February 14, 2020 • 12 mins
While we may not be able to do anything about all of the chaos in Washington, Tom discusses why it is so important that we never blindly follow any elected official.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I heard radio presents Tom Brokaw now here this. I've
been a political journalist since nineteen sixty two, and I
have gone through some periods of great chaos, none greater
in my judgment and my experience. In nineteen sixty eight,
when Vietnam was a death zone for American soldiers, the
President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, was forced to
(00:22):
announce he would not run for re election again. Dr
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated. Streets
in American cities went up in riots. At the same time.
We didn't know how we were going to emerge from
all of that. Where would it go? And then in
the summer of nineteen sixty eight, Czechoslovakia was making an
(00:43):
effort to try to be a more free country, and
the Soviets invaded and put down that revolt, and the
United States could do nothing about it. So here we
are in a new year, in a new century. And
the opening was Iowa, which always had a clumsy, chaotic
way of counting the votes. People had to go stand
(01:06):
in line, they had to give up their identity to
announce who they were for, and sometimes they were persuaded
to move from one side of the room to the other.
Imagine this, You're a wager in a town of about
two thousand people. You have a loan at the bank,
and you're counting on the good graces of a banker
to keep that loan because you need it for survival.
(01:28):
Now you go stand in a line for a candidate
you know the banker doesn't like, and your identity has
been spread out for the entire town and especially for
the people who may have some control over your destiny.
That is an athetical to the American system. The most
sacred right we have is to vote, and part of
(01:49):
that right is to keep our vote secret. It's our choice,
and it's confined to us. Even within families. I know
husbands and wives who don't tell each other how they
happen to have voted. Now, how do we go about it?
How do we run this country? Given the chaos that's
going on coming out of Iowa, we went to New Hampshire,
(02:10):
another small all white state, or for the most part
of all white in New England. It's always cherished his
right to be the opening bill in a political year, because, frankly,
it has an enormous impact on its economy. Now, what
do we have Bernie Sanders, a neighbor of New Hampshire,
(02:32):
a socialist Democrat who wants to tear up healthcare in America,
who wants to change so many things that people take
as a fundamental right, the right to choose where they
go to college and the obligation they have to pay
for that college. He says, we can have it for free.
Does anybody honestly believe that? At the same time, he's
(02:55):
being challenged by a very young mayor of a small
city who happened to be gay, has a very distinguished resume,
a Rhodes scholar, a military veteran, a man who served
at one of the very best financial institutions in America,
Pete Buotages. But is he going to be the answer?
(03:16):
It seems unlikely at this point. And Amy Colbatar from
Minnesota practical, a Minnesota woman through and through with a
law degrief from the University of Chicago, doing better, but
untested in the national arena. At the same time, Joe Biden,
who had high hopes as he began, a long time
(03:37):
senator from Rhode Island and then the Vice President of
the United States, now is disappearing without a treats in
the initial test. So there we are. We're going into
this year with a lot of chaos, and it's not
helped at all by the President of the United States
in a series of vindictive moves that no one could
(03:58):
have anticipated. But maybe they could have anticipated, because after all,
it is Donald Trump. He threw out of the White
House to distinguish American veference who have testified against him
in the impeachment hearings because they were so concerned about
what they overheard in his telephone conversations with the new
Ukrainian president, and for their honesty and for their obligation
(04:21):
to come forward, they were cashiered. At the same time,
this president is trying to protect one of the more well.
I don't quite know how to describe this, but Mr
Stone is not what you would call a sterling example
of a public servant. He's been on the underside of
American politics for as long as I can remember, and
(04:42):
when prosecutors prosecuted him and then recommended he get up
to nine years in prison, the President and his supporters
went ballistic, and the Attorney General took away from those
prosecutors the right to determine what he ought to get
as a sentence, and so they have resigned their office.
Everything in this administration seems to be vindictive in one
(05:06):
form or another. Now we're also faced with the possibility
of a new player, the former mayor of the City
of New York, Mike Bloomberg. Let me say parenthetically as well,
that he is a friend of mine. I've known him
long before he went into politics. We lived in the
same neighborhood. We shared a lot of interest. He's a
(05:28):
very canny guy. He did a good job in New
York for three terms, a tough city to govern. He
rearranged how city Hall is running. He opened up pipelines
so people can get their complaints heard quickly and hopefully
be acted upon them. Now he's prepared to spend a
good portion of his vast budget. He may be the
(05:51):
twelfth britihest man in the world, but he so dislikes
Donald Trump, not just personally, but for what he's doing
to the country. He termined to do whatever is necessary
to try to advance his own interests and perhaps one
day become the president of the United States. It's a
long shot, folks. He's going to have to get the
nomination of the Democratic Party, and so many members of
(06:13):
that party are so suspicious of people who are willing
to spend that kind of money to get the nomination.
