The Century by Peter Jennings, Todd Brewster

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

On Tuesday, November 17th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Peter Jennings, author of THE CENTURY.

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Moderator: Good evening, and welcome to the barnesandnoble.com live Auditorium. We are pleased to be chatting with Peter Jennings, anchor and senior editor of ABC's "World News Tonight" and coauthor of THE CENTURY. We are also very pleased to welcome our surprise guest, Todd Brewster, senior editorial producer and coauthor of THE CENTURY. Welcome to the Auditorium, Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster! We are delighted you could join us. Before we begin, how are you this evening?

Peter Jennings: We are well and grateful to be here. Thank you for inviting us.

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Brett Montgomery from Phoenix, AZ: Each decade of the 20th century has its own identity. What do you think the identity of the 1990s is?

Peter Jennings: It's the decade of runaway technology, and if the earlier years of the century are any indication, technology sometimes surprises us. We don't know the effects of the new technologies of the 1990s yet, any more than people in 1910 understood the auto or the telephone.

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Gerald Bourgeois from Hooksett, New Hampshire: I'm looking forward to reading your book and seeing the TV specials related to it. Do you plan to do any book signings, or will there be signed copies available anywhere? I'm a collector.

Peter Jennings: There are numerous book signings, hopefully one near you. Signed copies are certainly available. Barnes & Noble will know. Thursday we will be at the B&N on the Upper West Side in New York City.

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Greg from Oak Park, IL: Today's films, such as "Titanic" and "Saving Private Ryan," seem to have an effect on history after it occurs, creating a craze or a trend of thinking about history. What do you think of this? Do you think these films will shape how we view these events in history far into the future?

Peter Jennings: Yes. And not always fortunately. We are struck by how much interesting literature there is about the "Titanic," and we are pleased that the opening scene of "Private Ryan" takes the very same realistic approach that we take in THE CENTURY about the true horrors of combat.

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Melanie from Wichita, KS: In all of your reporting through the years, who was your favorite interview?

Peter Jennings: Todd says Václav Havel. I say probably Anwar Sadat who admitted in one interview that he actually shot a man, and it surprised the hell out of me.

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M.Harrison from yahoo.com: I remember this phrase being drilled into my mind in history class when I was young: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Can you give us any examples that have struck you of the past repeating itself this century? Anything we should watch for currently?

Peter Jennings: We are both struck by the reality that at the end of the century, man is still killing his fellow man -- see Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, etc., much as he did in previous generations. And that even in our freshly global society, it is the age-old ethnic conflict that continues to encourage so much violence.

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Reginald M. from Chicago, IL: How greatly do you think the Internet will play into overall history as we approach the millennium? I realize this is a speculative question impossible to answer, but any thoughts?

Peter Jennings: Regninald, you make the point yourself, but one thing the Internet does do is enable so many more of us to participate in events and the commentary about events.

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Valerie from Washington, DC: Does your book cover the evolving news coverage of the press? What do you think about how much the media has changed over the years? Are we heading in the wrong direction? Is this a result of technology?

Peter Jennings: We don't spend much time on the press in the book. Although we do note what changes were wrought by the introduction of a national culture, which really began in the 1920s with the arrival of radio. Some people will invariably argue the press is going in the wrong direction!

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Saul Goodman from Peekskill, NY: If you were doing a century book 100 years from now, what do you think the first important event of the 21st century could be?

Peter Jennings: Great question...we're thinking.

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Chris from Montana: If you had a choice to be born during any period of the century, what year would you choose? Also, under the same tone, what period would you have not wanted to live during?

Peter Jennings: Todd would love to have lived in the very first years of the century when America was coming of age and so many new technologies were leading people to believe that man could do almost anything. In the first chapter of THE CENTURY we include a witness who describes watching the Wright Brothers make a first flight. She arrives at the site in a surrey, and in that juxtaposition you can see what radical change was ahead. The automobile was not yet common, and yet first flights were being made. I would have wished to be a reporter during the First World War, where there were none. Perhaps a reporter might have better alerted the world to the horror of the war, which haunted the rest of the century.

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John W. Cheek from Lawrenceville, GA: Good evening, Peter. I was shocked and dismayed as I watched the evening news tonight that a person of your position and stature let such a mistake go uncorrected. The date January 1, 2000 is not the first day of the new century. The year 2000 is the last year of the 20th century -- you know, the 20th 100 years, hence the name, 20th century. Why are you and others like you not correcting this myth that is being promoted? Is this any example for students and young people&to view such a mistake to be carried out to such an extent? I was graduated in 1966, and I know a few of my old teachers are probably spinning in their graves. Please do something to straighten this out. Thanks.

