Where He Came From

Tom Brokaw never forgot.

The first time I saw Tom Brokaw up close was in 1984 when I was a young reporter working for WTTG, a local station in Washington, D.C. I was arriving at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, and as I got off the plane I realized he was behind me on the jetway. That night I phoned my parents to tell them that the anchor for NBC News had been on my flight. When you're toiling at the local level in television, the Big Three anchors are like rock stars. They've covered the stories you've only dreamed of. You want to be one of them, but you wouldn't admit that to your best friend; the prospect is just too unlikely.

A few years later, I got another glimpse of Tom. By then I'd risen to a somewhat higher level -- literally. It was 1989, jubilant crowds were pouring over the Berlin Wall, and I was standing in a cherry picker above the Brandenburg Gate. All three networks had hired cranes so they could get the East and West German sides into one shot. I was covering the upheaval for the CBS affiliates, trading places on the platform with Dan Rather; Peter Jennings of ABC was on the far cherry picker, and Brokaw was in the middle. Brokaw had arrived first, of course, and the whole world knew he'd beaten us to one of the biggest stories of the century. I looked over at him with a mix of envy and awe.

But it wasn't until the winter of 1992 that I actually met the man, the same evening he offered me a job. I'd had a call from an NBC vice president, asking if I'd be willing to have a drink with Tom Brokaw, and I'd had to suppress the impulse to be funny and say, "No, I'm sorting my sock drawer." We met in the bar of a hotel and sat sipping sparkling water for hours. By the time we got up, I had two pressing needs: One was a men's room, and the other was to phone home and tell my wife what had just transpired. I can't convey to you what it was like to have this icon not only promise to hire me as national correspondent, but hold out the possibility that I could become his successor. I was dazed.

TV news is not a business known for mentoring and generosity. It's a business where you can get a knife stuck squarely in your back by someone you work with every day. But with Tom, there was and is no hidden agenda: What you see is what you get -- a solid product of rock-ribbed Middle America. In his newscasts, he projected a rare combination of a been-there, done-that confidence and an earnestness that translated to great credibility. People believe him. They want to hear about major events through the filter of Tom's experience.

Off the air, he's exactly the same way. He might tell stories of flying on Air Force One with Nixon and Kissinger, but he's just as likely to reminisce about his boyhood in Yankton, South Dakota. Tom's father was a heavy-equipment operator who dropped out of school at 10, and his mother took any job she could to help pay the bills. The family boiled bathwater on the stove and saved bent nails in a coffee can. His parents taught him solid values -- honesty, hard work, thrift. When Tom wanted a power mower for his after-school job trimming the neighbors' lawns, his father built him one out of an old washing machine motor, toy wagon wheels and scrap metal. It was his mother who nourished his ambitions; she'd watch the local cut-ins on The Today Show and tell him, "You know, you can do better than that anchor in Sioux City." Yet if he asked her how he looked in a sharp new outfit, she'd say, "What makes you think anybody's going to be looking at you?" When people marvel at his lack of pomposity, he says, "My mother wouldn't allow it."

Actually, our mothers sound pretty similar. And I could have shared some of my own small-town tales -- I grew up in Elmira, New York, and spent my youth going to the state fairgrounds to watch auto racing on Friday nights. But our first conversations were awfully one-sided; Tom is one of the great raconteurs, and I just wanted to listen to him. I also watched him: You could learn more by sitting near him in the newsroom than you could at any journalism school. I still find myself doing things the way Tom did -- writing the ending of the newscast first, for example, and the lead item last, so that it will be fresh in my mind when I start the broadcast. When I'm at the anchor desk, I hear Tom's voice in my head.

Tom has a ranch in Montana. When he'd return to New York, it was always as if he had a fresh report from the front. In our insulated newsroom at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, you can easily let yourself drift too far from the sensibilities that make the nation go. But Tom has never lost touch with that side of America. He's always at his happiest in a place where sunup means fishing in the creek or leaving for an all-day ride on a favorite horse.

I've been out to visit him on the ranch many times. The Brokaws live in a lovely but modest home, and Tom has a pickup truck. He is not a big toy guy. He doesn't need many accoutrements around him. His proudest possession is probably his 120 head of bison.

The first time I visited the ranch, Tom taught me how to hand-feed bison with pellets he calls bison biscuits, about the size and shape of marathon batons. Tom hurled a 50-pound bag in the back of the pickup, and we drove out to the grassland. He ripped open the bag and the bison surrounded us.

You're looking up at the puffy white clouds, and you understand why it's called Big Sky Country. You realize that you're one very lucky man to be in the presence of this guy and this wonderful wide-open space. And you realize something else: If you never forget where you came from, it will serve you well for the rest of your life.

From Reader's Digest - June 2005

 

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