A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 1

DEBORAH LEFF: Good evening and welcome. I’m Deborah Leff. I’m director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of myself and John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, we are really happy to have you here and happy to have the people in the overflow theaters. I want to thank our Forum sponsors, Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute and Corcoran Jennison, Raytheon, the wonderful PT109 exhibit that we have. And our media sponsors: WBUR, The Boston Globe and boston.com.

The Greatest Generation -- the men and women who came of age in World War II and built the country we have today, this is the generation honored and revealed by the wonderful words of this evening’s speaker, Tom Brokaw. Tonight’s Forum coincides with the opening of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s tribute to the generation, our new special exhibit, JFK in World War II.

Lt. John Kennedy had a special role in World War II of course. As highlighted by the late Tonight Show host, Jack Parr, in a documentary that aired in 1962. Let’s watch.

[VIDEO CLIP]

Lt. Kennedy may have gone on to be President but he was only one of millions of men and women who fought to save this country and to protect A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 2 and enhance its values. Their stories are told compellingly by long-time NBC anchorman and the best selling The Greatest Generation. Mr. Brokaw was inspired to write the book by a trip he made to France in 1984 to mark the 40th anniversary of D-Day and the stories veterans told to him at that time. He enriches our lives by sharing their stories with us. And he enriches the Kennedy Library by his presence here tonight.

Mr. Brokaw, as you know, was the anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 until he retired this past December. He is a consummate newsman at a time when some of us wonder whether there is a future profession in that. He has won every major news award, lots of Emmys, the Dupont Award, the Peabody Award. He was NBC’s White House Correspondent during Watergate, a floor reporter at the national party conventions, a reporter on civil rights, the anchor of The Today Show, and on the scene around the world bringing us the major news stories of our generation.

What’s next for Mr. Brokaw we might hear tonight. He contemplated that question last December at the time of his retirement and told Outside magazine, “I was thinking of getting a big hog, growing a pony tail, and getting a tattoo.” We are waiting, Mr. Brokaw.

Now, moderating tonight’s discussion, we planned to have with us NPR’s senior correspondent, Juan Williams. And the magic of radio is that people never quite look like what you think they are going to. So I’m going to A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 3 pretend I’m Juan Williams. Juan was caught on the runway in Washington, D.C. His plane has landed. He is on his way here. So we will do a switch. I’m sorry for the disruption in the middle of the Forum but we didn’t want to keep you waiting. We wanted to hear as much from Mr. Brokaw as possible.

So please welcome Tom Brokaw.

[APPLAUSE]

LEFF: Mr. Brokaw, thank you for joining us. On the way over you mentioned to me that you had actually been to the Solomon Islands.

TOM BROKAW: That was so evocative for me. I actually remember when Jack Parr did that documentary. And then he also had live on the program the surviving crew members from the PT109. And for the Olympics in Australia, I actually didn’t go back. I worked in other elements of it. But we sent a producer to the Solomons and we found the native who rescued John Kennedy. He was 80-some years old, chewing beetle nuts and spitting it out and sitting on the beach.

And when John Kennedy said to him, “How are we going to get the message back,” he picked up the coconut half and said, “Why don’t you scratch something on this?” And Kennedy, according to the native said, “Jesus Christ, how did you think of that?” And it was very winning. And the A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 4 whole story with the Australian watchers off the coast were there and they, obviously, saved his life. So we ran it at great length during the Australian Olympics.

And then I gave it to Caroline so that she could share it with her children so that they would know about their grandfather in another passage in his life and gave it to his brother as well, Senator Kennedy. And it was a very warm and, I think, probably emblematic story about the peril that so many people went through at that time, especially as they were scattered across the Pacific.

And when John Kennedy came home, he came home not just a hero but he came home as a man who had matured a lot because of his war time experience. And what you saw with the crew of PT109 was typical of what happened across the services and across all the theaters of war, that they were bonded in a way that is just hard to describe for people who have not gone through combat together or life-threatening experiences. And that’s the story that keeps coming through on all these tales I tell about World War II.

When I go back to the cemeteries in Normandy or in Belgium or in the Philippines for that matter, and see American servicemen, veterans there, walking from graveside to graveside, looking for their fallen friends and saying, “I have the life that he didn’t have. So I have felt that I have had to A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 5 live my life for him as well.” So there are lots of recurring themes in all these stories. And they come out, I think, in the PT109 story.

LEFF: Is it that that makes stories of war so compelling? Why are we drawn to these stories?

BROKAW: Well, I think on two different levels. One, on a cosmic level, World War II was a struggle between good and evil, the likes of which the world has never seen before. John Keagan, a British military historian has said in a way that I don’t think we had a full appreciation of it at the time, “It was the greatest event in the history of mankind.” Fifty million people perished in World War II, 50 million, civilians and uniformed people alike.

It was fought on all but one of the continents. It was fought on all the seas. It was fought in all the skies around the world. And imperial Japan in the east, and Nazi Germany, the Third Reich in central Europe were determined to alter the world according to the vision of the despots who were running the countries at the time. If the United States and its allies, including Russia at the time, had not made the fight that they did, we would be living in a far different world today. So that’s the cosmic story of it.

The day-to-day story -- and it’s not just the story of combat, it’s also the story of what happened at home, the sacrifices that were made in families, the ability, the inventive mind of America to change Detroit from producing automobiles to producing tanks and war planes and designing new weapons; A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 6 the ability of farmers to grow more food and civilians to eat less so the soldiers would have more. And then these stories of being on these ships or being in a combat outfit or being in a submarine or being in the Merchant Marine or being in a fighter plane and having these kind of primal experiences of life and death never leaves us. And they were doing it when they were 18, 19, 20 years of age.

Ben Bradlee is from Boston, left Harvard in summer of 1942, graduated early, got his Navy uniform and went to sea. And he had been raised here in privilege, had a Harvard education in the classics. And I think he believes to this day that the greatest education he ever had was serving in World War II, that he learned more about life and about America and about what he was all about as a result of that experience.

President George Bush the 41st, another son of privilege, went to Yale at the same time. Became one of the youngest Navy flyers. Talk about being an officer on a ship and reading the letters of the men that they would send home because he had to censor them. Officers had to look at enlisted men’s mail to make sure they weren’t giving away military secrets. And he said to me, after prodding him several times because he was reluctant to talk about it, that he learned things that he would not have known growing up in Greenwich. He learned about life in small town America or about the struggle to keep a marriage together or financial difficulties that people were having. And he learned about courage. He talked about a terrible accident on his carrier where a plane had crashed and bodies were decimated, frankly, A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 7 and the deck of the carrier was covered in blood and body parts. And he said, “We were stunned into horror. And the crew chief took one beat. He said, ‘Clean it up. We’ve got to keep going here.’” And he said he learned about leadership from that moment. So there are untold stories, and I must say they keep on coming. I keep thinking that I’ve heard them all. And then I’ll hear another one and another one, either small or large. So it was an epic event.

I think history turned on that war in many ways. And it produced a generation of leaders in this country beginning with President Kennedy, but a lot of others who came back, ran for Congress, ran for the Senate, ran for governor, ran for president.

LEFF: You know war brings out, obviously, as you show so beautifully in your book, extraordinary qualities in ordinary people. I wonder about your characterization of this as the greatest generation. What was so special about this generation compared, let’s say, to our marvelous troops who are in Iraq today?

BROKAW: Well, I have two easy answers to that. The first one is that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] The second answer is not everybody in that generation agrees with me. Andy Rooney, who’s become a really good friend, keeps saying, “I don’t think we were the greatest generation. [LAUGHTER] I don't know where you get off calling A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 8 us the greatest generation. Why do you think you’re entitled to call us the greatest generation?”

