WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:05.000 JUDY WOODRUFF: A question: How do we remember our heroes and our nation's greatest victories? 00:05.360 --> 00:10.360 A provocative recent book examines the story of what's become known as the Greatest Generation 00:10.800 --> 00:14.000 and its impact on America's wars ever since. 00:14.000 --> 00:17.600 Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, Canvas. 00:17.600 --> 00:21.840 JEFFREY BROWN: Americans have their greatest generations, right? 00:21.840 --> 00:23.040 ELIZABETH SAMET, Author, "Looking for the Good War": Absolutely. 00:23.040 --> 00:26.000 JEFFREY BROWN: But, Elizabeth Samet argues, 00:26.000 --> 00:31.000 our mythologizing of the World War II Greatest Generation may, in the end, have harmed us. 00:32.080 --> 00:37.080 ELIZABETH SAMET: I still see the backward glance at World War II preventing us from 00:37.440 --> 00:41.920 having a clear sense of what we can accomplish today, in, 00:41.920 --> 00:46.800 let's face it, in many ways, a very different world from the world of 1945. 00:46.800 --> 00:50.640 JEFFREY BROWN: Samet's book is title "Looking for the Good War: 00:50.640 --> 00:53.840 American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness." 00:54.440 --> 00:55.440 NARRATOR: 00:55.440 --> 01:00.160 Somewhere in the Pacific, an unnamed United States aircraft carrier prepares for action. 01:00.160 --> 01:02.400 JEFFREY BROWN: This is not, she makes clear, 01:02.400 --> 01:07.400 an argument against America's involvement in World War II or the just cause in fighting it. 01:08.880 --> 01:13.880 Rather, she challenges a romanticized partial view of that era that has influenced our actions since. 01:14.960 --> 01:19.920 ELIZABETH SAMET: The myth always seems to win out in popular imagination, 01:19.920 --> 01:23.760 and it bleeds from popular culture into political rhetoric as well, 01:23.760 --> 01:28.760 and into the vocabulary with which we describe all the wars that have followed. 01:28.800 --> 01:30.080 JEFFREY BROWN: And that's why it matters. 01:30.080 --> 01:34.880 ELIZABETH SAMET: That why it matters, yes. It matters because every time we go to war, 01:34.880 --> 01:38.160 we somehow seem to expect a similar result. 01:38.720 --> 01:43.200 And we seem to have an endless capacity for surprise when it doesn't work out that way. 01:43.200 --> 01:45.840 I think Stephens (ph) is really getting at similar themes. 01:45.840 --> 01:50.640 JEFFREY BROWN: Samet explores all this from an unusual perch. She's a professor of English at 01:50.640 --> 01:55.640 the United States Military Academy at West Point. For the record, her views here are her own. 01:56.080 --> 01:58.560 CADET: The wine glass is spilled. The bottle is empty. 01:58.560 --> 02:02.800 JEFFREY BROWN: For a 2007 "NewsHour" profile, I watched her teach a class 02:02.800 --> 02:07.800 there on the literature of war to cadets preparing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. 02:08.800 --> 02:12.960 She's also the daughter of a World War II veteran, who died in 2020. 02:13.680 --> 02:18.560 He'd served as a staff sergeant in what was then called the Army Air Corps. He didn't 02:18.560 --> 02:23.560 speak much of it in later years, Samet says, but he did enjoy watching war movies with her. 02:23.600 --> 02:24.800 ELIZABETH SAMET: I think he liked 02:24.800 --> 02:28.880 watching them with me because that was how we spent some time together. 02:28.880 --> 02:33.880 He was reluctant to talk about his own war experiences. He would always say to me, 02:34.880 --> 02:38.480 when I asked him for a story: "Who the hell remembers? It was 100 years ago." 02:38.480 --> 02:39.120 And that was our... 02:39.120 --> 02:39.840 JEFFREY BROWN: All in the past. 02:39.840 --> 02:41.840 ELIZABETH SAMET: All in the past. And that was our ritual. 02:41.840 --> 02:42.240 JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. 02:42.240 --> 02:45.600 She shows how movies in the immediate postwar period, 02:45.600 --> 02:48.758 film noir such as "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers"... 02:48.758 --> 02:52.960 ACTOR: You're so sick that you don't even know the difference between right and wrong anymore. 02:52.960 --> 02:56.480 ACTRESS: You have killed. It says so in your records. 02:56.480 --> 02:58.240 ACTOR: I have never murdered. 