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BRIAN LAMB, host: Tom Brokaw, author of "The Greatest Generation." One of the things you
mention in this book is that you were governor of Boys State in South
Dakota.

Mr. TOM BROKAW (Author, "The Greatest Generation"): Yes.

LAMB: What year?

Mr. BROKAW: 1957, actually. It was the--kind of a highlight of my
high school years. It was a--it was a real step for me. As--as you
know, in the Midwest, that's a very big deal, and I was elected
governor.

LAMB: How did you get into it in the first place?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, I was very active in student politics and student
athletics. I kind of wanted to be in the swim of wherever I was and I
had not

lived in this town very long of Yankton, and I was a junior, and they
picked me as one of five to go and I went. And we had a little
political coup d'etat within my party and we pulled this off.
Curiously enough, I met that day, and the man became my lieutenant
governor--we formed this ticket. His name is Robert Legvold, who now
is very well-known as a Soviet affairs expert. He shows up on NBC and
ABC and he is from the Harriman Institute at Columbia for Soviet
Affairs. So we--we think--we were a fairly strong ticket. He took
care of foreign policy and I took care of domestic affairs.

LAMB: Well, you're f--if you were governor, then, did you go to Boys
Nation?

Mr. BROKAW: No, we had separate people go to Boys Nation in those
days but my wife, Meredith, went to Girls Nation, and when she came
home we were all very excited because she got to meet Dwight
Eisenhower. And I said, `What was that like?' And she said, `Well, he
had rosy, little cheeks; he looked like a--a grandfather to me but I
was in the Rose Garden.' And I--we thought, at that time--Meredith and
I were just great friends--I thought `That's as close as I'm ever
going to get to a president of the United States is that my friend
Meredith saw Dwight Eisenhower in the Rose Garden.'

LAMB: And you were going to school where at that time?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, we were in Yankton High School. It's a small town
on the Missouri River. It was a former territorial capital of the
Dakotas. It was, for me, a very big deal to move to a town of that
size, 400 kids in high school and a real Main Street and all that
other stuff. And it was a--it was very fortuitous. I not only met
Meredith there but I--I still call it home. I'm rooted there. My
father is buried there. My mother will be buried there. So it's
a--it's an important place for me.

LAMB: How did you and your wife meet?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, Brian, you're not going to believe this, but we
met the summer before I moved there because my roommate at a summer
camp where we were working as Boy Scouts had her picture in his
trombone case. And he would open up the trombone case every night and
take out the picture of this girlfriend, Meredith Auld, and I'd have
to stare at the picture with him and he'd kind of look at it moonily
and then midway through the summer she wrote him a `Dear John.' We
wrote a withering reply to her. And I had no idea that I would be
moving to Yankton, and my parents came to me at the end of that
summer--we worked in construction and they said, `We're moving to
Yankton.' And I thought `Well, I know really two people. I know my
roommate and I know this girl in the trombone case.' And I went to the
swimming pool the first weekend I was there and there was this
lifeguard who was the girl in the trombone case.

Now that man, Eldon Eisenach, went on to get his PhD, went to Harvard
on an academic scholarship, and teaches now at--at the University of
Tulsa where he's the academic dean. And when she turned 50 I brought
him in as a surprise guest to tell the story to all of her friends.
It was great fun. That's more than you wanted to know, but that's how
I met her.

LAMB: How do you feel--I mean, you--you write about the greatest
generation and one of the things you talk about is how loyal they were
to each other and marriages lasted. How has your marriage lasted all
these years?

Mr. BROKAW: I think, in part, because we're deeply in love. We were
when we got married and it's stayed that way. And I also believe that
given the kind of life that I have, the public life that I have, is
that Meredith intuitively and wisely has her own life and she has her
own accomplishments. She's a very successful businesswoman in New
York. She had a chain of toy stores that did very well and then she
sold them to the employees. She's written children's books. She's an
accomplished horsewoman now. She always went off on her own track.
She was proud of what I did, but not absorbed by it. That's what I
did for a living and I think it was important to our three daughters
to see this strongly independent woman as well. And we've always
given each other lots of latitude because there's a kind of inherent
trust that goes on. We've known each other so long and so well for a
long time that she can go off and do things for Conservation
International, which is one of her passions, or go to the ranch and I
go off in other directions with my friends, and we don't worry about
the--the relationship in any way deteriorating. It just gets stronger
as a result of that.

LAMB: How old are your daughters?

Mr. BROKAW: Our eldest daughter is 32, and then we have one 30 and
one 28. The oldest daughter is an emergency room physician in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the mother of a granddaughter and about
to be a second one. Our middle daughter is a record company executive
in Los Angeles and the youngest one is a psychiatric social worker in
New York and she has a masters degree from NYU. We had one--the two
oldest ones, curious--at one time, the oldest one was at Stanford when
the middle one was at Berkeley and I spoke at Berkeley and said, `It's
like having one who's a member of The Grateful Dead and the other one
is a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.' Well, Berkeley liked that
but Stanford wasn't too pleased with the metaphor.

LAMB: Go back to Boys State for a moment. How did you get there in
the first place?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, I guess because I was kind of one of the honor
students. I--you know, I was involved in athletics and then student
government. I was a junior class president and president of the
student council that year. I was not a great athlete, but I was
the--you know, I was a--a player. And I was involved in all--in a lot
of things and I voiced it--politics always interested me so I was
eager to go. I thought that was a wonderful experience. And when I
got there, it proved to be that. I mean, I made lifelong friends and
saw how it worked. I had a kind of political instinct about how I
could get to where I wanted to get to and we did form this little
group. There was a kind of an organization in place and some of us
sandbagged them, in a matter of speaking, and got the nomination, and
went on to win triumphantly. And the man that I defeated became a
very good friend of mine. He went on to Harvard and we haven't seen
each other in a number of years, but we saw each other through the
course of high school.

LAMB: The American Legion sponsors that.

Mr. BROKAW: The American Legion sponsored it and the American Legion
was an important part of my life because I played American Legion
baseball. I have this wonderful picture of me at home in my American
Legion baseball uniform. They also had oratory contests in those days
but I didn't--I must say, Brian, I didn't think about them in terms of
their war experiences. You know, they were the--they were the men who
got things done in town, so to speak. And there was always a legion
hall wherever I lived and there was these American Legion baseball
teams. They did sponsor Boys State. I went back for the 50th
anniversary of South Dakota Boys State and had a wonderful time, a
reunion with a lot of people.

LAMB: What do they teach you, though?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, they taught us that participation was important,
that you--you know, if you--if you want to do something about your
life, you have to get involved in politics and in government and this
is how it works. And it--you probably know, but at Boys State what
you do is you start at the municipal and county level and in the
course of a week work your way up the state level very swiftly. But
you learn about caucuses and party caucuses and organization of county
government and then state government, who runs for office, what makes
a campaign successful, and my own guess is that it launched a lot of
people into a political career. I've said to--Mack McLarty was the
chief of staff at the beginning of Bill Clinton's administration--he
was governor of--of Arkansas Boys State the year after, I think, I--or
a couple of years after I was in South Dakota, and Bill Clinton, of
course, went to Boys Nation. So politics is rife with people who have
those experiences.

