August 8, 2019 • 44 mins
Tom Brokaw didn’t win all those Peabodies and Emmys (and a Presidential Medal of Freedom) by cooling his heels! Hear how the legendary anchorman worked his way up from a little radio station in Omaha, why he thinks Watergate turned everyone into an investigative reporter, and how saying yes to opportunities and following his curiosity gave him the edge when the Berlin Wall came crumbling down. Plus, learn how he got a generation of quiet war heroes to finally talk about their experiences.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I heart radio.
They come back and their eyes are kind of wide.
We put in the tape casette and said, you're not
gonna believe this. And there is Richard Nixon standing in
his office next to the American flag, with a flag
at his lapel, and that Nicksonian way. He says, I've
always believed that Tom Broco was a man of very
(00:22):
good judgment, very good judgment. Never showed better judgments than
when he turned down my offer to be my press secretary.
I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome to Math and Magic. Stories from
the Frontiers and Marketing. We explore the analytical and creative
(00:43):
side of marketing, from marketers to founders to media types.
Since Theday, we have one of America's best known observers
of all trends of last fifty years, Tom Broke. I
met Tom in the late seventies, I would say radio programmer,
(01:04):
and Thom was the host of the Today Show. He
was the coolest, tipest guy I knew, and I benefited
from his insights ever since, including this fabulous perch when
he was the anchor of the nightly news on NBC.
Great to have you with us today? Tom, great to
be here. I love the whole concept of the reinvention
of radio in which you're in the sick of it.
And the podcast phenomenon is really something that is I
(01:27):
didn't see coming. When I was on my way over here.
My secretary said, I only listen to podcasts anymore. It's amazing,
isn't it. We're gonna get into some stories, but first
I want to do you in sixty seconds. This is
gonna be lightning round style. It's quick, easy. Give us
the first thing that comes to your mind. Do you
prefer dogs or cats? Oh? Dogs, We've had both. But
I'm I'm owned by dog. We've got two labs, and
(01:50):
you know they're they're at six thirty in the morning
putting their nose in my face and saying, come on, buddy,
it's time to go out. And there I am. I'm husty. Okay.
Beatles are rolling stones the stone. I have a great
story about them, and I've actually talked to Mick about this.
I was working in Omaha and it must have been
six four. I was going to work on a Saturday morning,
and Omaha has a big spot out in midwestern city
(02:12):
and there was a limousine, big stretch. We don't see those.
At ten o'clock in the morning, we're at a four
way stop and four very shaggy heads stuck their heads
out of this limousine. Oh my god, who are those guys?
And then I realized that they were the Rolling Stones.
They had a big townsen that night in Omaha, and
I later said that Mick I was working in Omaha
(02:34):
four He said, oh, yeah, we played it was a
barn and I said, it really was a barn. Okay,
let's go to movies. Network or anchor Man. Network is
a very important broadcast. They did a lot of the
research at our place, which make NBC happy when they
saw it on the screen. But I do think that
Network is an important film So wine or tequila, I'm
(02:54):
talking to a tequila man. Come on. The fact is
I like your tequila. I like it. I'm an Asian
staging life and I want to have something neat and
cold and not a lot of it. Frankly, Okay, so
we're gonna pick places Montana, New York, of Florida. That's impossible.
I mean they all have different appeals to me. I
(03:16):
couldn't live anywhere else except to York. So let's go
to the beginning. Out west. I did a motorcycle trip
across America with a group of bikers in I told
you about it, and you said, you've got to stop.
Only one suggestion yanked in South Dakota. Clearly, your hometown
was very important to you, and you talk a lot
about your early family life there. Can you give us
(03:37):
just like a second on it and then tell us
what lessons you took away from that that you've used
your whole life. Although towns of that size it was
about nine thousand at that point, but they had everything
they had to colleges. They had a very very good
public high school and a public school system because they
made a huge investment in it. And you were raised
not just by your family, but you were raised by
the community, and there was an enormous community provide if
(03:59):
you did something. When I was a junior in high school,
for example, I was invited to be on a television
question show here in New York. There wasn't a television
set at Yankton that was not tuned too for the
money that night because Tom Brokaw was on, did you win? Well, yeah,
we won six bucks. Which that was a change. You
(04:20):
came to New York. What else had you seen in
the bigger world? Or was the world really South Dakota
for you? Growing up, I always was looking over the horizon.
I knew there was life out there that I wanted
to be a part of. Radio for me was my
connection to the wider world. I thought maybe I could
do something like that. And you actually were on the
radio I was. I was fifteen years old. I moved
(04:42):
to this town. Why they hired me right away, I
don't know. I guess I had a reputation of being
a gabby kid. But I moved to Yankton in the
summer of nineteen By the following nineteen fifty five, I
was playing football and basketball, and at seven o'clock at night,
I was doing a teenage rock and roll show. And
those were the great days, you know. I was a
big fan of early rock and roll, Elvis and Jerry
(05:04):
Louy and everybody. It was two hundred fifty one station
got maybe to the end of Main Street, but for me,
it was a very big deal. And you went off
the air at what time went off here at midnight?
But I didn't stay until midnight. I was on from
seven until eight, and then at the summertime they hired
me as a vacation replacement. So it was a great deal.
All my other friends were out there breaking their backs
and working on highway construction projects. I was sitting in
(05:25):
an air condition studio playing songs for girls that I
wanted to meet. You know, so you met Meredith your
wife there. I met Merith. Tell us the story. She
was the brightest young woman in town and absolutely dropped
beautiful from the first family of Yanked and her dad
was a doctor, and her mother built a school library.
And she was very, very disciplined, which is part of
(05:46):
the reason that we still and still is, and so
we were great pals, but we didn't ever date. In
high school, she was a cheerleader and I was playing basketball.
We're going to the state basketball tournament. And she gave
me a Christmas gift, which was a sailor's cap because
I had a girl in every report. She had me
figured out early on, I went through a role kind
(06:07):
of off the cliff kind of time. I dropped out
of two colleges. I didn't know what I was gonna
do with my life, and Marath wrote me the harshest
letter I've ever received, saying, if you don't get your
act together, I never wanted to talk to you again.
We weren't even dating at that point. You're disappointed, your parents,
the rest of us can't figure out what you're up to.
There's a big wake up call. So I kind of
got my act together, and she came to me and said,
(06:27):
maybe I went too far. I said no, I had
it coming. And a year later, to the surprise of
everyone hours to go to we got married years ago.
That's a pretty good story. Yeah, you went through college
and you got into TV. How did that happen? I
was working in a television station at Seux City Aisle
(06:48):
when I was still a junior in college and I
could commute. He I made seventy five bucks a week,
or six days a week. I was a booth announcer
into the weekend weather and whatever else. Tell people what
a booth announcer is. You know, you had a live
announcers ten pm kt I V Channel four su City,
next up Dave Shu Maysher and the ten o'clock news.
(07:09):
When I did the weather, the news block led with
the weather. It was the most important thing in the Midwest,
and the weather was brought to you by the cab corn.
And so I would do the weather, and then I
would take a break and I would reach down, I
pull out an ear of corn out of the set
and say, notice these even yellow colonels. This is like
the cab corn product. You don't see that another quarter.
(07:29):
I had no idea what I was talking about. There
will be an included front, there will be a little
pursure system. What the hell does that mean? You go
through your career there you wind up in Omaha. How
do you make the jump? A friend of mine was
working in Sioux City and he had come out of Northwestern.
He was obviously destined for bigger things. He ended up
at CBS. David shu Maysher was his name, and he said,
(07:53):
you're getting married. You got a job? I said no,
I thought I had one, But he said, I think
it's an opening in Omaha. Let me call him. So
I went down to Omaha and I arrived out of
nowhere and it was a very serious news station, and
the news director took me out to lunch and we
started talking politics, and at the end of like she said,
I've never had anybody work for me, who knows as
much about politics as you do. We could use you.
I'll pay you ninety hours a week and I said,
(08:14):
I have to have a hundred. He said, you beg
for this job, not even want a ten dollar raise.
I said, I'm marrying the daughter of a doctor. I
have to be able to say I have a three
figure salary. Said you'll never get a raise, but I'll
start good to hundred, and he kept his promise. I
didn't many were there. I was there two and a
half and I thought I would never get out. I
was working six days a week, signing on the station
(08:36):
at six and the morning, working till one o'clock in
the afternoon. Mary's was teaching school and making more money
than I was. And one night, out of nowhere, I
got a call from the premier NBC of Philly in
America at the time, WUSB in Atlanta, Georgia. It was
a cock broadcasting station. It was the middle of the
civil rights movement, was a big, distinguished station in the
(08:56):
heart of the South. I said, who is this. It
was the station and manager and I said, how do
you hear about me? He said, I have friends in
the Midwest. I asked him to look around, and a
lot of them talk to me about you can you
come down and we'll take a lot. I was twenty
five years old, and I said, if I fly out
of here and my station manager he'll fire me, I
have to sneak out on the weekend, which I did,
(09:18):
and I got off the plane in an early spring
day in Atlanta. I left a snowstorm behind an Omaha
and the Magnolias were in bloom and the station was
in a any bellum mansion and sitting on the end
of Peachtree Street. And if I don't get this job,
I'm gonna kill myself. And by the end of the
weekend they said we'd like you to be our eleven
(09:39):
o'clock news acre. I couldn't believe it. I went back
to omahall told the trailer full stuff down to Omaha
and went to work right away, and more than a
hundred dollars a week, I mean more huns. They tripled
my salary, and that was a big deal. At night
at eleven thirty, I was often called by the NBC
news desk, Can you get to Selma, Can you get
to Montgomery? Can you get to Americas? There was all
(09:59):
hell bre can listen. So I would jump on a
charter and run down to those places until they could
get their NBC correspondence there. And I was on the
Today Show, It was on a lot of radio, and
I was at the time of my life. Damner got
killed a couple of times. The sheriff pointed a shotgun
at me. He said, if you don't get out of town,
I got a hair trigger here. And then I was
grabbed by a bunch of guys who wanted to put
(10:19):
me in the trunk of a car and drive me away,
and somebody intervene. Anyhow, six months later after I got there,
NBC came and said, we want you to come to
work for us. Take you to California, and we'll triple
the salary you're getting here, which has just been troubled.
