Product Description

In Boom!, Tom Brokaw, one of America’s premier journalists and the acclaimed author of The Greatest Generation, gives us an epic portrait of another defining era in America: the tumultuous Sixties. The voices and stories of both famous people and ordinary citizens come together in this “virtual reunion” as Brokaw takes us on a memorable journey through a remarkable time, exploring how individuals and the national mood were affected by a controversial era and showing how the aftershocks of the Sixties continue to resound in our lives today. In the reflections of a generation, Brokaw also discovers lessons that might guide us in the years ahead. Race, politics, war, feminism, popular culture, and music are all delved into here. Brokaw explores how members of this generation have gone on to bring activism and a Sixties mindset into individual entrepreneurship , as we hear stories of how this formative decade has shaped our perspectives on business, the environment, politics, family, and our national existence. Remarkable in its insights, wonderfully written and reported, this revealing book lets us join in these frank conversations about America then, now, and tomorrow.

Bonus DVD: Excerpt From 1968 with Tom Brokaw, A History Channel special


Praise for Boom!

“Tom Brokaw does an excellent job of capturing an exciting, controversial period in American history and Boom! is a worthy addition to his growing canon.”–New York Post

“[Tom Brokaw] approaches this magnum opus with warmth, curiosity and conviction, the same attributes that worked so well for his Greatest Generation.”
–The New York Times

“[A] verbal scrapbook of the Sixties . . . [Boom! shows] that the era’s core issues–racism, women’s rights, a nation-dividing war–remain central today, and that the values boomers championed haven’t yet gone bust.”
–People (four stars)

“Packed with memorable people, places, events . . . A ‘virtual reunion’ of 1960s folks telling what they did back then, where they’ve been since and how they assess that tumultuous decade.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Genuinely fascinating recollections . . . plenty of memorable anecdotes.”
–The Wall Street Journal

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82498 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-14
• Released on: 2008-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 688 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Brokaw's The Greatest Generation examined an era that brought America together, while Boom! considers some of the most divisive years in American history. Inviting listeners to a virtual reunion of characters from the 1960s (which he loosely defines as the years between 1963 and 1972), this compendium of interviews and anecdotes is loosely held together by Brokaw's own biographical time line and opinions. His warm, familiar voice is still filled with genuine curiosity, which listeners will find hard to resist. On audio, Brokaw's diction becomes a little rough around the edges, occasionally letting words run together. Brokaw, who has been a guest in our living rooms for as long as many people can remember, is still welcome to report on the world as he sees it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Tom Brokaw is the author of five best sellers: The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks, An Album of Memories, A Long Way from Home, and BOOM! A native of South Dakota, he graduated from the University of South Dakota with a degree in political science. He began his journalism career in Omaha and Atlanta before joining NBC News in 1966. Brokaw was the White House correspondent for NBC News during Watergate, and from 1976 to 1981 he anchored Today on NBC. He was the sole anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 to 2005. He continues to report for NBC News, producing long-form documentaries and providing expertise during breaking news events. Brokaw has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including two DuPonts, a Peabody Award, and several Emmys. He lives in New York and Montana.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

A Loss of Innocence

I felt everyone else wanted to be in our world. We were the last generation to be cooler than our kids.
—Tom McGuane

There’s a big “what if” over the Sixties. . . .Who knows what would have happened if King and Kennedy were alive?
—Tom Hayden

In 1968 America was deeply divided by a war in Southeast Asia and it was preparing to vote in a presidential election in which the choices were starkly different. The country was in the midst of a cultural upheaval unlike anything experienced since the Roaring Twenties. Everyone wondered whether America could regain its balance.

Forty years later, another war, this one in the Middle East, was deeply dividing the United States. Republican and Democratic candidates for president were laying out starkly different scenarios for the country’s future. The place of America in the world was hotly debated. The popular culture was again an issue.

The eve of 2008 was not exactly the Sixties all over again, but we still have a lot to learn from that memorable, stimulating, dangerous, and maddening time in American life forty years ago.

I arrived in Los Angeles to join NBC News in 1966, and by then, Charles Dickens’s opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities had never seemed so prophetic. Were these the best or the worst of times? I wish I could say I felt the tremors of seismic change beginning and spreading out across the political and cultural landscape, but I was mostly trying to find my way. I was a twenty-six-year-old pilgrim from the prairie heartland, raised with the sensibilities of a Fifties working-class family. I was the father of a toddler with another child on the way.

I fit the prototype of the typical young white male of the time. I had been a crew-cut apostle of the Boy Scouts, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, attending Sunday school and church, drinking too much beer in college but never smoking dope; marijuana in the Fifties and early Sixties was the stuff of jazz musicians and hoodlums in faraway places.

Before I married the love of my life, my high school classmate Meredith, we had never spent a night together. In those days, parked cars and curfews were the defining limits of courtship.