Peter Jennings: John, I stand corrected -- it won't happen again.

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Samira Chandwani from New York: Which event of this century was the most profound to you?

Peter Jennings: The First World War. See the previous answer.

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Tricia from Fort Wayne, IN: What made you decide to write a book?

Peter Jennings: It started as a companion book to a TV series to the History Channel and ABC, but then, thanks to Todd, the book took on a life of its own, and we have been chasing it ever since.

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SC from New York: If you were to write a book entitled "Millennium" what events would you choose then?

Peter Jennings: The first thing we would do was resolve&how we would spell millenium/milennium. See "World News Tonight" tomorrow.

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Elaine from Chicago: What does your book have to say about women in the 20th century? What are your observations about the changing roles and progress of women for the next century?

Peter Jennings: Women figure prominently in the first chapter of the book when the Progressive Era is in full swing. This is when social work emerged as a profession, and most early social workers were women. By the 1920s women were entering into a period of great social transformation and were part of the emerging urban culture. THE CENTURY includes a testimonial from a woman who was a barnstorming pilot. Boy, did she show them.

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Saul Goodman from Peekskill, NY: Peter, if I may call you that, has it been your experience that news is accurately reported? Have you ever had to fight against the "if it bleeds it leads" mentality? Thanks!

Peter Jennings: Saul, this is more of a local television story, not one which we have to deal with too much at the network.

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Paul from Florida: What event that you covered had the most effect on your personal life?

Peter Jennings: I think that it was the Iranian Revolution. My daughter was born then, and I was running back and forth from Iran to London where we then lived.

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Ben from Manhattan: Todd and Peter, what was the most difficult part of this book to write? And Peter, what was the thing that you wrote about that excited you the most? About what would you say, "This part is great!"?

Peter Jennings: Todd says, the more recent history because the dust is yet to settle. I agree, in that we have had to go back and write about events we may have covered. Which sometimes reminded us that we could have done better the first time.

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Georgianne from Athens, GA: They [say that] we live and learn [and] that the greatest part of history is that we learn from it. What would you consider the number-one lesson that we have learned from looking back at the history of the United States over the past century?

Peter Jennings: One of the most exciting parts of the century has been how the United States has intersected with the rest of the world. Sometimes pushing it away (isolationism), sometimes manipulating events (interventionism), and sometimes relishing the sheer theater of what is out there.

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Charles Pernice from Evanston, IL: The Watergate scandal has definitely made its mark in the history books. How big of a mark do you think the current presidential scandal will make in the history books, and what will it say about our society at the end of the 20th century?

Peter Jennings: Charles, we were amused to see Time magazine note that we had left out the Clinton story as the greatest constitutional crisis of the last 15 or 20 years. We were struck by the notion that had we written it that way, by the time THE CENTURY was published, we would have been dead wrong.

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Craig from California: Could you tell us a bit about what it was like to pull this book together? How did you collaborate? What can we expect to find in the series?

Peter Jennings: I would not have pulled it together without Todd. We spent a lot of time at the kitchen table. The television series on ABC is in March, and a separate series [is] on the History Channel in April. We think of the book as the opening act now, and hope that you enjoy them all!

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Naomi from Houston, TX: I always find it interesting to see how the popular culture reflects the times. What to you are some of the more interesting trends and popular cultural phenomenons over the past hundred years?

Peter Jennings: Naomi, we love this question. We have had so much fun with this. We are Elvis fans. And Marilyn fans. And Beatles fans. All of them are in the book. In one way or another, they all contributed to the culture. Presley particularly marked an enormous turning point for music and for the culture of the young.

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Halley from Newark, NJ: With the bipolar existence pretty much ending with the end of the Cold War, what direction do you see us heading in the near future?

Peter Jennings: Halley, the next book - ha! But as there was argument about when the century began -- including the notion that it began with the Russian Revolution and the bipolar competition between us -- some will argue that, with the end of the bipolar competition, the century has already ended.

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Christine in Houston [to Peter Jennings]: What do you think will set this book/series apart from others published at the end of this century? What makes it unique?

Peter Jennings: Christine, several things, we believe. The photographs, for one. The witnesses, for another, who were so vigorous and responsive when we asked them simply to remember. And what we believe is our intent to write each decade from the perspective of those who lived through it. This was history told from the bottom up, much like the century itself.