02:58.240 --> 03:03.240 JEFFREY BROWN: ... often portrayed disaffected, traumatized veterans. And she cites research and 03:03.840 --> 03:08.840 books like Students Terkel's 1984 oral history that offer a nuanced view of soldiers' motives 03:10.000 --> 03:15.000 for fighting and sometimes conflicted, even oppositional attitudes on the home front. 03:18.560 --> 03:23.560 By contrast, our prevailing view of the war has been largely shaped by movies like 03:23.680 --> 03:28.480 "Saving Private Ryan" and bestselling books by journalist Tom Brokaw 03:28.480 --> 03:32.720 and historian Stephen Ambrose, all from the late '90s and, 03:32.720 --> 03:37.720 in Samet's view, with an oversimplified take on personal and national purpose. 03:38.320 --> 03:43.320 Do you not buy the Greatest Generation idea or even the whole concept of the good war? 03:44.560 --> 03:49.200 ELIZABETH SAMET: Well, as my own father was a member of this generation, of course, 03:49.200 --> 03:54.200 I would -- the loving daughter in me would like to believe that his was the Greatest Generation. 03:54.560 --> 03:59.280 But I just don't think that's a provable claim. And I'm not sure what it might 03:59.280 --> 04:04.280 mean. People joined that war for a variety of reasons, the way they join 04:05.600 --> 04:10.600 any war. And despite the fact that they made great sacrifices, and heroic sacrifices, many of them, 04:12.560 --> 04:16.720 the sense in which they all joined because they were 04:16.720 --> 04:21.720 righteous liberators motivated by ideology is a false one, according to many studies. 04:23.600 --> 04:25.040 GEORGE W. BUSH, Former President of the United States: States like these 04:25.760 --> 04:29.680 and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil. 04:29.680 --> 04:34.680 JEFFREY BROWN: Why does this matter? Because, she says, political leaders and public sentiment 04:34.960 --> 04:39.960 have continued to apply this framing in very different conflicts, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. 04:40.640 --> 04:43.840 BARACK OBAMA, Former President of the United States: These were generations of men and women 04:43.840 --> 04:46.560 who proved once again that the United States of America is and 04:46.560 --> 04:49.360 will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known. 04:49.360 --> 04:53.760 ELIZABETH SAMET: I think it deeply, deeply burned into the national psyche, 04:53.760 --> 04:58.760 and it tapped into longer-standing myths of American exceptionalism, so that the 05:00.080 --> 05:05.080 figure of the G.I. as a righteous liberator, which is, of course, extremely flattering, 05:05.680 --> 05:10.680 why would we not want to believe that, became something that we would just assume would happen. 05:11.360 --> 05:14.720 And the rhetoric that we inherited from that war has shaped 05:15.680 --> 05:18.400 all other wars we have fought ever since. And, of course, 05:18.400 --> 05:23.400 those have not yielded victories, and those were not ultimately causes of liberation. 05:23.840 --> 05:28.840 JEFFREY BROWN: A deeper understanding of the past, she says, is also important because of the strong 05:28.960 --> 05:33.960 influence of popular culture and political discourse on those she teaches at West Point. 05:34.320 --> 05:38.640 Do you find yourself personally in sort of a contradictory place sometimes? 05:38.640 --> 05:43.640 You are surrounded by a kind of ethos of nobility of warfare and purpose. And yet 05:46.160 --> 05:51.160 here you are writing about a kind of purpose gone awry or a lack of understanding of what war is. 05:52.880 --> 05:54.160 ELIZABETH SAMET: Absolutely. 05:54.160 --> 05:56.240 But I think it is necessary work. 05:57.440 --> 06:02.440 I think that anything that distorts our sense of what wars can accomplish 06:03.680 --> 06:08.680 needs to be recognized for what it is, because I think too highly of the people I know who have 06:10.800 --> 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. 06:17.760 --> 06:20.960 JEFFREY BROWN: So, this began for you personally with your father, 06:20.960 --> 06:24.480 but it ultimately comes -- it's still personal because of the work you do. 06:24.480 --> 06:26.640 ELIZABETH SAMET: I think it is, yes, very much so. 06:26.640 --> 06:29.040 JEFFREY BROWN: Elizabeth Samet, thank you very much. 06:29.040 --> 06:29.680 ELIZABETH SAMET: Thank you. 06:29.680 --> 06:33.680 JUDY WOODRUFF: Provocative. We thank you for that conversation.