BROKAW

PROVIDENCE — In an age where the Internet lets people send an e-mail around the planet in seconds, former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw told a Brown University audience last night that modern Americans’ biggest challenge may be in simply trying to figure out how to talk to each other again.

Technology is accomplishing wondrous things, he said, but people still have to make sure they use it to serve humanity, not the other way around. Speed can overcome reason, he said, and ease can overwhelm compassion.

“It will do little good to wire the world,” he said, “if we short-circuit our souls.”

These days, he noted, many are looking at the uncertain war in Iraq and the increasingly bitter Democratic presidential campaign as the worst of days. He sought to provide the audience that packed the Salomon Center at Brown with some context, drawing on interviews he did for his latest book, Boom!: Reflections on the 60s and Today.

If you think 2008 is tough, he said, you should have tried living through 1968. Forty years ago, the war that America had to deal with was in Vietnam and he recounted how the Tet Offensive early in that year killed 16,000 American servicemen. The nation endured two political assassinations, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. And if candidates’ statements these days are often parsed for possible racial subtexts, Brokaw said the 1968 election had to contend with the thinly veiled racist campaign of third-party candidate George Wallace.

“America seemed to be unraveling,” he said.

Some of American’s political polarization of today can in some ways be traced to the side effects of the successes of the 1960s, he said. The victories of the civil rights movement and King’s example of nonviolent political organization inspired other groups in society to band together and assert their rights as well.

“Everyone got organized so effectively that they wouldn’t even talk to each other,” he said. “We need to find a way to get back and work our way to the dynamic middle.”

He said the America of 2008 is becoming divided in a way that troubles him. As a child raised by the World War II generation — he spoke of growing up on an Army base and the rationing of supplies and the worry of who was coming home and who wasn’t — he said it seemed to him that the current America doesn’t fully appreciate the troops it sends in harm’s way.

“So little is asked of us” on the homefront, he said; no taxes to pay for the war, no rationing for its supplies. At military hospitals he said he found families of injured servicemen and women who felt isolated from the rest of the country.

“We are two societies … separate. Civilian and uniform,” he said. “And that, in my judgment, is unacceptable in a democratic republic.”

Brokaw worked for NBC news for 38 years, starting as a reporter in Los Angeles in 1966 and ending as the anchor of its nightly newscast when he stepped down in 2004. He has remained active with the network, however, and will be working the network’s coverage of tonight’s Pennsylvania primary.

One questioner asked Brokaw if he thought network news was becoming dominated by analysts’ opinions rather than facts.

He said the emergence of the Internet has been a huge benefit to political coverage, opening up the debate to voices that in the past had little chance to be heard.

But as much as he spoke of worrying trends, he also spoke of an abiding faith in what he saw as the essential goodness of the American character.

He said he was often asked who, in a career that included conversations with presidents and luminaries such as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, and sports figures such as Michael Jordan and Ted Williams, were the most memorable people he interviewed.

Ironically, it was hard to remember the most memorable ones’ names, he said. He described interviewing regular men and women, social workers and engineers, who every year leave comfortable lives in the United States to volunteer in poverty-stricken countries. He told about reporting on the horrific civil war in Somalia, and how he met a young doctor from Oklahoma who was over there. Brokaw said he asked him why.

“God gave me these skills and I will go back to Tulsa and make a lot of money,” Brokaw said the young man told him. “But this is where I’m needed now.”

“One luminescent American doing the right thing for the right reason,” Brokaw said. “ … Those are the people who leave the most lasting impression on you.”

jhill@projo.com