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WB from New York: A quick look at my copy of the book suggests that you seem to give Reagan a lot of credit. Was my first impression accurate? How do you think he rates?

Peter Jennings: WB, thanks for getting the book. Since we were attempting to tell history from the bottom up, we included only those presidencies that had a real impact on the culture. Five presidents make the cut - Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, Nixon, and Reagan. The chapter title -- Morning in America -- says a lot for what Reagan represented, even while there is still argument about whether he accomplished as much as he did or whether much merely happened on his watch.

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Rich from New Berlin, NY: Mr. Jennings, which figures of the 20th century do you think have led the most interesting lives? I realize this is a really broad question, but can you name a few that have impressed you personally? Would you put Charles Lindbergh anywhere up at the top?

Peter Jennings: Rich, Lindbergh is right up there at the top of the list. We are doing a great TV program on him.

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Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Todd Brewster and Peter Jennings, to chat about an amazing period in history and an equally amazing book, THE CENTURY. Before you go, do you have any closing comments for your online audience?

Peter Jennings: Thanks, you are great. This has been quite an experience. May we be presumptuous? We hope you love the book. And we think you might enjoy The Century on the Internet at www.thecentury.com. Have happy holidays.

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Read an Excerpt

On the night of June 5, 1944, Americans tuned their radios to hear FDR announce that the Italian fascists had been deposed under the force of Allied troops. The Italian and African campaigns had always been sideshows to the war in Europe and Russia, but the fall of Italy was symbolic, the first of the Axis nations to surrender. In the Roman square where Il Duce had once whipped crowds into a frenzy, the celebration was enormous.

Roosevelt was happy over the news ("One up and two to go!" he said), but he was understandably preoccupied. For even as the president spoke, 175,000 young Allied soldiers (many of them teenagers about to witness their first days in combat) were pushing off from the coast of England toward France in the largest amphibious operation in the history of war.

Operation Overlord, as it was called, was a massive logistical challenge. Along with the enormous fighting force (which was scheduled to grow to 2.5 million before the invasion was completed), it involved moving 50,000 motorcycles, tanks, and bulldozers across sixty miles of open water, employing 5,333 ships and 11,000 airplanes. All told, the operation of D-Day (the "D" stood for nothing more than a reinforcement of the word "Day") was roughly comparable, historian Stephen Ambrose has written, to transporting the cities of Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, across Lake Michigan -- every man, woman, child, car, and truck -- and doing it all in one night.

But it was the strategy, much more than the logistics, that was the gamble. An amphibious invasion is an inherently dubious idea; historically, most have failed. The landing army arrives on a fortified coastline withits back already pushed to the sea and until it can sufficiently secure the beachhead to allow for trucks and artillery to come ashore, the attackers must move about on foot, a disadvantage that is rarely overcome. With Operation Overlord, there was all this against the Allies and more: the untested citizen-soldiers, tens of thousands of young men barely out of boot camp. On the morning of June 6, 1944, no one knew if they were up to the job.

Touring the bases under clearing skies (a torrential rain had forced the postponement of D-Day by twenty-four hours), General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied troops, went down to a Portsmouth pier to see off British units boarding a landing craft. He said farewell to twenty-three thousand Allied paratroopers at Newbury, aware of predictions that as many as 75 percent of them would be casualties. Holding lucky coins he had saved from his successful invasions of North Africa and Sicily, he chatted with the men of the 101st Airborne. Then, after saluting the planes as they took off for France, the stiff-lipped Kansan who would later occupy the White House turned away in tears.

For most Americans, D-Day was the climax of the war. It was their war, the trucks and tanks and armored vehicles carrying the Allied soldiers having recently slid off the assembly lines in Michigan and Illinois; the bombers and fighters ready for takeoff having emerged from assembly plants dotted throughout Ohio, Oregon, and California; the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers having been hammered together at shipyards on both coasts. People cheered the news of the invasion, which they had eagerly awaited. Churches rang their bells, factories sounded their whistles. Then, just as suddenly, everyone huddled in fear for the fate of their young boys, whose lives hung in the balance. On the night of June 6, Roosevelt, who had been too sick to go to London and participate in the planning of D-Day, came on radio to do the only thing that he, or for that matter, any American could do--pray. But the comfort that prayer provided at this moment was undermined by the knowledge that the God they depended upon now was the same one who had tolerated the carnage of Europe and the awful slaughters in the Pacific.

