The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 233: Tom Brokaw: From South Dakota to the World

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Tom Brokaw, Spencer Neuharth, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topic discussed; Always looking over the horizon; growing up in "Igloo," South Dakota; Steve's hot tip for armageddon preppers: don't set up next to other armageddon preppers; the virtues of being a jack of all trades and having a can-do mentality; when home is a hotel for Red Brokaw; young Tom's rock collection; the OG paddlefish; being done with guns; pheasant hunting as a religion in South Dakota; how fishing near Saddam's palace will get you blasted; chislic, tiger meat, and kuchen; the journalist's job, Main Street, and what it feels like to cover the world's biggest stories; turning down the offer to be Nixon's press secretary; the competitive relationship between Tom, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings; not letting public adulation grow toxic; how Tom doesn't like to call himself a writer; the need to talk about what needs to be corrected; how beards have taken over America; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. We're going to start out with an announcement about Das Boat, like the actual boat, Das Boat. V1, you could call it. And I don't mean the show, Das Boat, I mean the physical vessel, the boat. We are auctioning off Das Boat and other cool items in order to close the final gap for our land access initiative project. Which Cal now explain. Land access initiative, right? So we took all the profits from Ranella Putella's campaign merchandise that everybody bought.

Thank you. And now we're taking your hard-earned money and our hard-earned money we're we're giving it to uh the high peaks alliance outside of kingsfield maine for a property that will provide more hunting and fishing for america it's an access project like you name the thing yeah it's called Shiloh Pond. And Shiloh Pond is, you know, around here we'd call it a lake. And it's, there's an old logging road that you walk down for about five minutes to get to the lake. So right now it's foot access only.

And it's 33 feet deep, which is really bizarre. Not that big of a pond. That's deeper than the lake I grew up on. Yeah, it's wild. 66 acre lake, 20 feet deep. And yeah, it's a beautiful little spot and it has been publicly accessible for generations, but on private land. And now that private land is for sale.

Oh, yeah. And the, you know, the folks around Kingsfield and particularly this fellow Brent West, the High Peaks Alliance have really, really gotten after trying to secure this piece of property, uh, and no longer have it be private. So it'll be a piece of public ground. Available in perpetuity. Available in perpetuity with hunting and fishing being part of the access or part of the management plan for the property in perpetuity as well. Yeah. Cal has been, we were soliciting suggestions for a land access initiative project, and Cal waited through quite a few submissions and actually went out and flew out firsthand to investigate. Yes. And had to look people in the eye.

Waited around, smelled around, poked around, met people, visited the place. Yeah. Went to the, like, checked it out. Dipped my toes in the water. Did an investigative trip. Came back. Thumbs up. This is what we're doing.

We got a little chunk of change to go. So we're like, how are we going to raise this money? We're going to raise this money by selling, auctioning off Das Boat. So go watch. Go on YouTube. on the MeatEater channel on YouTube, and you can watch the whole damn Das Boat show. It's a YouTube series. That boat. So he started out, bought a boat on Craigslist, sight unseen,

an old aluminum center console fishing boat, and then did massive modifications to said boat reinforced the entire thing beefed up the trailer put a brand spickety new honda is that got a 30 or 40 on it 40 put a honda 40 so this is like a low hours brand new honda 40 four stroke on the back of this thing. It has a genuine original Ed Anderson painting. That's about how long? Six feet. A six foot long Ed Anderson original painting on the boat. It is rigged out.

It's just like entirely rigged out. Just get into the electronics package. So we should note is a 16 foot V-hole Alumacraft from 1989 is just the whole. The Honda four stroke outboard engine features all sorts of awesome stuff that I probably don't need to go into, but it is a highly sought after, um, premium outboard motor, uh, from Honda. Plus it's got a Minn Kota Ultrex removable bow mounted trolling motor with 80 pounds of thrust, which is probably equivalent to the outboard engine I own. Built-in sonar capability and iPilot link GPS with autopilot and spot lock, which if you aren't familiar, that means you can actually go out and fish by yourself. No. No friends necessary.

Highly accessorized. Yes. We got a casting platform that I built. Uh, we have a self stabilizing removable, uh, charcoal grill added by chef Jesse Griffiths. Um, JT Van Zandt did some fishing on there. This, this is a boat full of character. And at this point it is an absolute fish and machine too yeah so we did all the work we put the thing together and all the money all the money goes to public access it goes to a specific public access project you can go like cal did you can go sniff it and dip your toes

into it if you draw a moose tag it probably wouldn't be a waste of time to go out there and make some annoying cow moose calls. Check that spot out. We got a couple other things to cover us on our expenses here. I have, I am auctioning off, I've donated to the Land Access Project, and it's up for sale now. A Weathery Mark V. Left-handed Mark V. 6.5x300 caliber.

Accompanying this rifle is a Euro mount of a Coos deer. That I shot with the rifle. So you get the gun and the skull and antlers of a deer I shot with it. And this rifle's been on, this rifle's also been on episodes of the Meat Eater TV show. Which if you're ever going to get a secondhand rifle, if you think about it, it should always come with proof that the thing works. A lot of places send you a little target, you know, with some holes in it to show. This comes with the damn dead deer. So you can get that at auction.

What else we got, Cal? Yanni's got stuff he threw in. Yanni's literally pulling things off of his back, including his backpack, all the things that brought him good luck from the 2019 season. I am donating a incredibly awesome, powerful, clean, quiet steel MSA 220 electric chainsaw. That is my personal chainsaw, and it's fantastic. Low hours.

Low hours truck chainsaw. And I'm even going to write a personalized inscription to whoever buys this thing. The folks at Steele are throwing in an entire personal protection equipment package with chaps and gloves and eye pro and helmet and a few other goodies in there for you. I am going to pass along some excellent knowledge in the form of an entirely synthetic fish, which is just a fantastic book on wildlife management centered around the rainbow trout and the history of the rainbow trout. Presumably you'll sign this book over to the purchaser. Yes, yes. But it'll be a good thing to get your conservation library started.

And off of my own back is my very first and most well-worn Backcountry Hunters and Anglers public landowner t-shirt that has been through all the trials and tribulations of the restart of the Sagebrush Rebellion and being all sorts of pro-public land. We photographed all this stuff. When they photograph your shirt, I feel like when you go online to see all the auction items, including the big, like there's a great spread on Das Boat. Like you can really dig in.

