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In 1983, when Tom Brokaw took over NBC Nightly News, many derided him as a blow-dried anchor-stud. On December 1st, when he gave up the chair, he departed an elder statesman and bestselling author (The Greatest Generation) and, if not the most trusted man in America, then at least a guy who managed to go out on top and with class. On the eve of Brokaw's last broadcast, we caught up with him in his Rockefeller Center office, in New York.
It must be flattering, and also disquieting, that your retirement is being treated not only as a personal thing but also as the end of an era.
Yeah, that is truly an out-of-body experience. It really is. I think, "It's me they're talking about?"
But they're also acting like this half-century-old institution, the nightly network newscast, is entering its final period.
Which reminds me of the Super Bowl. All the sportswriters get together before the weekend and decide how the game's going to come out. Then somebody kicks off and it all changes. And I see this that way. I think it's very hard to know what's going to happen. There's a fair amount of doom and gloom. And if you just look at the raw numbers -- sure, the universe for viewers for the evening news broadcast has been considerably diminished. But I'm still getting 10 million people a night. Give me another circulation like that in America.
But does it worry you that you see more and more ads for Depends and Geritol?
Yeah, yeah -- it does. Obviously. One of the lines that I've used is "I want to get out of here before I have to start using the products we advertise." If I were going back and starting over again, I'd be saying, "OK, here's our immediate challenge. We can't give up the younger audience, and we don't want to drive away the older people."
It requires some serious thinking. Part of the constraint is we're only a half-hour. It's a big frustration. I don't know what more I can do within this format. A year ago, if NBC had come to me and said, "Look, we're going to give you an hour in prime time for the evening news," I might not be leaving today. In the late 1960s, Walter Cronkite singlehandedly helped turn public opinion against the war in Vietnam. Now the nation is caught in another unpopular war.
But do you think that a network newsman could again be as influential, if he was to do the same thing as Cronkite?
No, I don't think you can anymore. First of all, this war's at a much different stage. It was at the end of a long, long, difficult siege that Walter did that. Also, we have a different relationship with our audience. Walter was the avuncular uncle figure. People have said that about me, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings -- that we are the new uncles. I said, "No, no, we're the big brothers -- we're not the uncles."
What do you think about the idea that the New York media have a liberal bias? Is it true?
Not when I go to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. You know, they're all over me, saying we're giving Bush a free pass, saying, "You started the war." What the hell is this all about? And it's not just on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There are a lot of neighborhoods in this country where they think that we're toadies for the corporate establishment that owns us. And if you saw Fahrenheit 9/11 -- which was very popular -- you know we were the villains in that.
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Michael Moore said his film did so well because the TV networks didn't tell the truth about the war and people had to see his movie to find out what was really happening in Iraq.
Paul Wolfowitz with a comb in his mouth? [Laughs]
I think he was saying that the news media presented a sanitized version of the war.
Well, you know what, we do show those images. But with a little more discretion. People know that there are bodies; it's the nature of war. But you don't have to be grotesque about it. And Michael Moore was also the guy in other scenes in that movie who gave the impression that it was Disney World in Iraq before the war -- that there was no Saddam Hussein who had killed hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims. He refused to acknowledge that it was Richard Clarke who signed off on the idea that the bin Laden family could leave the country when they did. So I'm not as inclined to have that dialogue with him.
Were you surprised by the outcome of the election?
I did think there was a possibility that Kerry could squeak through in the electoral vote but lose in the popular vote. But I was a little surprised that Bush won the popular vote by as much as he did.
I spent the Sunday before the election with Bush and the re-election team. I came back here and said, "These gunfighters know what they're doing. They're probably going to win." A few days before that, I was in Iowa. The governor, Tom Vilsack, told me Kerry was going to win the state, because the Democrats had a 60,000-vote bulge coming out of the absentee ballots. Then I went over to the Republican headquarters, and they were as cool as a gambler holding three aces. They said, "We've been here for a year. We know where every vote is. We know how to get it out. We start Saturday. It's going to be close, but we're going to win." Guess what? It was close, and they won.
What do the blue-staters not get about the red-staters, and vice versa?
I think where the Democratic Party has made a mistake is that it does not take like-minded people who live in red states seriously enough about their personal values and faith -- and their concerns about the culture in which their children are being raised. I just don't think that they listen to them enough. And too often they rush to try to show solidarity with them: "Oh, we understand what you're talking about." But they're not organic with them, in a way.
The Republicans have this great line about those red-state, blue-collar male voters, who should be economically rooted in the Democratic Party: We used to have to rent them, and now we own them.
