with each other in a more meaningful way and I try to remind you that it is better to have a world where you have real connectivity than the two worlds between the analog world and the digital world and one of The way I remind you That is I will tell you that there is no text message in the world that can replace someone you care deeply about and whispering I love you in your ear.

You can't hold hands with an iPad in a movie. I don't. I never want to listen to a song that has a tweet as its lyrics, it's just a tweet as time goes by, I just don't want to listen, so I think it's up to us, this generation, to have a big bold idea that helps define. our time and our place in the 21st century because I promise you that a hundred years from now historians will look back and pass judgment not just on the NRA, on President Obama, on a red state or a blue state that we're all in. . the pier and these great ideas that have worked so well for us and that I just described to you in the last 20 minutes were really the product of peoplefrom the ground up, they made them a reality, our senior statesman and other visionaries gave them the dream that The dream was executed by the foundations of America when I heard Ben talk today about immigrants coming here.

We are still a nation of immigrants and they come here looking for the American dream and they put their shoulder to the wheel and we. It will always be better if we understand it well. Let me finally leave you with a story that has been the iconic story of the last six months for me. It has nothing to do with the kidnapping. It has nothing to do with background checks. With the terrible tragedies we have experienced in Newtown and also in Boston recently, the iconic photograph for me of the last six months occurred in December of the nation's capital in the rotunda where Danny, in a way, the senator from Hawaii lay in state of alert. and i applied the coffin of grapes and from some distance a photographer took a photograph of his old friend bob dole standing on the coffin greeting him.

I know the story of these two young men, they both went to war from their respective states, Hawaii and Kansas, Danny was a Japanese American citizen whose family has been in Hawaii since 1895. But when he found out that his cousins, aunts and uncles in the mainland were being sent to internment camps, he volunteered for service 442 and the entire Japanese American team again the race played a role in everything that while he was on the dock in Honolulu his father told him this country has been very good with your family now you may have to die for this country but if you do it will be a great honor for your family and with those words he went to war and won the medal of honor and lost an arm in Italy.

An extraordinarily heroic action did not earn him the medal of honor until later because again race played a role in denying him the opportunity within the same 20-hour period. Bob Dole, poor boy. from northern kansas his family rented the upper floors of his house they lived in the basement he left the university of kansas a three sport athlete you see pictures of him in those days he was a beautifully developed adonis he would have been a Just Do it Poster for Nike. I promise you, he volunteered for the 10th Mountain. And the day after Roosevelt died, his entire right side was shot while leading an assault on a heavily fortified German position.

They didn't think he would make it down the mountain, they certainly didn't think he would walk again, but he did. all the way back to Michigan to a small VA hospital there and he was in a small room with this tiny man from Hawaii who had lost an arm and this other man from Detroit who came from a powerfully connected family and from big wealth. He could have avoided combat, but he had been seriously wounded on D-Day and the three of them stayed up at night and talked about what they were going to do with their lives after they had been through everything they had been through and decided that public service would always be a part of their lives and they had a meeting in the United States Senate when each was elected by their home state danny inouye democrat of hawaii phil hart democrat of michigan who died too soon of cancer and when did both parties vote to appoint the most prestigious office building on the Senate side in honor of Phil Hart and, of course, Bob Dole of Kansas, a Republican presidential candidate of his party, Republican leader of the Senate, but Danny, Away and Bob Dole joined physically almost but Safely?

They were emotionally bonded by their experiences during the war and their commitment to their country and their determination to move forward without getting up in the morning and saying to each other, I can't talk to you, are you from a red state or a blue state or is this a national issue? that I can't talk to you because other members of my party say that I would be a traitor to our cause, they talked constantly and together they moved the country forward and while bob dole stood there greeting his friend danny In a way, I also knew that they had brought to the rotunda in a wheelchair, but I turned to his caretakers and said, "I don't want Danny's last sight of me to be in a wheelchair.

I want to greet him by standing next to him." I think it's a wonderful metaphor that we can all take away from this extraordinary day. We greet each other, we stand by each other and we go together into the future. Thank you very much to all.