Dave at Peace: The Rolling Stone Interview

How are you feeling these days?
I was across the road picking up fence posts all morning in the 90-degree heat, so I'm feeling pretty good.

After the major heart surgery in 2000, did you always feel that you were going to come back to the show?
There was never a doubt. It was the chief motivator — just to come back and show myself that I could do it. I loved the nature of the project: Today, you walk four feet. Tomorrow, you walk 20 feet, by the end of the week you're walking a quarter mile, with the ultimate objective of coming back to work.

Did you watch when people like Regis and Bill Cosby were filling in for you?
No.

Why not?
My doctor said, "You have a brand- new life ahead of you, don't waste a second of it [laughs]." I don't know. I knew it would be troubling one way or the other.

Too good, or...?
I suppose. Or maybe I couldn't stay up that late, I don't know. I never did watch them.

You called your surgery "the most exciting thing" that had happened in your life. But a lot of people go through a depression after a traumatic event like that.
I'd heard that as well. I'd heard because of the barbaric nature of open- heart surgery, that you would almost automatically be depressed by it. In my case, it was this grand excitement, and then I would just burst into tears for no reason — just racking sobs. But even that, I loved. It was such a relief.

Do you look at the surgery as being a major delineation in your life?
Of course. I have always said that there are four things I am just thrilled about in my life. I always put the heart surgery first, because the other three wouldn't have happened without the heart surgery. Then there's the birth of my son, and the third was winning the Indianapolis 500. Maybe there were only three. I can't remember the fourth. I guess talking to you.

I recently went back and watched the show you did a week after September 11th. That show was highly praised, but it was really unnerving, very raw, and takes you right back to that very difficult time. Did you want to do that show?
No, I didn't want to, and maybe this is human nature, but I wanted other people to do it. I wanted the president to do things, I wanted Mayor Giuliani to take care of everything....You always look for a leader in every situation. You're stuck in an elevator, you look for the guy with a Swiss army knife. I didn't want to be any of those guys. I just wanted somebody else to make everything right. I didn't want to go back because I didn't know what to say, and I didn't feel like going back and it felt like a mistake. If they had said, "All right, we're not gonna have any more television for another six weeks," I would have thought, "OK, that's about right." Then a few days after the attack, the Mayor said, "You've got to continue living your lives, you've got to go on," and I decided I had to go back. But I was just filled with trepidation and, "Oh, jeez, this is when you need Johnny Carson to come back on the air."

In recent years, you've also been praised by some for confronting people who aren't terribly used to being confronted, like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly.
It's been so long since I even thought about Rush Limbaugh. I remember in the beginning I had the impression that here's a guy who clearly knows better than what he is saying, but knows it's a show-business hook. I sort of feel the same with Bill O'Reilly. I even said so much to him. Maybe he feels that way, maybe he doesn't, but I made the mistake of taking Bill O'Reilly way too seriously, because he's just like any other boob. I hope he's coming back on the show because I would treat the whole thing differently now.