LAMB: In your book there's this picture of Jean and Anthony "Red"
Brokaw. What did they have to do with getting you to Boys State?

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, they--they grounded me in ways--it's hard for me to
describe in a few words, they were--my parents came from a very
difficult working-class background. My mother grew up on a farm. And
my father grew up on a--kind of a large, rambunctious family and he
went to work, really, at the age of 10. Dropped out of the third
grade to go to work because he had to. And my mother was a very
bright and bookish woman, but the family lost everything in the Great
Depression. They moved to a small town. She graduated from high
school at 16. Could not go to college because she couldn't afford it.
But all the time that I was growing up, it was--I was secure in our
family and they gave me lots of support and praise but also--they--you
know, they--they put limits on what I could do constantly. I had a
very bad patch when I was in college, first two years I was in
college, I kind of fell off the radar screen, you know, majored in--in
beer and co-eds.

LAMB: Where?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, University of Iowa first, and then at--at the
University of South Dakota. Couldn't get my act together. And my
parents, who had never had anyone go to college, so this was a new
experience for them, were mystified but at once understanding and
stern. At one point I was going to go to California and my dad stood
in the door and said, `No, you're not. You're not going to
California. You're going to figure this out and go back to school.'
Well, I was furious. I was 20 years old. I thought I could make my
own decisions. He was dead right.

LAMB: What did you study? What was your major?

Mr. BROKAW: Political science. Thought I would be a lawyer. I had
a very funny experience when I was at Iowa. And I'd come out of
high--high school as a whiz kid, you know, great grades and been
recruited by Harvard and, you know--and other schools like that but I
wanted to go to a Big Ten school and see football games and see the
co-eds and many, many years later I was working on the floor of the
convention here in New York, at the Democratic Convention, and a
member of the Iowa delegation came over to me and I recognized him
immediately and he said, `Tom, I'm Professor Don Johnston.' And I
said, `Yes, I know that.' He said, `Someone told me that I was your
professor.' And I said, `That's true. You were.' And he said, `I went
back and looked up your grade record. I only have one question? Was
it my fault or yours?' And I said, `It was all mine. Don't worry
about it, Dr. Johnston.'

LAMB: This is a photo in your book also--Tom Brokaw with Joe Foss.
Where are you appearing here? That's you on the right, by the way.

Mr. BROKAW: Yes, well, you can tell that in the crewcut and the
earnest suit. I bought that suit in Rochester, Minnesota, just for
the trip. Joe Foss was the governor of South Dakota, Congressional
Medal of Honor winner, a wonderfully robust character. He came and
spoke at Boys State when I was governor. We kind of formed an instant
friendship. Later that summer I was working in the bottom of a rock
quarry in Iowa in 110 degree heat on the end of an air hammer and the
end of a shovel, saying, `Please, God, anything to get me out of
here,' and Joe Foss' office called and said, `He's been asked to come
to New York and be on "Two For The Money" and he'd like you to be his
partner.' To this day I don't know what prompted him to say, `Let's
get that kid from Yankton to be my partner.' So I started getting
these calls from New York. Now you can only imagine in smalltown Iowa
where I was living with my aunt and uncle that summer what a buzz this
created. It was live television. I was going to be flown to New
York. I talked to a lot of people. They--news--the local newspaper
did a story and I got on the plane in Rochester, flew through to
Detroit, then into New York. I'll never forget landing in the heat of
the summer. Cab driver, wonderfully friendly man, drove me into
Manhattan, got set up in a hotel, and Joe Foss and I went on that show
together and made $612 apiece.

LAMB: Now you also talk in your book about the first time you ever
came to this city of New York.

Mr. BROKAW: It was that time and Joe said to me at the end of the
show--when we finished, he said, `What are you going to do?' And I
said, `Well, I'm supposed to go back tomorrow, but, God, I really
don't want to. There's so much I want to see.' I'd always loved New
York from a distance. I'd read a lot about it. And he said, `Well, I
think you ought to stay for a couple of days and I'll help you out
with that; I'll talk to your parents and we'll get some hotel
arrangements.' And I called my parents and it was a--I had this very
earnest discussion about the idea that I was going to stay, and my
dad, long pause, said, `Well, I think you should.' He said, `You'll
probably never get to see New York again.' Now I've lived here for
almost three decades at this point, but I got around. I--you know, I
went out to the Statue of Liberty, went to--hanging out in Times
Square, went to Broadway, Greenwich Village, and I was a Dodger fan,
last summer they were in the--in the city. Jackie Robinson, my
all-time hero, was gone, but I bought tickets somewhere in midtown
Manhattan, said to them, `How do I get out there?' They put me on the
right trains and I rode it out to Ebbets Field. So that was a really
memorable experience.

LAMB: What's the difference between--I mean, in your daughters--did
they grow up a lot here?

Mr. BROKAW: They grew up a lot of in New York. They grew up in Los
Angeles, Washington and in New York and the difference is that as a
result of that, as I say to them, they can be dropped anywhere in the
world and get along. They really know what they're doing. They grew
up in the city. They've traveled a lot. The doctor worked in
Peshawar, Pakistan. Two of them lived in Japan for a time. Jenny
worked in Africa, who's our doctor, is an Albert Schweitzer Fellow.
They're very adventurous. The youngest one traveled throughout the
Malaysian peninsula all one summer. And I think that's because of
the--of the confidence that they gained while they were living here.

LAMB: Speaking of big cities--then there's back to the dumbos in your
book.

Mr. BROKAW: Yes.

LAMB: Where--where is this picture taken?

Mr. BROKAW: This is in Yankton. These--these are--my in-laws are in
this picture and Dr. Heebner and--and other members of their very
close circle--Don and Lois Getchell, Joyce and Hack Hagen. This is a
group of people that I knew about in high school but I didn't really
know the origin. They would meet once a month, have dinner, play
bridge, have these ritualistic toasts that they would work on at great
length, which had kind of dumb jokes attached to them, and for me, and
for other members, I think, of the community, they were in some ways
emblematic of what was virtuous about family and community and
marriage and those kinds of things because they were the doctors and
the businessmen in town.

LAMB: Here's the--the Hagens.

Mr. BROKAW: Yeah, the Hagens--we're still very close to them.
They're--he is--he became an optometrist in Le Mars, Iowa, and his
wife was from Yankton and she played bridge with my mother-in-law,
Vivian Auld, during the war. Hack was on the USS Salt Lake City, saw
a lot of action as a gunnery officer. Came back, they are almost
Norman Rockwell in their kind of Midwestern qualities about church and
community and faith and family and supporting education.

LAMB: And who is Meredith, Merritt and Vivian Auld?

