In examining Sen. Bob Kerrey's review of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, it should be noted that while the World War II generation's achievements are comparable to the Revolutionary War and Civil War generations', those two generations were not followed 20 years later by anything like the '60s brats ("World of Our Fathers," March 8). As great as they were as fighters and builders, the Greatest Generation's record as parents is less impressive.
Of course, not all Baby Boomers turned out to be '60s brats, but all too many did, and these children make up the Culture War leadership whose goal is to transform the counterculture into the mainstream. With Bill Clinton getting over 60 percent job approval despite his crimes and decadence, it appears they have succeeded all too well. Small wonder Paul Weyrich has concluded that America no longer has a moral majority.
As an artillery forward observer and reconnaissance and survey officer in Korea in 1952 and 1953, I served with several of the Greatest Generation who had either stayed in the service or been recalled. When I arrived at the 37th Field Artillery Battalion of the Second Division there were still some veterans of Heartbreak Ridge. A few months later, the division also came through in an even bigger battle at White Horse Ridge. Much of our battalion's success was due to the competence of our operations officer, a veteran of the Pacific in World War II. However, all of us who knew him agreed he was one of the most personally obnoxious people we had ever met. (He once told a group assigned as forward observers, "You're meat for the hill.") We rotated home at the same time and he told me that his plan was to complete law school. As our communications officers speculated, "From S3 to ambulance chaser."
Most of the Greatest Generation were good people, but not all of them. And some of the good ones produced offspring such as Charles Ruff, who used post-modernist word games to explain that although President Clinton appeared to lie under oath, he did not commit perjury -- because in his own mind he was trying to tell the truth.
Clinton also probably thought that Juanita Broaddrick should have submitted consensually so that he did not have to bite her lip in the course of forcing her submission. How ironic that a generation including Audie Murphy, Major Bong, and Marion Carl could produce offspring such as James Carville, Sidney Blumenthal, and Craig Livingstone. From sacrifice and heroism to sleaze and thuggery.
GEORGE WEBER, PORTLAND, OR