I finally said, “Andy, I’m going to put an asterisk by your name; everybody except you is the greatest generation.” I’ve thought it through. And I’ve argued with distinguished historians like Arthur Schlesinger, who is in the book and others. And Arthur said the Founding Fathers. I said, “Yeah, they were all white males and they let slavery go on.” Others have said the Civil War generation. I said, “They tried to divide the country.”

This generation came of age in the Great Depression, which is a great trial in America. I’m a product of that time. My parents really thought they had no hope in the 1930s. My mother, a bright young woman, graduated from high school at 16. College was $100 dollars a year. There was no way that she could go to college. Her family lost their farm, moved to town. And she was working for a dollar a day at a restaurant and glad to have that kind of a salary.

My dad had dropped out of school in the third grade. And he had great skills as a construction equipment operator. But they just, every day, lived with deprivation and sacrifice and sharing and putting one foot in front of the other and not having any hope except that maybe the next day would get a little bit better. They go all the way through the ‘30s like this.

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And just when there is some hope that the economy now has righted itself, under the brilliant leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, the country is going to have a better time, then we are in a World War. And in 1938, the United States was the 16th military power in the world. Our military was on its backside, frankly. Poland had a greater army than we did at that time. Dwight Eisenhower in 1938 was a Colonel. In 1944 he was a general leading the greatest invasion in the history of warfare.

And we turned as one in this country, politically and militarily and culturally and economically to meet the threat in two different oceans, one across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific and to prevail. We weren’t perfect by any means. They let racism go on too long. They were too slow to acknowledge the place of women in our lives. But when they came back from the war, this generation, they began to address those deficiencies in American life as well and to expand the freedoms of those who had been left behind for too long.

So I think if you look at them at the end of their lives and you say to yourself, I don't know of another generation that measured up in terms of greatness like that one. They were imperfect. They had flaws. I said this at the time that we dedicated the World War II Memorial in Washington. Look, there were the lay-abouts and the shifty guys. And there were the con men and the criminals in there midst but they didn’t define the generation.

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That generation was defined by young men and women who came from very modest circumstances, answered their country’s call in one form or another, and came home and didn’t ask for credit for what they had done. And they had given up four or five years of their lives.

My wife’s father was in uniform when Pearl Harbor was attacked because he was a ROTC student and a physician. And he went to war five days after she was born, and she didn’t see him for five years. He was with the 34th Infantry Division in North Africa and all the way through Italy. And she, very few letters home because they couldn’t get mail. And they had no idea. She lived with her grandparents, didn’t know her father until she was five. So these were very difficult circumstances.

LEFF: You know, when I was growing up my father had been in World War II. And we were taught that these people were heroes. When we saw amputees on the street, we were told, “These people are heroes.” And then the war in Vietnam came and we were taught the military was terrible and these people were not to be respected, taught just by the lessons of many people in the street. I think your book has gone a long way to turning America around in its attitude. And I’m curious what your thought is about that and how you look at how Americans view the military because of the Vietnam War.

BROKAW: Well, I was deeply troubled by the Vietnam War. I was troubled by the policies and by the deception and the duplicity of the leaders A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 11 who led us into that war. And I lost one of my very closest friends there and had a brother …I didn’t go. My brother was a Marine in Vietnam and everyday was sheer terror for us in the year that he was absent.

But I never lost my regard for the military during that time. They were, again, doing what the military is supposed to do, following the orders of the Commander-in-Chief. And I never held them responsible, collectively if you will, for all that went wrong in Vietnam. And I also happen to believe that the denigration of the military has been slightly overblown.

There was a man who recently spat in the face of Jane Fonda because he said when he came back from Vietnam they were lined up in the airport in Los Angeles to spit on him. I was a correspondent in Los Angeles. I don’t think that ever happened. I think it might have been in his imagination. But, you know, there are very few signs that people actually got spat on when they came back.

Now, there were people who were on the fringes of the anti-war movement who went way too far in their criticism of people in uniform. I do think that first the military corrected itself, that it learned from Vietnam more than the rest of the country did about what was necessary institutionally in the military to get it back on even keel. And they worked harder at discipline and getting the best people that they could in uniform and training their officers in a new way, a new and more effective fashion.

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As a result, in the voluntary army that we have now, I believe it is probably the best military that any nation has ever produced anywhere. And I do think there is a danger, however, that we are disconnected from our military now because they are volunteers. And unless you have somebody in the military, you don’t feel like it is your responsibility, necessarily.

LEFF: Should we re-institute the draft?

BROKAW: Do I think what?

LEFF: We should re-institute the draft?

BROKAW: You know, actually, I don’t think that will ever be politically possible again. I don’t think it’s the worst idea. I mean I grew up in the time of the draft. I was ineligible for the strangest possible reason. I had flat feet. Because of John Kennedy, I wanted to operate a PT boat. And I got recruited by a Navy officer in South Dakota. All my other friends were Army ROTC and I wanted to go to the Navy, come to Newport, run PT boats. And I went down and passed all the physical parts of it until they got to me and they looked and said, “You have really flat feet.” And I said, “Yes, an athlete.” And they said, “Well, we can’t take you.” So I went to the Army and volunteered for the draft, just to see what my status would be and they said, “We are not going to take you.” It was the strangest thing that they didn’t take people with flat feet. Two years later, my brother, same A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 13 condition. Vietnam had heated up. “We’ll overlook the flat feet. You’re in.” So it was a different time.

LEFF: I’m curious. You mentioned just now about John Kennedy being some sort of a source of inspiration to you. I gather he is somebody that you never met. But I’m curious what impact his presidency had on you.

BROKAW: I saw him briefly. I was in Omaha. He came to the Strategic Air Command Headquarters and he was God-like in a way. For my generation -- and I grew up in South Dakota, real working-class environment but I had real ambitions about seeing the rest of the world. And the idea that this handsome, dashing man from this robust family with this distinctive accent and these stylish ways and that beautiful wife, these were not your father’s candidates for presidential office. This is a whole, new generation. This is a fresh, strong wind blowing through American politics. And the “vigah,” as he used to describe it, that they brought to the presidential process and the campaign was exciting for those of us out there. It was very romantic to have somebody like that who seemed to be someone that you could aspire to. I mean it is not that we didn’t admire, certainly we admired in our household Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt, but they were of a different generation for me.

You know, I could kind of think I could connect to John Kennedy. I’d like to be like that some day. I think a lot of people felt that across political lines. It was interesting. It was the first time that we had two veterans of A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 14

World War II running against each other. Then that became the norm. And then that broke off and now we have great confusion about the place of veterans when they are running for office.

LEFF: I want to bring you up to the present for the moment just because of a reference you just made. You said, “across political lines.” There’s not a lot happening these days in Washington across political lines. And I’m curious your reaction to that. You were White House correspondent for years. You covered Congress. The rift seems incredible to me.

BROKAW: Well, one of the things about the Kennedy era, the thousand days of Camelot that a lot of people forget about is how pragmatic he was politically. That he knew that he had won narrowly against Richard Nixon and that he did not see it as this president has, as a mandate to go off and do things, this president, in the first term, especially. That he was very cautious about how he was spending his political capital at that time. He was cautious in places where a lot of people wanted him to be bolder, for example, civil rights.

But he was moving the country in a way that he always knew where the center was. And I think that what we are missing now is the political center in national politics. And I think there is a litmus test if you are a Republican and a litmus test if you are a Democrat. And if you don’t meet that litmus test one through five in both parties, then you are not welcome. And that leaves out too many people who may have a more conditioned view of some A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 15 of the hot button issues of the day: choice, gun control, taxes, whatever they may happen to be. But unless you are lined up precisely as the parties now demand that you are and especially the people who manage these campaigns, then you are not welcome in Washington. And I think that we are then less than the sum of our parts when we need to be more than the sum of our parts.

LEFF: Do you see any solutions?

