JUDY WOODRUFF: A question: How
do we remember our heroes and
our nation's greatest victories?
A provocative recent book examines
the story of what's become
known as the Greatest Generation
and its impact on
America's wars ever since.
Jeffrey Brown has the story for our
arts and culture series, Canvas.
JEFFREY BROWN: Americans have
their greatest generations, right?
ELIZABETH SAMET, Author, "Looking
for the Good War": Absolutely.
JEFFREY BROWN: But,
Elizabeth Samet argues,
our mythologizing of the World
War II Greatest Generation may,
in the end, have harmed us.
ELIZABETH SAMET: I still see the backward
glance at World War II preventing us from
having a clear sense of what
we can accomplish today, in,
let's face it, in many ways, a very
different world from the world of 1945.
JEFFREY BROWN: Samet's book is
title "Looking for the Good War:
American Amnesia and the
Violent Pursuit of Happiness."
NARRATOR:
Somewhere in the Pacific, an
unnamed United States aircraft
carrier prepares for action.
JEFFREY BROWN: This is
not, she makes clear,
an argument against America's
involvement in World War II or
the just cause in fighting it.
Rather, she challenges a romanticized
partial view of that era that
has influenced our actions since.
ELIZABETH SAMET: The myth always seems
to win out in popular imagination,
and it bleeds from popular culture
into political rhetoric as well,
and into the vocabulary with which we
describe all the wars that have followed.
JEFFREY BROWN: And that's why it matters.
ELIZABETH SAMET: That why
it matters, yes. It matters
because every time we go to war,
we somehow seem to
expect a similar result.
And we seem to have an endless
capacity for surprise when
it doesn't work out that way.
I think Stephens (ph) is really
getting at similar themes.
JEFFREY BROWN: Samet explores
all this from an unusual perch.
She's a professor of English at
the United States Military Academy
at West Point. For the record,
her views here are her own.
CADET: The wine glass is
spilled. The bottle is empty.
JEFFREY BROWN: For a 2007 "NewsHour"
profile, I watched her teach a class
there on the literature of
war to cadets preparing to
fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She's also the daughter of a World
War II veteran, who died in 2020.
He'd served as a staff sergeant
in what was then called the
Army Air Corps. He didn't
speak much of it in later years,
Samet says, but he did enjoy
watching war movies with her.
ELIZABETH SAMET: I think he liked
watching them with me because that
was how we spent some time together.
He was reluctant to talk about his own war
experiences. He would always say to me,
when I asked him for a story: "Who the
hell remembers? It was 100 years ago."
And that was our...
JEFFREY BROWN: All in the past.
ELIZABETH SAMET: All in the
past. And that was our ritual.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
She shows how movies in the
immediate postwar period,
film noir such as "The Strange
Love of Martha Ivers"...
ACTOR: You're so sick that you
don't even know the difference
between right and wrong anymore.
ACTRESS: You have killed.
It says so in your records.
ACTOR: I have never murdered.
JEFFREY BROWN: ... often portrayed
disaffected, traumatized veterans.
And she cites research and
books like Students Terkel's
1984 oral history that offer a
nuanced view of soldiers' motives
for fighting and sometimes
conflicted, even oppositional
attitudes on the home front.
By contrast, our prevailing view of the
war has been largely shaped by movies like
"Saving Private Ryan" and bestselling
books by journalist Tom Brokaw
and historian Stephen Ambrose,
all from the late '90s and,
in Samet's view, with an oversimplified
take on personal and national purpose.
Do you not buy the Greatest
Generation idea or even the
whole concept of the good war?
ELIZABETH SAMET: Well, as my
own father was a member of
this generation, of course,
I would -- the loving daughter
in me would like to believe that
his was the Greatest Generation.
But I just don't think that's a provable
claim. And I'm not sure what it might
mean. People joined that war for a
variety of reasons, the way they join
any war. And despite the fact that
they made great sacrifices, and
heroic sacrifices, many of them,
the sense in which they all
joined because they were
righteous liberators motivated by ideology
is a false one, according to many studies.
GEORGE W. BUSH, Former President of
the United States: States like these
and their terrorist allies
constitute an axis of evil.
JEFFREY BROWN: Why does this
matter? Because, she says, political
leaders and public sentiment
have continued to apply this
framing in very different conflicts,
as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
BARACK OBAMA, Former President
of the United States: These were
generations of men and women
who proved once again that the
United States of America is and
will remain the greatest force for
freedom the world has ever known.
ELIZABETH SAMET: I think it deeply,
deeply burned into the national psyche,
and it tapped into longer-standing myths
of American exceptionalism, so that the
figure of the G.I. as a
righteous liberator, which is,
of course, extremely flattering,
why would we not want to believe
that, became something that we
would just assume would happen.
And the rhetoric that we
inherited from that war has shaped
all other wars we have fought
ever since. And, of course,
those have not yielded
victories, and those were not
ultimately causes of liberation.
JEFFREY BROWN: A deeper understanding
of the past, she says, is also
important because of the strong
influence of popular culture
and political discourse on
those she teaches at West Point.
Do you find yourself personally in sort
of a contradictory place sometimes?
You are surrounded by a kind of ethos of
nobility of warfare and purpose. And yet
here you are writing about a kind
of purpose gone awry or a lack
of understanding of what war is.
ELIZABETH SAMET: Absolutely.
But I think it is necessary work.
I think that anything that distorts
our sense of what wars can accomplish
needs to be recognized for what
it is, because I think too highly
of the people I know who have
signed up to do this kind of work
to be casual and careless about
how we send them into harm's way.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, this began for
you personally with your father,
but it ultimately comes -- it's still
personal because of the work you do.
ELIZABETH SAMET: I think
it is, yes, very much so.
JEFFREY BROWN: Elizabeth
Samet, thank you very much.
ELIZABETH SAMET: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Provocative. We
thank you for that conversation.