But they should put the little stink lines and everything coming off the T-shirt. They should. So you can go to themeateater.com and up in the banner, somewhere around there, thereabouts, you will find our land access initiative auction, which we're using to close the gap, to finish up the gap and finish off the project of more, better hunting and fishing for America. Go and do this. Yeah, and bid. Make a bid. We weren't just going to do the boat.

And they were like, hey, how many? Only one dude can buy a boat. One person can buy a boat. So we added all this other stuff. Go in there and get bidding. We got to finish this thing up. There's a deadline coming up where this sale is going to go through and we need to get in there and get it taken care of.

So the auction is only open for a week. We got to close her out. Selfishly. You're going to get amazing gear that all your friends are going to be very jealous of because it already comes with a bunch of good luck stories. Um, but not selfishly, you're going to be also getting like the warm, fuzzy feeling of making a difference by securing public ground in perpetuity in a spot that has zero public ground.

Yeah. And to guarantee that this is, Cal can't say this, but for me, to guarantee that this is not motivated personally, I have taken a personal pledge, a vow, to not personally hunt or fish this property. I've already fished it, but that's called due diligence. I might go and watch someone do it. I might go and say how they're doing it wrong or whatever. I would eat fish from it, but I will not personally hunt or fish this property. This is not lining my own pockets with sweet spots on the other side of the continent. Yeah.

And we don't want to stop here either. So this is a great start. It's a great spot. There's many of these high value, small parcels around and we want to know about them. Yeah. And you know what you could do? We used to talk about this the other day. A reasonable move would be to buy DOS Boat, take the engine and all the electronics,

get a torch, cut out the painting, hang that on the wall of your bar, and then just be like, and you boys can keep the rest. But, you know, you probably want the whole thing. But that in and of itself would be of extraordinary value. Extraordinary value. You're coming out ahead. So, yeah, we want a boatload of cash for Dawes Boat.

So don't, you know, get all penny pincher on it and look up what everything costs and then stop bidding once it gets there. This is a good deal, even at full value, because you're making a heck of a contribution for untold generations of folks who want to go outside. Yeah, the good people of Maine, which are de facto good people of the United States of America, depend on you. Now, on to our interview with Tom Brokaw. Alright, everyone. We're on Tom Brokaw's back porch along a beautiful stretch of creek in Montana. And Mr. Brokaw's back porch along a beautiful stretch of creek in Montana. And Mr. Brokaw came to us by way of Tom McGuane, a past guest. And I believe you also used to spend time mountain climbing with Yvonne Chouinard, who's been on this show. How did you become to be friends with mcquane

well i've known about time because generationally we're about the same and then there was that period of time when he was living in uh key muskane and other areas where he was notorious and he they loved him at esquire magazine because they could write an article about him every week and it was his now brother-in-law, Jimmy, was there, and a lot of other characters. And so I was, from a distance, very intrigued by them. And we had a lot of common interests. But as I told him later, I didn't want to get involved with you because I would not have survived

the way you guys were living. It just wouldn't have worked for me. I mean, he was writing this early stuff, and he was my generation, frankly. So that's how I first knew of him. And then when we came out here, which is a step back, I got interested in Montana because they came out to do a speech in northern Montana. And Meredith and I were doing a lot of backpacking at the time in California and Colorado and so on. And we asked to be set up with a backpack trip.

And we went across scapegoat wilderness early June. And it was a tough, tough time. But we were really taken with Montana. So I was looking around for some place that we were either going to do the East Coast to become sailors or we were going to come to the West and become sailors or we were gonna come to the West and become fly fishermen and horse people. And we decided to come here. And I went down to the West Boulder

where we had a prospect of a place that we were gonna buy. And I was invited over by Tom to just have a cup of coffee. I'd never met him before. And it was love at first sight, as we both say. We really had a lot of shared values and interests and kind of a quirky sense of humor. And it's a real brotherhood. When I was reading about how you grew up and very much in small town, South Dakota, and around, I guess guess pretty what would now be deemed conservative

values and like work ethics but then later in life you kind of fell in with sort of these uh like some of the libertines you know some fast living people did you ever did you often feel there to be like a difficult transition for you to jump from these very very rural america to these kind of fast living you know well people who are born and bred by showbiz yeah i wouldn't quite call it fast living i always wanted bright lights big city when i was growing up you did yeah i was always looking over the horizon i was in i was a you know all my friends and my family especially said i was pretty precocious about what was going on in the world and i wanted to be a part of it so that was my destination and then what happened was i got to be a part of it in a pretty elevated way but when i circled back

to south dakota both from a geographical and from a cultural point of view i didn't want to let go of that i wanted i knew that it had shaped who i am and i wanted to retain that as part of who i am you know we brought uh spencer new hearth who's sitting next to me here for two reasons. So you guys can do the South Dakota conversation, which I'd like you to have, where you go like, oh, I'm from there. And then two, because, so if you can

imagine, if you had Spencer's voice, how your career would have been even better. Well, people often say to me, A, how did you get involved in the business? B, where'd that voice come from? And I said, they had a special at Sears one year. I was able to get the voice. That's how it worked out. But I was a talkative kid early, and I had an enormous

curiosity. There's a famous story in our family. We were living on an army base during World War II, and I was three or, I think three years old when this happened. My mother had to go into the post office. She said, stay here, Tommy. I'm going to, I am going with you. And she said, no, I'm going to, I said, no, I got to go with you. She said, why do you have to, why do you want to go with me? I said, I've never seen the floor in there. So I've always thought that was the foundation of who I am. I wanted to see what was going on on the other side of someplace. You know, I got kind of carried away. I've been in Kathmandu and all over the world, China during the revolution, to Russia, the far, far east part of Russia, all over Africa, all over South America.

And it's always been rewarding. And I always felt this is who I am. I'm a bigger Tom Brokaw fan than I think most 28-year-olds because I grew up 30 miles from where you went to high school. I went to the same college as you. So I love the Tom Brokaw story. But I'm especially interested in the Army base of Igloo that you spent a few years on that

is like one of the strangest places that you could probably grow up in like a developed country tell us about igloo like how it came to be how you ended up there like what that community was like well my dad had a very very difficult childhood but he was uh introduced to a caterpillar when he was about 19. And it turns out man and machine were meant for each other. He became a highly in demand, heavy equipment operator. And that's when America was getting ready for the war. He was in Kansas building airports across Kansas for the long distance bomber runs. There was a little small arms factory that was being developed in New Brighton, Minnesota.

