Message To Tom Brokaw:

Before you continue your tributes to what you call "The Greatest Generation," Tom, you should read Nicholson Baker's book.

Many of the icons of "the greatest generation" are portrayed not quite as heroically as they are by their hagiographers and government-school textbook writers. Perhaps the most striking facts in this regard is how Baker portrays the real Churchill.

Winston Churchill is shown to have been consumed by an extraordinary hatred of the German people from an early age. "The British blockade" of Germany, Churchill is quoted as saying approvingly in 1914, "treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission." General Sherman could not have said it better if one transposes "Germany" for "the South."

In 1918 Eleanor Roosevelt complained about being invited to a party by financier Bernard Baruch, saying "I’d rather be hung than be seen at" the party because the attendees were "mostly Jews." Her husband Franklin, noticing in 1922 that one-third of the freshman class at Harvard was Jewish, "went to the Harvard Board of Overseers, of which he was a member," leading to a change in admissions policy such that "over a period of years the number of Jews should be reduced one or two percent a year until it was down to 15%."

Churchill published a newspaper article on February 8, 1920, in which he apparently took a break from his unbridled hatred of everything German to declare that his "real enemy" was "the sinister confederacy of international Jewry," which he blamed for communism.

He then turned his talents to India, Iraq, and other recalcitrant parts of the British empire. Being given responsibilities for developing British air power, he advised a subordinate that "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes." Subsequently, the British air force "bombed and strafed rebellious tribes" in Iraq, "fired on them with gas-filled shells, burned villages . . ." Churchill congratulated the British commander "upon the distinct improvement in the situation" in Iraq. If there was a British Fox News Channel at the time, it would have spent months celebrating the success of Churchill’s "surge" policy.

Meanwhile, the "Royal Air Force dropped more than 150 tons of bombs on India" in 1925 to tame the "rebellious tribes" there. War is hell for those who wish to secede from exploitative empires.

The great Franklin Delano Roosevelt should have been impeached for his deceit. He (along with Sir Winston) also should have been tried as a war criminal.