Tom Brokaw Reflects on the 1960s and America's Future

A little 60's music. >> Yes, a little 60's music for you. So, this must feel like home to to be on this lot. >> I arrived here at age 26 in 1966.

Uh not that long out of South Dakota. I drove in I drove all the way across the country from Atlanta. I'd been hired by NBC News. A very very exciting time in my life.

And in those days this studio Dean Martin in one corner, Sonny and Cher in another corner. I remember coming down to do the news one night and there was this attractive little kid sliding on the hallway and it was Michael Jackson.

Uh Johnny Carson hanging out around the corner, John Wayne walking through the hallway. And when I'd come in to park my car very often like my spot would be occupied by this large gold Chrysler with Bob Hope on the license plate.

And I quickly determined that he might have been a little more important at NBC than me. So, I'd say, "Bob, take my place." So, uh but it was very exciting time. >> Oh, I'll bet.

So, you you write a book and it's it's basically about the 60's. Is that to to you the most important decade or era or do you >> Well, it certainly was an it was an important decade for this country and for the

world for that matter. And for me as someone who grew up as a child of the 50's and then to be a reporter in the middle of the 60's when all the conventions of the time in which I was growing up were

suddenly being challenged. Uh the world was turned on its ear. And then we have that traumatic year of 1968. Dr. King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson was

forced from office, we had the Chicago riots, the urban uh inner cities of this country went up when Dr. King was assassinated. Richard Nixon who had said, "You won't have me to kick around anymore." in 1962 suddenly is the leading candidate

for president of the United States. And at the end of that year the Apollo 8 uh mission went to the moon to circumnavigate it to get ready for the moon landing. And as they emerged from the backside of the moon

for the first time we'd ever seen that, they looked out and into this void they saw this precious planet called Earth. In that inky void with a beautiful white filigree of clouds and the deep blue of the oceans, the great

brown swaths of desert and the deep greens of the wilderness areas. And Jim Lovell, who is in this book, told me, he said, "I realized that's our spaceship and we're all in this together in some fashion.

We ought to think about >> We got to remember that today. That's very important to remember Yeah. It's interesting to hear a perspective like that. and I it is so important to remember that. And now we are we we have a war like

we did in the '60s and we're are we repeating Do you see it the same? >> Well, there isn't There is an echo chamber. There are some similarities, but there are great differences as well.

Um there was a draft on in the '60s. There was no draft now. Uh I think that the protest would be in the streets now if there were a draft on. Uh one of the differences, of course, between now and

then is that there's a voluntary army. And what I say to a lot of audiences wherever I go, "However you feel about this war and and there's good reason to be very unhappy with it because so many promises and premises were either broken or not