contract. for it was a very unsettling moment for me. just recently reunited with a man that took me to launch. clif miller. he looked into his ice he is not going to do this. you're always flattered when some one in the white house want you to serve in an important role. my family were not nixon people. to put it mildly. but at the same time, i had covered him. i knew that he had extraordinary political skills. he was a very complicated man in so many ways but the idea of going to work for him never, ever, faintly passed across my consciousness and i was in, i wouldn't say i was in a state of terror but i was in some anxiety. this is something i didn't want to get out. i was starting my career as political reporter. i didn't want people to think i was a nixon person or kennedy person or johnson person. i went back to nbc after the pitch had been made and said you got to get me out of this. julian good man, head of nbc, was soming down from the might house. he went to bob haldeman quietly. privately. it was haldeman's idea. we have big plans for tom and it went away. you want to hear the follow-up? there are two pretty intriguing. no one knew about it. and many years later after watergate, after the resignation of the president, i was doing a retrospective nixon years and watergate and i was standing backstage and waiting to go on embraced from behind in a big bear hug. this familiar voice, how many times i. it was bob haldeman. i said, bob, never comes up again. when i turned 50 they went around with a camera crew to get the reactions of a lot of people. the camera crew came back in my office wide-eyed and tipped me off what was going on. we've just been with richard nixon. he was standing in front after flag, look at this. they played the tape and it is nixon saying i always thought tom brokaw was a man of good judgement. he never showed better judgment when he turned down the offer to be my press secretary. history turned out fine for me. i didn't take the job. i don't think i would have been very good at it. i would have had journal listic instincts saying to one. reporters, i think you have a point there. it is a special kind of job and i was not equipped for it. >> host: tom brokaw writes about that incident in, "boom", talking about the '60s. what happened, how it shaped today. lessons for tomorrow. how many presidents have you covered? >> guest: i always say the first campaign i really covered was lyndon johnson but i covered in the minor leagues out in the midwest but in fact, when it comes to presidents i had several encounters with dwight eisen hour. i kind of forgot about that. he came to omaha and campaigned for barry gold water, for example, in '64. when ronald reagan got elected he went down to see dwight eisenhower in the desert, palm desert. and at the time we knew that richard nixon wanted to run again in '68 and reagan was the new star on the west and there was rumors about him maybe running. so rage again went down just to spend some time with dwight eisenhower. as the limousine pulled out of the country club where they were the press scrum surrounded them and out of the car popped ronald reagan and dwight eisenhower. reagan, when you look back on it now you can see how the country gravitated to him, first in california. he was so handsome and so in command of who he was. and there was ike. and i had grown up during world war ii. he was the biggest hero of my young lifetime, the man who commanded american forces, became two-term president of the united states and the for some reason the los angeles press corps was paralyzed in place. so i stepped forward and i began asking questions of what i called, general eisenhower. i didn't call him the president because, to me had always been a general. we had really good exchange. and in which he said he wanted reagan to run as a favorite son in six at this it. -- '68. you thought that with be good for the party around good for the country. that was in his own way a shot at rich richard nixon. >> guest: boom, you write, one minute ike and man in gray flannel suit in the lonely crowd and next minute, tune on, tune in, drop out, time for we shall overcome and burn baby burn. while americans were walking on the moon, americans were dying in vietnam. there were assassinations and riots. jackie kennedy became jackie o. ty e-die shirts rpt martin luther king, jr. george wallace, tom hayden and. mick jagger and wayne newton. well you get the idea, boom. >> guest: i don't want to overstate this seldom in our recent history at least has there been such a fast hand forward to the a new reality as we went from the end of the eisenhower years and beginning of the kennedy years which were traditional but it was a new generation. it was entirely different kind of generation. jack kennedy didn't wear a hat and he didn't wear button-down shirts and he had the very stylish, 34-year-old first lady of the united states surrounded by all these dashing people and then that came to an end. and the war began to heat up and suddenly the country seemed, seemed to come unhinged in a way. all the values of the world war ii generation come home with challenged within their own families. institutions of government, place of government in our lives. the idea of loyaltity and patriotism all went out the window. civil rights movement went from nonviolent movement led by dr. king depending on rule of law, it went to the streets. you know, violence in america is as as american as cherry pie. so it was a, it was a head-snapping time. there was no question about it and the fact that we emerged from it and reasonably good shape is still fairly astonishing to me. it is a real tribute to the tense aisle strength of this country in a lot of ways. >> host: i began my marriage, tom brokaw writes and my career as journalist in 1962, a straight arrow product of the 1960s. by the time decade was over i had my first taste of the marijuana, i had long hair and weekends i wore bellbottom toms and peasant shirts and as a family we went to hippie festivals in north l.a. meredith and i were raising our children essentially as we had been raised by our great depression and world war ii parents in the midwest. >> guest: we went on to raise our children in new york. our very close friend bud was raising his children sultly in greenwich village and the two families were very close. bud always had the time we were adopted. look at his kids from time to time, all appearances to the contrary you're being raised in kansas city. i think we tried to retain values which we had been raised, manner which we had been raised our kids would