BROKAW: I think it takes a bold figure to break through that, and I’m not sure who that is. I think that the country is sending very strong signals that they are not happy, that they don’t like the gridlock and the distraction. A perfect example was the Terri Schiavo case when that consumed Washington and congressional debate until the country, by a margin of about 60-40 said, “Enough! We have procedures. They are in place. The courts have ruled. This is not a political matter. It’s a family matter as well. Move on.” And then, suddenly, the moral indignation went away in a hurry.

We may see it again. The latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal Poll this past week, the country has been watching the filibuster debate and they are not happy. Now, I’m a sports writer here. I’m not taking one side or the other. I’m just saying that these are the conditions that exist out there, that the country is saying, “Wait a minute. Get together. Solve these problems. If social security is something that needs to be fixed, let’s find a way in which we can all agree about fixing it. And, by the way, we don’t think that A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 16 that is the number one issue. Healthcare, probably, percolates much more to the top.” So what I’ve been saying as I go around the country is that if you live out in America or live in Massachusetts where you have a Republican governor and Democratic traditions; if you go to Kansas you have a Republican legislation, a very red state and a Democratic woman as a governor; and Arizona, Barry Goldwater’s home state, a Democratic woman, Republican legislature. New York, where I live, room for Hilary, Rudy Giuliano still a hero, and a Republican governor in Pataki because people want to get things done. They want to find pragmatic solutions. And that lesson seems to have been lost on both parties at the top in Washington.

LEFF: Does the loss of that lesson suggest to you media coverage should be handled a different way?

BROKAW: Well, I do think that we exacerbate it. And I say “we” in the broadest sense of the term. I think that what has happened is that conflict has become a big piece of what drives 24/7 cable news, MSNBC, FOX, CNN, and all the rest of them. I mean you saw it here in Boston, they had more people turning out for the Chris Matthew show than the Red Sox rally, which I didn’t think was possible by the way.

You know, and a lot of cheering and a lot of signs and a lot of kind of sports bar culture that is going on. I think we need to be contemplative from time to time. And we need to stand back and think and have opportunity for a greater discussion of the issues. A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 17

I’m very encouraged by what goes on on Sunday mornings. My very good friend, Tim Russert, does a great job on Meet the Press but so does Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation and George Stephanopoulos and then the other shows in the morning in which people have an opportunity to examine in some detail what is going on.

And we need to get beyond the idea that just because someone has decided to run for public office, make a declaration that they are automatically guilty of something, poor judgment at the very least. I don’t think that. I think it is the most honorable calling there is, that you want to serve your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean that thereare not going to be rascals or bad people or people that don’t deserve to be examined because they all do deserve to be examined. But I also think that we have to do it contextually, stand back a little bit, take a look, because who among us is not without some kind of sin or something in our background we would rather not everyone know about.

LEFF: Well, while we are on this subject of news, our forum coordinator Amy Macdonald has just given me this incredible flash that there is actually traffic this evening on the southeast expressway. So it’s going to be a few more minutes before Juan gets here. What I’m going to do is in a few minutes I’m going to turn to audience questions. I’d encourage those of you who are interested in asking Mr. Brokaw questions to line up at the A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 18 microphone or if you are in one of the theaters to submit written questions. And I do ask for questions and not statements.

BROKAW: Can I just say one more thing?

LEFF: Sure.

BROKAW: About how I came to write the book and then about the sequence of the books that came out. It did begin in 1984 when I went to Normandy. I’m a pure product of World War II. I was born in 1940. My dad went to an army base. He was a little bit older in 1943 to await his draft call, which he knew was coming. And we got there and he was working there in a base in Washington, South Dakota, dreadful little place where they were storing ammunition and transporting it to the state of Washington and the east coast for shipment overseas and then testing it there.

So it was a pretty exciting place for a kid to live but it was very hard for my mother with three little boys and a tiny, little house about the size of this stage by the way. And my dad got drafted, goes off, is gone for about four weeks and he suddenly gets called back to the base because he’s so critical to the operation of the base they say, “We need you here more than they are going to need you in the Navy Seabees.” So at least we had him at home.

But that was the whole definition of my life. Everybody around me was going to war or coming home from war. And curiously enough, there were A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 19 these people wandering around town in orange outfits with funny hats and speaking a language that I didn’t understand. And they were prisoners of war from Italy. They were Italian prisoners of war, which will lead me to another story I’m going to tell in a moment. And they were in a compound in the edge of town. They had been shipped all the way to southwestern South Dakota to be held there because they didn’t have room to hold them overseas. Now the war ends. There’s great jubilation in America, great relief. We move to the center of South Dakota, where they are beginning to build big damns on the Missouri River, the corps of engineer are the kind of quasi military operations. And all these veterans come in who are working guys, who are heavy equipment operators like my father was or skilled craftsmen of one kind or another, and then the engineers. And they built a town out in the middle of nowhere and we have this great life. And I just didn’t think much about these people who were around me and what they had been through in their lifetime.

Life goes on. I get to Normandy. I’m doing the 40th anniversary. I walk on the beaches with two men the first day to begin the filming. And emotionally I’m brought to my knees because I realize these are the guys who raised me. They were in windbreakers. Their wives have got tight little permanents, clutching their handbags. They work for the VA in Pennsylvania. They are school teachers in Florida or they are priests from Alabama. One was a Congressman from Florida.

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And they started telling their stories very quietly and very modestly. And they were stories of great courage and great horror and great sacrifice and great separation. And it made a deep impression on me. And I couldn’t get it out of my system. So I began to collect these stories and by the 50th anniversary I said aloud for the first time on the air, “I think it’s the greatest generation any society ever produced.” But I still didn’t quite have the courage to write the book. And I kept collecting the stories in commencement speeches and in other lectures I was giving I would use these themes. And I could quiet any audience. And finally Random House said to me … I went to them and I said, “I think I have this idea.” I was working on another book, actually. And they said, “Oh, my God. Go write that book.” And in a year I got it done. And it became kind of a publishing phenomenon. It wasn’t about me. It was all about them. It wasn’t the fact that I wrote the book. It was their story. And it touched this common nerve across America. This is the point that I want to make. I got such an extraordinary response to the book that we published two other books that don’t get nearly the attention that The Greatest Generation did.

One of them is called The Greatest Generation Speaks, which are firsthand accounts. And then the other one is called An Album of Memories in which we divided the war up into theaters and then took stories, both after action reports and other things and put them together. In many ways I feel that The Greatest Generation by itself is only complemented by these other books because they are powerful, first-person accounts. There is no Brokaw between you and the story. They are telling their own story and they came A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 21 from across America. It was overwhelming. And I can’t go anywhere now in this country without someone, almost every day -- this is not hyperbole -- stopping me and saying, often with tears in their eyes, “I read your book. And I didn’t understand my parents until I read it.” That was a revelation to me. I didn’t think it would touch the boomers the way that it did. Or members of that generation, catching my eye in an airport, looking at me and saying, “I’m a member of that generation.” And the kind of quiet pride.

Then there are those memorable moments that I’ve had. After 9/11, I was down at ground zero, the first correspondent to get down there. And it was a very difficult time. They were recovering bodies and the firemen and the other rescue workers, recovery workers were exhausted, physically and emotionally. And a fireman came up to me and he had lost a lot of buddies and he was caked in clay and mud and muck and he was working 18-hour days. And he just stood in front of me for what seemed like a long time. And he said, finally, “I read you book.” And I said, “Thank you.” And he said, “I didn’t understand my father until I read your book.” I said, “I’ve heard that a lot.” And he said, “And because I read your book, I understand what it is that we have to do here now.” And I said, “Thank you, very much.” And he said, “I learned a lot from that book about my father. And I learned a lot about you.” And I looked at him and I said, “You used to think I was a Communist, right?” [LAUGHTER] And he looked at me for a moment, never changed his expression. He said, “No, just a liberal scum.” [LAUGHTER] And we shook hands and walked away from each other.