Mr. BROKAW: Merritt and Vivian Auld were my in-laws, both gone now,
tragically. Extraordinarily handsome couple. They're holding my
wife, Meredith, who at the time had just turned three. It was the
first time she had seen her father. He'd been gone for three years.
He left right after she was born. And she didn't see him again until
she was five, when he came back. And we've talked about that a lot.
It really did have an impact on their relationship. He came out of a
very male environment. He saw a lot of heavy-duty action as a
front-line surgeon all the way through North Africa and Italy. And it
took him awhile to really establish a kind of intimate bond of father
and daughter, but once they did they--they found that they were more
alike than--than unalike.

LAMB: It--this isn't the easiest thing to see, but on the screen is
a--you know, a mid-January best-seller list from The Wall Street
Journal. And right up here on top of non-fiction is "The Greatest
Generation," your book, put out by Random House. And over here, last
week, in this particular case, the number was 679. It's hard to
describe what that means but it means that you set the pace for every
book that...

Mr. BROKAW: Right.

LAMB: ...was being sold, whether it be business or fiction. You beat
"A Man in Full," Tom Wolfe. His number was 289. It's a ratio number.
How did this happen?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, I think a combination of things. First of all, it
was unexpected on my part. I thought the book would do reasonably
well. And this is not being immodest, but television people who get
their names on books sell pretty well. I mean, Cokie's book did very
well. Dan Rather's books have done well. Peter's doing well. But
this has taken off to a degree that not even Random House anticipated.
It's the fastest-selling book in the history of Random House. Barnes
& Noble said it's the fastest-selling book for them of the decade. I
think, Brian, it's a combination of things. I think that we are at a
stage in our lives where we're turning the calendar, looking back on
the 20th century. Everyone now on--reflections of the--World War II
was the defining moment for us. These people in their 70s and 80s
have never told these stories. These are fresh stories to a lot of
people, their children and their grandchildren, and they're now
beginning to want to make their mark. You know, they didn't speak out
for a long time. They're buying the book, but what is most gratifying
to me is that their children and grandchildren are buying the book by
the armsload. I--I've--one family in Massachusetts told me the other
day that the parents--they had like seven children, the parents of
this generation, and the parents got seven books for Christmas, one
from each of their child--children.

LAMB: How'd you do it?

Mr. BROKAW: Morning, noon and night kind of...

LAMB: When'd you start?

Mr. BROKAW: ...on floppies--I started in December of '97 and I had
some of these stories in mind so it was pretty journalistic and pretty
linear but, boy, laptop computers and floppy disks were a saving
grace. And then I had an exceptional young woman by the name of
Elizabeth Voyer who had once worked in the East Wing of the White
House and then helped Hillary with "It Takes a Village," her own book,
and she became my ace researcher until I was forced to make her go to
the University of Virginia where they were holding a place for her in
the law school there. She's--a lot of law schools have been holding a
place for her and everybody keeps saying, `You can't--Liz, is, you
know, she's passed too many times.' And I said, `No, that's the deal.'

And then Phil Napley who was a PhD freshly minted from Alan Brinkley's
department up at Columbia helped me in, Julian Wong, who works for me
as a researcher at NBC. They would get on the phone and talk to
people. I--I knew a lot of people. We would hear from children and
others and we networked like crazy and then we would do these long
interviews. I would call back, go through some more material. We'd
winnow them out--is this one going to work, is it going to fit in. I
had the basic structure pretty well in mind going in, about ordinary
people, heroes, fame, shame. La--love, marriage and commitment I
added at the end because I was so struck by these great romances. And
so I wanted to have a chapter just on that.

LAMB: How many times did you go out to these towns and interview
people yourself directly?

Mr. BROKAW: A--a fair amount. A lot of it was done by telephone.
But I was in Indiana with Margaret Ray Ringenberg. I was in--in
Washington with Bob Bush. I went down to Washington to see Sam
Gibbons and Bob Dole, again. I knew the people in South Dakota,
obviously, and could talk to them easily about what was going on. So
I did, you know, move around the country wherever I could, but I did a
lot on the phone as well.

LAMB: Did you do all the interviews and get all the quotes in here or
did your helpers do it?

Mr. BROKAW: No, the researchers did a lot of that on the phone and
then I would call back and--and--and clear things up or, you know, add
to or when it didn't connect for me I would talk to them. So I talked
to, I think, almost everybody in the book.

LAMB: How many people are there?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, there are about 50 principal characters. But
there--toward the end--then there are lots of little anecdotes that I
wanted to get in. I didn't talk to as many of them.

LAMB: How much of it did you physically write yourself?

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, I wrote it all, every word.

LAMB: Every word?

Mr. BROKAW: Word for word. Yeah, yeah.

LAMB: When do you...

Mr. BROKAW: Just wouldn't do it any other...

LAMB: When do you have time to do it?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, I just made time, Brian. I'm--I'm--I'm a pretty
fast writer and it's pretty journalistic and I would get up early in
the morning and start working on it and then I would take time at 9:30
for the "NBC Nightly News" conference call and then I'd say, `I'll see
you about 1." And I would write from 10 to 1. I'd write on airplanes.
I wrote on fishing trips. I wrote in hotel rooms late at night.
I'd--I became s--I went out to Montana for two weeks in August and I
would get up early in the morning, go for a run with my dogs, come
back, and sit down and lock in to the computer until about 1:00, 1:30,
and then I would go off and fish a little bit or do something and then
come back and write some more. And my family was interested to see
whether I could stay on that schedule. I was determined not to lift
my head up and count pages or words until at one point Kate Medina, my
editor at Random House, called me and said, kind of with a small sense
of awe, `There's a lot of copy here.' I said, `OK, let's start
organizing it. We think we're close to a book.' She said, `We're very
close.'

LAMB: Now we're recording this in the middle of January, but you've
already got how many books in print?

Mr. BROKAW: A million four hundred thousand. At the beginning
of--kind of the first or second week in January. They--they printed,
originally, like 350,000 and then went quickly to 600,000 and then
went quickly to 800,000 and then went quickly to 1,000,000 and then
1,200,000, now 1,400,000. And most of that's to order.

LAMB: There's also--you've done a television show that's aired.
You've also got the audio version of this.

Mr. BROKAW: Right.

LAMB: You can get it in CD and--and you read it.

Mr. BROKAW: Right. I read it...

LAMB: It's four hours long.

Mr. BROKAW: ...I read--did do that. That's the other thing I did.
I--you know, but then that's what I do for a living so I think it was
a little bit easier.

LAMB: How long did it take you to do that?

Mr. BROKAW: It was two, two-and-a-half-hour sessions. So it was
about five hours altogether, as I remember. I think that's about
right. It might have been a little longer than that.

LAMB: And do you have any sense of which medium has the--you know,
the lasting impact, your television--how long a television show did
you do on this?

Mr. BROKAW: Did an hour, 44 minutes.

LAMB: Four hours on your audio and then your book. Which one has
the--the book? Why?