He was part of that. But then as the war became more and more evident that it was going to happen, he wanted to get a place to park us, the family, my mother and me, and then I had another brother on the way, and he heard about Igloo, South Dakota. And so we drove through the night.

I'll never forget it. I had my face pasted to the windows because the black hills were not very popular in that day and and we had mountain lion running alongside of us for a while there were deer and you know and everything everywhere and then the sun came up on this god forbid place in south dakota called igloo and it was all sagebrush rattlesnakes, no water to speak of except sloughs. And my dad said to my mother, we're going home. And she said, no, we've got to stay. And it turned out to be a fabulous experience for all of us.

They have little tiny houses. I think the house that my parents put us in was not much larger than the room in which you now sit. And there were five of us by the end. It was about 280 square feet. And my dad made the base go. I mean, everything that needed to be fixed, he could fix it. Everything that needed to be improved, he could improve it.

So his draft came up, and he wanted to be a CB. So he went to Denver. By the time he got to Denver, the base commander at Igloo said, send him back. We can't operate without him. So we were there for the duration. There was an enormous presence of uniformed American Army people who were part of the ordnance division of the Army. Then there were the civilians like us. And then on the edge of town, there were Italian prisoners of war.

There were about 200 of them, And they wore these orange outfits. They were in a lightly guarded, where were they going to go? These are guys captured in the European theater and flown to South Dakota. And that happened out here as well. I was in, where was I here in Montana one day? Oh, I was in, where was I here in Montana one day? Oh, I was in Billings and I saw a guy

with a very sophisticated little Italian, no, he was in Missoula, and he had a very sophisticated little Italian food store. And I said, hmm, where did you come from? He said, oh, I've been here for a while. I said, you came during the war, right? And he said, how'd you figure that out? I said, because I lived in a place

where there were other Italians. You were a prisoner of war. And he said, I was, and I decided to stay. That's kind of lost in history. Anyhow, the story about these Italian prisoners of war, which is, you can now tell because the statute of limitations has run out, turns out they were also, to put it politely,

servicing some of the war widows. You know, they were at night visiting. Oh, is that right? Yeah, and there were some children that were born. And it's never been tracked down, but that's part of, people now write about that. So there we were in this town. I can still tell you the name.

Joe was a police chief who lived across the street from us. He was a former rodeo rider. And then down the street were the Silver Nails. And I remember seeing the Silver Nails' son go off to war in his Navy uniform. It was very exciting to be a part of that. And out on the prairie, the igloos, the town was called igloo because they created these igloo-like things out of the earth, and that's where they stored ammo and other high-performing kind of detonation stuff shipped up from the Denver Rocky Mountain storage area because they knew the Germans knew about that and they wanted to get someplace else. So there were bombs going off and stuff going off all the time and you know it was a lot of fun to live there yeah and it was selected i believe because of the ruralness of it right like there's nothing else around oh my god it's the most i've

been back and you know it still is as remote as they come rattlesnakes and sagebrush pretty much and uh but we stayed and there was a community, a culture, it all pulled together, all paying attention to what was going on. I had a very saucy, sassy aunt who was my mother's sister. She was kind of like, she was like my big sister. She was very young, but she flew Piper Cubs and every guy in town wanted to date her. So there was a lot going on.

And then they typically, they built an infrastructure. You know, they had a high school gym with a good basketball team. They had a movie theater. We had a parade grounds, a good shopping area. And people were secure there. So it was one of those amazing kind of developments in World War II that were lost to history after a while. Yeah, and the whole thing was gone by the 60s, right? The population peak of Igloo is probably 1,600 or 1,800 people,

and then by 63, it was zero. Yeah, it's not what you would call destination. It was pretty tough stuff. I've shot antelope within eyesight of the Igloo, so it's that kind of country yeah it was and we used to see antelope a lot of uh my dad i remember was not a hunter but he had all these uh wonderful uh weapons from a swedish homesteader would raise him at a 30 30 which i still have a winchester a 40 82 which i still have, and a little tiny saddle 22.

Anyhow, somebody persuaded him to go out and shoot a deer. I think he shot the oldest deer in the history of mankind. It was the toughest. We had one meal, and that was it. Really, my parents thought, well, we've got meat supply. No, no, no. One time, that's it. And now that area is, you probably know, it's like very popular for doomsday preppers.

Those 800 igloos, these big concrete structures built into the earth, all kinds of people that are planning for Armageddon. They purchase those. You can buy those? Oh, yeah. You can prep them? Yeah, and some people have actually bought them for that reason. They think Armageddon's coming. I've got a place to hide out.

That'd be a good spot, I think, though. Now, my tip to Armageddon preppers would be to not set up next to Armageddon preppers. Like, that would be who I'd be most suspicious of. Well, there's 800 of them. Because they have a tendency to jump the gun. Sure. You know? I would want a good prepping spot would be where there's no preppers.

Yeah. I feel. Well, the characterization of the place was a high school nickname, the team nickname, were the Rattlers. So that's how they were. I mean, everybody knew what they were up against. We were there for, well, we didn't leave until 46, 47, and then we moved to the center part of the state to another very, very barren area

where they were building Fort Randall Dam. Nothing had been done. And when we arrived, it was just the rolling hills and the Missouri River, part of the Yanktoni Sioux Reservation. So that also was exciting for me because I loved exploration and I became very involved in the geology of the area and the people

moved in from all over the country. A lot of them coming right out of the war, a lot of them from very poor circumstances and they were able to get good jobs. I have later been in touch with friends of mine and and i said so when you got to pixdown what was the most surprising thing they said we had indoor plumbing didn't have indoor plumbing before when you said that your dad had a rough

upbringing or a rough childhood in what way just poverty or more complicated than that? Not poverty, more complicated. The family, there were 10 children in the family. They had this big hotel, railroading hotel, which was just a sweatshop. And he was the last of the group. He had a learning disability. He had a little difficulty reading, and nobody would kind of deal with that at all. So in the third grade, he dropped out, and he went to work for a Swedish homesteader who was living in the hotel, who was a jack of all trades. He had a team of horses and he would drill wells and he would move houses and that kind of thing. And my dad at age nine,

eight, nine, and 10 was working for him. He'd go up in the morning. They dropped my dad headfirst down a well to retrieve the leathers that had been lost down there in that well or to clear it out in some fashion one he told the story of it finally got the well set up he got up changed his clothes and a little tiny pig ran down into the well they dropped him down again head first to grab the pig and bring it out i mean that's the kind of life that he had he He dropped out in third grade. He dropped out. He didn't finish third grade, no.