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LEFF: Well, while we are waiting for people to come to the mic -- please do come with your questions -- one other little thing in your book caught my eye, which was the mention of Jack Hemingway. As you probably know the Kennedy Library has the entire Hemingway archives. And I’m curious. I’d love to hear a Hemingway story from you. I know you live in Hemingway land now.

BROKAW: The story about Jack Hemingway. He was Papa, Hemingway’s son. And, by the way, Andy Rooney tells a marvelous story about Andy Rooney went into Paris when it was liberated. He was working for The Stars and Stripes. And he was on the outskirts of Paris the morning that they were moving into Paris. And 20 feet away from him was Ernest Hemingway, who was going in as well as a war correspondent. And Andy wasn’t crazy about him. It turns out he was a difficult man. [LAUGHTER] Why is that not a surprise? [LAUGHTER] But Andy loves to go back to Paris every year and drive into Paris the same route that they took when they liberated it, when he was with Stars and Stripes. And as he says with great pride, when they get to the Arc de Triomphe or Champs-Elysees, or he is stuck in traffic and he is a little uncertain, the French begin honking their horns at him, he rolls down the window and says, “I was here before you were,” and then goes on. [LAUGHTER]

The story about Jack Hemingway … I’m an enthusiastic fisherman. He was a great, great fly fisherman. And we ended up in a fairly disappointing, Russian fishing camp under very difficult circumstances a few years ago. A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 23

And Jack began telling me these stories about his World War II experience. He was an OSS officer. He jumped behind the lines in France with a fly rod in his backpack, telling his commanding officer it was a radio antenna. And he wanted to go fishing in France while he was fighting the war. And he was wounded and captured by the Germans and held prisoner of war. Had a very distinguished war record, much braver than his father in many ways. And came home from the war and was a bellhop at the Sun Valley Resort. Think about that, Ernest Hemingway’s son, because he was in love with a girl there. It didn’t work out. And he was adrift. He didn’t know what to do with his life. And he made his way to Cuba to see his father. And they had this memorable reunion in Cuba, drinking a lot of Martinis and talking about his future. And Jack went back in the Army after that. These were the kinds of tales that were just bubbling up across America. And, as I said earlier, they come to me in waves, to this day.

The story that I wanted to tell a moment ago, which is about African- American soldiers and, especially, Japanese-American soldiers as well, and the uncommon courage that they showed. When Danny Inouye was in the 442nd, he was from Hawaii. He was a Japanese-American citizen. Pearl Harbor happened. He rushed down, patched up a lot of people. And then when they started sending his cousins to interment camps on mainland America he volunteered for the 442nd, heavily decorated combat outfit in Europe. He led an assault on a trapped National Guard unit from Texas in the mountains of Italy and should have won the Medal of Honor on the spot. It took 40 years for it to catch up to him. Lost his arm in the process, went A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 24 to a hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he lay side by side with two other wounded veterans that he had not met before. One was from a small town in Kansas who had been badly shattered by his own combat experience. And the other one was from a fairly well connected and wealthy family in Michigan who could have gotten out of combat but chose to be in it. And these three young men bonded there in that hospital and they talk about what they were going to do with their lives. And they could have easily have said, “I’ve done my share. Put down my arms. I’m going home. I’m going to raise hell. I’m going to have a good time. I’m going to worry about me.” But they decided night after night in these discussions that they should get into public life and run for office. And they had a reunion in the Senate. It was Inouye, Bob Dole and Bill Hart, who is known as the conscience of the Senate, after whom the Hart Office Building is named. And that’s another typical story.

The one that I wanted to tell you was that African-Americans, Tuskegee Airmen and others who came back from combat would return to America. And if they were at Fort Bragg in the south or Fort Benning in the south, could not go into officers’ clubs, even though they were officers. And German prisoners of war who were officers were welcomed in those clubs. And these men staged a protest. And in the case of the Tuskegee Airmen they were court martialed. It was later overturned. The lesson is, about them for me, they didn’t give up on the country. They didn’t walk away. They didn’t say, “This country has turned its back on me. I’m turning my back on this country.” They went back to their communities, suffered the A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 25 indignation of segregation and racism and kept working hard to make sure the next generation, the generation that came of age in the late ‘50ss and the s’60s would have the strength to go to the streets and turn this country around on the issue of race. All of that connective fiber is what I think makes it a great generation.

LEFF: Few people have chronicled that next generation better than Juan Williams in his biography of Thurgood Marshall in his book Eyes on the Prize. So fresh from US Airways, I’m happy to turn it over to Juan. Thank you all.

JUAN WILLIAMS: I think this is your show. But before we go to the audience questions, I think lots of people would be interested in talking beyond the book about your experience in media and where you think we are today in American media?

BROKAW: We talked about that a little bit while you were sitting on the runway. I think it’s a mixed message. The metaphor that I’ve been using is that when I first came into the business, there were really only two planets in the sky when the sun went down, CBS and NBC. I liked that. I worked for one of the two planets. Then ABC came along and became much more of a player. I’m talking electronically. There were always a vast array of newspapers.

A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 26

And then we had what I called the big bang of media. We created a new universe, Ted Turner with CNN and FOX and MSNBC and CNN and all the other outlets, all-talk radio across America, the Internet. That’s a good thing in a free democracy, to have lots of choices because those choices also include the BBC and C-SPAN and Jim Lehrer for an hour every night and NPR, which is greatly expanded.

What I say is consumers of news have to be as selective about the news that they are getting and where they are getting it from as they do about where they buy their groceries or their prescription drugs or their cars or their tires or their gasoline. You have to be aggressive and be informed. Now, having said all of that, there is far too much copycat reporting, too much frenzy, too much chasing the same sensational story. If I never hear another moment about the Michael Jackson trial, I’ll live a lot longer. [APPLAUSE] And there are profound issues out there that are not getting enough attention. We have these discussions at NBC every day. So what I think is that we’re an industry in transition, I really do.

WILLIAMS: And what about your counterpart, Dan Rather. His career seems to have ended on a down note. Yours ended on such an up note. That story about President Bush and his service in the military seemed to have backfired on Rather. Would you agree or do you think CBS really did their job properly there?

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BROKAW: What I think about this is … I have to say at the outset that Dan, Peter, and I represent a very small fraternity. And we had a really high regard for one another. And before Dan ran into the difficult patch there were a couple of dinners in New York for me as I was getting ready to leave, because I had made my decision much earlier. And Peter really summed it up best when he got up one night and said, “You know, a lot of people ask, ‘Are you friends?’ And, in fact, we are because we don’t see each other very much.” But what he also said and what we all three agreed on is that we all made each other better at what we did because we were so competitive. And we happened to be in the cockpit when there was so much going on around us, the fall of Communism and the changes in America.

To get to the Dan Rather story. CBS made a mistake in my judgment. CBS News did and took too long to acknowledge that it had made that mistake or that it had grave doubts about the authenticity of the documents. I read the whole internal document. I’ve talked to others about it. But I also believe that Dan’s entire career ought not have been judged by that one story.

And that there is a tendency in America now and left and right to kind of form a jihad against somebody that you get in your line of sight. And so talk radio and Internet and bloggers and commentators pile on, so to speak, and make a good deal more out of it. Every news organization that I know has been through a trial. Newsweek just went through one. New York Times is a pretty conspicuous case. The Boston Globe has had its own cases. Time A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 28 magazine has been through them. The Washington Post went through it as you know. So we’ve all been through these kinds of difficult times.

I think, frankly, the journalists are a lot better at saying, “We made a mistake,” than politicians are and acknowledging it. And I think that the country -- it’s always been my experience -- has got a longer view of these matters than we are inclined to give them credit for.