It was unbelievable. And the station, as you're in Atlanta,
he had a big relationship with the NBC, and he said,
we just got this guy. They said, you're not gonna
(10:41):
be all hang on to him. And he came to
me and he said, they're right, take the opportunity and
go with our blessing. Mareth was pregnant. We waited as
the baby was born, moved to California, and I got
there ahead of our nineteen six in the spring, and
the genius at the news tests said, we hear you
know a lot about politics. So there's this actor run
for governor. We don't think he's going anywhere. Get on
(11:01):
the bus with Ronald Reagan. So that was my first
introduction to California politics. I was on the bus with Ronald,
riding around with him. Were you a reporter. I was
a reporter, and I did the Sunday night news and
I filled in as an anchor, you know, when somebody
was off. I would do that. Sometimes I would arrive
at the station at seven thirty in the morning and
they hand me a plane ticket and I jumped on
a plane and fly tot Berkeley, California, and cover of
(11:24):
the riots and Berkeley, get on the four o'clock plane
and fly back again. And then, because I did have
this reputation politics, I would brief David Brinkley when he
would come out to do a story about California politics
or Sandy Matt Oaker or other people. So tell us
a little bit about that period. The country is going
through upheaval. You have both the sort of glitzy go
(11:44):
go sixties, which also had this other almost revolution going on.
It was a cultural revolution, but people forget how much
violence there was as well. We had wats blow up
at that time, and in northern California, Berkeley was seven
a riot. Was not university anymore. Reagan became governor. He
had a reputation as a law and order guy, but
(12:04):
he had to do some things to get control of
the institutions, which he did quite well. Frankly, he was
the governor, but he also had Buff Chandler, who published
the Los Angeles Times at paul from Paula Hale, a
big oil company, Norton Simon, the great art collector, and industrialists.
They were on the board of regions. So I was
exposed at that point to this great group of people
(12:26):
and saw how they acted in the best interests of
the state. And one of the regions was the president
of the U. C. L A Alumni Association, Bob Holdenman.
The first time I ever met him was at a
regent's meeting, and he was actually a wholly different person
that he became. He kind of had a good sense
of humor. If I had questions about the Republican Party.
(12:46):
I could pick up the phone and call me to
give me the straight answer. Then he went off to
work for Nixon and he was a different character. He
really had become the tough cop. He had no sense
of humor about anything. And then he tried to hire
him to be press secretary. Can work for Nixon? Was that?
That was nineteen sixty eight. They were just an office
and wasn't working out with Ron, I would have been
(13:07):
killed in Washington. I got to know the Washington crowd.
They were tough. And this kid coming in from California,
I was twenty eight. If you think they were, they
had been twice as tough on me, frankly, and I
knew better. And I said no, and I swore him
to secrecy. I said, no one can know about this spot.
I want to be an NBC News correspont. I want
to go to Washington, but on my terms, and he
(13:28):
honored that. Now I turned fifty, and they sent camera
crews around. This is later, obviously, and they come back
and their eyes are kind of wide. We put in
the tape causette and I said, you're not gonna believe this,
And there is Richard Nixon standing in his office next
to the American flag, with a flag at his lapel,
and that Nicksonian way. He says, I've always believed that
Tom Broco was a man of very good judgment, very
good judgment. Never showed better judgment than when he turned
(13:51):
down my offer to be my press secretary. Remember, oh yeah,
he remembered. Yeah, So you arrived in Washington summer of
seventies three. Watergate was under way of point, and I
didn't quite know what I was in for. I had
a pedal very hard. I was keeping up, but at
the same time there was still little skepticism about who's
this guy from California? What does he know? And I
(14:11):
was helped by guys like Bob Novak, the old newspaper guy,
because he would come out. I would brief him on
California politics and Johnny Apple from the New York Times
and say, oh, wait a minute, this guy knows what
he's doing. So I was taken in frankly by some
of the olders, and I once said that l Hague,
he said, how are you doing? I said, It's like
skiing an avalanche. I just just keeping going all day long,
(14:32):
because something was happening every day in the fall of
the nineteen seventies three, Nixon was under sea that one
of the tapes, a special prosecutor was after him, and
Syria and Egypt invaded Israel, and Israel was not prepared
and they were about to go down, and they called
out s os to Nixon, and Nixon called the Pentagon
(14:54):
and said, send every goddamn thing we've got to Israel
and saved Israel. It was a stimulating time. We went
to Russia once and the least he was all over
the country, proving that he was told at the President
United States, my feet really didn't touch the ground for
and you traveled with him, And had you seen the
world before then? I had. I've been in Europe a
couple of times, but I really didn't see it as
much as I was beginning to see it. One of
(15:16):
my favorite moments was Pompido died and we were in
Paris and I was a pool reporter. So I was
at Notre Dame and we had bad seats and I
saw a young priest and I went over to him
and I said speaking. She said, yes, I know who
you are, Mr Broke. I said, I want to be
up there, and I pointed to the ceiling. He said,
there's a backstaircase. We may run into quast motto, but
(15:37):
he said, we'll go. We walked all the way up there,
and I stood on a very narrow pathway at the
top of Notre Dame, looking down on this gathering of
everybody in the world coming in for Pompido's fineral hut.
This is better than being in high school. And Yankton
talk about Watergate and this period, what impact it had
on journalism, all the president's men, big book sort of
(15:58):
open people's eyes to was going on. What was the
sea change? Washington journalism was reinvented by Bob and Carl. Frankly,
you know what they did. It was treat this like
a cop show. We're gonna go find out what happened.
The Washington press establishment was pretty much the establishment. They
were buddy buddy with everybody that they knew in the
White House and they knew in Congress. And a few
(16:20):
things would break. Who but Bomb and Carl over two
rookies who went out and covered Watergate from the ground up.
Were they really rookies? Oh yeah, they were really rookies.
Bob had been covering the cop beat in Montgomery County.
They had parked him way out in Montgomery County, but
he was available the day that they were charging the
burglars as they had caught, and he grabbed a notebook
in the little chiny apartment that he had out in
(16:41):
Montgomery County. He ran down to the courthouse in Washington
and the first thing he saw was some very well
groomed larrior who was defending these guys. You know what's
that all about? Who is this guy? Carl was a
renegade kid who was a great writer and a stylist,
and they worked through the night. They go on, knock
(17:01):
on doors. And so what's the lasting legacy on journalism
in general that comes from that era? I think in
many ways, it made everybody a detective. They could be
a nineteen year old starting report and let's say, bake sale, Huh,
who paid for those cookies? Who supplied you with that?
Everything was suspect. It wouldn't take anything for granted. And
(17:22):
now we've got a great generation of very very good journalists.
They've grown up wanting to be working journalists. The other
legacy of Watergate is that there's always a scandal waiting
to be uncovered in the nation's capital, because the stakes
are so big. There's an enormous concentration of power there,
and somebody wants to take advantage of that in every administration.
(17:44):
There hasn't been an administration since I've been covering Washington
that hasn't had a scandal of one degree or another.
We talked about today many people worried about the world
and where we're going. You sort of forget that moment
we were worried that we were gonna have a nuclear war.
Grouping the war with Russia, politics of oil, give us
a little view of what that felt like then and
what the view of the future was from that vantage point.
(18:06):
At that moment. Well, there was more structure to the
international poltical system in those days. The Russians and the
United States had a kind of bifurcated relationship. Russia took
care of the East, We took care of the West.
They had serious talks about nuclear Obviously, Vietnam was a huge,
huge part of what was going on. The warmakers in Washington,
(18:26):
d C. Completely miscalculated the meaning of what Vietnam was,
and that was the rise at that point of Southeast
Asia and the rise really of the place of China.
Nixon understood that he wanted to go to China, it
was his idea. To his credit, he got there and
he opened relations with China. That was a profound move, frankly,
(18:46):
because we then cut out the Russians. We could triangulate.
That was critically important. And the Chinese understood the opportunity
that he brought to him, and Kissinger was a great
facilitator of that as well. And then the world began
to change and now it's chump ball. I'm going to
West Point tomorrow to talk about this to the new
(19:07):
class of cadets. They're going to enter a world in
which all the lessons of the past are upper grabs
because we don't have a relationship anymore with Western Europe
as we wanted to be. Alliance's coming apart and is
being driven apart by the President Trump. But also Western
Europe is not prepared to do what it once did.
(19:27):
Poland used to be a great ally after the war
with US, and now they're having their own internal feuds.
The same thing is going on in Austria. China is
a huge threat commercially, economically, culturally to this country. And
then you have the other players. The renegades like North Korea,
what's going to happen there, and the rise of these
(19:47):
other powers that are not part of a larger complex,
if you will, they're on their own. One of my
oldest friends is one of the leading authorities in the
world on nuclear power. He's a Soviet expert, and he's
I've ever been more frightened about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
He said, it's too easy to get him anymore, and
people have gotten them. So worried more about it today
(20:08):
than back then, because then there was a system for
dealing was that the Russians had him and we had
and we kept track of who else was trying to
get him. Just hold on a second, because we've got
so much more to talk about. We'll be back after
a quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic. We're
here with Tom Brokaw. So you've moved from Washington. You
(20:32):
go to the Today Show for a while, and then
you jump the nightly news, probably at that time the
greatest perch to see what's going on in the world.
You've always had great personal observations. When I would see you,
I would say, Okay, Tom, what really went on? And
you told me the story of talking to Gorbachof and
Castro comes up. Can you tell us the story? Well,
Gorbachoff and I had this relationship because I did the
(20:53):
first and only interview with him at that point that
any Western or ever done. He thought I was the
only American encountered. So he came down to Cuba to
tell Cashow, it's over. We're shutting off the spiccott You're
not getting help from us anymore. We got our own problems.