Mr. BROKAW: That one, the book will, other--the print. Well,
because it's permanent and you can pass it around, you can read from
it, go back to it again. You know, you can do that with videotapes,
but it's--you've got to put it back in the machine and get back to the
place and that's why I think the print medium will always be with us.
I think even for this new generation that they'll stay with it. Jim
Lehrer said a wonderful thing to me. He had been in--oh, if not quite
on the beginning, he--we--we have an annual dinner in it--and I told
stories of the themes of this book, not about specific characters, one
night at dinner, and I was so struck by the fact that Jim and others
who were there--Roger Rosenblatt--said, `God, you know, that's the
kind of thing that you ought to be writing.' So that helped
write--when I finished it, Jim held it up and said, `Your
grandchildren, your great-grandchildren won't see you on television,
but they'll read this and there's something wonderful about that.'

LAMB: Now how long did it take you to title this book?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, that was the title I always wanted. I was
determined to stay with it. I--that came out of a discussion that I
had with Tim Russert on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, on "Meet the
Press." He said to me, `What do you think of the generation?' Quite
spontaneously, I said, `I think it's the greatest generation any
society ever produced.' Came out of the Depression with all that
economic depr--deprivation, went beyond their own shores to help save
the world from fascism, came back, rebuilt their enemies, built the
country that we have today, married in record numbers, went to college
in record numbers, kept their values, never whined, never whimpered.
I also point out there that they weren't perfect. You know, they were
very slow on racism. McCarthyism reared its ugly head after they got
back from the war. They were very slow on gender equality but once
they got it, they really did get it. And that generation, I think as
much as any other generation you can think about, was a whole
generation. Everybody was involved--men, women, old peop--the older
ends of that generation, the younger ends of that generation. And
they all participated. The Founding Fathers were the Founding
Fathers. There were not that many women who were involved and didn't
go beyond these shores except as an example of the world. The Civil
War generation didn't go beyond these shores and they allowed--and
women didn't have a--as large a role in that. This is a reflection of
everybody.

LAMB: Back to the--when you got into this business. When was the
first time you ever sat in front of a microphone?

Mr. BROKAW: I was 15 years old. I was working in Yankton at a
little radio station called KYNT. They wanted some high school kids
to come down and spin records and that was a--a wonderful invitation
to me. I was always a little entranced by the sound of my own voice,
I suppose. So I went down there with my girlfriend, Mary Lee Keating,
and we had a little record show, and then I stayed on to read the news
and do other things and stayed with the business.

LAMB: When did you think this was--this was the thing to do?

Mr. BROKAW: When I think--you know, I--I--I don't think that there
was that one kind of eye-popping moment in which I said, `Oh, my God,
that's what I can do!' I do believe that if the nadir of my own
personal life, which was in the fall of 1960 I dropped out of college,
things were not going well, I couldn't get my act together, I was
still utterly absorbed by national politics, paid a lot of attention.
I was back in my parents' home. I stayed up all night long to watch
the coverage of the Kennedy-Nixon returns. And I watched Chet Huntley
and David Brinkley. And I--you know, I went to bed about 8:00 in the
morning. And as I went to bed, I thought `God, what a wonderful way
to go through life is to do that.' I--you know, that's something I
care about, know about, I think I can do it. And I think it was maybe
the beginning of a little turnaround for me in which I thought `This
is an objective that I can do.' I also thought, given where I came
from, a working class family, I--we were not poor, but we were not
prosperous. We--you know, we earned everything that we had. But my
parents gave me the opportunity to go to college--that I thought `This
is a way for me to get beyond these horizons. You know, maybe I can
see the world on someone else's money as a national correspondent.' In
the early days of television, Brian, you may remember, it was a real
meritocracy. They didn't ask for your credentials. You know, you
weren't recruited out of Ivy League schools. If you could do it, you
got the chance to do it. So that's what I decided to go try to do.

LAMB: Did you serve in the military?

Mr. BROKAW: I didn't. And it's curious that I didn't because I grew
up in such a quasi-military environment and I always thought I'd
probably--there was a time in my life when I was in junior high I
thought I'd maybe have a professional military career. I wanted to go
to Annapolis to the Naval Academy and I've reminded Joe Foss that he
talked me out of it. He said, `You know, with your interest in
politics and journalism and everything, I'm not sure you'll do really
well in a highly regimented place like Annapolis. You probably ought
to think about other interests in life.' And then when I graduated
from college, everybody was going off to Army ROTC. I had--was
recruited by the Navy, `cause I was--still wanted to be in the Navy in
some fashion. Passed all the OCS exams. Thought I was going to
become a naval officer at--in Rhode Island, a--at Newport, do my
training. Had flat feet. And at the last station of the physical
they said, `Well, we can't take you.' So I went out and volunteered
for my draft examination and they said the same thing, `Well, those
feet are flat. We'll give you ...(unintelligible).' So I didn't have
any military experience which I regret. I don't regret not getting
shot at or, you know, making the sacrifices that young men did in
Vietnam, but I think that it's one of life's experiences for males
especially.

LAMB: What year did you get your university degree?

Mr. BROKAW: In '62. Actually it reads '64, `cause I didn't quite
finish it. I was still working on a paper and it took me a little
while. And...

LAMB: University of South Dakota finally?

Mr. BROKAW: Yeah. By then I was back at the University of South
Dakota where this wonderful professor, Dr. Farber, who is the
political science professor emeritus and a mentor to not just me, but
Dr. Leghold whom I talked about earlier, Ken Bode, whom you know, Pat
O'Brien on CBS, I mean, Larry Pressler, George Mickelson, who was the
governor of South Dakota. He had a long curve and he wouldn't let me
out of there until I finished--had to do a senior undergraduate paper.
And I--when I finished it then he said, `OK, we'll give you your
degree,' and it reads 1964.

LAMB: What year did you get married?

Mr. BROKAW: Got married in '62. We left the university in '62, two
children. I was 22. Meredith was 21. All of our friends were
getting married. Almost all of the marriages, I'm happy to say, have
lasted. We put everything that we had in the backseat of a--the most
bare-bones new car that her father could buy me--that Dr. Auld could
buy us was a Chevy, too. It cost $1,700. No air-conditioning; no
radio. He wasn't going to go that far. And we drove off to Omaha and
rented a basement apartment, furnished, barely. I went to work for
$100 a week at KMTV as a--as a reporter on the street and then quickly
became kind of the morning news editor and--and did the morning
"Today" show cut-ins.

LAMB: How did you get that job in the first place?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, I was desperate. I thought I had a job--first of
all, I thought I was going to go in the Navy and I was counting on
that. That didn't work out. Then I thought I had a job in Miami and
that fell through. A friend of mine knew about the job that there may
be open in Omaha, I got in the car with Dr. Farber who agreed to
drive down with me to offer moral support, the professor at the
university. And we--I went in and quite blindly said to this news
director `You've got to hire me.' And we went out to lunch and we
talked politics and he said later that he had never had an applicant
who was as enthusiastic about American politics or knew as much about
American politics, including Nebraska congressional races and other
things. So on that basis he decided to hire me. He said, `OK. We'll
hire you. 90aweek.′AndIsaid,Iˋhavetohave90 a week.' And I said, `I have to have 90aweek.′AndIsaid,Iˋhavetohave100.' And he
said, `Wait a minute. You just come begging for a job and you're
asking for a raise before you get the job.' I said, `My new
father-in-law is a doctor and I don't think he thinks I'm going to
amount to a lot and if I don't have $100 a start, it's going to be a
bad beginning of this marriage.' So he said, `I'll give you $100 but
I'll tell you something, you're not going to get a raise for a long
time.' Well, when--and when I got one of those big NBC contracts that
have gotten fairly well-publicized--his name was Mark Goterie. He was
a wonderful kind of green eye-shade news editor. He was--lamentably,
we lost in the last year. He wrote to me and said, `Hey, Brokes,
maybe NBC ought to hire me as a negotiator. I did a lot better on
your salary than they seem to have.' Which is a pretty good joke
between us.

