1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000 JUDY WOODRUFF: A question: How do we remember our heroes and our nation's greatest victories? 2 00:00:05,360 --> 00:00:10,360 A provocative recent book examines the story of what's become known as the Greatest Generation 3 00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:14,000 and its impact on America's wars ever since. 4 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:17,600 Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, Canvas. 5 00:00:17,600 --> 00:00:21,840 JEFFREY BROWN: Americans have their greatest generations, right? 6 00:00:21,840 --> 00:00:23,040 ELIZABETH SAMET, Author, "Looking for the Good War": Absolutely. 7 00:00:23,040 --> 00:00:26,000 JEFFREY BROWN: But, Elizabeth Samet argues, 8 00:00:26,000 --> 00:00:31,000 our mythologizing of the World War II Greatest Generation may, in the end, have harmed us. 9 00:00:32,080 --> 00:00:37,080 ELIZABETH SAMET: I still see the backward glance at World War II preventing us from 10 00:00:37,440 --> 00:00:41,920 having a clear sense of what we can accomplish today, in, 11 00:00:41,920 --> 00:00:46,800 let's face it, in many ways, a very different world from the world of 1945. 12 00:00:46,800 --> 00:00:50,640 JEFFREY BROWN: Samet's book is title "Looking for the Good War: 13 00:00:50,640 --> 00:00:53,840 American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness." 14 00:00:54,440 --> 00:00:55,440 NARRATOR: 15 00:00:55,440 --> 00:01:00,160 Somewhere in the Pacific, an unnamed United States aircraft carrier prepares for action. 16 00:01:00,160 --> 00:01:02,400 JEFFREY BROWN: This is not, she makes clear, 17 00:01:02,400 --> 00:01:07,400 an argument against America's involvement in World War II or the just cause in fighting it. 18 00:01:08,880 --> 00:01:13,880 Rather, she challenges a romanticized partial view of that era that has influenced our actions since. 19 00:01:14,960 --> 00:01:19,920 ELIZABETH SAMET: The myth always seems to win out in popular imagination, 20 00:01:19,920 --> 00:01:23,760 and it bleeds from popular culture into political rhetoric as well, 21 00:01:23,760 --> 00:01:28,760 and into the vocabulary with which we describe all the wars that have followed. 22 00:01:28,800 --> 00:01:30,080 JEFFREY BROWN: And that's why it matters. 23 00:01:30,080 --> 00:01:34,880 ELIZABETH SAMET: That why it matters, yes. It matters because every time we go to war, 24 00:01:34,880 --> 00:01:38,160 we somehow seem to expect a similar result. 25 00:01:38,720 --> 00:01:43,200 And we seem to have an endless capacity for surprise when it doesn't work out that way. 26 00:01:43,200 --> 00:01:45,840 I think Stephens (ph) is really getting at similar themes. 27 00:01:45,840 --> 00:01:50,640 JEFFREY BROWN: Samet explores all this from an unusual perch. She's a professor of English at 28 00:01:50,640 --> 00:01:55,640 the United States Military Academy at West Point. For the record, her views here are her own. 29 00:01:56,080 --> 00:01:58,560 CADET: The wine glass is spilled. The bottle is empty. 30 00:01:58,560 --> 00:02:02,800 JEFFREY BROWN: For a 2007 "NewsHour" profile, I watched her teach a class 31 00:02:02,800 --> 00:02:07,800 there on the literature of war to cadets preparing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. 32 00:02:08,800 --> 00:02:12,960 She's also the daughter of a World War II veteran, who died in 2020. 33 00:02:13,680 --> 00:02:18,560 He'd served as a staff sergeant in what was then called the Army Air Corps. He didn't 34 00:02:18,560 --> 00:02:23,560 speak much of it in later years, Samet says, but he did enjoy watching war movies with her. 35 00:02:23,600 --> 00:02:24,800 ELIZABETH SAMET: I think he liked 36 00:02:24,800 --> 00:02:28,880 watching them with me because that was how we spent some time together. 37 00:02:28,880 --> 00:02:33,880 He was reluctant to talk about his own war experiences. He would always say to me, 38 00:02:34,880 --> 00:02:38,480 when I asked him for a story: "Who the hell remembers? It was 100 years ago." 39 00:02:38,480 --> 00:02:39,120 And that was our... 40 00:02:39,120 --> 00:02:39,840 JEFFREY BROWN: All in the past. 41 00:02:39,840 --> 00:02:41,840 ELIZABETH SAMET: All in the past. And that was our ritual. 42 00:02:41,840 --> 00:02:42,240 JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. 43 00:02:42,240 --> 00:02:45,600 She shows how movies in the immediate postwar period, 44 00:02:45,600 --> 00:02:48,758 film noir such as "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers"... 45 00:02:48,758 --> 00:02:52,960 ACTOR: You're so sick that you don't even know the difference between right and wrong anymore. 46 00:02:52,960 --> 00:02:56,480 ACTRESS: You have killed. It says so in your records. 47 00:02:56,480 --> 00:02:58,240 ACTOR: I have never murdered. 