When I left Nightly News I said I only had one obligation every day which was to get it right. And when I didn’t get it right, I’d let you know that as quickly as I possibly could. And I was always grateful for your forbearance because I think the country sees this as a continuum and they don’t believe that we’re infallible, just as we shouldn’t believe that we are infallible.

WILLIAMS: Now, your successor is Brian Williams. And you have been very gracious to Brian. But at the same time it’s the case that the audience seems to be declining for nightly news in general. Do you think that that phenomenon in American life where people over dinner would tune into this common story as told by an authoritative anchor, be it Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw, do you think that they have gone in this new media universe?

BROKAW: I think it has been greatly altered, Juan, because you have so many choices during the day. And you see that reflected in the evening news broadcasts now in the way that they are organized. When I got into the business you picked the ten most important stories of the day and kind of run A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 29 them in a row and then run something like Charles Kuralt at the end or a feature story of some kind. Now when we come in at 6:30 at night in the east or 5:30 in the mid-west or delayed by three hours in the Pacific time zone, people are read in. They have been at their office computer or they’ve been listening to all-news radio all day long. Or they have seen in many instances very complete local newscasts before they get to the network newscast. So I believe that what we have to do is work harder at value added, as I describe it -- be distinctive, be better at what the others do, and find those big things that people really do care about that are not getting the attention from the other parts of the day.

We still have the most professional staff, and we still have the resources and the budgets to do things. I’m going to Iran on Monday morning. I’ve just gotten back from Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia working on a war on terror documentary. Local news is not doing that. And the Internet doesn’t take you there in the same way. So I hope that there will continue to be a place. I think it’s a challenge that crosses generational lines, however.

WILLIAMS: Well, that brings me to this thought, then. Is it the case that the American public, as you know it, now hears the same stories in the same ways as they did a generation ago or is it that everybody hears the story from their political perspective, their racial perspective, their gender perspective? And are we becoming flip in terms of being news consumers?

A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 30

BROKAW: One of the things that has happened is that when you talk about the glory days of Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, people tend to forget that they were real phenomena. There had never been anything like that before in America. I remember listening at home to the radio to Edward R. Murrow or Lowell Thomas. But these were distant voices for 15 minutes at night. Suddenly they were on television. Walter Cronkite, taking you places you had never been before. And listening to David Brinkley’s distinctive style summing up what had gone on in Washington. It was transformational for me. Now people have grown accustomed to it. And I think that we have to keep adjusting to their conditioning as it were. They outrun us. I was just out at Microsoft yesterday and a man in a van (we were being moved from one site to another conference about the future) and he showed me a personal computer, camera and cell phone that was this big. And he could pop that open and go to the Internet on it and read the news, and it was an instrument that everybody will have before too long. We can’t pretend that that doesn’t affect what people think at 6:30 at night -- been there, done that. So how do we make our claim on them? And I think the thing that we have to do is be more serious, be more resourceful, be more investigative and be more original. And that there is too much, as I said earlier, of kind of copycat reporting.

WILLIAMS: What do you think is going on with newspapers? Do you think newspapers are suffering through the same phenomenon of declining leadership because there is this broader range of sources of information?

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BROKAW: If you take the publishers of great newspapers like The Globe and The Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, they’ve got migraine headaches. They’ve got diminishing circulation. Classified ads are down because people are spending their money on the Internet. And they are wondering what they place in the future is. I don’t have an easy answer for them.

My own guess is that it will be some kind of synergy between the internet and traditional forms and that you’ll have to find a way to get across the platform. I got up this morning in Seattle and read The New York Times online. And I actually kind of enjoy reading papers online because it’s more efficient for me in a way. I miss the tactile experience but it lays out there and I can say, “I will just go to that story.” And then I will get to that one and I’m not distracted by other things that are happening. So how they then form profitable entity out of that, I don't know.

WILLIAMS: Let’s go to the audience and take some questions. I suppose people should line up at the microphones. Please let us know who you are and, as always, try to keep the questions pointed so that Mr. Brokaw will have a maximum amount of time to respond. Please, go right ahead.

JACK SIMMONS: My name is Jack Simmons. Every day there are fewer survivors of the greatest generation. I happen to be one of the fortunate who are still surviving. In that time and place, we never had any questions about A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 32 whether we should enter into military service. You just did it. It was obvious. Today, the question of whether one should be in military service perhaps gets looked at differently. I served in submarines in the Pacific for several years and those few survivors who served on pilot fish still keep in touch all the time, although more from a distance than close at hand.

One of the things that I have difficulty with and I think others of my generation do is what’s going on in Washington today? Why do we have such a tremendous conflict between the right and the left and nothing in between? And what happened to the great country we put together? What has happened to our management? Help me to understand what we did wrong?

[APPLAUSE]

BROKAW: Thank you. I hear that wherever I go, by the way all across the country. What is going on? I talked about it for a few moments before your arrival, Juan. And I do believe that what’s missing is the center. One of the characteristics of these people that I wrote about, your generation, is that they came home and, for example, that story I told about Dole and Inouye and Bill Hart, two Democrats and a Republican. But at the end of the day, they were interested in moving things forward.

And the tone changed from six o’clock at night until ten o’clock at night. They would get together in the cloakroom. They would find a way to work A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 33 things out. I don’t remember -- and I’ve been following national politics for 42 years now, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who have made both an anecdotal and an academic study of Washington and especially Congress, and no one remembers it being more poisonous than it is at the moment. And if you ask the senators who have left the institution, Republican and Democrat alike, Al Simpson, Fred Thompson, Republicans John Braugh(?), Sam Nunn, Democrats, Bob Kerry, Democrat, they all say the same thing. “It’s never been worse. It is not a place that you like to be anymore,” because of the ad hominem attacks and the unwillingness of the people to find common ground.

I think it’s going to take boldness on the part of leaders, willing to sail against the wind, as John Kennedy might have put it. I think it also requires those of us in our business to focus on those people who are willing to take those kinds of stances. There are some out there who are more iconoclastic. John McCain is a good example, somebody who is willing to stand up and call them as he sees them along the way.

Chuck Hagel does that to some degree in the Republican Party, although not as much as McCain. Democrats are in disarray at the moment. I don’t think that is any secret to anybody. They are having a very hard time figuring out who they are and where they want to get to and how they want to get there. And there is no one who really has kind of emerged from the post election period in the Democratic Party who is rising to the top.

A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 34

A lot of them are positioning themselves, including Senator Clinton and your own Senator Kerry who would like to run again. But at the moment there is no one person who is kind of defining it. But I also think it depends on you in terms of what you demand from Washington. And they read the tea leaves and that poll that I indicated a few moments ago about people increasingly unhappy with the inability of Congress to get things done. I don’t remember a number for Congress that’s lower than the one that we just saw the other night on the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, very low indeed. They’ll see that. They’ve got elections coming up, and we will see how they respond to it.

WILLIAMS: Well, just to pick up on this thought, when you see this kind of polarization in American politics, don’t you think it is driven to some extent by the power, the increased power, unprecedented, of special interest groups and the money that they flood in to influence and press these politicians?

BROKAW: There are two big factors here. First of all, we have had a real shift from the House into the Senate. The House is always a much more partisan body. And they brought a lot of the attitudes into the Senate. And then the House remained the same. And then the business of running elections has become so cold-blooded. It was always tough. It was always rough. It’s much more cold-blooded and efficient now than it was in the past, and it is fueled by huge amounts of money and driven by these single interests. A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 35

The little litmus test that I’ve been sharing with the country is that if you’re a Republican, you must be anti-choice. You must be anti-gun control. You must be pro-tax cuts, whatever the fiscal reality. And you must be against the American culture, popular culture. If you are a Democrat, whatever the circumstances, you must be pro-choice, no conditioning. You must be for all gun control laws. You must be against the wealthy. And you must defend the American popular culture however gross it may be or however excessive it may be in public displays. And people who say, “Look I can go with two of those. I can’t go with all five of them. I’ve got a whole problem with what I’m hearing on Rap records.” Or “I’ve got a little problem with gun control laws going a little too far. You know, maybe they have application in Massachusetts. But in Montana where I live, we have different attitudes about guns and a different kind of problem. Maybe we ought to have a little more nuanced view.” Not welcome. And if you are not welcome, then how do you draw good people into the arena.