Off the English Channel, thousands of terrified infantrymen from twelve Allied nations, many having already vomited their breakfasts, floated in flat-bottomed landing craft toward shore beaches code-named Sword, Juno, Omaha, Gold, and Utah. As the coastline grew near, appearing to them through thick gray fog, the soldiers, carrying seventy pounds of wet battle gear apiece, jumped neck-deep into the waters and waded ashore. Now the battle was theirs to win or lose, all theirs. The first units, taking advantage of the element of surprise (the Germans had predicted that the Allies would invade at Pas-de-Calais, the channel's narrowest point, and were thus underfortified at Normandy), made their way quickly into the farmland at Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. But the Americans pushing in at Omaha were not so lucky. There, in the center of the front, soldiers walked into a wall of German gunfire and paid dearly for it. Attempting to scale a bluff well covered by German defenders, more than 2,000 GIs were killed or wounded. By nightfall they had secured it, and joined the 156,000 Allied men on their way to liberate France.

Despite its astonishing success, the invasion of Normandy was a messy affair. German mines (nicknamed "Bouncing Betties") made the waters treacherous, and red with blood. After penetrating the corpse-laden beaches, the soldiers ran into the Normandy bocage, a maze of hedgerows in which the Germans had stationed small groups of machine gunners, invisible to the Allies until they were virtually on top of them. Still the British and American losses were nowhere near those anticipated. The total number of casualties suffered in the operation's first day was under 5,000, considerably less than the 75,000 some planners had feared.

Around the beginning of July, the Allies had landed more than one million troops, 566,000 tons of supplies, and 171,000 vehicles. By August, they had freed Paris and turned east. But the Germans were not ready to give up. They mounted one last strike at the Allies through Belgium in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge (because it pushed a forty-five-mile-wide dent into Allied lines). When Eisenhower's forces broke that offensive, too, the march to the Rhine was easy.

By early 1945, the Nazi strategy had been reduced to the bizarre. In an attempt to stiffen German morale, the high command unveiled an epic movie on the resistance of a small German town to the invasion of Napoleon in 1807. Kolberg, which had been created at Goebbels's insistence, was a film with Hollywood flair. It included 187,000 soldiers, who had been borrowed from the front to serve as extras. And at a time when the rail lines were under seige, hundreds of train cars had been commandeered to transport salt to the set where it became the "snow" of winter scenery. Even the director was appalled at the excess. "Hitler and Goebbels must have been obsessed with the idea that a film like this could be more useful to them than even a victory in Russia," he said.

Hitler was surrounded, his nation rapidly disintegrating. From the East, the Russian army pushed through Poland (conveniently pausing outside Warsaw so that the Germans could finish off the city and make it easier for the Soviets to hold it in their palm after the war) and marched toward Berlin. From the West, the Allied forces moved deeper into Germany, their eyes on the Elbe River. His nation was a landscape of ruins: Dresden, Essen, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Hamburg, all reduced to rubble. Hitler retired to a concrete bunker at the center of the German capital, the only place where the myth of his destiny remained intact, and waited for a miracle.

The German leader first put his hopes in a home army composed of teenagers and old veterans -- the only men who had not yet been drafted; later in the death of Roosevelt on April 12, which he received as his last bit of good news. Perhaps now, he thought, his fortune will change, just as it changed for Frederick the Great in 1762 when his rival, Tsarista Elizabeth of Russia, died, shifting the momentum back toward the House of Brandenburg. But of course the transition to Harry Truman was smooth, and the Allies remained solid.

By April 30, even Hitler's fanatical optimism had failed him. After a quiet lunch of spaghetti and salad, the führer and Eva Braun (he had married Braun, his longtime mistress, only two days before) walked into his underground suite, closed the door, and proceeded to swallow lethal doses of cyanide. An aide, following Hitler's instructions, waited until the poison had taken effect and shot him once in the head (to be sure that he was dead), then helped carry the two bodies upstairs where they were laid side by side in a garden, soaked with gasoline, and set on fire. Shells from the guns of the invading Russian army were bursting around them while a small group of mourners stood and raised their arms in a final salute. Within days, the Germans had surrendered.

Crowds in Red Square, Times Square, Picadilly Circus, and along the Champs Èlysées erupted in celebration. But the news from Berlin failed to slow the pace of warfare on the other side of the globe where the savagery of the Pacific war had been becoming increasingly surreal.