LAMB: Did you ever get trained in being a television newsperson?

Mr. BROKAW: No, no.

LAMB: Never voice training?

Mr. BROKAW: No, no. No, I mean, I've--I've worked--you know, I have
this problem with my L's, so I work with that from time to time, but
no, I--and I don't think that there's a school that you can go to.
I've always believed that you have to be primarily yourself, as you
have been so successfully.

LAMB: Let me ask you about--I--I don't know why I want to ask you
about this, but why is it that television and radio--I remember when I
started out in radio. You know, you'd almost cup your ear and
you--you would find yourself--I mean, in television and radio, you
almost become something other than what you are.

Mr. BROKAW: Artificial.

LAMB: Why--why has the business grown up that way where there's a lot
of yelling and, `We'll be right back after this!' You know,
what--what's that come from? Because we don't talk to each other...

Mr. BROKAW: I think it--no, I think it--you know, if you go back and
look at--listen to the old announcers that you and I grew up with and
the old newscasters, Edward R. Murrow was highly stylized. I mean,
he's a reverential figure for all of us, but he couldn't get away with
that now. You know, that cigarette smoke and the kind of the use of
the language and how he did it and, `the fault lies not in the stars
but with us,' and that kind of thing, and that's how we--you know,
Gabriel Heater, Lowell Thomas, all the people that you heard.

But, having said all that, the best single newscaster I ever heard was
a man by the name of Whitey Larson on WNAX in Sioux City, Iowa, who
would come on and do the 10:00 news--I later learned in his municipal
band uniform. It was on radio. And he would say, `Well, it's gonna
snow tomorrow, but it won't be the shoveling kind, so if you're gonna
hang out the wash, you'll be OK, ladies, until about noon.' That's how
he would start the newscast. I was like 12 years old listening to the
10:00 news on the radio. And then he would talk his way through the
news. And I've always thought he was the perfect radio newscaster
because it was as if he came to your home to tell you about what was
going on.

LAMB: We go--let me ask you again, though, why--why is it like in
commercials, especially radio commercials, they're yelling
at--what--what happened?

Mr. BROKAW: I--I don't know. I--there's this--it's probably the
rock 'n' roll attitude about radio that it has to be louder. The--but
one of the things that has happened with me, by the way, with this
book, now that you bring it up, is that I have been able to go around
the country and be interviewed on various NPR outlets, and it's been
one of the great joys of having written a book. Diane Rehm's in
Washington, and the University of Washington, a young man the other--a
couple of weeks ago, and other people. And then I've done AP radio
and I've done--AARP has got a radio outlet as well. That's the
opposite. These are old-fashioned radio interviewers, and it gets to
be very intimate and it's about what radio, I think, is all about.

LAMB: I have something I picked up today and I want to share it with
you. We'll get a close-up here, if we can. It's kind of hard to see
it. This is out of the New York Post, and it's the first time I've
ever seen anybody do this. You know, usually on these ratings, they
only--they do the rating numbers and you never understand what it is.
This is a breakdown of total actual viewers right here, and it shows
here ABC had 14.3 total viewers last week. This is in the middle of
January again. NBC had 14 million, CBS 13 million, Fox 11 million.
And it goes on down here to some of the programs, the fir--the top
30...

Mr. BROKAW: Right.

LAMB: ...and then it goes right here to the network news. You're on
top, but you have 12.94 million. ABC has 12.5 million and "CBS
Evening News" has 12.3 million. You're almost neck and neck. How
does that happen?

Mr. BROKAW: Yeah. Well, I think you got three thoroughly
professional people working hard at these broadcasts every night, and
I'm not surprised. I think that they're highly competitive news
organizations with their own--each with a strong lineup of affiliates
out across the country. That's why paying as much attention as we do
to the ratings probably is overstated, but nonetheless you like to
finish number one. You know, I'm--so we're ahead by 400,000 viewers,
I'll take it.

LAMB: Well, what have you found from your studies that matters in
a--in a newscast, that gets more viewers than the others? I mean, how
much do you matter in that?

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, I think I'm a factor. I think people watch people,
but--but I think the three of us have been at this for so long now,
we've all roughly had the same tenure, you know, as--in my case, it's
about 16 years altogether. Dan's been there a little longer, Peter
just a sho--like 15 years. So I think they know who we are at this
point. I think it's a combination of things, Brian. It's often the
lineup of affiliates and how strong they are, how well your network is
doing, what precedes you, what comes right after you is a part of it.

In that particular case, you know, that reflected a big news week.
There was a lot of stuff going on. It was cold. People stayed
inside. And also we had articles of impeachment being delivered to
the US Senate and they were trying to work out the rules. And then
folks paid attention. I think that they still count on these evening
news broadcasts to do the important stories. When war broke out again
in Iraq, our viewership went up. They come to us. When they're--when
the news is kind of flat, it's much more diffused. There are a lot of
choices out there now. One of my friends was telling me the other
night Comedy Central, you know, has become very hip for a lot of young
people to look at because there's not much in the news that interests
them.

LAMB: Look at this week. This is the week of December 28th through
January the 3rd, and it's cable...

Mr. BROKAW: Right.

LAMB: ...basic cable. And I think if you count it up there, there
are 14 different programs they mention. I think six of the top 10 are
wrestling.

Mr. BROKAW: They're all wrestling, yep.

LAMB: You can see World Wrestling Federation is number two with six
million viewers. World Championship Wrestling on TNT, five million
viewers. This is where we're getting when people actually have a
choice. What do you think this means?

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, I'm not surprised. I mean, carnivals have always
done well, you know, in a--in a community. And as I often say to
people when they say, `Well, why do you--why do you deal with the bad
news?' I say, `Well, we don't see it as bad news. We see it as
change.' You take a long cross-country trip, there's a nine-car pileup
at an intersection in an--in an interstate, you're gonna stop and take
a look at that. You're gonna say, `Well, that's bad news. I don't
want to be in--absorbed by it.' But that's--that's part of it.

And I--I also think right now in America, there--people are so
switched off of politics, times are so good, we have the highest level
of prosperity in our history, probably in the history of Western
civilization for as many people, that they can be kind of disengaged
from real things and say, `I'm amused by that,' you know, and the--and
the--the various wrestling outlets know how to--how to exploit that.