So Cashrow through this huge reception. Castro was leading him
around the room. I could see that Gorbachof was saying,
what the hell have I got myself into? Yearned? So
(21:15):
when gorber Shop sees me, he's relieved. He comes running
over to me. Was an interpreter, and we start this
animated conversation, and all of a sudden, Cashro realizes that
he's lost the guests, and he comes running over and
he starts talking in the Sicago Spanish and the interpreters
keeping up, and he's saying, corp Shof, don't pay any
attention to broke On and van Rats coming in here,
don't pay any attention to these guys. They come down
and they interview us, and they interviews for two hours.
(21:37):
They go back to New York and they play it
for twenty seconds, and they mean millions of dollars. We
get nothing from all of us. Gorbach was looking at
me and rolling his eyes and rolling his eyes, and
but it was a turning moment because the Russians turned
off the spiccott and the Cubans had to deal with
it on their own. So he rolled his eyes. Probably
one of the most telling things about what was going
(21:58):
on there. But you really weren't able to talk about
on TV today. You that would be the lead. So
what happened then and today? In terms of how people
cover story, what happened? What happened is a proliferation of outlets.
I mean, what happens that Everything is seven now, so
you gotta fill it up with material. There's too much repetition,
not enough original reporting, and it's just repeating, repeating, repeating,
(22:21):
And then you have the ideology of two networks, Fox
and MSNBC going on. But it's mostly just filling things
up and not taking time to be thoughtful. It's tough
for me to watch it sometimes, and I think they
get tired of hearing me. But I have to say
to him, come on, guys. If I'm living in Des
Moines and I'm looking at you for my news, and
I leave the house at eight o'clock in the morning
(22:43):
and I hear what you were reporting. And I come
home at four o'clock in the afternoon or five, and
I'm hearing the same thing again again again. Give me
something fresh, Take me somewhere or I haven't been in
the last nine hours. And by the way, the world
exists beyond on the Hudson River and beyond the belt. Boy,
it's an interesting country out there. Go cover that. Let's
(23:06):
keep going on history the Berlin Wall. I think you
were the only news anchor to be Did you see
it coming and were you prepared for it? How did
you wind up there? Well, what happened is that we
had a very good guy by named Jerry lamprect To
was our foreigner, and he came to me and he said,
you know, there's not much going on here, and it's
beginning to percolate in Berlin. Why don't you think about
(23:26):
going over there. We've got nothing to lose. I checked
the airpoints, you can go tomorrow. So the next morning
I was able to go into East Germany pretty easily,
for the first time. It didn't stop me at checkpoint Charlie.
They just said okay, and I had to have an
escort with me. East Germany. It was a completely different
climate than it had been in the past. People were
wandering around trying to figure out what was going on,
(23:48):
and it was this enormous line at the gate taking
in the Czechoslovakia. And so I said, we don't have
to be on the air live tonight. I just do
some reporting from here, but keeps the satellite for tomorrow night.
Next day, same thing. At about three o'clock in the afternoon,
there was a press conference. Mr. Trobowski, who was their
information chief, who is their propagandists, had this meeting and
(24:08):
the East German journalists by then had been emboldened and
they were challenging him on everything, but he was holding
him off. And then somebody came in gave him a
slip of paper and he says, oh, the polite Berro
has decided, so distance of the g R can exit
and re enters through all of the portholes on the wall.
(24:29):
What I had a camera crew that had grown up
in Germany and they looked at me said, my god,
the wall is down. That's what he's saying. The wall
is down. Everybody was hammering their head and he gets
up and leaves, and I had a pre arranged appointment
with him up in his office, so I ran up
there and I said, Mr Trobowski, read that again on
(24:50):
my camera, and he did. And I said, that means
that East German citizens can leave and come back. That
means the wall is open. Ah, that's what it means.
And I said, you've spent your life as a communist.
Is this the end of it? No, he said, we
will retain control. So I went downstairs a bunch of
(25:11):
newspaper men and I said, it's over. He just confirmed
that the wall is going to be opened. And I
ran back to the office and I said, get the satellite,
make sure it's up. We'll do it at Brandenburg Gate.
It's now about five o'clock and it's you know, noon here,
and it was chaos. We go to the Brandenburg Gate
at about eleven o'clock at night, and Brandenburg Gate is
a great division between East Germany and West Germany and
(25:34):
it looks out on the East German side, and there
were a lot of students from West Germany would come
and stood atop the wall at the Brandenburg Gate shouting
at the East German kids come most us and the
East German kids didn't know whether they'd be shot or not,
so they were reluctant to do it. And then the
guards got the hoses out and they try to drive
him off. That didn't work. In the middle of all this,
(25:56):
a guy who had been on the wall was a
leather jacket on aways. Remember what he looked like, holding
up his hands. It's back to the East German guards
who were hosing him, and he wouldn't be moved, and
he was laughing. So I said Martin Fletcher was our
correspondent from Middle East wh would come up to help out.
I said, go over and get that guy. He's the
image of the new Germany and he'll be on the
cover of Time magazine next week. We're going to interview.
(26:18):
Martin comes back, doubled over and laughter, and I said,
where is it? He said, well, it's not what we saw.
I said, what do you mean? He said, he's a drunk.
He's been living over the woods. He has no idea
what's going on. This first shower he's had in two weeks.
And then obviously I remember this well. At six five,
we got the first footage of one of the gates
(26:39):
being opened, and we put that on the air and
came on the air. Then I had lived thirty minutes
of nightly news. Historic moment. How do you deal with
sudden and unexpected disasters? The space shallow Challenger comes to mind.
We always knew there was a chance that something would
happen with the shuttle, but we were kind of prepared
for that. The worst one, Bob was n eleven. That
was Holly on an anticipated. I was at home when
(27:01):
I got a call that morning of nine eleven and
they said, a small point is at the World Trade Center.
Maybe you ought to come in. I said, okay, So
I dashed out onto Park Avenue and I heard sirens.
They were going screaming across the city, and I thought,
I wonder if they're going down there in the cabin
turn of the car. Radio Art Athens is a very
(27:21):
good radio reporter in this town, and he said, an
airliner at high speed and low altitude just flew over
Washington Square Park and into one of the towers. Oh
my god, it's not an accident. So I called Marathon
Montana woke her up, and I said, I don't want
to talk again, but you better start watching television. Went
right down to the studio and Katie and Matt were
(27:43):
on the air, and Tim was in Washington, and we
started sharing information and everybody was in very good form.
And Jim Michaelschowski is our Pentagon correspondent. They said, Michael
Schefski needs the air right now. So I said, Jim,
Michael shows gets Pentagon. He said, we just had an
enormous shuttering of a Pentagon on a huge sound on
the other side. We think maybe the Pentagon has been hit,
(28:04):
and in fact it was. We had a camera fixed
on the Twin Trade towers. We saw people jumping. I
don't even want to repeat it now. I'll never forget
a woman who jumped out. It was hopeless for them,
and so we quickly shut that down. I don't think
it was on more than three or four minutes until
people could react and say, stopped. We're not going to
show that. And then I said, because I've grown up
(28:25):
around construction, there's so much damage to these towers, they're
going to have to bring them down. At about three
minutes later, first hour starts to collapse and then the
second tower, and no one was taking a breath. At
that point, I had looked into the camera and I said,
this will change it. We're at war. It was an
(28:45):
unprovoked attack on the United States, the worst attack on
the United States since eighteen twelve. This is an attack
on us and probably came from the Middle East. And
we have to from this moment on think differently about
who we are, on what we're going to do. And
I guess that was the first one to say that
kind of thing on the air. And some walky guy
(29:05):
who was a political science masure wrote and said, you
don't have the authority to declare war. I wasn't. I
was a journalist trying to be realistic. So the follow
up to that is, you got an anthrax attack. The
hardest thing I've been through in my working days. There
we were getting these hate letters. You guys are playing
at all in the Bush administration. So one of my secretary,
(29:28):
as the wife of a cop, she said, this letter
is really disturbing. I picked it up and read it. Well,
it turns out that was not the active letter, but
it looked like it might have been. A day later,
she came in and she said I've got this kind
of scabbard thing on my my upper breast, and I said,
what's that all about? And her friends are going to
(29:48):
the bathroom and they said, well, this doesn't look good.
We couldn't find anybody in New York who had ever
seen an answer AX attack. We sent her to the
very very best dermatologist. He called me. He said, I
can't rule this outtown. I said, what do we do?
He said, trying to get the agencies to make a
decision for you. So I actually got in touch with
the very secret facility in Fort Dietrich, Maryland, and they said,
(30:11):
I can't tell anybody, but get us a sample for
Dietrich said, we don't think it is answer. So I
was very relieved. So I think we're home free. And
then we sent it down to the c d C.
Friday morning, I get a call and we were not
home free, and I had to call my secretary, who
was hysterical. Understandably, she had an eighteen month old child.
At that point. There was a movie scene at thirty Rock.
(30:33):
We're on the fiftieth floor. We've got the head of
the FBI, the police Commissioner, Rudy Juliani, the landlord for
thirty Rock NBC's people, and it's jump ball. Nobody knows
what to do or how to do it. I had
to go down to the news room and say, everybody
has to make their own decision. We think it's confined
to these two people, but if you want to go
(30:54):
home or go to your doctor, please do that right now.
And it turns out an in turn in the outer
office had a worst case because she'd opened the original
letter and it's spilled out in her lege. They sent
out a hazmat crew. They went to her trash because
they didn't have their older hazmat stuff, and some of
them got ant tracks attacks as well. It was a
very very tricky, difficult, difficult time. So let's make one
(31:19):
more jump. I'm a pilot. I was giving you a
ride once in the small turbo prop I had back
from Montana, and you were in the back of the
plane working on this book, and you had this idea
for a book to talk about your dad's generation, and
you were laying out the thoughts about it. Of course
it was the greatest generation. What was the thesis of
(31:40):
that and how did it come to you? Well? I
was born in nineteen forties. So I'm an old dude
and my first memories of life were a World War Two.
We lived on an army base. Everybody was going to
war coming home from war. After the war, we went
to work on a big government project building damns in
the middle of West and there was a town called
Tickstown Fort Randall, and workers came from all over America
(32:02):
for these very good jobs. I'll bet the guys were veterans.