Did he ever go? So he never went back? Oh, no, he went back all the time because he turned out to be a success story. I mean, he stunned everybody. Everybody had rejected. Everything that happened in town, whether he was around or not, he got blamed for.

And he was aware of that. And when he was about 12 or 13, he bought a team of sorrel horses and he decorated them. And he was a genius at making things happen. So he planted gardens and mowed lawns and removed snow and delivered coal and did all that when he was a teenager. And his big goal was to make something of himself. He never ever had a play date. He never had a day in which he could just, on Sundays when everybody's playing baseball, he was working.

And his friends, who all admired him because he was so strong and capable, said to me later, we just couldn't get your dad to be one of us when it came to the weekend. Because he had a job to do, true for the rest of his life. You know, I was a high school jock. He rarely showed up at the games. I didn't mind that because he was home putting in a new acoustical tile in our dining room, or he was fixing a car, or he was buying something to, you know, to make into a trailer.

He always had this other thing, and he had his fantastic sense of humor, big red-haired, good-looking guy. And he was wickedly funny with me and with everybody. And he was quite heroic wherever he lived because they saw the evolution of this guy. The great story about him was he was the toughest kid in town. And no matter what happened in town, he was blamed for it. He said, I could be 10 miles out of town, but something happened, I got blamed for it. But every farm kid would want to come to town and take him on to try to test themselves. He never lost a fight until when he was about 18 or 19, a professional boxer, this was in the 30s, came through looking for some easy change.

And they all said, oh, Red oh red broke off that's your guy the guy knocked my dad out in the first round that was the last time he ever went back into it again uh we interviewed once the athlete bo jackson and he was remembering how everything that happened in his town blamed on him. And I said, why? And he said, well, it's because I did it. In my dad's case, it was the opposite. He didn't do it.

I mean, he was too busy, frankly. And the hotel was a sweatshop. It was a sweatshop. He never knew which room he was going to be in. Whatever room was empty at night is the room that he would take. And it was unheated from the second floor up so he had a big buffalo robe that he slept under with his brother who uh got the hell out of there after two not too long went to california went to the coast guard then in the in the uh uh and then in the Navy. Was your dad baffled by your decision to pursue media? Because it seems like it would have been something

that probably didn't occur to him. Well, it didn't occur to him, but he also knew of my vivid interest in what was going on, fueled in part because of my mother. My dad, this is the great, great part of his story, is that my mother was part of an Irish-American family farming south of town, really quite beautiful. Skipped a grade, so she was in high school and 15. He saw her in a play, and he said to a friend of his,

I'd like to get a date with her. And the guy said, well, if you do, then I'll get another date. So my dad drove out to the farm. He was four or five years older than her at that point. And he left the car running, the lights on, the door open. He went up and knocked on the door. He'd never met her. And he said, some of us are going to, finally, he said, some of us are going to the movie tomorrow night. Would you go with me? And she turned around, looked at her father and her father said, he has a really good reputation. You know, he's honest, hardworking.

I think he'll be okay. And so they went to the movie. And then over, my mother wanted to be a journalist. A lot of my interest came from her. She was always interested in what was going on in the world, reading about stuff. And she couldn't afford to go to college. It was $100 a year. So she was working around town, a lot of stuff. And they continued to go to college. It was $100 a year, so she was working around town,

a lot of stuff, and they continued to see each other. My dad was often racing over to Minnesota to work on a construction job of some kind or another once he learned how to operate the Caterpillar and the construction company that hired him originally really tried to stay in touch with him because he was such a good hand, frankly. And then they decided they'd get married in 1938,

at the height of the Depression. And my mother and dad had a little tiny trailer. They put it behind the thing, and they had two goals in life, which was to do better every year and save every year at least $1,000. I mean, that's pretty unusual. No credit cards, It was all cash.

And he had this, as I say, this wonderful sense of humor, funny and robust. And my mother was a great audience for him. She would laugh easily, and she was interested in books and other things. So it was a great yin and yang. And out of that, I came. You briefly touched on growing up up around fort randall dam and for our listeners that don't know that's like one of the biggest dams in north america and it created lake francis case on the missouri river in south dakota and that's one of the biggest reservoirs in north america as well it's hard to fathom seeing the completion of that, seeing the river change just like overnight.

So can you talk about that, like seeing Fort Randall show up? Yeah, I remember when we moved from Igloo in the far southwestern part of the state to this place where they were going to build a dam around Lake Agnes and Wagner in the middle of the Yanktoni Sioux Reservation. My dad took me out and stood me on a river bluff looking at the wild Missouri below. And he said at that time it was going to be the largest dam of its kind in the world.

And he said they're going to do this. I was in the second grade at that point. He had caught on with a contractor that was building the highway to the site, and he had a really good job because he could do the whole thing. And then he wanted to go back and re-enlist in the government again, work for the Corps of Engineers because he had points built up with them. And the Corps was desperate to have him because he could do everything. From that moment on, three years later, there was a town of about 3,500 people. It had the most modern shopping center in South Dakota, had an unbelievable state-of-the-art high school, curb and gutter, bowling alley, movie theater, hospital, hotel, and enough room on one end of the town for about 200 trailer houses of workers who came in from all over America.

And it went on for 10 years, 24-7, to build that dam. And it was the best years of anyone's life because they were all working class. I said to Meredith the other day, I remember the second Christmas that we were in Bixstown, every kid in town got a chemistry set or a new gun or they got a new set of clothes or whatever because their families were making real money. These are all people who came out of the Depression and went through the war, and for the first time, they had spending money.

First time. My other favorite story about it was there was a terrible hailstorm one day, and all the windows in our little house were knocked out. So dad woke me up. He said, come on, we're going down to the shop to get this repaired. By the time we got to the shop, there must have been 45 guys in there, many of them white collar engineers. And they organized themselves very quickly, and they set up this kind of assembly line, and they repaired all the windows on a Sunday afternoon.

That's what they did. You know, it was all can-do. They didn't wait and say, when's the insurance guy come? We've got to get this done. The can-do thing was phenomenal there. When you were involved with that big, not you personally, but being exposed to that big dam construction project, I think I often wonder about people

involved in in some of those was there like were there any people at that time questioning the idea that you would dam up rivers or would the conversations we're having now about the long-term, it was just like you were doing God's work. Well, it's also, they were great jobs for one thing. And frankly, the Missouri was out of control constantly. It flooded every year during what they call June rise. It would come up because it was draining this whole part of the world we're in now. And farming would go down and everything. And, you know, if you were to go back and do it again, you'd probably do it in a more efficient, you know, way of preserving what you need to preserve.