But this one is a long way from over. So
there we are. What you need to keep your eyes
on now is Super Tuesday, because it does seem that
will not have a clear cut winner between now and
Super Tuesday, when so many states step up and say
(06:36):
this is who we want as our nominee. Whether Bloomberg
gets involved directly or whether he waits to see how
that shakes out, and as another kind of tactic to
get the nomination, well, again, just have to wait and see.
On the Democratic side, we have a long way to
go before we can sleep and before we'll know who
is the nominee of that party. On the Republican side,
(06:59):
all hands are on deck for Donald Trump. It is
stunning to me that Republicans that I know in the
United States Senate, moderate and responsible have not raised their
hands and said, on many occasions, as President, you're going
too far here. I know that they have spirited exchanges
(07:20):
behind the scenes, because I've heard them talk about it,
but the president almost always is not interested in their advice.
He'll do things his way. When he had that meeting
with our senior national security people at the Pentagon in
which they were trying to do a day of education
for him, he walked out and said that they were babies.
They didn't know what they were talking about. So that's
(07:41):
where we are. Yet, at the same time, in the
era of social media, Donald Trump can count on a
vast army of people who will believe anything that he says.
One of my former friends, somebody I've known for most
of my life now, has accused me and other members
of the national media of inventing the stories that we
(08:04):
tell about Donald Trump. He insists that he was not
involved in any sex scandals. Can you believe that? He
also insists that he's going to clean up the country.
He's going to get rid of the things that have
held us back. You may recall that Donald Trump, on
that early morning when he was a surprise winner in
the presidential election, announced that he would immediately begin a
(08:26):
public works project. Have we seen that yet? No. He
also said that fixting healthcare in America is not a
big issue. It can be done overnight. Have we seen
that yet? Know what we don't know from day to
day is what Donald Trump is interested in doing except
tweeting and advancing his personal interests and not just his
(08:48):
political obligation to this country. What is going on around
this country right now is a modern version of what
we went through in the difference, of course, is the
power of transmission of communication. People can pump out with
a keystroke the most heinous, the most unreliable, the most
(09:10):
lying kinds of claims, and there is a vast audience
out there willing to listen to them and use that
as a basis for making decisions. I am puzzled, frankly,
by way, we don't have more responsible citizens in this
country stepping up, Republicans and Democrats alite saying we're gonna
form a coalition. We're gonna try to bring this country
(09:32):
back to the center where it's always been at its
very best. You cannot just blindly follow the leaders on
the Democratic side of the House of Representatives are on
the Senate side, the Republicans who control that. You can't
blindly follow the president of the United States. That is
not what the founding fathers had in mind. What they
(09:55):
wanted was a representative government and an active citizens ry.
That would exercise its responsibility and its role on a
daily basis. Now we have too many people who are
cowed by what is going on and have lined up
on one side or the other without carefully examining the
(10:16):
consequences of their decision, without determining not just what's gonna
happen in the next twenty or four hours, but where
are we going to go as a country? Where are
we going to go as a society? What are our
children and grandchildren, what can they expect from this country?
Because it's like a wrestling match on television. At the moment,
kind of semi stage, everybody is slamming to the mat,
(10:39):
and then at the end of the day, we don't
know where we are. I'm telling you, folks, it's time
for people of goodwill and responsibility to get together in
some fashion and say, let's pick out some priorities, let's
try to get those in place, and let's not be
afraid to stand up and speak up to the press.
(11:00):
Into the United States, he got there because he won
the votes, no question about that, but it is not
a lifetime appointment. And on the Democratic side, it's important
to say to them, are you kidding you think that
we can eliminate our current system of healthcare and replace
it with a government system and not pay a terrible
price financially and otherwise for the turmoil that that would bring.
(11:23):
Are you kidding you think you can get free college
education for every young American? It can't be done. Changes
can happen. It can happen over a long curve and
with the best minds in the business figuring out what
the responsibilities are of individual citizens and with the costs
are from a financial point of view. We've done this
(11:46):
in the past. We introduce Medicare to America. That was
an enormous change. The American medical system hated the idea. Now,
of course, it's one of the most important aspects of
the support of America from its individual health point of
view and from the medical system itself. There are ways
to get out of us, but not if we constantly
(12:07):
are engaged in a food fight of some kind with
no consequences for those who lose or those who go
too far. I'm Tom broke off her I Heart Radio.