And we never heard a war story, never ever heard
a war story. That was the culture that we were
living in. The anniversary of D Day, and went to
Normandy and the first day that I was there, I
walked on the beach with two members of the Big
Red one the first division landed in the first wave,
(32:22):
two smallish guys from Pennsylvania, and it turns out they
had been in the same landing craft. Didn't realize that
until we put them together and I said, what do
you remember. They looked at each other and they said,
we remember the same thing. The landing ramp went down,
and as soon as we went down, our lieutenant and
our sergeant were shot through the head. We had no leadership,
We're on our own. Were eighteen years old and we
(32:44):
were just terrified. And there was a colonel running down
the beach like his outproths morning jog, and he was
leaning over groups like us and saying the same thing.
Two kinds of people on the beach, men the dead
and those about to be dead. Keep going right now,
it going. He saved a lot of lives that day,
and they both have the same reaction. They said, we're
(33:06):
going to fight this war one day at a time.
We're gonna stay alive one day at a time. By noon,
I was a puddle. At the end of that day,
I thought my life has changed. I just couldn't get
enough of these stories. And I came back here and
I started gathering more and more and more of them.
So you wrote this book. It redefined you and you
became the greatest generation guy. You know. I must say
(33:29):
it was very gratifying. Random House. I thought they had
a big hit. They didn't know for sure. They ended
up printing editions in Japan, Indonesia and everywhere they could
get a printing press. An Irish woman from Boston wrote
to me and said, I'm Irish. We're big patriots, we
have a big family. I now have twelve copies of
your book. You don't like my life. He was just
(33:51):
stop sending me the book. It was not about me,
it was about them. I was a beneficiary of it, obviously,
because people saw me in a different way. And I
still hear about it because generations have come along and
didn't know about that, and they've heard about their grandfather
being in the more they get the book and they
come to me and say, oh my god, I had
no idea. So it was a single most important professional
(34:12):
thing I've ever done. So You've done a lot of
great professional things. You're the only person to ever host
the Today's Show, nightly News and briefly meet the Press.
You've won seven Emmy's three Peabodies. You've been inducted into
the Television Hall of Fame in two thousand and fourteen.
You even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.
Life must have really changed when you gave up the
anchor seat on nightly News in two thousand and four
(34:35):
What led to that decision. I mean, you're sitting on
the pinnacle of power at that moment. These are the
days the broadcast TV networks had huge audience, is big ratings.
There were three of you and you decide to step down, well,
because I didn't want to be hostage to someone else's agenda.
As you know, I love hunting and fishing and being
outdoors and going places when there's not a rating period on.
(34:58):
I wanted to be able to do that. Summer before
nine eleven, I had decided that I would wind it
down then, But when nine eleven happened, I knew I
had to stay through the next selection, which I did.
I've been on television at that point for thirty or
five years. I didn't need one more time with makeup
on Frankly, So I just I didn't want to do
something else. So you were always thought of it among
(35:20):
the three anchors, and probably in journalism, you're always the
champion of real America, that part of America that the
media elites flyover. Has anyone taken your place? No, this
is an extraordinarily complex, wonderful place, and there are great
stories to be told. Now they have twenty four seven
(35:40):
cable news, but it's from a narrow base. Frankly, I
know that out there that people resent that what about us.
I think they're right. No, not just to be a
picture from twenty feet That's how I feel about it.
So let's move on to a book. A Lucky Life
Interrupted the memorial Hope. You wrote it in two thousand
(36:01):
and fifteen about your battle with cancer. Since I've known
you were always that physical, healthy, outdoorsy kind of guy.
You were that Midwestern specimen of health. Did you like
a ton of bricks? Tell me about it. It's early
part of that year. I went to the South Africa
to cover a Mandela's funeral and I had a backache.
And I had back ache before because I had climbed mountains,
and as you say, you know, I was out fishing
(36:22):
and doing things I didn't think. I thought I'm gonna
get past this. But then I began to fall. My
primary care doctor there was an intern, a really smart guy,
and he said I shouldn't go on this long. So
he drew some blood and then he called in the
oncologist and they sat me down and they said, you
have a malignancy. It's called must mobile alma. You know
(36:43):
people have died from this. Geraldine Farrow died from a
Frank Renol's ABC anchor man died for We don't think
you're in peril of dying, he said. We got about
a five year life term. How do you get it, Well,
we don't know. Is there a cure? No, not yet.
How is it going to affect my life? Well, that's
kind of up to you. But it's going to change
your life, there's no question about that. So, I mean,
(37:06):
there are other people on this journey that you've been on.
What advice do you have for them? My advice is
live every day and try to park it as much
as you can. One of the things I've learned about
having cancer is the extraordinary work that is being done
in these fields and the dedication of people. And let
me just say something else, and that is we couldn't
(37:26):
have a hospital system in America without immigrants working for us.
And they're working at the highest levels and as the
lowest levels of the American healthcare system. And they come
from South America, they come from Africa, they come from Asia.
Is the untold story of the American health care system?
Are these immigrants that Sloan Cattering, a woman from Argentina
(37:46):
Whee raised that was here. She said, yeah, We're not
a melting boat. Were a pure So as we record
this your seventy nine approaching eighty, this podcast is about
insights probably you have some of the most unusual insights
and certainly had some of the best vantage points. Give
us a little insight as we wrap up here on
(38:07):
let's start with the TV networks. I'm not one of
those that we ought to go back the old days.
I love the idea that you get everything you want
on all these different instruments, and the fact that we
can get somebody in a nanosecond to for example, New
Zealand the recent shooting, or get pictures out of the
border down in Mexico. And we have a whole new
(38:27):
generation of journalists coming along, and I'm thrilled with who
they are. It's opened up to women now in a
way that in the past. So I'm very encouraged by that.
With the bid concern that I have a social media
I don't know how we ever get our arms around that.
You can be a guy who never got a date
for the proms, sitting in your underwear in Chicago, and
(38:49):
you can raise Holy hell by not ever telling the truth,
by making stuff up, and it goes bang across the world,
and it's very very persuasive and skillfully done. And it's
a form of a kind of induced genocide. Because it's
pitting one group against another constantly. You almost never see
anything on social media anymore where here's an idea for
(39:11):
working together. You don't hear that. What you hear is
I'm against it. Here's why. I remember in the early
days of Trump, That's how he gave an important speech
in the Middle East in which he went to the
Middle Eastern leaders and he said, if they come and
they want to start jihad in your country, throw them out.
Remember that speech, throw them out. And I said, I've
(39:31):
been waiting to hear something like I got killed. Why
people who read my Twitter, I don't go on Twitter
anymore as a result of that. It's just too easy
to misinterpret it. So let's go to in the news today.
You've seen the cycles capitalism and socialism. Well, I think
that the Democrats got a problem. I think the problem
for the Democrats is going to be are they going
(39:52):
to be driven by the hard left, by the socialism crowd,
or are they going to go back to their working
class roots. And my bias, If they don't go back
to their working last roots, they're gonna lose. There's, in
my judgment, too much attention paid to Bernie Sanders and
everybody else. But then you go out and talk to
people who on a hardware store in Minnesota or a
guy who worked on the line and one of the
manufacturing plans, they're not interesting. They believe in the American dream.
(40:15):
It doesn't mean that we can't improve things. I think
we do have to do something about healthcare, about how
we pay for it and who has access to it.
But I did think Nancy Pelosi said the right things,
and I'm not interested in impeachment. It's a waste of
our time. We've got to move on with this country.
That was a very smart thing for her to say,
because that will play to the middle class. It's going
to be a knife fight, there's no question about it.
(40:37):
The other concern that I have is that most of
these candidates, who are quite a way to the left,
I yet to hear from him about foreign policy. You know,
we're going through a huge transition. The European alliances are broken,
they're shattered at this point. If Britain doesn't know where
it's going to go. The polls and the Austrians have
gone hard right. I thought Obama did not handle Russia
(40:58):
very well, and as a reason, all Russia is more
powerful than it deserves to be in Europe. And then
the big issue is not having a meeting with Kim Joan.
It's about what are we gonna do about China, How
we're gonna manage China going forward. China has enormous problems
to get a hundred million people moving to the cities.
They want cars and they want utilities. China also wants turf,
(41:21):
and they're determined to get a built away to the
Middle East from China. They're coming out of the South
China see going right to the Middle East so they
can plug into the oil that's there. Oh, we have
much of a policy about it. I know that the
military people worry about it a lot. Let's end on
the real future. What do you think about space exploration?
You watched the entire space program unfold, you were covering
(41:42):
much of it. What do you think we're doing. I
like the unmanned space stuff. I thought that what Caltech
did on Mars was astonishing. We learned so much from
sending up an unmanned space thing. And you don't risk life.
It's a lot of less expensive. I know there's a
romance about going into space, but I think the idea
that we're going to go and on eyes Mars is
not going to happen. I know you're a young man,
(42:03):
but it won't happen in your lifetime either, but maybe
my grandchildren. So we end this always because it's Mathew
Magic talking about the greatest mathematician. You know, we're the
greatest magician in your case, tell us about the greatest journalist.
You know, who's the most analytical, who's the best storyteller.
I've always had this connection to the frick crowd and
(42:24):
John Miatsham is a classic example of what it gifts.
He is for this country. Evan Thomas is another one.
And then when it comes to people on television, Tim
was in a class of his own. Nobody would deny
that tis yeah, Tim Russer. We've always been able to
find the right people at the right time. The Today
Show is now being run by two women. Are really
(42:45):
bright or enormously successful. Tom, thanks my pleasure, Bob. Always
there's three lessons I take away from Tom. One, make
the big gask sometimes you'll actually get it, like Tom
getting to the top of Notre Dame. To don't overlook
the middle. It's easy to focus on extremes, but Tom
(43:05):
built his career, his life, and remembering the Middle three
say yes to opportunities. He went to Atlanta covering those
key moments in the civil rights movement. He got on
the bus to cover a small Republican guber Notorio Canada
in California turned out to be Ronald Reagan and even
his experience with the Berlin Wall. Tom has his own
(43:27):
podcast now here this be sure to give it a
listen as well. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue
(43:48):
Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat. Nikki Eatre for pulling research bill plaques,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time, m
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I heart radio.
