Riding the same wave of nostalgia and admiration that Tom Brokaw surfed in his acclaimed The Greatest Generation (1998), Chicago Tribune columnist Greene (Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights) delivers a heartfelt tribute to his father's generation in this triangulated memoir. Called back to his hometown (Columbus, Ohio) to say good-bye to his dying father, Greene decides to seek out his father's longtime heroAan 83-year-old fellow WWII vet and Ohioan named Paul Tibbets. Tibbets was the man who, as a 29-year-old lieutenant colonel, piloted the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Combining excerpts from his father's wartime journals, interviews with Tibbets and his own personal recollections, Greene pays homage to the ideals of his father and conveys successfully what WWII meant to men of that generation. Meanwhile, through his conversations with Tibbets, Greene comes to better understand his late father. Like the aging pilot, Greene realizes, his father felt that the freedoms these men had fought for in the war are unappreciated by today's younger generations, and, like Tibbets, his father was angry about postwar cultural changes. Regrettably, what is occasionally a touching salute by a grieving son is marred by credulousness and overly dramatic prose. Greene's admiration and respect for the pilot of the Enola Gay even manages to get in the way of his well-honed investigative skillsA for example, he accepts with little follow-up Tibbets's assertion that he never had any regrets whatsoever about dropping the bomb. And Greene's relentlessly uncritical depictions of Tibbets's seemingly unreflective, unemotional and gruff personaAas well as his nostalgia for traditional valuesAwears thin.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
According to Greene (Be True to Your School), the man who won World War II was Col. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay--the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in August 1945. Greene, a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, has created a powerful and poignant tale of his personal relationship with Tibbets from their first meeting in 1998. With the skill and sensitivity of an accomplished journalist, Greene tells of Tibbets's involvement with the planning, training for, and execution of that fateful flight to commit the most violent act in history. More importantly, Greene relates how Tibbets and the surviving members of the aircrew have adjusted to their unwanted notoriety in peacetime. In addition, this book is a heart-wrenching story of Greene's relationship with his dying father, also a World War II veteran. Through Tibbets (who lived near Greene's father), Greene finally comes to understand how his father and the World War II generation came to embrace the true meanings of patriotism, courage, and duty. Strongly recommended for all public libraries.
---William D. Bushnell, formerly with USMC, Sebascodegan Island, ME
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
As his father's death approached, Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Greene was forced to come to terms with their distant relationship. He found in another man, Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the atomic bomb to Hiroshima, someone who could help him understand his father's generation. Tibbets lived in obscurity in Greene's hometown, Columbus, Ohio. After 20 years of attempts to interview him, Greene got to meet Tibbets informally. That led to friendship and a chance to understand the reticence and the responsibility of Tibbets' and his father's generation. To Greene, his father seemed to be the archetypal man in the gray-flannel suit, a no-nonsense corporate worker who kept his nose to the grindstone, never complaining but never connecting either. Tibbets, like Greene's father, was a reticent man. But the fact that Greene was working a legitimate news and historical angle and that he and Tibbets weren't related helped ease communication between them. Tibbets' astonishing mission and unswerving responsibility in carrying it out symbolized for Greene the sense of duty of his father's generation. That sense of duty is also evident in the ruminations of Greene's father, excerpted from the taped oral history he left for his children, which are interspersed throughout Greene's narrative. Through his father's death and his friendship with Tibbets, Greene writes, he "realized anew that so many of us only now, only at the very end, are beginning to truly know our fathers and mothers." A touching look at parent-child relationships and the psychological distance that can grow between generations. Vanessa Bush
Review
"Here is one of the most heartwarming books I've ever read. Anyone who remembers World War II will hang on every word. -- Ann Landers
"[Greene] delineates one of the most significant cultural divides in America -- between the deeply dutiful World War II generation and its more cynical and radically individualistic descendants." -- The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Award-winning journalist Bob Greene is the author of six New York Times bestsellers and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Op-Ed page.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The morning after the last meal I ever ate with my father, I finally met the man who won the war.
It was from my father that I had first heard about the man. The event--the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima I of course knew about; like all children of the post-World War II generation, my classmates and I had learned about it in elementary school.
But the fact that the man who dropped the bomb--the pilot who flew the Enola Gay to Japan, who carried out the single most violent act in the history of mankind and thus brought World War II to an end--the fact that he lived quietly in the same town where I had grown up . . . that piece of knowledge came from my father.
It was never stated in an especially dramatic way. My dad would come home from work--from downtown Columbus, in central Ohio--and say: "I was buying some shirts today, and Paul Tibbets was in the next aisle, buying ties."
They never met; my father never said a word to him. I sensed that my father might have been a little reluctant, maybe even a touch embarrassed; he had been a soldier with an infantry division, Tibbets had been a combat pilot, all these years had passed since the war and now here they both were, two all-but-anonymous businessmen in a sedate, landlocked town in a country at peace . . . what was my dad supposed to say? How was he supposed to begin the conversation?
Yet there was always a certain sound in his voice at the dinner table. "Paul Tibbets was in the next aisle buying ties . . . " The sound in my dad's voice told me--as if I needed reminding--that the story of his life had reached its most indelible and meaningful moments in the years of the war, the years before I was born.
Those dinner-table conversations were long ago, though; they were in the years when my dad was still vital, in good health, in the prime of his adult years, not yet ready to leave the world. I had all but forgotten the conversations--at least the specifics of them, other than the occasional mentions of Tibbets.
Now my dad was dying. We had dinner in his bedroom--he would not, it would turn out, again be able to sit in a chair and eat after this night--and the next morning I told him that I had somewhere to go and that I would be back in a few hours, and I went to find Paul Tibbets. Something told me that it was important.