And that I believe is a huge issue and then it’s driven by these single interest groups. And, by the way, they are not confined to one side of the spectrum or the other. They are the teachers union; they are the labor union. But they are also the retailers; and they are also the manufacturers; and they are the trial lawyers; and they are the AMA. Every group measures what’s going on in American life by those single interests. And they are not willing to have a broader point of view.

A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 36

Politics has always been a rough business, and the man that we honor in this library, John Kennedy, knew that well. And he played one interest off the other very effectively. But at the same time, at the end of the day he wanted to move things forward.

WILLIAMS: By the way, are you a Democrat or a Republican?

BROKAW: I’ve never been registered in either party in my entire life. I’ve always been registered, “Declined to say.” And I actually … I’m an agnostic. I see appeal in both parties. I think, for example -- I think that the President came to this too late -- but I think the idea of indexing and social security and entitlement programs is something that ought to be explored. I think just from a pragmatic pointy of view that’s something that ought to be explored.

I’ve never believed that the federal government was a demon on the other hand. I grew up in a family where my dad worked for the federal government for the corps of engineers. And Franklin Roosevelt and government policy saved my family’s life in the thirties. And, you know, living where I do in the American west and seeing US forests and national parks and highways systems and what they do for the economy out there and price support systems for grain farmers, I know that the federal government has a huge role in our lives. It’s in many ways the glue that keeps us altogether.

A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 37

WILLIAMS: But you’re a good friend of Tom Daschle, as I recall.

BROKAW: Yes, I am. But I know everybody in South Dakota. I mean I was just introduced by Conrad Burns at a national park thing. He was Republican Senator from Montana, for example. And I’ve know all of the Republicans. I knew Bill Janklow when he was governor of South Dakota. It’s a tiny state. There are 750,000 people.

I will tell you one quick story about this because it came up yesterday. I was at Microsoft yesterday working with Bill Gates and others on this Microsoft CEO leadership conference they are having. I was doing some interviews for him. And a few years ago we invited Bill Gates to go to Watertown, South Dakota where Microsoft had put computers in libraries and paid for the internet connection so that the public could have access, for those who didn’t have computers at home. And it wasn’t getting a lot of attention and it was really kind of a 21st century version of Carnegie with libraries. It was making the internet available to everyone. So I met him out there in Watertown.

Now I have not lived in South Dakota in 43 years. But the moment I stepped back in the state, they just kind of look at me and say, “When you coming home? What are you doing back there?” And this is a town where I’d played against them in basketball and I still have friends who live there in the north central part of the state and northeastern part of the state. So Bill and I flew in to Watertown from separate directions. We went to the A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 38 library. It was really very touching because there were people who were looking for jobs on the internet. They had lost their jobs and they were looking for new opportunities. And they couldn’t afford to have a computer at home or internet access. There was a young girl who was communicating with her father who was serving on a ship in the Arabian Sea. They didn’t have a computer at home.

So we were doing that and talking about how this has become, in a way, the connective tissue for America. Then I said, because as you probably know in Seattle coffee is the culture and certainly is at Microsoft, there is a farm woman downtown who is a widow. Her husband had been killed in a farm accident, and she has opened a pretty good coffee shop, you know, with Cappuccino. And we will finish the interview there standing at the coffee bar.

So we did. And half the town came in as you might expect. I mean there is Bill Gates and Tom Brokaw standing at the coffee bar in Watertown, South Dakota. And we finished the interview. And he is very engaging and talking about coffee consumption in America and everything. We finish the interview. He goes on to Seattle. I go on to Montana at this point to go fishing.

And I woke up at five o’clock the next morning. This is a true story. Having grown up in that state and knowing the ethos of small town America I woke up and I thought, “We did not pay for the coffee. And we did not A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 39 leave a tip.” The richest man in the world and the anchorman who has come home stiffs the farm widow. So, in a panic, I picked up the phone and I called the producer who was back in New York by then. And I said, “Eric, did we leave a tip?” “No. No. No. It was all on the house.”

I said, “Eric. We’re dead meat.” By eight o’clock that morning it was on the internet. “Tom Brokaw and Bill Gates were in Watertown, South Dakota, and they stiffed this woman.” Well, she got a very healthy tip, I got to tell you.

WILLIAMS: Well, the power of the American media. Please.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. This is a two-fold question, a media question. If both of you want to comment that would be great. As you mentioned, we do have much broader access to a whole range of news information and sources. And that is our responsibility to figure out what that information is and what’s accurate, etcetera. However, it does seem that more and more major outlets are owned by fewer and fewer corporations. So could you comment on the consolidation of the media ownership of journalism, the media ownership of some of these outlets as they relate to journalism and our democratic future?

The second part is could you comment on some of the recent concerns raised by the new head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and if his criticism you see as valid or politically motivated – his recent criticisms A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 40 about NPR and PBS? Or if they mean something else, just what your thoughts in general are on that? Thank you.

WILLIAMS: Well, now, NBC is owned by GE.

BROKAW: But NBC used to be owned by RCA. That was a big corporation. It was a defense contractor. It owned Hearst for a while and carpet companies and a lot of other companies. It was owned by a big corporation. Bill Paley did not operate a grocery store on a corner when he owned CBS. It was huge in those days. You talk about consolidation, there were only two networks. They were both owned by powerful economic interests. And they controlled the five largest television stations in America at that time as well. I think that corporate ownership of large media has gone about as far as it should go. I am maybe arguing against my own corporate interest here, but I don’t believe we should own any more television stations in America. I think that NBC owns about a third of the market share now, and I think that is enough. I think there is a tipping point, frankly.

And the newspaper business: The Boston Globe used to be independently owned by the Taylor family. Now The New York Times owns it. The Chicago Tribune has been buying up a lot of newspapers in America. They probably saved The LA Times, on the other hand, because it was in disarray and financial difficulty. So there are advantages to corporations, big corporations with deep pockets owning these media outlets as well. A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 41

When 9/11happened, Jeff Immault, the chairman of GE, had been on the job for five days, succeeding Jack Welch, your fellow Bostonian now. And he came to the newsroom. Now, think about this. This guy was succeeding this legendary figure as the chairman. He’s on the job five days. The American economy, to say nothing of America, period, has just been put under attack. And his network has taken down all commercials and is burning through mountains of cash because we were going 24/7.

He walked in the newsroom, patted everybody on the back. We didn’t know him. I mean he was so new on the job that we had really no relationship with him. He said how proud he was of the job that everybody was doing and how proud he was that NBC news was part of GE. You know, he gave everyone a lift. And I walked down the hallway with him and I said to him, “Look, I know what’s going on here, how much money we are spending. But this is what we do and this is what we have to do.” And he stopped me. He said, “Don’t go there. I worry about that. You worry about the news. Just go do what you need to do.” Well, that was comforting, frankly. Big corporation, well managed, had real reserves and could do those things. And it came through with the anthrax attack as well when my assistant was a victim of that. And the arrangement that we made for her, not just for her immediate care but for her long-term well-being and her long-term welfare came as a result of that.