go back to south philly spend time with parents every year. we sent them to camp in minnesota we want wanted them to have some appreciation from culture which they came. it was, it was a head di time. steve roberts and coke which roberts were very close friends of ours and they were doing the same thing we were. they were raising their children in traditional fashion but we often talked that on weekends you would kind of put on costumes and be if not part-time hippies you could skirt around the edge of what was appeared to be a kind of liberation movement of some kind. wasn't true for everyone obviously. there was silent majority. there were a lot of people, like ron ziegler and, and haldeman, for example, and dwight chapin. they came out of usc. they were still the straight arrow kind of country club set. so there were lots of cultures in play in california in those days but on monday morning i had to get up and put on shirt and tie and jacket and go off to pursue my career as a journalist. >> host: are there parallels to be drawn from the '60s to today? >> guest: i think that there are some parallels. the separation between the values of the parents and many of their children were not nearly as, are not nearly as great today as they were then. i had this kind of mythical family i described. i say, imagine somebody who joined the marine corps at age of 18 at 1 1941. fought across the pacific. came home. married his high school sweetheart. got to good job in detroit. cute with the wave of prosperity with working class families at that time. had a little fishing cabin in the upper peninsula. one day he came home at old marine and sitting at table was his daughter, not wearing a brassiere and having hair under her arms and leg hair and with a guy that she identified only as zeke, who had sunglasses on, greasy hair and a guitar and said daddy we'll move in together. we aren't getting married because no one does that anymore. he is looking to his son for some reinforcement. his son has got united states flag swastika over it and son says i'm going to canada. i'm not going to fight. this is somebody else's war. if when he turns around to get help from his wife she is standing at kitchen stove saying to him, okay, big guy, how come i'm only one in this house that does the dishes and fixes meals anymore? that is what was going on. it was kind of 180 from how a lot of that generation had been raised to what they were experiencing in the their own families. >> host: one more quote from "boom". as a reporter i was fascinated by what was happen but was not tempted to dive into that pool. my ambitions were counter to the counter culture. when i let my hair grow long and abandon straight arrow wardrobe on weekends i always felt i was in a costume just playing a role. >> guest: it was intriguing. you could do things that you never expected to do. i mean, for example, some experimentation on weekends with marijuana. that was when i was being raised that was the devil weed. there were these kinds of horror films about what one hit on a marijuana weed would do to you but it was so prevalent, so part of the california social scene, even among the old hollywood crowd for example. there were reports that some of the grand dames of hollywood were kind of taken with marijuana. i didn't handle it very well. i didn't get addicted to it. i got out of it after a couple experiments with it. that is as much as i wanted to try but i was interested in doing it. i think there were lots of people that shared my view of that. then you move on with your life. you know, you kind of circle back and say, what's the long haul here? what are we going to do? >> host: who is red brokaw? >> guest: my father was a working-class kid. he was very, he had a very troubled childhood. he came from a large, hard scrabble family. they ran a little railroading hotel in bristol, south dakota in the north prairie. conditions were very harsh. dad was last of 10 children. his mother died when he was about eight. his dad was kind of a ne'r-do-well in town. by the time he was 10 he was effectively turned out and left to his own devices. he was taken in by a swedish homesteader, oscar johnson. you look back on it, technically he was guilty of violating every child labor law that ever been imagined but he gave my dad a life. learned how the to drive a team of horses. deliver coal, drew wells. he also learned that he had a extraordinarily defined skill for operating heavy equipment. construction crew came through town one day. wanted to use his team of horses of the he said i will let you use them teach me how to operate that. a big caterpillar. for rest of his life he made a very bad living as -- good living as a man master of anything that was mechanical. >> guest: . >> host: who is your mother? >> guest: my mother jean was something entirely different than that she grew up in a bookish, irish-american family out on hard scrabble farm south of bristol. they had little prosperity during the '20s and then the depression came and they lost everything. mother went to a one-room school and she, to the day that she died a couple months ago was one of the most intuitivelily bright people i had ever known. she wanted to go to college and become a journalist. she was 16 when she graduated from high school. college costs $100 a year. completely out of reach. so she went to work for a dollar a day. my father, and this is always most unlikely thing, here's my motorcycle-riding, red-haired father, no education whatsoever but he spotted my mother and she spotted him and between the two of them they became more than the sum of their parts, the big muscular guy with a great sense of humor, my mother who was not athletic at all but was bookish and in our family was the centrifuge for civility and goodmanners they put together a working class life and managed to save out of every paycheck x-amount of money. they decided that at the end of the first year they would try to have $1,000 in the bank, a veritable fortune in those days. lived in two-wheel trailers and rooming houses as they chased across the midwest. then they had me in 1940. and we moved to an army base. we had two other brothers in succession. mother held us all together. three rough neck boys, hard-hat father, and my dad because he had been raised in part by his sisters, had an enormous regard for my mother and for place of women in his life. i grew up with this consciousness before a lot of young men my age did and my mother made me learn to sow on a button, iron my own shirts, iron my own pants and make dinner if necessary if no one else was at