48 00:02:58,240 --> 00:03:03,240 JEFFREY BROWN: ... often portrayed disaffected, traumatized veterans. And she cites research and 49 00:03:03,840 --> 00:03:08,840 books like Students Terkel's 1984 oral history that offer a nuanced view of soldiers' motives 50 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:15,000 for fighting and sometimes conflicted, even oppositional attitudes on the home front. 51 00:03:18,560 --> 00:03:23,560 By contrast, our prevailing view of the war has been largely shaped by movies like 52 00:03:23,680 --> 00:03:28,480 "Saving Private Ryan" and bestselling books by journalist Tom Brokaw 53 00:03:28,480 --> 00:03:32,720 and historian Stephen Ambrose, all from the late '90s and, 54 00:03:32,720 --> 00:03:37,720 in Samet's view, with an oversimplified take on personal and national purpose. 55 00:03:38,320 --> 00:03:43,320 Do you not buy the Greatest Generation idea or even the whole concept of the good war? 56 00:03:44,560 --> 00:03:49,200 ELIZABETH SAMET: Well, as my own father was a member of this generation, of course, 57 00:03:49,200 --> 00:03:54,200 I would -- the loving daughter in me would like to believe that his was the Greatest Generation. 58 00:03:54,560 --> 00:03:59,280 But I just don't think that's a provable claim. And I'm not sure what it might 59 00:03:59,280 --> 00:04:04,280 mean. People joined that war for a variety of reasons, the way they join 60 00:04:05,600 --> 00:04:10,600 any war. And despite the fact that they made great sacrifices, and heroic sacrifices, many of them, 61 00:04:12,560 --> 00:04:16,720 the sense in which they all joined because they were 62 00:04:16,720 --> 00:04:21,720 righteous liberators motivated by ideology is a false one, according to many studies. 63 00:04:23,600 --> 00:04:25,040 GEORGE W. BUSH, Former President of the United States: States like these 64 00:04:25,760 --> 00:04:29,680 and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil. 65 00:04:29,680 --> 00:04:34,680 JEFFREY BROWN: Why does this matter? Because, she says, political leaders and public sentiment 66 00:04:34,960 --> 00:04:39,960 have continued to apply this framing in very different conflicts, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. 67 00:04:40,640 --> 00:04:43,840 BARACK OBAMA, Former President of the United States: These were generations of men and women 68 00:04:43,840 --> 00:04:46,560 who proved once again that the United States of America is and 69 00:04:46,560 --> 00:04:49,360 will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known. 70 00:04:49,360 --> 00:04:53,760 ELIZABETH SAMET: I think it deeply, deeply burned into the national psyche, 71 00:04:53,760 --> 00:04:58,760 and it tapped into longer-standing myths of American exceptionalism, so that the 72 00:05:00,080 --> 00:05:05,080 figure of the G.I. as a righteous liberator, which is, of course, extremely flattering, 73 00:05:05,680 --> 00:05:10,680 why would we not want to believe that, became something that we would just assume would happen. 74 00:05:11,360 --> 00:05:14,720 And the rhetoric that we inherited from that war has shaped 75 00:05:15,680 --> 00:05:18,400 all other wars we have fought ever since. And, of course, 76 00:05:18,400 --> 00:05:23,400 those have not yielded victories, and those were not ultimately causes of liberation. 77 00:05:23,840 --> 00:05:28,840 JEFFREY BROWN: A deeper understanding of the past, she says, is also important because of the strong 78 00:05:28,960 --> 00:05:33,960 influence of popular culture and political discourse on those she teaches at West Point. 79 00:05:34,320 --> 00:05:38,640 Do you find yourself personally in sort of a contradictory place sometimes? 80 00:05:38,640 --> 00:05:43,640 You are surrounded by a kind of ethos of nobility of warfare and purpose. And yet 81 00:05:46,160 --> 00:05:51,160 here you are writing about a kind of purpose gone awry or a lack of understanding of what war is. 82 00:05:52,880 --> 00:05:54,160 ELIZABETH SAMET: Absolutely. 83 00:05:54,160 --> 00:05:56,240 But I think it is necessary work. 84 00:05:57,440 --> 00:06:02,440 I think that anything that distorts our sense of what wars can accomplish 85 00:06:03,680 --> 00:06:08,680 needs to be recognized for what it is, because I think too highly of the people I know who have 86 00:06:10,800 --> 00:06:15,800 signed up to do this kind of work to be casual and careless about how we send them into harm's way. 87 00:06:17,760 --> 00:06:20,960 JEFFREY BROWN: So, this began for you personally with your father, 88 00:06:20,960 --> 00:06:24,480 but it ultimately comes -- it's still personal because of the work you do. 89 00:06:24,480 --> 00:06:26,640 ELIZABETH SAMET: I think it is, yes, very much so. 90 00:06:26,640 --> 00:06:29,040 JEFFREY BROWN: Elizabeth Samet, thank you very much. 91 00:06:29,040 --> 00:06:29,680 ELIZABETH SAMET: Thank you. 92 00:06:29,680 --> 00:06:33,680 JUDY WOODRUFF: Provocative. We thank you for that conversation.