There were 18 different species of fish in the Missouri at that time. We'd go down and go fishing. We'd catch sturgeon, for example, you know, and paddlefish, all kinds of fish that were going on. And I don't think there was a day until it got really bad in the wintertime that I wasn't down on the river somewhere. I had an enormous rock collection of rare arrowheads and other things like that, beautiful pieces of agate, a chert, which is a really great chunk of very hard rock that the Indians used to make their tools out of, I collected. And there were people my age who came from these other places who had like-minded interests. It was a fantastic place to live for a young person. There was one guy, town manager, who was a really great musician. So he would create every year a town musical.

He would write the musical. And we'd all go to the gym, and there would be the musical. And there were enough people in there who could play pianos or violins or whatever they needed and put on these shows. When I went back later and talked to my friends, I'd say to them, geez, you didn't seem to have my, they said, we didn't have anything. You know, one of my best friends, Jerry Bernison, he said his parents had a small trailer house. They built a kind of an attachment to it. He slept there in the middle of the wintertime in South Dakota. He said, never had an indoor plumbing. You know, this is the first time.

This is great for us. One of my friends who's not doing well now grew up in North Carolina, and he and his mother rode the Greyhound bus all the way from North Carolina to South Dakota because his dad had gone out there to get his job. I think his dad was trying to leave the family behind and the mother would not allow that to happen. And Don was extraordinarily good athlete and funny and everything. So there was this mix. I had friends from Oklahoma. I knew all about Oklahoma. I had friends from Mississippi. So I learned about Ole Miss really early on,

about the loyalty that everybody has to that. It was a mix unlike anything else in my age group rooted in South Dakota. Now, you're a worldly man, obviously, but I think South Dakota has a very underrated and unknown cuisine. And so I want to say some names of like some local South Dakota food. Chiswick.

And I want to get your take on them, see if you liked them then, if you still like them now, and if you like ever crave them despite having been all over the world and had all these different foods. This is going to include your tiger meat. The first one is Chislic, though. First one's chislic. Yeah, chislic was a big excuse to leave the University of South Dakota and drive to Freeman, where you are very familiar and connected to,

and spend the Sunday afternoon drinking beer and eating chislic off, I guess, paper, wasn't it? I mean, spread it out on the paper. Yeah. And heavily salted, as I remember. I don't even know mean it spread it out on the paper yeah and heavily salted as i remember i already know what it is so chislic is cubed mutton that can either be eaten loose or on a stick and it's deep fat fried or grilled yeah and it's like uh it has a little bit of marbling on there and then there's a chislic circle where i grew up which which was Freeman, Menno, and what would be the other one?

Parkston, I think. And that's like where Chiswick was born out of. And where you go. Deep fried mutton. Deep fried mutton. Depends what you get. Sometimes people serve it with toast. Sometimes it's with saltines.

Heavily salted, by the way. Yep. Garlic salt is common on them. Salt, pepper. But like, have you ever encountered anything like Chiswick in other places? No, never have and i took mcguine uh to south school to go pheasant hunting we i had him fly into mitchell picked him up there and we went to freeman uh and i said we're gonna have a bunch of free we're gonna have chisley he's

well chisley what's chisley i said you're gonna you're gonna find out you're gonna love it so we did yanni i gave you some chiseling for taking me out. It was great. Is it like crispy on the outside? Or no? No? It doesn't have that. It might get a touch crispy when it's fried. Yeah. All right.

So the next one would be tiger meat. Yeah, I didn't. I was not involved in that, frankly. You know what tiger meat is, though? Yeah. Yeah, I do. But it was not part of my household. It's just raw deer meat, right?

Well, it'd be like raw beef, and then it's got a lot of salt, onion, green pepper in it, and other spices. God, it's making me hungry. So the next one, how about Fleisch Kekla? No, I don't know that one either. we were pretty much meat and potatoes people in our family well this was like ground meat inside of like a pastry that you then deep fat fry

tell him Yanni it's not was that a German dish I'm German so a lot of these are probably German. That part, I remember that. How about nefla soup or dumpling soup? Yeah, we did have that.

But in our family, my mother worked, my father worked. So it was at the end of the day, it was meat and potatoes. It wasn't any, there was no exotica, as it were. I'm trying to think of a—I'll tell you a peasant story. When I was in college, my roommate was one of the two or three best wing shots in the state. And we would arrange our classes in the morning from 8 until noon. Meredith would pick me up with Tom. And in those days, we'd road hunt.

We'd drive out of Vermilion, South Dakota, north along gravel roads along the cornfields and shoot pheasants. We'd see them in the ditch and flush them and shoot them. And by the time Thanksgiving came around, we must have had 50 birds in the locker downtown, clean. So we bought two kegs of beer. And the way we prepared presents in those days,

you threw everything away except the breast. Nobody ate the legs or anything like that. And you cooked them in big casseroles with, was it tomatoes? cream of mushroom cream of mushroom oh yeah over the top that's how we knew we knew that recipe yeah that's how we cooked it and then we invited all of our faculty uh members and never worry about our grades for the rest of the year so my mom used to take she would take like just quartered out squirrels so you take the four legs yeah in the back and then just dump them in a crock pot yeah and then pour cream of mushroom soup right in there and then cook it so long that the bones would be like a bone bed on the bottom.

They just settle down at the bottom. You'd have like an inch of miniature squirrel bones, and then floating up above that would be this squirrel meat-laden. Squirrel soup. And then you'd make toast and put it on toast. Shit on a shingle. Shit on a shingle, yeah, which people also, that's another popular deer recipe, shit on a shingle. I should make that for my kids.

They'd probably like that. And then another one, and this is probably a myth, but people had told me that the red beer was popularized or created in Vermilion where we went to college. Did you drink a lot of red beers down there? I drank a lot of red beer. It could have been at the Varsity, which was the hangout.