Now hear this
I heard radio presents Tom Brokaw now here this. I've
been a political journalist since nineteen sixty two, and I
have gone through some periods of great chaos, none greater
in my judgment and my experience. In nineteen sixty eight,
when Vietnam was a death zone for American soldiers, the
President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, was forced to
(00:22):
announce he would not run for re election again. Dr
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated. Streets
in American cities went up in riots. At the same time.
We didn't know how we were going to emerge from
all of that. Where would it go? And then in
the summer of nineteen sixty eight, Czechoslovakia was making an
(00:43):
effort to try to be a more free country, and
the Soviets invaded and put down that revolt, and the
United States could do nothing about it. So here we
are in a new year, in a new century. And
the opening was Iowa, which always had a clumsy, chaotic
way of counting the votes. People had to go stand
(01:06):
in line, they had to give up their identity to
announce who they were for, and sometimes they were persuaded
to move from one side of the room to the other.
Imagine this, You're a wager in a town of about
two thousand people. You have a loan at the bank,
and you're counting on the good graces of a banker
to keep that loan because you need it for survival.
(01:28):
Now you go stand in a line for a candidate
you know the banker doesn't like, and your identity has
been spread out for the entire town and especially for
the people who may have some control over your destiny.
That is an athetical to the American system. The most
sacred right we have is to vote, and part of
(01:49):
that right is to keep our vote secret. It's our choice,
and it's confined to us. Even within families. I know
husbands and wives who don't tell each other how they
happen to have voted. Now, how do we go about it?
How do we run this country? Given the chaos that's
going on coming out of Iowa, we went to New Hampshire,
(02:10):
another small all white state, or for the most part
of all white in New England. It's always cherished his
right to be the opening bill in a political year, because, frankly,
it has an enormous impact on its economy. Now, what
do we have Bernie Sanders, a neighbor of New Hampshire,
(02:32):
a socialist Democrat who wants to tear up healthcare in America,
who wants to change so many things that people take
as a fundamental right, the right to choose where they
go to college and the obligation they have to pay
for that college. He says, we can have it for free.
Does anybody honestly believe that? At the same time, he's
(02:55):
being challenged by a very young mayor of a small
city who happened to be gay, has a very distinguished resume,
a Rhodes scholar, a military veteran, a man who served
at one of the very best financial institutions in America,
Pete Buotages. But is he going to be the answer?
(03:16):
It seems unlikely at this point. And Amy Colbatar from
Minnesota practical, a Minnesota woman through and through with a
law degrief from the University of Chicago, doing better, but
untested in the national arena. At the same time, Joe Biden,
who had high hopes as he began, a long time
(03:37):
senator from Rhode Island and then the Vice President of
the United States, now is disappearing without a treats in
the initial test. So there we are. We're going into
this year with a lot of chaos, and it's not
helped at all by the President of the United States
in a series of vindictive moves that no one could
(03:58):
have anticipated. But maybe they could have anticipated, because after all,
it is Donald Trump. He threw out of the White
House to distinguish American veference who have testified against him
in the impeachment hearings because they were so concerned about
what they overheard in his telephone conversations with the new
Ukrainian president, and for their honesty and for their obligation
(04:21):
to come forward, they were cashiered. At the same time,
this president is trying to protect one of the more well.
I don't quite know how to describe this, but Mr
Stone is not what you would call a sterling example
of a public servant. He's been on the underside of
American politics for as long as I can remember, and
(04:42):
when prosecutors prosecuted him and then recommended he get up
to nine years in prison, the President and his supporters
went ballistic, and the Attorney General took away from those
prosecutors the right to determine what he ought to get
as a sentence, and so they have resigned their office.
Everything in this administration seems to be vindictive in one
(05:06):
form or another. Now we're also faced with the possibility
of a new player, the former mayor of the City
of New York, Mike Bloomberg. Let me say parenthetically as well,
that he is a friend of mine. I've known him
long before he went into politics. We lived in the
same neighborhood. We shared a lot of interest. He's a
(05:28):
very canny guy. He did a good job in New
York for three terms, a tough city to govern. He
rearranged how city Hall is running. He opened up pipelines
so people can get their complaints heard quickly and hopefully
be acted upon them. Now he's prepared to spend a
good portion of his vast budget. He may be the
(05:51):
twelfth britihest man in the world, but he so dislikes
Donald Trump, not just personally, but for what he's doing
to the country. He termined to do whatever is necessary
to try to advance his own interests and perhaps one
day become the president of the United States. It's a
long shot, folks. He's going to have to get the
nomination of the Democratic Party, and so many members of
(06:13):
that party are so suspicious of people who are willing
to spend that kind of money to get the nomination.