They come back and their eyes are kind of wide.
We put in the tape casette and said, you're not
gonna believe this. And there is Richard Nixon standing in
his office next to the American flag, with a flag
at his lapel, and that Nicksonian way. He says, I've
always believed that Tom Broco was a man of very
(00:22):
good judgment, very good judgment. Never showed better judgments than
when he turned down my offer to be my press secretary.
I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome to Math and Magic. Stories from
the Frontiers and Marketing. We explore the analytical and creative
(00:43):
side of marketing, from marketers to founders to media types.
Since Theday, we have one of America's best known observers
of all trends of last fifty years, Tom Broke. I
met Tom in the late seventies, I would say radio programmer,
(01:04):
and Thom was the host of the Today Show. He
was the coolest, tipest guy I knew, and I benefited
from his insights ever since, including this fabulous perch when
he was the anchor of the nightly news on NBC.
Great to have you with us today? Tom, great to
be here. I love the whole concept of the reinvention
of radio in which you're in the sick of it.
And the podcast phenomenon is really something that is I
(01:27):
didn't see coming. When I was on my way over here.
My secretary said, I only listen to podcasts anymore. It's amazing,
isn't it. We're gonna get into some stories, but first
I want to do you in sixty seconds. This is
gonna be lightning round style. It's quick, easy. Give us
the first thing that comes to your mind. Do you
prefer dogs or cats? Oh? Dogs, We've had both. But
I'm I'm owned by dog. We've got two labs, and
(01:50):
you know they're they're at six thirty in the morning
putting their nose in my face and saying, come on, buddy,
it's time to go out. And there I am. I'm husty. Okay.
Beatles are rolling stones the stone. I have a great
story about them, and I've actually talked to Mick about this.
I was working in Omaha and it must have been
six four. I was going to work on a Saturday morning,
and Omaha has a big spot out in midwestern city
(02:12):
and there was a limousine, big stretch. We don't see those.
At ten o'clock in the morning, we're at a four
way stop and four very shaggy heads stuck their heads
out of this limousine. Oh my god, who are those guys?
And then I realized that they were the Rolling Stones.
They had a big townsen that night in Omaha, and
I later said that Mick I was working in Omaha
(02:34):
four He said, oh, yeah, we played it was a
barn and I said, it really was a barn. Okay,
let's go to movies. Network or anchor Man. Network is
a very important broadcast. They did a lot of the
research at our place, which make NBC happy when they
saw it on the screen. But I do think that
Network is an important film So wine or tequila, I'm
(02:54):
talking to a tequila man. Come on. The fact is
I like your tequila. I like it. I'm an Asian
staging life and I want to have something neat and
cold and not a lot of it. Frankly, Okay, so
we're gonna pick places Montana, New York, of Florida. That's impossible.
I mean they all have different appeals to me. I
(03:16):
couldn't live anywhere else except to York. So let's go
to the beginning. Out west. I did a motorcycle trip
across America with a group of bikers in I told
you about it, and you said, you've got to stop.
Only one suggestion yanked in South Dakota. Clearly, your hometown
was very important to you, and you talk a lot
about your early family life there. Can you give us
(03:37):
just like a second on it and then tell us
what lessons you took away from that that you've used
your whole life. Although towns of that size it was
about nine thousand at that point, but they had everything
they had to colleges. They had a very very good
public high school and a public school system because they
made a huge investment in it. And you were raised
not just by your family, but you were raised by
the community, and there was an enormous community provide if
(03:59):
you did something. When I was a junior in high school,
for example, I was invited to be on a television
question show here in New York. There wasn't a television
set at Yankton that was not tuned too for the
money that night because Tom Brokaw was on, did you win? Well, yeah,
we won six bucks. Which that was a change. You
(04:20):
came to New York. What else had you seen in
the bigger world? Or was the world really South Dakota
for you? Growing up, I always was looking over the horizon.
I knew there was life out there that I wanted
to be a part of. Radio for me was my
connection to the wider world. I thought maybe I could
do something like that. And you actually were on the
radio I was. I was fifteen years old. I moved
(04:42):
to this town. Why they hired me right away, I
don't know. I guess I had a reputation of being
a gabby kid. But I moved to Yankton in the
summer of nineteen By the following nineteen fifty five, I
was playing football and basketball, and at seven o'clock at night,
I was doing a teenage rock and roll show. And
those were the great days, you know. I was a
big fan of early rock and roll, Elvis and Jerry
(05:04):
Louy and everybody. It was two hundred fifty one station
got maybe to the end of Main Street, but for me,
it was a very big deal. And you went off
the air at what time went off here at midnight?
But I didn't stay until midnight. I was on from
seven until eight, and then at the summertime they hired
me as a vacation replacement. So it was a great deal.
All my other friends were out there breaking their backs
and working on highway construction projects. I was sitting in
(05:25):
an air condition studio playing songs for girls that I
wanted to meet. You know, so you met Meredith your
wife there. I met Merith. Tell us the story. She
was the brightest young woman in town and absolutely dropped
beautiful from the first family of Yanked and her dad
was a doctor, and her mother built a school library.
And she was very, very disciplined, which is part of
(05:46):
the reason that we still and still is, and so
we were great pals, but we didn't ever date. In
high school, she was a cheerleader and I was playing basketball.
We're going to the state basketball tournament. And she gave
me a Christmas gift, which was a sailor's cap because
I had a girl in every report. She had me
figured out early on, I went through a role kind
(06:07):
of off the cliff kind of time. I dropped out
of two colleges. I didn't know what I was gonna
do with my life, and Marath wrote me the harshest
letter I've ever received, saying, if you don't get your
act together, I never wanted to talk to you again.
We weren't even dating at that point. You're disappointed, your parents,
the rest of us can't figure out what you're up to.
There's a big wake up call. So I kind of
got my act together, and she came to me and said,
(06:27):
maybe I went too far. I said no, I had
it coming. And a year later, to the surprise of
everyone hours to go to we got married years ago.
That's a pretty good story. Yeah, you went through college
and you got into TV. How did that happen? I
was working in a television station at Seux City Aisle
(06:48):
when I was still a junior in college and I
could commute. He I made seventy five bucks a week,
or six days a week. I was a booth announcer
into the weekend weather and whatever else. Tell people what
a booth announcer is. You know, you had a live
announcers ten pm kt I V Channel four su City,
next up Dave Shu Maysher and the ten o'clock news.
(07:09):
When I did the weather, the news block led with
the weather. It was the most important thing in the Midwest,
and the weather was brought to you by the cab corn.
And so I would do the weather, and then I
would take a break and I would reach down, I
pull out an ear of corn out of the set
and say, notice these even yellow colonels. This is like
the cab corn product. You don't see that another quarter.
(07:29):
I had no idea what I was talking about. There
will be an included front, there will be a little
pursure system. What the hell does that mean? You go
through your career there you wind up in Omaha. How
do you make the jump? A friend of mine was
working in Sioux City and he had come out of Northwestern.
He was obviously destined for bigger things. He ended up
at CBS. David shu Maysher was his name, and he said,
(07:53):
you're getting married. You got a job? I said no,
I thought I had one, But he said, I think
it's an opening in Omaha. Let me call him. So
I went down to Omaha and I arrived out of
nowhere and it was a very serious news station, and
the news director took me out to lunch and we
started talking politics, and at the end of like she said,
I've never had anybody work for me, who knows as
much about politics as you do. We could use you.
I'll pay you ninety hours a week and I said,
(08:14):
I have to have a hundred. He said, you beg
for this job, not even want a ten dollar raise.
I said, I'm marrying the daughter of a doctor. I
have to be able to say I have a three
figure salary. Said you'll never get a raise, but I'll
start good to hundred, and he kept his promise. I
didn't many were there. I was there two and a
half and I thought I would never get out. I
was working six days a week, signing on the station
(08:36):
at six and the morning, working till one o'clock in
the afternoon. Mary's was teaching school and making more money
than I was. And one night, out of nowhere, I
got a call from the premier NBC of Philly in
America at the time, WUSB in Atlanta, Georgia. It was
a cock broadcasting station. It was the middle of the
civil rights movement, was a big, distinguished station in the
(08:56):
heart of the South. I said, who is this. It
was the station and manager and I said, how do
you hear about me? He said, I have friends in
the Midwest. I asked him to look around, and a
lot of them talk to me about you can you
come down and we'll take a lot. I was twenty
five years old, and I said, if I fly out
of here and my station manager he'll fire me, I
have to sneak out on the weekend, which I did,
(09:18):
and I got off the plane in an early spring
day in Atlanta. I left a snowstorm behind an Omaha
and the Magnolias were in bloom and the station was
in a any bellum mansion and sitting on the end
of Peachtree Street. And if I don't get this job,
I'm gonna kill myself. And by the end of the
weekend they said we'd like you to be our eleven
(09:39):
o'clock news acre. I couldn't believe it. I went back
to omahall told the trailer full stuff down to Omaha
and went to work right away, and more than a
hundred dollars a week, I mean more huns. They tripled
my salary, and that was a big deal. At night
at eleven thirty, I was often called by the NBC
news desk, Can you get to Selma, Can you get
to Montgomery? Can you get to Americas? There was all
(09:59):
hell bre can listen. So I would jump on a
charter and run down to those places until they could
get their NBC correspondence there. And I was on the
Today Show, It was on a lot of radio, and
I was at the time of my life. Damner got
killed a couple of times. The sheriff pointed a shotgun
at me. He said, if you don't get out of town,
I got a hair trigger here. And then I was
grabbed by a bunch of guys who wanted to put
(10:19):
me in the trunk of a car and drive me away,
and somebody intervene. Anyhow, six months later after I got there,
NBC came and said, we want you to come to
work for us. Take you to California, and we'll triple
the salary you're getting here, which has just been troubled.