When the Marines landed on Saipan in 1944 (the tiny island was strategically important because its airfields would put American B-29s within striking distance of Tokyo), they battled fiercely against the Japanese banzai attacks, losing more than sixteen thousand men, then encountered a surprise: wave upon wave of Japanese civilians coming at them in a suicidal orgy. While the conquering Americans assured the people from loudspeakers that they would be treated well as captives, mothers threw their children from the edge of cliffs and then jumped after them; others pulled the triggers on grenades, then hugged them close to their bodies.

Reclaiming Guam the same year, Marines encountered desperate enemy soldiers armed only with pitchforks and baseball bats, bottles and rocks. Some took sticks, attached knives to the ends of them, then came hurling at the Americans in an unrelenting suicidal barrage. And even after the island was securely in American hands, thousands of Japanese refused to capitulate, taking to the hills instead, where they continued to attack guerrilla style for months.

But the stories of the fighting at Peleliu (pronounced Pell-ee-loo) are surely among the most bizarre, and tragic. The island was considered a stepping-stone to the recapture of the Philippines and an easy one at that. Admiral Chester Nimitz expected the Marines to work for three or four days and encounter minimal casualties. In fact, the fighting would last for two months and end the lives of 1,262 Marines and nearly 10,000 Japanese.

A preinvasion bombardment was thought to have weeded out most enemy troops at Peleliu. But when the Marines hit the beaches on September 15, 1944 they discovered thousands of Japanese hiding in a series of interlocking caves. Safe from attack, the enemy troops then undertook a deadly game of hide and seek, popping open the camouflaged steel doors of the caves, firing at the Marines, then disappearing again into the earth. The terrain, too, proved an obstacle. The Americans had brought shovels with them to dig out their protection, but the island's tough coral surface was impossible to penetrate, forcing them to lie exposed to deadly accurate mortar and artillery fire, or to crouch behind their own dead. In the end, the Marines would need almost two months to root out the enemy, and only much later would they learn that the island fight had probably been unnecessary: the Philippines were in easy grasp whether they had Peleliu or not.

The battle for Okinawa had already begun when news of the end of the European war arrived. The island was a critical target for the Americans -- just 350 miles from Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, it was a natural step before the invasion of Japan itself. But a wave of suicide bombers, numbering in the thousands, was making it hard for the Americans. Off the coast of the island, a Japanese Zero crashed onto the flight deck of the U.S. aircraft carrier Bunker Hill. Thirty seconds later, another kamikaze fell from the sky ripping a forty-foot hole in the side of the Bunker Hill. The Americans won at Okinawa (at a price of fifty thousand casualties) but the Japanese resolve showed no signs of easing.

By early summer 1945, the Japanese had just 800 functioning aircraft; the Americans, 22,000. American fliers were finishing the last of hundreds of firebombing sorties over Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama, obliterating every military target, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, too. Yet their devotion to Emperor Hirohito forced the people of Japan to fight on. Expecting an invasion force even larger than the one which hit the beaches of Normandy (in fact, fifteen divisions were in the blueprints for Operation Olympic, as the Allied invasion was to have been called, versus the nine that crossed the English Channel), civilians on Japan's main islands were mobilizing to repel the enemy with anything they could find: rocks, sticks, bamboo. Throughout the Pacific, the American forces were dreading the coming weeks, if only because they had seen the tenaciousness of the Japanese and feared that an invasion of the main islands could only create a gruesome battle fought to the last man, another Stalingrad.

The precious few who knew that America was testing a secret weapon in the summer of 1945 never referred to it as a bomb. To the boys at the assembly plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, it was Project S-Y; to the Joint Chiefs, S-1; to the head of the Department of War, only "X" (though Secretary Stimson's diary entries also include references to "the thing" and "the dreadful"); to the scientists at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, test site, the ones with the best vantage point to the weapon's awesome power and destructive potential, it was "the gadget," "Thin Man," and "Fat Man." Such was the peculiar, humbling atmosphere around the first atomic weapon that the closer it came to reality, the more childish the appellation those near it gave it.

On August 5, 1945, "Little Boy," which was the name that stuck on the one that mattered, was loaded onto the bomb bay of Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets's B-29. Seventy-five crack fliers had been waiting for months for this moment, having volunteered for an assignment about which they knew only one thing: they would be doing "something different." During maneuvers, the fliers had been instructed to wear welder's goggles and never look back in the direction of their target (peculiar enough) but when they were told they would be dropping one bomb and only one bomb, they took the news as both perplexing and demeaning.

On August 5, the night before the historic day, the members of the 509th Composite Group learned that their "one bomb" would be delivering a destructive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. By that time, it was obvious that something very different was at hand. The military's top brass had arrived on the i