Give me a red. You know, I think that's probably true. It's a beer with tomato juice. Do you ever order at other places and have the bartender look at you funny? I wasn't crazy about it. You know, I kind of like good, clean beer. And I try to remember what would be the

occasions it would call for me to drink a red that would be when i was hungover there you go hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a

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what was your your dad didn't hunt you mentioned um you remember him shooting a deer once well that was it i mean he never shot a gun How did you, at what age did you start to become aware of and participating in hunting and fishing? I think 12. There was a neighbor who had a little 410 and pheasant season was a religious holiday in South Dakota in those days. And I went out with him and he said, look, you can use the 410. And then I had other friends. So a lot of the Southern guys are good hunters. For we didn't you know we shot everything we shot squirrels i didn't have anything to do with eating the squirrels they all had squirrel stew at home for example that kind of thing but pheasant season and in those days the limit was four and you could

walk into any farm and say hey can we hunt it sure not to worry about it now i go back every year and it's just one big you know uh organized very expensive and very well run by the way uh place after another uh so it was a different time did you guys fish in the river yeah I fished a lot in the river. And we caught something called drum, which is a river, you know what that is, a river bass of some kind. And we caught small sturgeon. And then we caught catfish.

And we also caught flathead catfish from time to time. So yeah, it was, my friend who's not doing well, who came from North Carolina, we'd be down there at night fishing with our parkas on, up against the, you know, the heavy rock part of the riprap of the river,

throwing out these big slugs, you know, a huge night crawlers on them and catch eight or nine of these. Pretty good, not bad eating eating fish i used to work for the u.s fish and wildlife service in yankton at gavin's point fish hatchery yeah i don't know i don't know you did like a hatchery gig oh yeah for four years huh i uh my dad built by the way built all those oh yeah parks around there that was his job job. I appreciate his work. What were you guys hatching?

We did everything. Primarily we were the pallid sturgeon recovery people. But we also did paddlefish and every spring we would go catch our broodstock paddlefish at the White River up by Chamberlain. How would you catch those? With enormous drift nets

in the White River which they'd be running up to spawn. And so in 2014, I think it was, we netted a 149-pound paddlefish, which would actually break the world record that was just broken. But because we were biologists catching this thing, it doesn't count. And the biologists I was with that were certainly smarter than me. That's like a legit certified scale 149 oh yeah we took it back to the hatchery spawned her out took millions of eggs from her and then released her again you ever eat any of those eggs in there um one time we had a

paddlefish die that somebody took the eggs from went went home and made some stuff, and it was fine. I don't know. And below Yankton, when the river was still, Yankton was the last dam, so they had a pretty strong current from there on down. There was a guy named Henry Wolfe, who was a commercial fisherman. He had a rig, you know, that was out there,

and they caught a couple of catfish that were national records at the time down below Yankton. And by the time we moved to Yankton, I ran the waterfront. I rented boats and sold bait, did that kind of thing, took chicks for a ride. You had a bait shop? Yeah. Like Johnny Morris from Bass Pro, huh? Yeah. Right. kind of thing took chicks for a ride you uh you had a bait shop yeah right like johnny morris from bass pro huh yeah right where i was going that story the paddlefish that we caught that 149 pound or seven feet long the biologist i was with said that that was there before the dams were put in like that was an og paddlefish before yeah it's interesting before his dad finished the dam.

Yeah. It's crazy to think about. Well, and the... He probably swam around telling everybody about what it used to be like. That's right. I could swim from here, clear out. Much different. Yeah. At Fort Randall, there were all those shale cliffs along the river.

And we'd peel them off and we found, unfortunately I didn't keep, we found a lot of fish embedded in that that were thousands of years old. Oh, no kidding. Fish skeletons? Yeah. Do you remember the Channel catfish record in South Dakota that was caught down by Vermillion? Yeah, it was caught between Elk Point and Yankton.

Yep. But then it turned out to be. This is a scandal, though. Then it turned out to be a blue catfish from the photos. Right. You remember that story? I remember when it happened. I don't remember.

I knew those guys. You did? Because Henry Wolfe, the guy that I was talking about from Yankton, they were his buddies. And they would come up in the morning and have coffee. And I would sit in his little powered boat, you know, with him. It was like a little tug. And sit and have coffee with him in the morning. And we became very close friends.

And he said, you've got to go to medical school and become a doctor. That's the best profession. I said, you know, I think I would be a journalist. What? A journalist? No, you can't be a journalist. That area had some great cat fishermen from that area. Yeah.

The pictures you see and stuff. They really did. Now you got to walk through it. Like, you got to walk through the story. So how this fish for how many ever decades had been misdiagnosed. Yep. Misidentified. I can't even remember.

The area has the three species of catfish, blues, channels, and flatheads. And as a channel catfish and a blue catfish mature, they tend to look very similar. And it gets to a point where the only way to identify them with some catfish is to count the anal rays on their fin. And a blue, I might have this wrong, and I can't Google it right now. Like which one has which number? I think a blue has 26 to 28, while a channel will have 22 to 24.

You got to remember that before all those dams went in, the Missouri River was primordial. It drained out of the mountain west, came all the way across North Dakota. I mean, Montana first, then North Dakota. And there was stuff that people had no idea that they were there. Species that they were there.

They'd been living there prehistoric times. Yeah, you had uninterrupted travel from the gulf and the lower end all the way to some mountain stream so the great cat cat fishermen from that area uh one of them caught a 55 pound what he thought was a channel catfish and what a biologist agreed was a channel catfish and luckily there's photo evidence that exists showing you can count the anal rays. You can see that it's, you know, rounded or flat where it shouldn't be.

And the record was pulled here about two years ago. And I wrote about this when I first started writing for the Farm Forum in South Dakota. I said, this record is a farce. They need to look into it. Other people had talked about it too. And then a few years later, they indeed did pull it because it was not a channel catfish. And for a channel catfish, it was at one time the world record. I think South Carolina ended up having a bigger one, but for a channel catfish, this is enormous, like the biggest channel in the world. But for a blue, it's probably half the size of like what the blue catfish record is. So this was indeed just a small blue catfish. They misidentified as a channel. And then they reset the state record at zero.

They set it to zero. And where is it now? Oh, I can't even remember. Because people were breaking it every day. Oh, yeah, every day. They started a catfish festival, and they really embraced it. And there was two pounds, and it was four pounds, and it was 10, and it was 11. Do you know where it's at now? I can't remember where it's at right now no it there was an enormous jump there

was like it was like seven to eight and then like eight to eleven and eleven to thirteen then someone got like uh 32 or something yeah and then that's kind of slowed it down now tom i was reading um i don't want to tell you my source because as a lifelong journalist, you're probably aware of the fallibility of Wikipedia. However, that's where I go for all my news. What I was reading in Wikipedia was that after Martin Luther King's assassination, and then the Kennedy assassination, you got fed up with guns and didn't want a firearm. I was living in California. Gave my guns away.