It was unbelievable. And the station, as you're in Atlanta,
he had a big relationship with the NBC, and he said,
we just got this guy. They said, you're not gonna
(10:41):
be all hang on to him. And he came to
me and he said, they're right, take the opportunity and
go with our blessing. Mareth was pregnant. We waited as
the baby was born, moved to California, and I got
there ahead of our nineteen six in the spring, and
the genius at the news tests said, we hear you
know a lot about politics. So there's this actor run
for governor. We don't think he's going anywhere. Get on
(11:01):
the bus with Ronald Reagan. So that was my first
introduction to California politics. I was on the bus with Ronald,
riding around with him. Were you a reporter. I was
a reporter, and I did the Sunday night news and
I filled in as an anchor, you know, when somebody
was off. I would do that. Sometimes I would arrive
at the station at seven thirty in the morning and
they hand me a plane ticket and I jumped on
a plane and fly tot Berkeley, California, and cover of
(11:24):
the riots and Berkeley, get on the four o'clock plane
and fly back again. And then, because I did have
this reputation politics, I would brief David Brinkley when he
would come out to do a story about California politics
or Sandy Matt Oaker or other people. So tell us
a little bit about that period. The country is going
through upheaval. You have both the sort of glitzy go
(11:44):
go sixties, which also had this other almost revolution going on.
It was a cultural revolution, but people forget how much
violence there was as well. We had wats blow up
at that time, and in northern California, Berkeley was seven
a riot. Was not university anymore. Reagan became governor. He
had a reputation as a law and order guy, but
(12:04):
he had to do some things to get control of
the institutions, which he did quite well. Frankly, he was
the governor, but he also had Buff Chandler, who published
the Los Angeles Times at paul from Paula Hale, a
big oil company, Norton Simon, the great art collector, and industrialists.
They were on the board of regions. So I was
exposed at that point to this great group of people
(12:26):
and saw how they acted in the best interests of
the state. And one of the regions was the president
of the U. C. L A Alumni Association, Bob Holdenman.
The first time I ever met him was at a
regent's meeting, and he was actually a wholly different person
that he became. He kind of had a good sense
of humor. If I had questions about the Republican Party.
(12:46):
I could pick up the phone and call me to
give me the straight answer. Then he went off to
work for Nixon and he was a different character. He
really had become the tough cop. He had no sense
of humor about anything. And then he tried to hire
him to be press secretary. Can work for Nixon? Was that?
That was nineteen sixty eight. They were just an office
and wasn't working out with Ron, I would have been
(13:07):
killed in Washington. I got to know the Washington crowd.
They were tough. And this kid coming in from California,
I was twenty eight. If you think they were, they
had been twice as tough on me, frankly, and I
knew better. And I said no, and I swore him
to secrecy. I said, no one can know about this spot.
I want to be an NBC News correspont. I want
to go to Washington, but on my terms, and he
(13:28):
honored that. Now I turned fifty, and they sent camera
crews around. This is later, obviously, and they come back
and their eyes are kind of wide. We put in
the tape causette and I said, you're not gonna believe this,
And there is Richard Nixon standing in his office next
to the American flag, with a flag at his lapel,
and that Nicksonian way. He says, I've always believed that
Tom Broco was a man of very good judgment, very
good judgment. Never showed better judgment than when he turned
(13:51):
down my offer to be my press secretary. Remember, oh yeah,
he remembered. Yeah, So you arrived in Washington summer of
seventies three. Watergate was under way of point, and I
didn't quite know what I was in for. I had
a pedal very hard. I was keeping up, but at
the same time there was still little skepticism about who's
this guy from California? What does he know? And I
(14:11):
was helped by guys like Bob Novak, the old newspaper guy,
because he would come out. I would brief him on
California politics and Johnny Apple from the New York Times
and say, oh, wait a minute, this guy knows what
he's doing. So I was taken in frankly by some
of the olders, and I once said that l Hague,
he said, how are you doing? I said, It's like
skiing an avalanche. I just just keeping going all day long,
(14:32):
because something was happening every day in the fall of
the nineteen seventies three, Nixon was under sea that one
of the tapes, a special prosecutor was after him, and
Syria and Egypt invaded Israel, and Israel was not prepared
and they were about to go down, and they called
out s os to Nixon, and Nixon called the Pentagon
(14:54):
and said, send every goddamn thing we've got to Israel
and saved Israel. It was a stimulating time. We went
to Russia once and the least he was all over
the country, proving that he was told at the President
United States, my feet really didn't touch the ground for
and you traveled with him, And had you seen the
world before then? I had. I've been in Europe a
couple of times, but I really didn't see it as
much as I was beginning to see it. One of
(15:16):
my favorite moments was Pompido died and we were in
Paris and I was a pool reporter. So I was
at Notre Dame and we had bad seats and I
saw a young priest and I went over to him
and I said speaking. She said, yes, I know who
you are, Mr Broke. I said, I want to be
up there, and I pointed to the ceiling. He said,
there's a backstaircase. We may run into quast motto, but
(15:37):
he said, we'll go. We walked all the way up there,
and I stood on a very narrow pathway at the
top of Notre Dame, looking down on this gathering of
everybody in the world coming in for Pompido's fineral hut.
This is better than being in high school. And Yankton
talk about Watergate and this period, what impact it had
on journalism, all the president's men, big book sort of
(15:58):
open people's eyes to was going on. What was the
sea change? Washington journalism was reinvented by Bob and Carl. Frankly,
you know what they did. It was treat this like
a cop show. We're gonna go find out what happened.
The Washington press establishment was pretty much the establishment. They
were buddy buddy with everybody that they knew in the
White House and they knew in Congress. And a few
(16:20):
things would break. Who but Bomb and Carl over two
rookies who went out and covered Watergate from the ground up.
Were they really rookies? Oh yeah, they were really rookies.
Bob had been covering the cop beat in Montgomery County.
They had parked him way out in Montgomery County, but
he was available the day that they were charging the
burglars as they had caught, and he grabbed a notebook
in the little chiny apartment that he had out in
(16:41):
Montgomery County. He ran down to the courthouse in Washington
and the first thing he saw was some very well
groomed larrior who was defending these guys. You know what's
that all about? Who is this guy? Carl was a
renegade kid who was a great writer and a stylist,
and they worked through the night. They go on, knock
(17:01):
on doors. And so what's the lasting legacy on journalism
in general that comes from that era? I think in
many ways, it made everybody a detective. They could be
a nineteen year old starting report and let's say, bake sale, Huh,
who paid for those cookies? Who supplied you with that?
Everything was suspect. It wouldn't take anything for granted. And
(17:22):
now we've got a great generation of very very good journalists.
They've grown up wanting to be working journalists. The other
legacy of Watergate is that there's always a scandal waiting
to be uncovered in the nation's capital, because the stakes
are so big. There's an enormous concentration of power there,
and somebody wants to take advantage of that in every administration.
(17:44):
There hasn't been an administration since I've been covering Washington
that hasn't had a scandal of one degree or another.
We talked about today many people worried about the world
and where we're going. You sort of forget that moment
we were worried that we were gonna have a nuclear war.
Grouping the war with Russia, politics of oil, give us
a little view of what that felt like then and
what the view of the future was from that vantage point.
(18:06):
At that moment. Well, there was more structure to the
international poltical system in those days. The Russians and the
United States had a kind of bifurcated relationship. Russia took
care of the East, We took care of the West.
They had serious talks about nuclear Obviously, Vietnam was a huge,
huge part of what was going on. The warmakers in Washington,
(18:26):
d C. Completely miscalculated the meaning of what Vietnam was,
and that was the rise at that point of Southeast
Asia and the rise really of the place of China.
Nixon understood that he wanted to go to China, it
was his idea. To his credit, he got there and
he opened relations with China. That was a profound move, frankly,
(18:46):
because we then cut out the Russians. We could triangulate.
That was critically important. And the Chinese understood the opportunity
that he brought to him, and Kissinger was a great
facilitator of that as well. And then the world began
to change and now it's chump ball. I'm going to
West Point tomorrow to talk about this to the new
(19:07):
class of cadets. They're going to enter a world in
which all the lessons of the past are upper grabs
because we don't have a relationship anymore with Western Europe
as we wanted to be. Alliance's coming apart and is
being driven apart by the President Trump. But also Western
Europe is not prepared to do what it once did.
(19:27):
Poland used to be a great ally after the war
with US, and now they're having their own internal feuds.
The same thing is going on in Austria. China is
a huge threat commercially, economically, culturally to this country. And
then you have the other players. The renegades like North Korea,
what's going to happen there, and the rise of these
(19:47):
other powers that are not part of a larger complex,
if you will, they're on their own. One of my
oldest friends is one of the leading authorities in the
world on nuclear power. He's a Soviet expert, and he's
I've ever been more frightened about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
He said, it's too easy to get him anymore, and
people have gotten them. So worried more about it today
(20:08):
than back then, because then there was a system for
dealing was that the Russians had him and we had
and we kept track of who else was trying to
get him. Just hold on a second, because we've got
so much more to talk about. We'll be back after
a quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic. We're
here with Tom Brokaw. So you've moved from Washington. You
(20:32):
go to the Today Show for a while, and then
you jump the nightly news, probably at that time the
greatest perch to see what's going on in the world.
You've always had great personal observations. When I would see you,
I would say, Okay, Tom, what really went on? And
you told me the story of talking to Gorbachof and
Castro comes up. Can you tell us the story? Well,
Gorbachoff and I had this relationship because I did the
(20:53):
first and only interview with him at that point that
any Western or ever done. He thought I was the
only American encountered. So he came down to Cuba to
tell Cashow, it's over. We're shutting off the spiccott You're
not getting help from us anymore. We got our own problems.
So Cashrow through this huge reception. Castro was leading him
around the room. I could see that Gorbachof was saying,
what the hell have I got myself into? Yearned? So
(21:15):
when gorber Shop sees me, he's relieved. He comes running
over to me. Was an interpreter, and we start this
animated conversation, and all of a sudden, Cashro realizes that
he's lost the guests, and he comes running over and
he starts talking in the Sicago Spanish and the interpreters
keeping up, and he's saying, corp Shof, don't pay any
attention to broke On and van Rats coming in here,
don't pay any attention to these guys. They come down
and they interview us, and they interviews for two hours.