We were married in 1962, when Meredith was twenty-one and I was twenty-two, in a traditional Episcopal church wedding with a reception at our hometown country club. We left the next day with all our worldly possessions, including the five table cigarette lighters we had received as wedding presents, in the backseat of the no-frills Chevrolet compact car her father had given us as a wedding present.

We were eager to see a wider world, but only one step at a time. California was still four years away. Our first stop was Omaha, Nebraska, which then was an unimaginative and conservative midsize city a half day’s drive down the Missouri River from our hometown. We could barely afford ninety dollars a month to rent a furnished apartment, but when we went looking, in the stifling heat of a Great Plains August, I was dressed in a jacket and tie, and Meredith was wearing part of her honeymoon trousseau, including a girdle and hose. Five years later, I rarely wore a tie except on television, and Meredith was freed not only of girdles but also of hose and brassieres on California weekends.

In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter’s job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of one hundred dollars a week, because I didn’t feel I could tell Meredith’s doctor father I was making less. Meredith, who had a superior college record, couldn’t find any work because, as one personnel director after another told her, “You’re a young bride. If we hire you, you’ll just get pregnant before long and want maternity leave.”

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early Sixties seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was confronting racism in the South and getting a good deal of exposure on The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC and The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the two primary network newscasts, each just fifteen minutes long.

In the fall of 1963, first CBS and then, shortly after, NBC expanded those signature news broadcasts to a half hour. As a sign of the importance of the expansion, Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley were granted lengthy exclusive interviews with President Kennedy. ABC wouldn’t be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports. Kennedy, America’s first truly telegenic president, was a master of the medium, fully appreciating its power to reach into the living rooms of America from sea to shining sea.

During our time in Omaha, John F. Kennedy was not a local favorite. The city’s deeply conservative culture remained immune to Kennedy’s charms and to his arguments for social changes, such as civil rights and the introduction of government-subsidized medical care for the elderly. I’m sure many of my conservative friends at the time thought I was a card short of being a member of the Communist Party because I regularly championed the need for enforced racial equality and Medicare.

One of the most popular speakers to come through Omaha in those days was a familiar figure from my childhood, when kids in small towns on the Great Plains spent Saturday afternoons in movie theaters watching westerns. Ronald Reagan looked just like he did on the big screen. He was kind of a local boy who had made good, starting out as a radio star next door in Iowa and moving on to Hollywood, before becoming a television fixture as host of General Electric Theater.

Reagan’s Omaha appearances were part of his arrangement with GE, which allowed him to be an old-fashioned circuit-riding preacher, warning against the evils of big government and communism, while praising the virtues of big business and the free market. He was every inch a star, impeccably dressed and groomed. But those of us who shared his Midwestern roots were a bit surprised to find that although he was completely cordial, he was not noticeably warm. That part of his personality remained an enigma even to his closest friends and advisers throughout his historically successful political career.

In Omaha the only time he lightened up in my presence was when I noticed he was wearing contact lenses and I asked him about them. He got genuinely excited as he described how they were a new soft model, not like the hard ones that could irritate the eyes. He even wrote down the name of his California optometrist so Meredith could order a pair for herself. (Later, when he became president, I often thought, “He’s not only a great politician, he’s a helluva contact lens salesman.”)

President Kennedy also passed through Omaha, but only for a brief stop at the Strategic Air Command headquarters there. In those days, SAC was an instantly recognized acronym because the bombers it comprised—some of which we could see because they were always in the air ready to respond in case of an attack—were a central component of America’s Cold War military strategy.

More memorable for me was a visit to SAC by the president’s brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The younger Kennedy was a striking contrast to the president, who had been smiling and chatty with the local press and even more impressive in person than on television. Unlike the president, who was always meticulously and elegantly dressed, the attorney general was wearing a rumpled suit, and the collar on his blue button-down shirt was frayed. He was plainly impatient, and his mood did not improve when I asked for a reaction to Alabama governor George Wallace’s demand that JFK resign the presidency because of his stance on school desegregation. Bobby fixed those icy blue eyes on me and said, as if I were to blame for the governor’s statement, “I have no comment on anything Governor Wallace has to say.”

I was on duty in the newsroom a few weeks later when the United Press International wire-service machine began to sound its bulletin bells. I walked over casually and began to read a series of sentences breaking in staccato fashion down the page:

three shots were fired at president kennedy’s motorcade in downtown dallas . . . flash—kennedy seriously wounded, perhaps fatally by assassin’s bullet . . . president john f. kennedy died at approximately 1:00 pm (cst).

John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment. In ways we could not have known then, the gunshots in Dealey Plaza triggered a series of historic changes: the quagmire of Vietnam that led to the fall of Lyndon Johnson as president; the death of Robert Kennedy in pursuit of the presidency; and the comeback, presidency, and subsequent disgrace of Richard Nixon.

