访谈录 2010-03-12 汤姆汉克斯Morning Joe访谈（三）

...spread out it was.

So you're on the cover of Time Magazine.

It's big.

Oh, did you...

A big win to Tom Hanks...

I got a foldout I'd like to say.

And you're a hero. Mike Tonicle was talking about this earlier in the show when we were talking about you being on today. You're a, like Tom says, a history maker 1, you’re a hero to history thoughts.

A history teacher.

That's, uh, a history teacher. And that's got to feel, I mean, given all the things that you've been able to do in Hollywood, that's got to be the most, I would think, rewarding.

Well, when we were promoting Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg and I, and the great Stephen Ambrose, we were flying around to 5 different countries over the course of a week. And at the end of the hard work of promoting one's wares 2, and shamelessly flogging your product, we would get on a plane and fly to the next city and Stephen Ambrose would sit at the little table on our little plane and he would just tell stories. That was the most evocative, the most heroic, the most personal avenues into what was really the greatest conflict of the greatest generation. And it wasn't about tactics 3, and it wasn't about maps, it was about just what human beings did, said and went through. And the amazing thing was that these guys came back and picked up their jobs, working in glass factories and selling insurances or driving cabs or being barbers. And that to me was the way to communicate history.

You know Tom, one of the things Tom says in this Time article, Mike, is, when you came back from Pacific, it took you a hell of  a long time to get home on the Atlantic.

Get on that ship it's two weeks…

Guys are in a living hell right now in Iraq, in Afghanistan. 18 hours later, they're in Des Moines. It's ...

That's another set of challenges actually.

One of the things we're talking about earlier, while you're in the control room directing the show probably, is that we live in a country, in a culture today with great benefits, you know the visual stuff, Google. Everything comes instantly. But if you look at high school history books, WWII is like 2 pages, Vietnam’s maybe 8 paragraphs. When did it occur to you or has it occurred to you that, with Saving Private Bryan, with Band of Brothers, with the Pacific, you're actually America's history teacher for many, many people who don't know these stories, who would never have achieved, you know, access to these stories. Human beings, you know, these are, these are face on the Pacific...