(21:37):
They go back to New York and they play it
for twenty seconds, and they mean millions of dollars. We
get nothing from all of us. Gorbach was looking at
me and rolling his eyes and rolling his eyes, and
but it was a turning moment because the Russians turned
off the spiccott and the Cubans had to deal with
it on their own. So he rolled his eyes. Probably
one of the most telling things about what was going
(21:58):
on there. But you really weren't able to talk about
on TV today. You that would be the lead. So
what happened then and today? In terms of how people
cover story, what happened? What happened is a proliferation of outlets.
I mean, what happens that Everything is seven now, so
you gotta fill it up with material. There's too much repetition,
not enough original reporting, and it's just repeating, repeating, repeating,
(22:21):
And then you have the ideology of two networks, Fox
and MSNBC going on. But it's mostly just filling things
up and not taking time to be thoughtful. It's tough
for me to watch it sometimes, and I think they
get tired of hearing me. But I have to say
to him, come on, guys. If I'm living in Des
Moines and I'm looking at you for my news, and
I leave the house at eight o'clock in the morning
(22:43):
and I hear what you were reporting. And I come
home at four o'clock in the afternoon or five, and
I'm hearing the same thing again again again. Give me
something fresh, Take me somewhere or I haven't been in
the last nine hours. And by the way, the world
exists beyond on the Hudson River and beyond the belt. Boy,
it's an interesting country out there. Go cover that. Let's
(23:06):
keep going on history the Berlin Wall. I think you
were the only news anchor to be Did you see
it coming and were you prepared for it? How did
you wind up there? Well, what happened is that we
had a very good guy by named Jerry lamprect To
was our foreigner, and he came to me and he said,
you know, there's not much going on here, and it's
beginning to percolate in Berlin. Why don't you think about
(23:26):
going over there. We've got nothing to lose. I checked
the airpoints, you can go tomorrow. So the next morning
I was able to go into East Germany pretty easily,
for the first time. It didn't stop me at checkpoint Charlie.
They just said okay, and I had to have an
escort with me. East Germany. It was a completely different
climate than it had been in the past. People were
wandering around trying to figure out what was going on,
(23:48):
and it was this enormous line at the gate taking
in the Czechoslovakia. And so I said, we don't have
to be on the air live tonight. I just do
some reporting from here, but keeps the satellite for tomorrow night.
Next day, same thing. At about three o'clock in the afternoon,
there was a press conference. Mr. Trobowski, who was their
information chief, who is their propagandists, had this meeting and
(24:08):
the East German journalists by then had been emboldened and
they were challenging him on everything, but he was holding
him off. And then somebody came in gave him a
slip of paper and he says, oh, the polite Berro
has decided, so distance of the g R can exit
and re enters through all of the portholes on the wall.
(24:29):
What I had a camera crew that had grown up
in Germany and they looked at me said, my god,
the wall is down. That's what he's saying. The wall
is down. Everybody was hammering their head and he gets
up and leaves, and I had a pre arranged appointment
with him up in his office, so I ran up
there and I said, Mr Trobowski, read that again on
(24:50):
my camera, and he did. And I said, that means
that East German citizens can leave and come back. That
means the wall is open. Ah, that's what it means.
And I said, you've spent your life as a communist.
Is this the end of it? No, he said, we
will retain control. So I went downstairs a bunch of
(25:11):
newspaper men and I said, it's over. He just confirmed
that the wall is going to be opened. And I
ran back to the office and I said, get the satellite,
make sure it's up. We'll do it at Brandenburg Gate.
It's now about five o'clock and it's you know, noon here,
and it was chaos. We go to the Brandenburg Gate
at about eleven o'clock at night, and Brandenburg Gate is
a great division between East Germany and West Germany and
(25:34):
it looks out on the East German side, and there
were a lot of students from West Germany would come
and stood atop the wall at the Brandenburg Gate shouting
at the East German kids come most us and the
East German kids didn't know whether they'd be shot or not,
so they were reluctant to do it. And then the
guards got the hoses out and they try to drive
him off. That didn't work. In the middle of all this,
(25:56):
a guy who had been on the wall was a
leather jacket on aways. Remember what he looked like, holding
up his hands. It's back to the East German guards
who were hosing him, and he wouldn't be moved, and
he was laughing. So I said Martin Fletcher was our
correspondent from Middle East wh would come up to help out.
I said, go over and get that guy. He's the
image of the new Germany and he'll be on the
cover of Time magazine next week. We're going to interview.
(26:18):
Martin comes back, doubled over and laughter, and I said,
where is it? He said, well, it's not what we saw.
I said, what do you mean? He said, he's a drunk.
He's been living over the woods. He has no idea
what's going on. This first shower he's had in two weeks.
And then obviously I remember this well. At six five,
we got the first footage of one of the gates
(26:39):
being opened, and we put that on the air and
came on the air. Then I had lived thirty minutes
of nightly news. Historic moment. How do you deal with
sudden and unexpected disasters? The space shallow Challenger comes to mind.
We always knew there was a chance that something would
happen with the shuttle, but we were kind of prepared
for that. The worst one, Bob was n eleven. That
was Holly on an anticipated. I was at home when
(27:01):
I got a call that morning of nine eleven and
they said, a small point is at the World Trade Center.
Maybe you ought to come in. I said, okay, So
I dashed out onto Park Avenue and I heard sirens.
They were going screaming across the city, and I thought,
I wonder if they're going down there in the cabin
turn of the car. Radio Art Athens is a very
(27:21):
good radio reporter in this town, and he said, an
airliner at high speed and low altitude just flew over
Washington Square Park and into one of the towers. Oh
my god, it's not an accident. So I called Marathon
Montana woke her up, and I said, I don't want
to talk again, but you better start watching television. Went
right down to the studio and Katie and Matt were
(27:43):
on the air, and Tim was in Washington, and we
started sharing information and everybody was in very good form.
And Jim Michaelschowski is our Pentagon correspondent. They said, Michael
Schefski needs the air right now. So I said, Jim,
Michael shows gets Pentagon. He said, we just had an
enormous shuttering of a Pentagon on a huge sound on
the other side. We think maybe the Pentagon has been hit,
(28:04):
and in fact it was. We had a camera fixed
on the Twin Trade towers. We saw people jumping. I
don't even want to repeat it now. I'll never forget
a woman who jumped out. It was hopeless for them,
and so we quickly shut that down. I don't think
it was on more than three or four minutes until
people could react and say, stopped. We're not going to
show that. And then I said, because I've grown up
(28:25):
around construction, there's so much damage to these towers, they're
going to have to bring them down. At about three
minutes later, first hour starts to collapse and then the
second tower, and no one was taking a breath. At
that point, I had looked into the camera and I said,
this will change it. We're at war. It was an
(28:45):
unprovoked attack on the United States, the worst attack on
the United States since eighteen twelve. This is an attack
on us and probably came from the Middle East. And
we have to from this moment on think differently about
who we are, on what we're going to do. And
I guess that was the first one to say that
kind of thing on the air. And some walky guy
(29:05):
who was a political science masure wrote and said, you
don't have the authority to declare war. I wasn't. I
was a journalist trying to be realistic. So the follow
up to that is, you got an anthrax attack. The
hardest thing I've been through in my working days. There
we were getting these hate letters. You guys are playing
at all in the Bush administration. So one of my secretary,
(29:28):
as the wife of a cop, she said, this letter
is really disturbing. I picked it up and read it. Well,
it turns out that was not the active letter, but
it looked like it might have been. A day later,
she came in and she said I've got this kind
of scabbard thing on my my upper breast, and I said,
what's that all about? And her friends are going to
(29:48):
the bathroom and they said, well, this doesn't look good.
We couldn't find anybody in New York who had ever
seen an answer AX attack. We sent her to the
very very best dermatologist. He called me. He said, I
can't rule this outtown. I said, what do we do?
He said, trying to get the agencies to make a
decision for you. So I actually got in touch with
the very secret facility in Fort Dietrich, Maryland, and they said,
(30:11):
I can't tell anybody, but get us a sample for
Dietrich said, we don't think it is answer. So I
was very relieved. So I think we're home free. And
then we sent it down to the c d C.
Friday morning, I get a call and we were not
home free, and I had to call my secretary, who
was hysterical. Understandably, she had an eighteen month old child.
At that point. There was a movie scene at thirty Rock.
(30:33):
We're on the fiftieth floor. We've got the head of
the FBI, the police Commissioner, Rudy Juliani, the landlord for
thirty Rock NBC's people, and it's jump ball. Nobody knows
what to do or how to do it. I had
to go down to the news room and say, everybody
has to make their own decision. We think it's confined
to these two people, but if you want to go
(30:54):
home or go to your doctor, please do that right now.
And it turns out an in turn in the outer
office had a worst case because she'd opened the original
letter and it's spilled out in her lege. They sent
out a hazmat crew. They went to her trash because
they didn't have their older hazmat stuff, and some of
them got ant tracks attacks as well. It was a
very very tricky, difficult, difficult time. So let's make one
(31:19):
more jump. I'm a pilot. I was giving you a
ride once in the small turbo prop I had back
from Montana, and you were in the back of the
plane working on this book, and you had this idea
for a book to talk about your dad's generation, and
you were laying out the thoughts about it. Of course
it was the greatest generation. What was the thesis of
(31:40):
that and how did it come to you? Well? I
was born in nineteen forties. So I'm an old dude
and my first memories of life were a World War Two.
We lived on an army base. Everybody was going to
war coming home from war. After the war, we went
to work on a big government project building damns in
the middle of West and there was a town called
Tickstown Fort Randall, and workers came from all over America
(32:02):
for these very good jobs. I'll bet the guys were veterans.