LAMB: This is not a question about network news so much or networks
as th--Robert Samuelson had a column this morning in The Washington
Post. And we show it on the screen. It says Network Fadeout. And I
ask you this more of a--from a standpoint of a sociology department
than a network. It says, `The major TV networks as we know them are
dead. You need not worry that ABC, CBS and NBC will vanish, but their
central role in American life is finished. Since TV's early years,
they have commanded the heights of news, entertainment and sports.
They decimated the ranks of newspapers, decided what we saw and talked
about, and according to their fiercest critics, turned the minds of
millions of Americans into mush.' Mr. Samuelson says then, `Never
again.' What do you think? You're in the middle of MSNBC and you have
the Internet and NBC's got it all right at the moment. What's
gonna--what's it all gonna do to the country?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, one of the reasons that we are in the middle of it
all is that we do see this diffusion of the spectrum, you know. What
Mr. Samuelson does not say is that we used to have a duopoly. It
used to be just CBS and NBC. ABC was not even a player in the early
stages, and so we could dictate, and television in those days was a
phenomenon. People would sit and watch whatever came along. They
became more discriminating, more choice was available to them through
cable and other kinds of outlets, and my own guess is that we're in a
passage now, the end of which we cannot see; that people are making
determinations about what is important to them.

Are--are networks--well, first of all, I don't find them as sinister
as he does. I think if you look back on the place of networks with
great entertainment--I mean, there's been a lot of bad stuff as well,
but there's been a lot of wonderful stuff. If you look just recently
at "Seinfeld" as a comedy of reflecting the '90s and then going back
to "The Jackie Gleason Show" and Sid Caesar and all the wonderful
shows that were there in the '70s and '80s.

And then on big events, as you know from your own experience, the
assassination of John Kennedy made television news what it is today.
People took the medium seriously. There we were. We were the glue
that held the country together that weekend. That's happened on a lot
of other occasions: Persian Gulf War, Vietnam--it was a hugely
important instrument, I think, for the country. There was no more
important policy tool during the civil rights movement than network
television news coverage every night of that big story from a
distance, because in the South, they could no longer control what was
happening in terms of what people were seeing. The whole country then
saw what was going on.

So I think that we'll adapt, is what I believe, and I think that
people will take the best of what they need from various outlets. But
we'll never have--he's quite right. The networks will never be as
dominant again as they once were. Now having said that, when there
was a big news week just recently, the three evening newses commanded
half of the television sets in use at the time that we were on the
air. That's a pretty impressive number, Brian.

LAMB: Back to this book, Tom Brokaw and "The Greatest Generation."
Had they had television like we know it today, or even like we knew it
back in the '60s--mid-'60s to '70s where you dominated everything,
what do you think would have happened in World War II? I mean...

Mr. BROKAW: I don't think Hitler would have gotten as far as he did.
I think that's part of it, and that's what we--we tend to have that
kind of hypothetical on the shores of Omaha Beach, for example. Would
they have turned? Would the country have been outraged? And I always
say go back to the 1930s as Hitler was marching across Poland and
marching across France. Would this country have been as soporific as
it was about what was going on over there, about the buildup that was
going on in Japan? I think it would have aroused real passions here
and probably mi--I like to think he wouldn't have gotten that far.

LAMB: Want to ask you--you mentioned Omaha Beach. I want to ask you
about two cemeteries. One you write about in the book. You went with
your father's brother to a small cemetery in Bristol, South Dakota.

Mr. BROKAW: Right.

LAMB: What was that all about?

Mr. BROKAW: I went on Memorial Day, oh, eight or nine years ago now
to see my father's surviving brother. This is the family homestead
founded by my great-grandfather, this little town, Bristol, which was
an intersection of two lines of the Milwaukee road--Railroad, north
and south, east and west. They built a little railroad hotel there
and the family lived there, 11 brothers and sisters. Pretty raucous
group, but wonderfully cohesive in terms of family. And John was the
surviving brother and he'd been in the Navy during the war and he said
to me, `We have to go put the flags out on the graves.' He said, `I've
given up that assignment to this young farmer south of town who is a
Korean War veteran and he's supposed to do it. I--I don't know
whether he knows where all the graves are.'

So I walked down with him to the cemetery and I stood on this knoll
and looked at these two men, each clutching a fistful of small flags,
going from cemetery to cemetery putting them on, and the great gray,
you know, late spring South Dakota sky was stretched out behind them,
and it was an epiphanous moment for me. I--I thought of all the
sacrifices that had been made just in that community in wars, and then
the people who'd stayed behind and kept the community going, kept the
country going together. And these men paying homage to them as men
will and women will forevermore in that community. And that also led
me to write this book.

LAMB: And you also write about Omaha Beach and standing up on that
hillside looking down with that cemetery there, some 14,000 people
buried in that cemetery.

Mr. BROKAW: Right.

LAMB: How have we done, from your experience--and you've done a lot
of work on this--maintaining these cemeteries? And what impact do
they have on people that go there and see them?

Mr. BROKAW: The cemeteries are magnificent. I mean, they really are
wonderfully maintained. And it's not just by the Americans who
maintain them, but in Holland, for example, or in the Philippines or
in France, the local people are so grateful that they still work on
those cemeteries and make sure that they're im--impeccably kept up.
There's a--Robert Gagnon's father is bo--buried in Holland. He talked
about the Dutch caretakers out at the American cemetery there and how
there wasn't a scrap to be seen anywhere.

And when you go there, it is a leveling experience. It's--you know,
emotionally it's--it really does bring you to your knees. Bill Malden
tells this wonderful story about the dedication of Colleville-sur-mer,
which is the cemetery in Omaha Beach, and I think it was General
Prescott--I'm--I'm not sure--who turned to the dignitaries who were
looking out at the cemetery and he had his back to the cemetery
because that's where the speaker's platform was, and he said to the
dignitaries, `I mean no disrespect,' he said, `but I want to address
my men.' And he turned around and made his speech to those thousands
of white crosses and saying, `I'm sorry I couldn't keep you alive.'
And Malden, as I saw him tell this story on a PBS show, broke up, and
with good reason.

LAMB: If somebody out there watching this right now is a Vietnam
veteran, why--you--you call this the greatest generation. Why
wouldn't it be just as great of a generation that went to Vietnam when
this country wasn't very hospitable about it?

Mr. BROKAW: Hospitable, right.

LAMB: You go over to Vietnam, your head's in the mud over there, you
get your hands blown off or whatever. You're back here now and you
went back to work and you didn't--you don't--I mean, they don't talk
about it either, a lot of them. Why aren't--why isn't that
...(unintelligible).

Mr. BROKAW: No, I think that--I think that they deserve more
attention than they're getting, and I think that that, too, is worthy
of a book called "Coming Home" or whatever you want to describe it as.
And I think that the--I think that there's something that can be done,
frankly, Brian, between those who didn't go and those who did go and
how they're joined in communities all over America now and don't know
that. Or they're not talking about it together, about what motivated
you.