home. that was just part of the deal. >> host: how did you end up in yankton, south dakota? >> guest: well after the war my dad wanted to go to texas and to the oil patch and chase dirt as he called it. he was so good at getting good construction jobs. and mother thought it would take us out of our comfort zone in south dakota and she knew that they were building big dams on the missouri river and there would be good jobs and government benefits. this is the era of great public works projects. the interstate highways were being built. big dams were being built and so we moved to the middle the state to very forewarned part the south dakota. part of an indian reservation. and i remember standing there my dad saying to me they will build the biggest dam in the world across the missouri river right here. within two years 3,000 people living in shake and bake town. like army base. course of engineers came in and built the town. we lived half a year, little more than that in two bedrooms of small town nearby. there was no housing but it was very exciting. it was farm life and i still have friends from that time. then we moved to the town and when i look back on it my wife is call ad brigaoon if was in a way brigadoon working class families came into the town had good government housing trailers and good jobs and good wages and dam was being built 24/7 over a period of about eight years. it was a massive either dam and came from california and oklahoma and mississippi, iowa and minnesota and they would be gone after nine months because their phase of the work had been completed. then a new group would move in. so it was very exciting place to live. we had state-of-the-art movie house, a great high school. extremely elegant kind of layout of a town with traffic circle and curb and gutter and people thought that they died and gone to heaven because they were not that many years out of the great depression and out of serving on the front lines in europe and the south pacific. they still, the town is no longer really there but my old classmates still have regular reunions there. they will put in a little museum. people would come from all over south dakota just to drive through the town to see because it had popped up overnight and then in 1955 it came to an end and my mother and dad came to me at boy scout camp where i was working at counselor in minnesota said we're moving to yankton which was down the river. another dam had been put in there and that's how we moved to yankton. >> host: from a long way growing up in the american heartland, tom brokaw writes as a young, white male in the '50s i was a member of ruling class. however inadequate my qualifications or uncertain my prospects it was a white man he is and white boy's world. >> guest: it was indeed. i was talking with someone yesterday in very successful new york executive and he said, what are you going to write about our generation the luckiest generation? and i said, we happened to be the kings of that generation because we were white males. it was a white male-dominated world in those days. when i graduated from college in the early 1960s, after what can be euphemisticly dibed as a stutter start. i kind of went off the rails for a couple of years but when i graduated from college everyone that i knew was getting a job, whatever their college record happened to be. it was the era of still big corporations. friends of mind went to work for ibm for example or for xerox or for john deere. they got jobs or if they went to law school there was a law practice for them to join and it was all affordable. so it was a time when white males in america had a clear field before them unparalleled opportunities and i'm always conscious of that. >> host: from a long way from home, chapter 11, failure is an option. if i were equipped with one of the black boxes so useful determining what went wrong in an airplane crash i might be able to cite a moment or incident when my life, my personal flight plan suddenly veered off course and careened along a dangerous trajectory more than two years. sometime in my senior year in high school when i turned 18 i began to steady descent in pattern of self-deception, conceit and irresponsibility. >> guest: it was a time that i still to this day can not completely understand where my compass went awry. up until then i had not been just a goody-two-shoes, i had been as mischievous as most teenagers are. had my share of good times i suppose but i always managed to accomplish things academically and socially politically. by the time i got to be a senior i think i began to take that foregranted. i think i was on autopilot. it would come my day whatever i did. i also suspect i was little bored. my mother talked about it little later and you had always done anything the right way and we had maybe too much confidence. when you began to go of the rails and we should have put the brakes on you a lot harder than we did. it took me a couple years. he actually dropped out of school at one point. i was wandering around the landscape in a way a lot of my friends were puzzled. they were extremely disappointed. the woman who have been married for 50 years now, meredith, played a pivotal role getting me out of it. i was interested in her, so i thought she would be interested in me. she wrote me the harshest letter i think i have ever gotten say i don't want to hear from you, don't want you to call. don't want you to show up at the door. you're not going anywhere. >> host: good afternoon, and welcome to "book tv" on c-span2s. this is our monthly, "in depth" problem where we feature author and body of work. this is nbc journalist, tom brokaw and he is author of six books. we begin with the greatest generation from 1998. followed by the greatest generation speaks in 1999 and album of memories, another follow-up to the greatest generation in 2001. a long way from home, his autobiography growing up in south dakota, 2002. boom, talking about the '60s came out in 2007. and finally his most recent book is, the time of our lives, a conversation about america. mr. brokaw, what got you to write --. >> guest: what prompted this? >> host: yeah. >> guest: there was a seminal moment, really. it was spring of 2009 and i had gone to the 65th anniversary of the d-day landing. i go back about every five years for those and i went from there to dresden, germany, to meet with the new president of the united states, a young african-american. and i went through berlin on the way. i had been in berlin the night the wall came down. i had the experience being only correspondent there with live capacity and repo