Yeah. Explain that thought process. I didn't give away my antique guns that my father had been given because I wasn't shooting them anyway. But I had a.30-30 and a little.22 Remington. And I think probably that was when I had a Wingmaster 12-gauge pump shotgun. And I said to the camera crews, who wants a gun? I'm not going to have them in the house. We have three girls.

I was just so devastated by all the shooting that was going on. I gave them away. And I didn't get involved again until I moved to New York. And I had some friends who were making more money than they knew how to spend. So a lot of them were going out and buying expensive guns, enjoying hunting clubs and so on. And one of them said to me one day, hey, you grew up in that part of the world. You must have been a shooter. We've created these great pheasant lodges and so you want to go. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I go. So they got a gun for me

and I quickly came back and at the end of the day, they said,, you gotta do this. And by then I could afford a really nice gun. And I got involved again and I started coming out to South Dakota every year to hunt pheasants with my pals. It's a religion in South Dakota, frankly, and it was a way for us to reconnect again. And that's what I do now. I'm a bird hunter and uh i until recently in montana i could shoot uh a lot of game birds that are not here anymore

we don't know why some of them disappeared and then you got you eventually became a avid fly fisherman correct yeah that uh i remember the first time I went fly fishing. I was down at Jackson Hole and I had a cameraman who was a very good fly fisherman. He said, you ought to try this. So we went to town and bought me some, you know, kind of rudimentary equipment. And I went out, I'm a reasonably good athlete,

and I was catching on pretty quickly. But my favorite story about that is there's a bend in the snake where I was catching on pretty quickly. But my favorite story about that is there's a bend in the snake where I was fishing, and there was a boatload of tourists coming by. I thought, I'm going to show them. So I do a double haul, cast, and the two tips from my rod went flying across the river in front of them. And I just pretended like that's the way it is.

That's the intention. My favorite part of pheasant hunting is just the camaraderie and like the buzz of that opening weekend. Yeah. But you keep doing it, not even in South Dakota sometimes. So what is it about pheasant hunting that you like so much? A lot of it is the camaraderie. A lot of it was the camaraderie a lot of it was the uh you know kind of being with your pals

a wonderful part of the outdoors i love the fall and the great plains and you know friends of mine who grew up hunting quails ah anybody could hit one of those pussies i said come with me you know very fast uh and but it was a it was a religion when i was growing up and it was a a big social thing and i you know the other part of my life is that i want to be involved whatever was going on you know well that looks interesting let me try that uh but then i moved to omaha and i created a little group there and continued to hunt. And then went to Atlanta to quit hunting. When I moved to Los Angeles, quit hunting. And then from L.A., Washington, and then New York.

And then I got involved with a club business. I belonged to one. And the only reason I stay is the handlers and everything. I had a fantastic dog, one of the best dogs in the world. Got it by accident. Frankly, it was trained and everybody wanted to be around that dog and that dog kept me hunting. So I'd go up to this very high-end club

and the general manager, the guy who really put it together, would say, field one, it's all yours. Don't worry about it. And so I'd have the best place to hunt and just me and my dog. And I love that. Did you, in that era working in media, did you need to, did you ever feel social repercussions? Um, from being a hunter? Like now I feel that there are a lot of people who are very, I don't want to out them,

but I'm always hearing from various celebrities who like to hunt a little bit, but don't want anyone to know they hunt. Well, I didn't think about that, frankly. I was always willing to defend. I said, look, I eat what I shoot, you know, and we do limits, you know, and the conservation goes hand in hand with good hunting properties. So I don't have any worry about that. And it's always, for me especially,

it's been a great social connection to my friends in South Dakota, that we all grew up the same way. And I got to a certain place in life and I could go back to South Dakota and be one of the guys. But I had this fantastic dog called Sage and everybody wanted to be around Sage so I would go out there every year and hunt with Sage no apologies no it's not it's different when you're a sport hunter and you're

using a shotgun or if even if you're shooting game like deer or whatever then the crazies I mean there's a great place in uh in big timber where the guy kind of wide-eyed said to me they want machine guns now so they can shoot coyotes from the sky and i said that's crazy that's nuts and he said i know but it's not illegal in many instances that's what makes me crazy and people the whole carry business my son-in-law's mother died and we went back to a small town in Oklahoma where he'd been raised

in a big wonderful place where everybody gathers on Sunday night four or five guys walked out with 45s on their hip with their family what's that all about? you didn't like it? Well, I didn't stand up and object to it, but I don't.

No, it's hard to object when they... You know, it's just, you know, it wasn't necessary. Look, people have a right to arm themselves. You know, I've got guns on the property where you sit right now, but they're secure. You know, I don't know if I'm under my bed or anything, but the whole idea that I'm defined by what I've got on my hip, I find offensive. Yeah, I got you.

Did you introduce any celebrities to pheasant hunting or guns? No, it was, I think, you know, one of the guys, one of the guys now is the CEO of iHeartRadio, big, big broadcaster type. I think he was the one who said to me, you must have hunted, you know. And what happened in Wall Street, they suddenly, a lot of guys made a lot of money right away and went out and bought guns. And then these clubs kind of developed around the rim of the city. And a lot of it had to do with old Eastern culture. You know, they'd grown up, you know, shooting, that kind of thing. So that's when I got involved. But I have kind of stayed in the middle.

I don't go to Europe and hunt in Scotland or anything like that, although if I were asked, I might. Well, I was going to ask if any of your travels for work ever took you to a place where you had come upon the opportunity to fish or to hunt in a... You know, I'm so busy when I'm traveling. I'm always aware. You know, I was, you know, when I'm in the Middle East,

a number of my ichthyology friends say, you know, when I'm in the Middle East, a number of my ichthyology friends say, you know, there's a species of trout in some of those rivers. I say, you know, look, I'm not looking for fish. I'm looking for sanctuary when I'm over there. You know, I'm not going to go down and wade into the river. There was a famous story about Saddam Hussein. This is after he came down. I went to the 3rd Division. I had been following a kid. He was a mortar man,

and we'd been following him from basic training through and followed him over there. Had a really tough war. Anyhow, he was at the base of this dam, and they were protecting the dam. It was hydroelectric. And one guy they befriended who was a local,

and he told them that Saddam had a big palace. I went to see the palace. It was a huge palace. By then, the army had taken it over, and they were using it as a headquarters. And they said some locals before the war came up here and they were fishing at the base of the dam because it was so rich and then one day out of the palace helicopter rises comes up blows the hell out of the guys and nobody went back to fish again you know that's

how i'm operator seriously seriously huh seriously you uh you had a hard time getting I'm an operator. Seriously? Seriously. Huh. Seriously. You had a hard time getting started in college, huh? Like you kind of bombed out at a couple schools. Yeah, I did. And then your wife-to-be shamed you? Yeah, pulled the chain hard. I still don't know what happened to me. I came out of high school.