On that beautiful late autumn November morning, however, my immediate concern was to get this story on the air. I rushed the news onto our noon broadcast, and as I was running back to the newsroom, one of the station’s Kennedy haters said, “What’s up?”

I responded, “Kennedy’s been shot.”

He said, “It’s about time someone got the son of a bitch.”

Given the gauzy shades of popular memory, the invocations of Camelot and JFK as our nation’s prince, it may be surprising to younger Americans to know that President Kennedy was not universally beloved.

Now Kennedy was gone, and this man was glad. I lunged towa...

Customer Reviews

Totally, totally.....
Right off let me say that if you missed the sixties, this book is still something you'll want to read. If, like myself, you came of age during that decade you will also find Boom more that worth the time to read.

Brokaw has a way of condensing the ideas he's trying to get the reader to engage. I found The Greatest Generation terribly revealing about my parent's generation. I suspect those born during the sixties and after will also find Boom's content interesting.

I was also impressed with the famous who agreed to be interviewed for this work. I have heard the following quip, "If you can remember the sixties you didn't experience it." Well, clearly for those Brokaw interviewed that isn't true.

Boom is logically organized and intelligently written. You can tell that Brokaw loves doing research and loves his subject.

The hogwash about how much money Brokaw has made and whether this effects his objectivity toward Cheney and others is a distraction. No one has ever challenged Brokaw's professionalism because he earns a lot of money. For some reason, being financially successful is a kiss of death in some individuals eyes.

Boom is a wonderful look at a time that truly is a defining era. There is America before the sixties and the America after the sixties and they aren't the same place. You'll want to read this one slowly and ponder what it says.

Peace from North Carolina

I already had the book form of this and then bought the Kindle edition after participating in a live online chat with Brokaw
I'm writing this in the wake of an online chat with Brokaw where he was kind enough to answer some of my questions as well as those of other participants there. It was one short hour which simply flew by!.

Although I had the book in "traditional" form already, I got the Kindle version as well so I could share it with others tomorrow, along with the chat itself (I'd name the site but I don't know if that is allowed here)

As I already knew -but Brokaw reiterated in the chat - the book was a type of "virtual reunion" of people who'd lived through the Sixties and were open to revealing their thoughts and changes forty years after those pivotal years.

The book is aptly titled Boom! because there were true shock waves as major changes rippled quickly - and sometimes tore- through our culture. Brokaw focused on major areas such as feminism and the women's movement,politics (including the Democratic identity crisis), Vietnam, race relations and racism, assassinations, etc.

The famous, infamous and anonymous are interviewed or lend their voices to this book, making it more accessible, not at all dry and very lively. Brokaw noted that he wished he could have covered such topics as the Evangelical movement and the changes in journalism so if you get this book, please be aware that HE is aware of what was not covered. I think that including more areas might have watered down the book so I think this was a wise choice.

I think he did a superb job, especially with the format, including firsthand accounts from those who'd been in Vietnam as well as notable names like Gloria Steinem, Judy Collins (her albums seemed to be everywher and her songs were a backdrop to my days), Kris Kristofferson, Jann Wenner (of Rolling Stone magazine), Dick Gregory and many, many others.

He doesn't forget the tragedies of that time, either, and quotes both Dylan and Lennon in his opening to the book. If you are looking at a definitive book on the Sixties, you'll find a stance here that isn't decided about the final impact of those years. Even forty years later, the author writes that it will take longer to see the Sixties with perspective. Again, I agree.

As a member of the 60s generation, I couldn't put this book down, especially as as I fully agreed with one point made by Brokaw- that the Sixties "blindsided" us with quick and startling changes, from the variety of drugs available eveywhere to women's lib.

It is hard for me to understand how others see this time, the ones who didn't live through it, but I felt this book did a super job of encompassing many of the key events and it certainly set off waves of memories in my brain. I suggest you pick up a copy of this, sit down and let this author take you back in time. I got a shock when I saw the words "forty years ago" in print. It truly seems like only yesterday!

Outstanding...
I am reading Boom and am enjoying it immensely. As a former classmate of Tom and his wife Meredith at the University of South Dakota, I recognize many of the names that he mentions from this era, especially the mention of Gene Kimmel and his wife Mary Lou, for I knew them well. The juxtaposition of the rich and famous with ordinary people is a testimony to Brokaw's writing skills and I suspect that if researchers did some of the work for him, in the final analysis, he was his own superb editor.

One fact that needs correction, however, is that Tom was part of the Boomer generation. He was pre-boomer, and thus had part of his sensibilities in the Greatest Generation era. However his work put him right in the center of the enormous changes that occurred in the 60s, both good and bad. His understanding of both eras is important and undoubtedly helped him write this book.

Tom's unique perspectives make Boom an important contribution to the literature about the '60. He has consistently taken his responsibilities seriously, in the tradition of Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and other great broadcast journalists and continues to do so with his books. Keep up the good work. Highly recommended.