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And we always have to be on guard against it internally in the organization. Jack Welch likes to say, “If I had gone down there and raised my eyebrow to Brokaw suggesting that he do some kind of a story that would be in our interest, he would have led the troops out into the street in about 30 seconds. I still believe he’s a Communist but that’s what he would have done,” he liked to say. He’s joking about that because he would always love to come down and tweak us thinking that we did not have enough appreciation of American corporate life. And at NBC the standing rule for me is then, “I don’t care how small the story is about GE, if it doesn’t meet our threshold we still put it on the air and they are the corporate parent of NBC.

We are the only network to do the story about PCBs in the Hudson River, for example. I insisted that we do it for Nightly News. And I know that it was probably not a popular decision in the corporate hierarchy but I never heard back on it.

WILLIAMS: But let’s go to the heart of her question, which is when you have consolidation of ownership that it means that certain points of view are promoted in American media.

BROKAW: But we don’t have consolidation. We have more outlets now than we had 20 years ago, Juan. The fact is that you have many more choices than you did then. And that’s one of the differences. Look at magazine racks, for example, in the print world, all the niche magazines that are out there. We didn’t have NPR 20 years ago. We didn’t have C-SPAN A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 43

20 years ago until the cable operators got together and decided to put that on the air. So there’s a much broader spectrum than there had been in the past. If it were just FOX, NBC and CBS or some combination thereof, yeah, I would be raising my hand too as a citizen. But the spectrum now is much broader than it used to be. Look, when I first came into the business, the world that you saw on television news was seen through the prism of white, middle-aged men who lived on the northeastern coast of the United States and reflected their experience and their interest.

You couldn’t get stories on the air about women and their particular concerns about health or their place in the American … They were kind of novelty stories. And there would be an occasional woman correspondent, and she would get kind of America’s sweetheart treatment but not treated really as just a working correspondent. I remember -- true story -- in the NBC Nightly News room when toxic shock syndrome emerged as a grave threat to women’s health. There were lots of guys who said, “We are not going to say ‘sanitary napkin’ on the air.” You know, so there have been some heartening changes as well. The rearview mirror is often a little rosier than it needs to be.

WILLIAMS: And if people said to you … Well, what about my employer, FOX? If they said, “What about Rupert Murdoch?” Is that a different kind of owner, a political owner, than let’s say GE.

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BROKAW: Sure. I think it is. But that’s the business he’s in. He is purely in the media business. And I think he’s entitled to have a point of view because it’s cable. That’s where he does his news -- on cable. You know what you get when you go there.

WILLIAMS: What do you mean by that?

BROKAW: I mean that you know that you are going to get a generally right of center view of what the news is.

WILLIAMS: Do you feel that way about CNN being a left of center news?

BROKAW: I think it is a little more mixed. I don’t think it is as distinctive. I think there are not as many … Are the microphones are okay?

WILLIAMS: They want you to stop clicking your pen.

[LAUGHTER]

BROKAW: Oh, clicking my pen. Audio men, I’ve had a lifetime experience with them. If a bird cheeps two miles away, they think you can hear it. They can.

Yeah, I think that there are more conservative commentators, for example, on FOX than there are on CNN. But I don’t have any problem with any of A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 45 it. I think that the American consumer makes a judgment about it. They go where they want to go. I don’t think anybody is being bamboozled by what they are seeing on the air, and they have a right to have the spectrum of choices.

WILLIAMS: And then the second part of the question had to do with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting now run by Ken Tomlinson, who has lots of complaints about Bill Moyers, especially Bill Moyers’ show Now, which is off the air now. And the whole notion that PBS has been a servant of the left wing in the country and needs to come back to the center. He also had some complaints about National Public Radio. What do you think?

BROKAW: I love NPR, and I love the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I think these are really important assets in America. [APPLAUSE] Truth in advertising: my wife sits on the board of Channel 13 in New York. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with examination either. I really don’t. I think if these things get brought up from time to time. We look at them like ombudsmen in newspapers. I mean, it took The New York Times far too long to have an ombudsman, in my opinion, in which they can make a judgment at the end of the week about what they’ve done right and what they’ve done wrong.

The problem with most journalists is … There was a wonderful journalist when I was a White House correspondent by the name of John Osborne. He used to be with Life magazine, and then he wrote TRB for the New Republic, A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 46 and he was a garrulous guy but a really wise man. And he would say at the end of a particularly rancorous day in the White House during Watergate -- and there were a lot of them -- he’d say, “You know, journalists have glass jaws. We throw punches all day long. As soon as somebody takes a swing at us we go down to our knees, crying in pain.”

And I think we’ve got to be as tough minded about looking from the outside in as we are about looking from the inside out. I really do. And I think that these people and people all across America are the best arbiters of what’s in their best interest. And they get it. They know what they want and where they are going to get it and how they are going to respond to it. And they don’t react moment-by-moment the way that many of us in the news business do to what’s going on.

I think that all these elements that we now see have interesting, engaging, instructive parts to them. I mean I like to watch parts of FOX. I like to watch parts of MSNBC and CNN. And I click around in the morning. I’m a very aggressive consumer. And my colleagues at Nightly News, I used to drive them nuts because I was a C-SPAN wonk. I would come in and say, “You should have seen that hearing last night on prescription drugs under Medicare.”

And they would say, “Pardon me. Do you think that’s how I’m going home and spending my evening?” So you’ve got a lot of choices out there, but it’s up to the individual to make a determination about what’s in their interest. A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 47

WILLIAMS: What do you think about this business with Buster? That somehow PBS is promoting gay lifestyles through some of the children’s programs. Did that ever cross your scope?

BROKAW: That has not occurred to me.

JACK REGAN: Good evening. My name is Jack Regan. Last month I returned from China. I’ve been working there on and off for the past four years for the National Committee on US-China Relations. And I’m just wondering, Mr. Brokaw, if you could kind of give us your assessment of modern China’s place in the 21st century and anything you might like to say about the present Chinese government.

BROKAW: I think that they are under reported in this country for one thing. I’m going to go in the fall. I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years. I did two hours in 1983 called Changing China when they were just beginning to emerge from the Cultural Revolution. And then we did a week in 1988, NBC News did. We were there with all of our programming. I’ve been back several times since then.

It is the emerging colossus in the 21st century. I don’t think there is any question about it. You know, great industries and retailers and other people are looking at it as a marketplace or as a production center. Politically, it has enormous potential strength in that part of the world. And I don’t think that A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 48 we have as complete an understanding as we need to from this point of view. There they have very difficult circumstances. When you have that many people, and you are trying to maintain the kind of political control that they are but at the same time introduce the realities of a market based economy and all that it brings with it, then you’ve got very difficult circumstances.

I heard somebody speaking yesterday and they said, “In the next 15 years 400 million people -- 400 million people! -- will move from the countryside into the cities in China. Think about that. That’s an enormous shift. How do you find employment for all those people? How do you find housing? How do you deal with pollution? How do you deal with transportation? How do you deal then with political control and self-determination? So the seismic shifts in the world are pretty profound at the moment.

WILLIAMS: One of the worries among many is that they become a military opponent for this generation. Do you share that worry?

BROKAW: I think it depends a lot about how we deal with them. We were talking earlier about Korea and China. The foreign minister now from China used to be the counsel in New York, and I knew him quite well. And so when he came back, I was at a small dinner with him with some people that were well beyond my experience in terms of diplomacy and international relations. And they were trying to sort out in the course of this evening about where China was heading. And he was typically very canny about it. And at one point when they were talking about Korea, he turned to me and A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 49 said, “Well, Tom, what do you think?” And I said, “I think it’s an opportunity for China to take its place at the head of the Asian nations. It’s in your backyard. This is a system that grew out of the early days of Mao and Zhou and that you could show the world a new, mature, China, a progressive China.” He looked at me and said, “Very interesting.” That’s as far as he wanted to go. And recently they’ve put the ball back in our court.