And we never heard a war story, never ever heard
a war story. That was the culture that we were
living in. The anniversary of D Day, and went to
Normandy and the first day that I was there, I
walked on the beach with two members of the Big
Red one the first division landed in the first wave,
(32:22):
two smallish guys from Pennsylvania, and it turns out they
had been in the same landing craft. Didn't realize that
until we put them together and I said, what do
you remember. They looked at each other and they said,
we remember the same thing. The landing ramp went down,
and as soon as we went down, our lieutenant and
our sergeant were shot through the head. We had no leadership,
We're on our own. Were eighteen years old and we
(32:44):
were just terrified. And there was a colonel running down
the beach like his outproths morning jog, and he was
leaning over groups like us and saying the same thing.
Two kinds of people on the beach, men the dead
and those about to be dead. Keep going right now,
it going. He saved a lot of lives that day,
and they both have the same reaction. They said, we're
(33:06):
going to fight this war one day at a time.
We're gonna stay alive one day at a time. By noon,
I was a puddle. At the end of that day,
I thought my life has changed. I just couldn't get
enough of these stories. And I came back here and
I started gathering more and more and more of them.
So you wrote this book. It redefined you and you
became the greatest generation guy. You know. I must say
(33:29):
it was very gratifying. Random House. I thought they had
a big hit. They didn't know for sure. They ended
up printing editions in Japan, Indonesia and everywhere they could
get a printing press. An Irish woman from Boston wrote
to me and said, I'm Irish. We're big patriots, we
have a big family. I now have twelve copies of
your book. You don't like my life. He was just
(33:51):
stop sending me the book. It was not about me,
it was about them. I was a beneficiary of it, obviously,
because people saw me in a different way. And I
still hear about it because generations have come along and
didn't know about that, and they've heard about their grandfather
being in the more they get the book and they
come to me and say, oh my god, I had
no idea. So it was a single most important professional
(34:12):
thing I've ever done. So You've done a lot of
great professional things. You're the only person to ever host
the Today's Show, nightly News and briefly meet the Press.
You've won seven Emmy's three Peabodies. You've been inducted into
the Television Hall of Fame in two thousand and fourteen.
You even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.
Life must have really changed when you gave up the
anchor seat on nightly News in two thousand and four
(34:35):
What led to that decision. I mean, you're sitting on
the pinnacle of power at that moment. These are the
days the broadcast TV networks had huge audience, is big ratings.
There were three of you and you decide to step down, well,
because I didn't want to be hostage to someone else's agenda.
As you know, I love hunting and fishing and being
outdoors and going places when there's not a rating period on.
(34:58):
I wanted to be able to do that. Summer before
nine eleven, I had decided that I would wind it
down then, But when nine eleven happened, I knew I
had to stay through the next selection, which I did.
I've been on television at that point for thirty or
five years. I didn't need one more time with makeup
on Frankly, So I just I didn't want to do
something else. So you were always thought of it among
(35:20):
the three anchors, and probably in journalism, you're always the
champion of real America, that part of America that the
media elites flyover. Has anyone taken your place? No, this
is an extraordinarily complex, wonderful place, and there are great
stories to be told. Now they have twenty four seven
(35:40):
cable news, but it's from a narrow base. Frankly, I
know that out there that people resent that what about us.
I think they're right. No, not just to be a
picture from twenty feet That's how I feel about it.
So let's move on to a book. A Lucky Life
Interrupted the memorial Hope. You wrote it in two thousand
(36:01):
and fifteen about your battle with cancer. Since I've known
you were always that physical, healthy, outdoorsy kind of guy.
You were that Midwestern specimen of health. Did you like
a ton of bricks? Tell me about it. It's early
part of that year. I went to the South Africa
to cover a Mandela's funeral and I had a backache.
And I had back ache before because I had climbed mountains,
and as you say, you know, I was out fishing
(36:22):
and doing things I didn't think. I thought I'm gonna
get past this. But then I began to fall. My
primary care doctor there was an intern, a really smart guy,
and he said I shouldn't go on this long. So
he drew some blood and then he called in the
oncologist and they sat me down and they said, you
have a malignancy. It's called must mobile alma. You know
(36:43):
people have died from this. Geraldine Farrow died from a
Frank Renol's ABC anchor man died for We don't think
you're in peril of dying, he said. We got about
a five year life term. How do you get it, Well,
we don't know. Is there a cure? No, not yet.
How is it going to affect my life? Well, that's
kind of up to you. But it's going to change
your life, there's no question about that. So, I mean,
(37:06):
there are other people on this journey that you've been on.
What advice do you have for them? My advice is
live every day and try to park it as much
as you can. One of the things I've learned about
having cancer is the extraordinary work that is being done
in these fields and the dedication of people. And let
me just say something else, and that is we couldn't
(37:26):
have a hospital system in America without immigrants working for us.
And they're working at the highest levels and as the
lowest levels of the American healthcare system. And they come
from South America, they come from Africa, they come from Asia.
Is the untold story of the American health care system?
Are these immigrants that Sloan Cattering, a woman from Argentina
(37:46):
Whee raised that was here. She said, yeah, We're not
a melting boat. Were a pure So as we record
this your seventy nine approaching eighty, this podcast is about
insights probably you have some of the most unusual insights
and certainly had some of the best vantage points. Give
us a little insight as we wrap up here on
(38:07):
let's start with the TV networks. I'm not one of
those that we ought to go back the old days.
I love the idea that you get everything you want
on all these different instruments, and the fact that we
can get somebody in a nanosecond to for example, New
Zealand the recent shooting, or get pictures out of the
border down in Mexico. And we have a whole new
(38:27):
generation of journalists coming along, and I'm thrilled with who
they are. It's opened up to women now in a
way that in the past. So I'm very encouraged by that.
With the bid concern that I have a social media
I don't know how we ever get our arms around that.
You can be a guy who never got a date
for the proms, sitting in your underwear in Chicago, and
(38:49):
you can raise Holy hell by not ever telling the truth,
by making stuff up, and it goes bang across the world,
and it's very very persuasive and skillfully done. And it's
a form of a kind of induced genocide. Because it's
pitting one group against another constantly. You almost never see
anything on social media anymore where here's an idea for
(39:11):
working together. You don't hear that. What you hear is
I'm against it. Here's why. I remember in the early
days of Trump, That's how he gave an important speech
in the Middle East in which he went to the
Middle Eastern leaders and he said, if they come and
they want to start jihad in your country, throw them out.
Remember that speech, throw them out. And I said, I've
(39:31):
been waiting to hear something like I got killed. Why
people who read my Twitter, I don't go on Twitter
anymore as a result of that. It's just too easy
to misinterpret it. So let's go to in the news today.
You've seen the cycles capitalism and socialism. Well, I think
that the Democrats got a problem. I think the problem
for the Democrats is going to be are they going
(39:52):
to be driven by the hard left, by the socialism crowd,
or are they going to go back to their working
class roots. And my bias, If they don't go back
to their working last roots, they're gonna lose. There's, in
my judgment, too much attention paid to Bernie Sanders and
everybody else. But then you go out and talk to
people who on a hardware store in Minnesota or a
guy who worked on the line and one of the
manufacturing plans, they're not interesting. They believe in the American dream.
(40:15):
It doesn't mean that we can't improve things. I think
we do have to do something about healthcare, about how
we pay for it and who has access to it.
But I did think Nancy Pelosi said the right things,
and I'm not interested in impeachment. It's a waste of
our time. We've got to move on with this country.
That was a very smart thing for her to say,
because that will play to the middle class. It's going
to be a knife fight, there's no question about it.
(40:37):
The other concern that I have is that most of
these candidates, who are quite a way to the left,
I yet to hear from him about foreign policy. You know,
we're going through a huge transition. The European alliances are broken,
they're shattered at this point. If Britain doesn't know where
it's going to go. The polls and the Austrians have
gone hard right. I thought Obama did not handle Russia
(40:58):
very well, and as a reason, all Russia is more
powerful than it deserves to be in Europe. And then
the big issue is not having a meeting with Kim Joan.
It's about what are we gonna do about China, How
we're gonna manage China going forward. China has enormous problems
to get a hundred million people moving to the cities.
They want cars and they want utilities. China also wants turf,
(41:21):
and they're determined to get a built away to the
Middle East from China. They're coming out of the South
China see going right to the Middle East so they
can plug into the oil that's there. Oh, we have
much of a policy about it. I know that the
military people worry about it a lot. Let's end on
the real future. What do you think about space exploration?
You watched the entire space program unfold, you were covering
(41:42):
much of it. What do you think we're doing. I
like the unmanned space stuff. I thought that what Caltech
did on Mars was astonishing. We learned so much from
sending up an unmanned space thing. And you don't risk life.
It's a lot of less expensive. I know there's a
romance about going into space, but I think the idea
that we're going to go and on eyes Mars is
not going to happen. I know you're a young man,
(42:03):
but it won't happen in your lifetime either, but maybe
my grandchildren. So we end this always because it's Mathew
Magic talking about the greatest mathematician. You know, we're the
greatest magician in your case, tell us about the greatest journalist.
You know, who's the most analytical, who's the best storyteller.
I've always had this connection to the frick crowd and
(42:24):
John Miatsham is a classic example of what it gifts.
He is for this country. Evan Thomas is another one.
And then when it comes to people on television, Tim
was in a class of his own. Nobody would deny
that tis yeah, Tim Russer. We've always been able to
find the right people at the right time. The Today
Show is now being run by two women. Are really
(42:45):
bright or enormously successful. Tom, thanks my pleasure, Bob. Always
there's three lessons I take away from Tom. One, make
the big gask sometimes you'll actually get it, like Tom
getting to the top of Notre Dame. To don't overlook
the middle. It's easy to focus on extremes, but Tom
(43:05):
built his career, his life, and remembering the Middle three
say yes to opportunities. He went to Atlanta covering those
key moments in the civil rights movement. He got on
the bus to cover a small Republican guber Notorio Canada
in California turned out to be Ronald Reagan and even
his experience with the Berlin Wall. Tom has his own
(43:27):
podcast now here this be sure to give it a
listen as well. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue
(43:48):
Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat. Nikki Eatre for pulling research bill plaques,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time, m
Host
Bob Pittman
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