But this one is a long way from over. So
there we are. What you need to keep your eyes
on now is Super Tuesday, because it does seem that
will not have a clear cut winner between now and
Super Tuesday, when so many states step up and say
(06:36):
this is who we want as our nominee. Whether Bloomberg
gets involved directly or whether he waits to see how
that shakes out, and as another kind of tactic to
get the nomination, well, again, just have to wait and see.
On the Democratic side, we have a long way to
go before we can sleep and before we'll know who
is the nominee of that party. On the Republican side,
(06:59):
all hands are on deck for Donald Trump. It is
stunning to me that Republicans that I know in the
United States Senate, moderate and responsible have not raised their
hands and said, on many occasions, as President, you're going
too far here. I know that they have spirited exchanges
(07:20):
behind the scenes, because I've heard them talk about it,
but the president almost always is not interested in their advice.
He'll do things his way. When he had that meeting
with our senior national security people at the Pentagon in
which they were trying to do a day of education
for him, he walked out and said that they were babies.
They didn't know what they were talking about. So that's
(07:41):
where we are. Yet, at the same time, in the
era of social media, Donald Trump can count on a
vast army of people who will believe anything that he says.
One of my former friends, somebody I've known for most
of my life now, has accused me and other members
of the national media of inventing the stories that we
(08:04):
tell about Donald Trump. He insists that he was not
involved in any sex scandals. Can you believe that? He
also insists that he's going to clean up the country.
He's going to get rid of the things that have
held us back. You may recall that Donald Trump, on
that early morning when he was a surprise winner in
the presidential election, announced that he would immediately begin a
(08:26):
public works project. Have we seen that yet? No. He
also said that fixting healthcare in America is not a
big issue. It can be done overnight. Have we seen
that yet? Know what we don't know from day to
day is what Donald Trump is interested in doing except
tweeting and advancing his personal interests and not just his
(08:48):
political obligation to this country. What is going on around
this country right now is a modern version of what
we went through in the difference, of course, is the
power of transmission of communication. People can pump out with
a keystroke the most heinous, the most unreliable, the most
(09:10):
lying kinds of claims, and there is a vast audience
out there willing to listen to them and use that
as a basis for making decisions. I am puzzled, frankly,
by way, we don't have more responsible citizens in this
country stepping up, Republicans and Democrats alite saying we're gonna
form a coalition. We're gonna try to bring this country
(09:32):
back to the center where it's always been at its
very best. You cannot just blindly follow the leaders on
the Democratic side of the House of Representatives are on
the Senate side, the Republicans who control that. You can't
blindly follow the president of the United States. That is
not what the founding fathers had in mind. What they
(09:55):
wanted was a representative government and an active citizens ry.
That would exercise its responsibility and its role on a
daily basis. Now we have too many people who are
cowed by what is going on and have lined up
on one side or the other without carefully examining the
(10:16):
consequences of their decision, without determining not just what's gonna
happen in the next twenty or four hours, but where
are we going to go as a country? Where are
we going to go as a society? What are our
children and grandchildren, what can they expect from this country?
Because it's like a wrestling match on television. At the moment,
kind of semi stage, everybody is slamming to the mat,
(10:39):
and then at the end of the day, we don't
know where we are. I'm telling you, folks, it's time
for people of goodwill and responsibility to get together in
some fashion and say, let's pick out some priorities, let's
try to get those in place, and let's not be
afraid to stand up and speak up to the press.
(11:00):
Into the United States, he got there because he won
the votes, no question about that, but it is not
a lifetime appointment. And on the Democratic side, it's important
to say to them, are you kidding you think that
we can eliminate our current system of healthcare and replace
it with a government system and not pay a terrible
price financially and otherwise for the turmoil that that would bring.
(11:23):
Are you kidding you think you can get free college
education for every young American? It can't be done. Changes
can happen. It can happen over a long curve and
with the best minds in the business figuring out what
the responsibilities are of individual citizens and with the costs
are from a financial point of view. We've done this
(11:46):
in the past. We introduce Medicare to America. That was
an enormous change. The American medical system hated the idea. Now,
of course, it's one of the most important aspects of
the support of America from its individual health point of
view and from the medical system itself. There are ways
to get out of us, but not if we constantly
(12:07):
are engaged in a food fight of some kind with
no consequences for those who lose or those who go
too far. I'm Tom broke off her I Heart Radio.
Now hear this
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