I know a--I know a--I have a lot of neighbors in Montana and up in New
England who are Vietnam veterans and they are the stuff of the
community. You know, they're ranchers and they run building supply
companies and they're the first selectmen and so on, and one of the
lessons of Vietnam and those men who went and came back is that a lot
of them want to get involved in their communities because they didn't
want there to be a time in their lives again when they didn't have a
say in what happened to them and who made decisions about their lives.

LAMB: One story that I know I--I--struck home with me was the
gentleman by the name of Broderick, who is blind. Tell that.

Mr. BROKAW: Well, it just strikes everybody. Tom Broderick was the
only son of a Chicago Irish-American family. His father had a small
trucking business. He--he was in pre-med when the war broke out. He
joined the Merchant Marine, got accepted to the academy. The Merchant
Marine Academy was on a long, boring cruise across the Atlantic, as he
described it, and decided that he wanted something more exciting so he
went into the airborne, and everybody tried to talk him out of it--his
parents, his draft board, the Merchant Marines. Said, `No, that's
what I'm gonna do.' Well, in the Battle of Arnhem, he was shot through
the head. He was blinded. They didn't tell him that he was gonna be
permanently blinded, and so he came back in quite a rage. That's a
wonderful picture of him with his sisters. But he...

LAMB: And he's blind here.

Mr. BROKAW: He's blind there. Yeah, you would never know it. But
when he came back, and when his children came--got to an age where
they understood that their father was blind, he would tell them this
story. He would say, `Your mother--your grandmother took me to
Lourdes hoping that there could be a miracle.' And he said, `Just
before they put the holy water on my eyes, I said, "Lord, I know that
we don't always get what we want, but what we deserve, and what I
really need is a good woman,"' and he met Eileen, his wife, not too
long after that, and they raised seven children. He built a very
successful business.

And his children got in touch with me to talk about him. And one of
his sons said when Vietnam veterans were sent over to the house by the
VA, he said, `They would get out of the car looking suicidal, but Dad
would sit on the porch and talk about White Sox baseball and he
would--Mom would get a case of beer and he'd walk them through the
house and talk to them about what they could do with business.' He
said, `By the end of the evening,' this son would say, `I'd hear
laughter and reason for life to go on again.'

LAMB: Then there's Dr. Charles Van Gorder.

Mr. BROKAW: Yeah, I feel very close to Dr. Van Gorder because of my
own father-in-law, who had similar experiences, and never ever talked
about them. Dr. Van Gorder--I mean, this is an extraordinary
story--he--he jumped on D-Day and they did something unusual. They
decided not to set up well behind the front lines, that they were
gonna jump into the middle of the action and set up a MASH unit so
that he could operate on young men, and he was operating on them. By
9:00 in the morning, they had 300 or 400 casualties. He was captured
later, a prisoner of war, almost died a couple of times during that
experience. His glo--closest friend, John Rata, they kind of kept
each other alive.

They made their way back through Poland, came back. They were gonna
go to fellowships here in New York, have big distinguished practices.
And he went to visit his family down in Andrews, North Carolina, and
saw that they needed a physician, got his friend, they went down
there, set up this very small clinic and they were the doctors there
forevermore, delivered all the babies, set all the bones, built a
hospital. I mean, that--that's really what has made this country what
it is today, what these people did when they came back.

LAMB: The Romeo Club.

Mr. BROKAW: The Romeo Club. Retired Old Men Eating Out, and, Brian,
you and I, we'll go up there and have lunch with them one of these
days, because it's about as much fun as you can possibly have. These
are some of the--some of the guys.

LAMB: Where are they?

Mr. BROKAW: They're in a bar, and I--that's in the Phil...

LAMB: It's Panama.

Mr. BROKAW: Panama. That's in Panama. They're on their way to the
South Pacific. I couldn't remember. They were--some of them were in
the Philippines in another picture. They grew up in an Irish-American
working-class neighborhood just o--just off Harbor Yard, two- and
three-story homes with two and three families living in every home,
six and seven kids; all went to the parochial schools, played pickup
baseball and basketball and football and swam in the Charles River.
War came, big banner, you know, `Kerry Corner's contributions to the
war effort.' Came back, became cops, schoolteachers, headmasters and
so on. One of them, Lefty Caulfield, was kind of the organizer of the
group, went to Harvard on a baseball scholarship and was captain of
the team and says to this day with great pride, `And we beat Yale when
George Bush was playing first base.'

LAMB: Johnnie Holmes.

Mr. BROKAW: Johnnie Holmes was raised in northwestern Chicago--in
fact, in Evanston. Didn't know much racial discrimination growing up
in that community, which is the home of Northwestern University, and
then went into the Army. As he said, `I was--told my mother I wasn't
gonna let the Army break me. I was gonna let it make me.' And he
became a member of the 761st tank battalion, but saw really God-awful
racial discrimination, both at home and abroad, but came back and led
a distinguished life in Chicago working for the city, and now he works
for his Catholic church as a volunteer, and one of the things that he
says is that, `I made a deal with God. If he would let me come back,
I would then do his work.' And he said, `For everybody I killed in
Europe, I think I've helped 10 more here at home.'

LAMB: Did you ever find yourself personally being overwhelmed with
the stories?

Mr. BROKAW: Yeah, a lot.

LAMB: Break down?

Mr. BROKAW: Pardon me?

LAMB: Did you break down or cry? I mean, it...

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, sure. No, I had--yeah, I--my--a couple of times, I
could barely--there's an Art Buchwald story in there that you--that
you may have read, and my children--he's very close in our family.
He's like an uncle, and Buchwald wo--the mo--world's most unlikely
Marine--at Parris Island was trained by a DI by the name of Pete
Benardi, and Pete Benardi was sure that Art would--he called him
Brooklyn--Pete Benardi called Artie Brooklyn. He was sure that he was
gonna die because he couldn't do anything right, and he was on demerit
all the time. But Art got back after hi--undistinguished military
record and went to USC and became famous as a columnist. Life
magazine said, `Want you to go back to Life--to Parris Island.' He
found Pete Benardi to take him back with him. They had a wonderful
week. Art still couldn't do anything on the obstacle course or, you
know, with weapons or anything else, but it was a big laugh.

A few years later, someone called and said, `Art, your friend, Pete
Benardi's dying of cancer.' Art wrote him a--got out one of the
photographs from the Life magazine series and said, `To Pete Benardi,
you made a man out of me; I'll never forget you,' and sent it off to
Pete Benardi, whose wife then told Art that he hung it above his bed
so everybody could see, and when he died, he asked to have that
picture buried with him.

Now as I would try to--try--describe that over the phone to my
daughters, I couldn't get through it because--and still to this day,
it says to me about that generation and what they did for each other.
Here is Art, you know, who became a very famous, celebrated newspaper
columnist, moving in the--you know, the highest circles of Washington
and Paris, Pete Benardi came back to be a security agent at the
World's Fair, but at the end of their lives, they were like this
because of those formative experiences that they had.

LAMB: When do you think--or, maybe you know--you--you worked the
hardest in your life? What years?