Why do you think Republicans have been so effective in getting people in these states to vote against their interests?
I talked to Richard Wirthlin -- who was Reagan's first pollster -- a fair amount going into this election. When I asked him what he was finding that surprised him, he said that the Reagan generation keeps on coming, that there are young men coming into the system -- cycle after cycle after cycle -- who have been raised on the tenets of Ronald Reagan. And I think that the Democratic Party just doesn't know how to deal with them. And they better figure it out, if they want to be competitive.
What do people in the red states need to know about the blue states?
What I really strongly feel is that it's easy to say that the Democrats can't be a national party unless they can run in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain West, and the Republicans can't be a national party unless they can run in the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest and along the metropolitan areas of the California coast. The genius of Ronald Reagan is that he connected a lot of those dots. You know, he pulled a lot of people across the line. Now, more and more, it's a case of both parties trying to isolate and polarize.
Is the country really more polarized, or just that the politics has become more partisan and vicious?
I think [it's less that] the country's polarized. I go around the country and talk to a lot of people and listen to what they have to say. There's more common turf, and there's more eagerness for people to find connective tissue than the parties are willing to acknowledge. Here's an objective demonstration of that. There's no more red state than Kansas -- but it has a Democratic governor. Wyoming has a Democratic governor. Montana just elected a Democratic governor and a Democratic state senate. Janet Napolitano in Arizona is a Democratic woman governor -- a former U.S. attorney. These are Democrats out there finding pragmatic solutions to vexing, overarching problems.
You've interviewed Bush many times. What, up close, have you learned about him, or seen, that surprised you?
Well, I think he's grown a lot. He's much more at ease with power, and with the details of a lot of these complicated issues. He talks much more knowingly about the economic situation in Japan, for example, than when I first met him. He is very competitive. Somebody who I trust and like who had worked for Clinton and was working for Kerry said, "This is the most competitive son of a bitch I've ever dealt with." People always underestimate how competitive this president is. He's really competitive. He loves the game.
The phrase "the genius of Ronald Reagan" came out earlier. No one would have called Ronald Reagan a genius when he was in office, but in retrospect, people in both parties have put him on a pedestal. Does this mean that in fifteen or twenty years, people will talk about the genius of George Bush?
Genius is not the word that I would use. I think that George Bush is much more of what I would call a "circumstantial president." He's a president who has responded to the circumstances that he had to deal with. I don't think Bush is nearly the performer that Reagan was, but he's good -- he's good at what he does. Look, here is a president who had a war that was not going well; the oil prices are at a record high in this country; a flu-vaccine shortage going on; real questions about whether or not he had the mental firepower to be the president of the United States. And he wins by three-and-a-half million votes. That's an impressive performance. And I think the Democrats recognize that at this point.
Back to news: In the next generation of newsmen to come after you, the most visible figure isn't someone who does what you do but Bill O'Reilly. Do you even consider him to be a newsman, or is he just an entertainer?
I guess he's a commentator-entertainer. I mean, I don't want to be unfair to him. Bill can be unpredictable, and he's always entertaining. But one thing about O'Reilly. When you watch, there's real information. I say the same thing about Rush Limbaugh, by the way. But O'Reilly has a technique that I find a little maddening, which is the straw-man technique. I mean, he's always inviting somebody in just so he can, you know, knock them over.
But I've known him a long time. He was banging around for years, trying to get back into a network in some fashion. He was always kind of engagingly full of himself. You know, he'd jump in taxicabs with you and ride downtown and tell you about what his latest projects were. And he always had his own beat going.
Do you even think outfits like Fox News are in the same league as NBC News?
What's slightly mystifying about some parts of cable to me is that it resembles a fight at the end of the bar, and if you walked in that bar, you'd probably turn around and walk out. What we do is . . . much more of a community-lecture series, in which you hear a reasoned discourse that's much, much more civil and much more polite.
In the next six, twelve, eighteen months, what story are you going to miss being on top of every day?
Well, I'm obviously very interested in how Iraq turns out. I've spent a lot of time over there -- and I won't walk away from that. I think that's a big fulcrum on which a lot of things depend, about which way we're going to tip.
Do you feel, now that you're vacating this chair, that you can --
Speak out? No. It's not my instinct. Maybe in five years I'll say, "I'm tired of being a journalist. I want to go off and be an activist." I have a lot of strong, strong feelings about a lot of issues. But I think that my value as a journalist is that I have a reputation for telling it straight. I'm not trying to leave the "Brokaw imprint" at the end of the day on what I do.
When are you going into politics?
I'm not. Ever. Ever.
Next: Johnny Depp