FAMOUS PEOPLE

One of my favorite pictures from the World War II era is of Jimmy Stewart standing with a group of ordinary young Americans, his right hand raised, being sworn into the Army Air Corps. It was everyone’s war, from the impoverished North Dakota farm kid to the Ivy League scion, the Hollywood star, the sons of the rich and powerful. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. landed in Normandy on D-Day. FDR’s boys were on duty in the South Pacific when their father died, and only Elliott was able to get home for the funeral. Jack Kennedy and his brother Joe were in uniform and in harm’s way.

Others we came to know later: George Bush, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, all Navy officers, later presidents of the United States. Ben Bradlee, the most celebrated newspaper editor of his time, was another young naval officer in the Pacific. Art Buchwald, a foster child from the Bronx, joined the Marines at seventeen and emerged to become a universally beloved columnist. Johnny Carson, the master of the television medium, looked like a skinny twelve-year-old in his naval officer’s uniform. Julia Child, America’s favorite woman in the kitchen, was in the OSS. Byron “Whizzer” White, an All-America football player and Rhodes Scholar, was turned down by the Marines because he was color-blind but was accepted for the Naval Intelligence School. He met John Kennedy in England, and when Kennedy became president, White was his first appointment to the Supreme Court.

Kennedy was just one of scores of World War II veterans to enter the political arena. Their fame grew out of their place in the great public policy debates of their time and the offices they occupied.

The themes of war have long been the stuff of great literature, and once World War II ended, a new generation of American writers emerged. Some are still at work today. Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, William Manchester, James Jones, Paul Fussell, Shelby Foote, and Joseph Heller all served in uniform during World War II.

So did Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary and, later, ABC News correspondent. Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, was a combat infantryman. Andy Rooney, of 60 Minutes, wrote for Stars and Stripes during the war.

William Webster has been a distinguished federal judge, the director of the FBI, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. During the war he had an unremarkable time as a Navy lieutenant; he was not involved in combat, yet he credits the discipline and organizational skills he learned from the Navy with helping him when he took over the formidable job of reorganizing the FBI after the chaos of the Watergate years.

Cyrus Vance embodies the best of his generation as a private citizen and public servant. Vance, a small-town native of West Virginia who earned Ivy League credentials at Yale as an undergraduate and law student, was a junior officer in the Navy during World War II. He left the military in 1946, but in a manner of speaking, he’s never left the service of his country. Now in his seventies, he’s still at the top of any list when there’s a need for a skilled and tireless diplomat in trouble spots such as Bosnia or Africa. For more than half a century he has moved gracefully and effectively between congressional staff jobs, a thriving New York law practice, and as secretary of the Army during the John Kennedy administration, a major player on Lyndon Johnson’s diplomatic and national security team, and, for three years, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state.

World War II, like the Civil War but so distinctly different in origin, locale, and time, was the common denominator and the defining experience in the lives of millions of young Americans, whatever their status before the first shots were fired. Later accomplishments, however grand or notorious, cannot diminish the place of their service in the war years.