WILLIAMS: Our last question.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, gentlemen, for the opportunity to ask you questions. There seems to be a movement in academia that seems to be growing, of cosmopolitans where people see themselves as citizens of a global society. Their citizenship sort of transcends, I think, global borders. And see this as a path to peace, a path to world peace. I’m just wondering if you would comment on your opinion. Do you think this is a trend, this cosmopolitanism, and what does this political philosophy say about the endurance of nationalism and patriotism that existed during the greatest generation?

BROKAW: Well, I’ll begin easily by giving you my quick definition of patriotism, which is that you should love your country but always believe it can be improved. It’s not a kind of blind love that you are involved in. [APPLAUSE] And one of the things that’s really troubled me about the last couple of years is this suppression of dissent or questioning or vigorous discussion about the issues that are before us. A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 50

And the last night I was on Nightly News I said, “After 42 years doing this kind of work, what I really have concluded is the questions are not the problems. It’s the answers.” We should always feel free to ask the questions. And if we are going to be patrons of the democracy and the essential element of free speech abroad, then we damn well better be the stewards of it at home as well and make sure there is always a free and open climate in which we can address these issues without fear of becoming the subject on the internet or talk radio or in some place and being accused of being treasonous or un-American in some fashion.

There used to be, as I have often said, in the ‘60s, on college campuses and in the anti-war movement, a kind of tyranny of the left, that conservative voices were just not welcome in the dialogue of the day. They just weren’t. There were very few. Bill Buckley and Bob Novac and George Will were about the three that you heard at that time. And on college campuses, you know, if you had a conservative point of view, you were sent off the campus. Now we are in dangers of the pendulum swinging completely the other way in which if someone has a left-of-center point of view that they are immediately vilified in some fashion in terms that are far too harsh. And I just don’t think that that’s in our best interest.

The issue that you raised about globalism, however, I think is one that … [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Globalism I think is a big issue. What do companies like GE, for example, or Microsoft or the big, like Toyota, what A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 51 are their social obligations outside their own borders? You know, when they land in countries and they are manufacturing or selling products there, do they have the same standard of social consciousness and social contract that they do here at home? And that’s something that I think that American business and businesses everywhere really have to be thinking more and more. And I think that they are.

WILLIAMS: On just that point, do you believe that we are in danger in any way in this country of becoming a theocracy, given the rising importance and power of the religious evangelical community?

BROKAW: These are all openings for me because I’m also doing a documentary on evangelism. [LAUGHTER]

WILLIAMS: Always helping you, Tom.

BROKAW: It’s an important development in American life, the place of faith and faith as a kind of political scene in America. And the imposition in the eyes of a lot of people of faith as one more litmus test in political life. And I don’t think we’re by any means at the end of it. I’m fascinated by it, by what are the roots of it? How did it take hold? Why are people moving toward large evangelical churches? I think I know some of the answers.

Last fall we took two couples in Missouri -- one from St. Louis, a left-of- center urban couple, two lawyers -- and then a couple from Springfield, A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 52

Missouri, who were members of the big evangelical church who grew up in rural America. And we kind of put them together and had them spend some time together talking to each other to see what they could learn from one another. And at the end of the dialogue it was pretty encouraging about what they were learning.

The couple from the evangelical church, I said to them at one point, “Do you think the National Democratic Party takes you seriously?” And the guy said to me, “I can’t even go there.” He was wounded in a way by how he had been treated. His faith was very important to him. And she said, “No, they don’t. They don’t think about what’s important to us.” And a lot of these people are moving there because they find sanctuary there. They find common values and people who share their views and even though it may not be entirely compatible with their economic interest, they are reassured by what they are finding in that movement. And they have strong standards that they want the rest of the country to hear about. Then it always becomes a matter of the imposition of those standards on everyone else and that becomes one more litmus test. But it does require a greater dialogue.

WILLIAMS: Before we ask Deborah Leff to come up and conclude this session, I think lots of people would be interested in what’s next for Tom Brokaw. You talked about some of these documentaries that you are making. Do you have any other books in mind? Do you want to retire? What do you want to do?

A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 53

BROKAW: Well, my family is getting ready to make a T-shirt for me that says, “I’m not retired. I’m shifting gears,” because everywhere I go people say, “How’s retirement?” And I say, “I’ve got to go back and take lessons in it because I’m not doing very well at this time.” I have been trying to shift gears. I wanted after almost 25 years in that job -- and I loved every moment of it, and it was a great privilege to have it -- I wanted for myself to get de-coupled from having to be in the same place wherever I was in the world at 6:30. I also wanted the next generation at NBC News to have the same opportunities that I did. And I was determined to go off and do long- term programming, which I’m involved in, and to write books on my own time. My mistake was, and everybody warned me about this, was that I over-committed on a couple of fronts.

Eight months ago I would say, “Oh, I will have a lot more time. I can agree to do that.” I love these kinds of evenings because I couldn’t do them before. You know, we’ve gone right through 6:30. We couldn’t have done that before. So I love being here and having interaction with people. And I’m working on another book.

WILLIAMS: What is it about?

BROKAW: It’s about -- if it all holds up and I think it will -- about what I call, broadly speaking, the class of 1968. That was a defining year of my life as a young reporter. It was a difficult year for America, a terrible year in the eyes of a lot of people, and it changed the country profoundly. Bobby A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 54

Kennedy was killed. Dr. King was killed. TET happened. Czechoslovakia was invaded. It was the full flowering of the counterculture movement. The drug culture really began in about 1968. The mores of the country changed in a lot of ways.

And what do we think now? We’ve been through it. What are the consequences of it? People who lived through that, what are their conclusions? How did it change their lives? People are very eager to talk about it, I must say. And I was just with Andy Young the other day in Atlanta for about three hours. And that was a hugely important part of my life. I was in Atlanta in the ‘60s and would see them regularly and cover the civil rights movement in the south. And it was stunning to me to hear Andy Young say -- he’s kind of the sole survivor of the inner circle; Jesse Jackson was not nearly as close as Andy was to Dr. King -- and Andy said two things. He said, “Martin would be amazed by what’s happened in Atlanta, the prosperity in the black business communities and so on. And he would be appalled by what’s going on with the black family and the absence of progress.” And Andy, for his part, said, “I am astonished by how many young African American people in this country, and for that matter white Americans, have no idea who Martin Luther King is. Those were terrible, terrible sacrifices that were made. And they’ve kind of disappeared into the mists of history for too many people.” So that’s what I’m working on and I’m enjoying every moment of it. I get some fairly tough calls from my daughter saying, “Come on, dad, slow down a little bit.” But it’s just not my nature. A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 55

WILLIAMS: Deborah.

LEFF: Well, you know, if you didn’t get Mr. Brokaw to do the PT boat thing, we thought at the very least you should have a PT109 T-shirt to remember this evening. And, Juan, same for you for the rigors of combating Logan Airport, Reagan Airport and the expressway. This has been a fantastic evening. You have been a very patient audience with the unpredictability. And I really want to thank Tom Brokaw, Juan Williams.

[APPLAUSE]

BROKAW: If I can, I will tell you one story. I have been here on many occasions, and I was here for the opening of the Library. Then I came back for the re-dedication. In fact, I was the master of ceremonies for it. And on that occasion when Jackie Kennedy was here and John was here and Caroline and all the members of the family, I said -- President Carter came as well -- and I said at that time, looking at the White House press corps of which I’d been a member, I said, “In fact, on August 17, 1962, the day that Meredith and I were married in Yankee, South Dakota, President Kennedy made his only visit to South Dakota as president of the United States. So we shared, in effect, the headlines in the local newspaper.” We still have it. And I said to the White House press corps, “We thought about inviting you. But I’ve seen what you do to free buffets and we simply couldn’t afford it.” [LAUGHTER] A CONVERSATION WITH TOM BROKAW 5/20/05 PAGE 56

LEFF: Thanks so much. It’s been a great evening. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]