Mr. BROKAW: I think 1989 might have been the hardest year. That's
when everything collapsed around the world. You know, the Soviet
Union came down, Czechoslovakia was freed, and Poland was freed and
Mandela was released from prison and Tiananmen Square happened, and I
was on an airplane almost every night to some distant place. It was
very exciting, but it was a lot of hard work, but it was something I
never thought I would see in my lifetime. It's--it was immensely
rewarding as well, because I think that at NBC particularly, but at
all the networks, that we did a distinguished job of covering that
momentous time.

Now during the Watergate years, I worked very, very hard, too, in part
because I was often on duty as John Chancellor's substitute if he were
away, and then I would fill in on the "Today" show and then go back
and report all week long and all weekend long during Watergate.

LAMB: Did you ever think about politics yourself?

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, early on, I did, when I was a young man, but not
since I've been in this business, you know, and people have talked to
me about it, but I think it's an honorable arena. I still love it. I
think it defines who we are at any given time. We have no one to
blame but ourselves. I still get excited about even city council
races, you know, in remote villages. But, no, it's not for me.

LAMB: What would you change--I mean, you interview people all the
time. What would you change about people you interview if you could,
politicians in particular? What do they do that bugs you?

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, what they do that bugs me is that--that--that even
though we know each other and they know that they're gonna--they're
gonna spin--this whole thing--spin thing is totally out of--you never
get an--you never get real candor anymore. You do from a few. John
McCain and Bob Kerrey, two veterans, by the way. You know, once in a
while, they just say, `Well, I don't know what I'm gonna do about
that,' you know, or I--`Got me.' Boy, that's refreshing, you know,
from time to time if somebody would say--you know, I thought you were
gonna say what would I do about politics. I would change--I'd change
campaign finance. I think it's ruined it.

LAMB: But how do you get pas--go back to the interviewing. How do
you get past the spin?

Mr. BROKAW: You just have to keep working at it. This will have
been on by the time I do it, but I got to go from here to interview
Trent Lott about the impeachment trial, you know, and I'm--my mind is
reeling about how I'm gonna come at him at a different angle to get
him to say something that is truly spontaneous and insightful, you
know, that will reveal his soul a little bit. There's gotta be a lot
of turmoil in Trent Lott about how this thing is gonna go, but he's
very buttoned up and he'll have a set piece that he'll lay out there,
you know, for public consumption, and how do you get beyond that is
hard.

But then you know what, Brian? I'm doing the same thing here, in a
manner of speaking. You know, I'm not gonna--you know, I've got my
guard up a little bit, even as kindly and friendly as you are about
all this and it's positive. Yeah, I think everybody does.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. BROKAW: Oh, because it's a minefield out there. You know,
the--it can be taken out of context--not by you, but somebody can lift
it out and say `Brokaw said on Brian Lamb's "Booknotes"'--and then,
bang, you read about it on page six in some publication somewhere. I
mean, I'm very cautious. I live in New York. I'm around, you know,
taxicabs and restaurants and theater and whatever, and it doesn't
always go exactly the way you'd like it to. You know, sometimes taxi
drivers are rude or they don't--people do things, and you'd like to
snap back, but you just don't dare if you're a public figure.

LAMB: What would you tell people that you have to deal with out there
in the world who obviously recognize you wherever you go about how to
treat you as--I mean, do people do things that bug you?

Mr. BROKAW: No, they're very nice actually. I--and I--I'm pretty
gregarious and I--one of the things I think that happens is--as a
result of the nature of the work that I do--the news--is that the
people have a little different appreciation of that than if I were a
talk show artist or a--you know, a rock 'n' roll star. That's for my
next life, by the way. Or a film star. I've had--I have friends who
are big film stars. It's--I don't know how they do it, frankly.
Michael Jordan--he can retire from basketball, but he still has to go
through life.

So when I--I'm pleasant to people. I mean, I--this sounds
self-serving, but I--you know, I'm generally interested in what they
have to say and I try to, you know, nod and be pleasant and--and
accessible to them. And you develop little--people will say, `Gee, I
watch you every night,' and I'll say, `Well, make you rich or famous,
but I really appreciate it.' You know, because I do. I--it's a real
connection. If--you know, what I do, what you do, we both depend on
those people on the other side of the screen, and we can never forget
that. That's why we're here. We're not here for ourselves, we're
here for them. And I try to keep that in mind.

And I travel a lot. I'm out across America, you know. I'm in the
fabric of this country in--in many ways, and it's always wonderful for
me to be able to hear what's going on somewhere; you know, how people
got here, what they're doing, what their business is, what their
interests are.

LAMB: What have you missed that you haven't been able to do yet?

Mr. BROKAW: Well, that's one big piece of it. I--you know what I
haven't been able to do? I haven't been able to take like six months
and just disappear. I'd love to do that. Because the technology now
is such that they can find me anywhere in the world and almost always
do. As you may know, I do--or love to do adventurous travel. And a
couple of years ago, Meredith and I were in Mongolia. But just before
I left, NBC put in my hands a mobile phone not much larger than that
book, and on a riverbank in northwestern Mongolia, I thought, `Well,
maybe I'll try it out,' and I popped it open. And it shoots a
satellite on its own. Put in a couple of keys and I was talking to my
office with about a half a second delay. Now that's good news and
terrible news for me.

LAMB: By the way, what's Meredith like?

Mr. BROKAW: What is she like?

LAMB: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BROKAW: Well, she's exceptionally physically attractive, for one
thing, which is what people always notice about her right off the bat,
an extraordinarily handsome woman. And Barbara Walters once said to
me, `When did you first realize just how beautiful she is?' And I
said, `Well, I don't--I never thought it in those terms. I always
thought that she was extraordinarily handsome woman.' And I think what
everybody is struck by is her wonderful openness, but at the same
time, strong sense of independence. You know, that she--she doesn't
move through life in my orbit. She moves her life in her orbit and
our orbits happen to work well together.

LAMB: We don't have much time, but I want you to name each of your
three daughters and just say a little bit about each one of them.

Mr. BROKAW: Jennifer Brokaw is a physician and she's an emergency
room specialist, and that's a perfect match for her personality. She
takes charge. And if you've gotten yourself in trouble, she'll fix
you up but tell you where you went wrong.

LAMB: Like you or your wife?

Mr. BROKAW: A combination of the two. Really confrontational like
me, but looks like her mother and has same mothering instincts.
Andrea Brokaw, the middle one, is in the record business, has an--I'm
told by everybody in it--a great ear for talent and also a strong
business head and is more like me in terms of her interest in kind of
the popular culture. Sarah, the youngest one, is--this is a father
speaking, of course--but she's a darling girl with a long run of
boyfriends over the years, and is totally fearless about life; will go
up and meet almost anyone anywhere in the world and is great fun to be
around, and she's in New York and it's great fun to have her back
here.

LAMB: The book looks like this. It's by Tom Brokaw and it's called
"The Greatest Generation." We thank you very much for joining us.

Mr. BROKAW: Brian, it's a real pleasure always to be with you.

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