This is immodest, but I was a real whiz kid. I came out of high school, this is immodest, but I was a real whiz kid. I was a boy state governor and I was a jock and I was president of my class and I was getting all these honors. I was being recruited by schools. I went to the University of Iowa and the University of Iowa is a very good school.

A lot of fantastic co-eds from the North Shore of Chicago who proved to be a big distraction to me. And I was interested in not going to class but going to other things. I remember going, they have something called the Old Capitol, it was a lecture place. And I'd go over there and hear these exotic lectures by guys talking about theology in the nuclear age, that kind of thing.

But going to the classes that I should have been going to, I wasn't doing as much. And I guess I just thought I could get along what it carried me through before. I'd always been a good student, but I just wasn't paying attention. And most of my friends were a little bit older. Some of them were football players.

And so I didn't flunk out, but I came close. So at the end of the year, I was so kind of at odds with myself, I thought, I better go back, get my act together, and I enrolled at the University of South Dakota. Continued on that same plane, and at the end of that year, a fabulous professor there, head of the political science department,

and there was a small group of us who were political science majors, called me over to his house for dinner. And he said, get out of here. Get it out of your system. Come back when you can do yourself some good, your family some good. Get out of here.

Just whatever it takes. I don't want to see you next year. I thought that was a ticket to go do whatever the hell I wanted to do. And because I had a certain skill set as a radio disc jockey and other things, I got jobs. And then I got a job in Sioux City, Iowa, which is 60 miles away from the University of South Dakota, as a booth announcer, weekend weatherman,

and kind of all-purpose guy for 75 bucks a week. And they had a wonderful news director who'd come from Northwestern. And he was destined to do well. And he ended up being a CBS correspondent. And he became a good friend. And he became a mentor. And he said, Tom, this is not the way for you. You've got to get your act together.

So I went back to the university. to town, this is not the way for you. You've got to get your act together. So I went back to the university and I called Meredith, my friend from high school, who was kind of all everything. She was a big scholastic leader at the university. She'd been Miss South Dakota and all these other things. She was so highly regarded with good reason. And I said, yeah, I'm going to be in town.

Let's get together. She wrote me the most dismissive note you can possibly imagine. I'm not interested. I don't want to see you again. Your mother doesn't know what to do with you. She's terribly disappointed. I don't know what's going on. So I took that letter to a very close friend of ours who later,

because I stayed in touch with the intellectual circles, and Bob became one of the leading Soviet authorities in America, still at it, Bob Legvold. And I said, can you believe that Meredith, and he said, yeah, I can believe it. We don't know what's going on with you. It was a wake-up call. So I went back. I got in the carpool, and I started driving. I'd get off work at

midnight. I'd get up at 5, go to the university, and be in class until noon, and go back and work. And about, I don't know, five months into that, I was in the library one day, and Meredith came over and said, I went too far. I said, no, you didn't. I had it coming. Went from there, and 58 years later. What's the key to 58 years of marriage? Oh, the easy key in my case is that she can do everything. I mean, what you see around here is her. She's an expert bridge player.

She came out of here when I wanted to buy the ranch. She thought it was the worst idea I ever had. Within two years, she was one of the leading sliders, riders in Montana. She could just do whatever she's done and not break a sweat. And in terms of the public profile, which comes with my life, not interested.

She has, everybody is, she doesn't have any enemies. Everybody's an admirer. but it rolls off from her. There's a great story about, that I wrote about when we were young and in California, we suddenly got pulled into the old Hollywood crowd because there'd be big benefits and that kind of thing, and I would be there as a NBC guy and then they saw Meredith

and Meredith was just so drop dead beautiful and easy and charming and everything that we suddenly got kind of pulled into that and my favorite story is that Rosalind Russell came up to me at a party and said

you know who I am Mr. Brokaw? And I said, of course I do. And she said, I hear that beautiful young woman over there is your wife. And I said, yeah, she is. She said, we're having a wedding anniversary. Freddie and I, her husband, Freddie Brisson. We don't have any young people. Would you come?

Can you imagine? I mean, you know, I'm doing the 11 o'clock news. We're four years out of South Dakota at that point, five years out of South Dakota. I said, yeah. She said, do you have a tuxedo? And I said, no. She said, rent one. I said, okay.

And she said, I'll send you a telegram. That's how they did things. So we go to this party. We're the only ones we don't know, in a way. It was Jack Lemmon and Kirk Douglas and Ronald Reagan, who had just been elected governor of California, who I know a little bit because I was covering him. But it was like that.

It was filled with these triple A stars. So Roz Russell says, "'Okay, we're gonna have dancing now, "'real old fashioned stuff.' And she went by and winked at me and I couldn't figure out why. And she had hats, caps for the guys and scarves for the women.

You had to match the cap and the scarf. That was your dancing partner. And I look up and Meredith's being led onto the dance floor by Ronald Reagan. And he was a huge star at the time. He'd just been elected. And Meredith's a very good dancer and Dutch, as we like to call him, was an outstanding

dancer within three beats. Everybody stands back and watches my wife. At that point, 28 years old, most money she ever spent on a dress was $94 for that party. And they just tear up the floor and they're having the best time out there. So now the dance ends. Mary starts back and Reagan says, oh no, we're going to do this again. Two beats into the dance. Nancy Reagan says, Ronnie, there's a question I can't answer.

And pulls them away back to their table. So it's one of our favorite stories that we became very, very close to Nancy before the end of everything. So we've just had this right place right time magical life and huge part of it for me is that meredith is there you know kind of even keel you know winning for everybody so we've been for two kids from yankton high school worked out pretty well when you were doing those early jobs

you mentioned like disc jockeying and doing weekend news uh what was it that you were doing well enough to keep advancing along like when you look back now you know like what were the characteristics or traits was Was it just work? Is there sort of a talent and is there a native talent? Well, I don't know. To delivering news? I think people determined that I was interested in what I was doing, that I was serious about journalism.

And, you know, and I had a certain cosmetics thing where I could get on television and, you know, and I was, from the time I could remember or anybody could remember about me, I was at ease talking and doing things. So I was not a bad performer, but I was really interested in the substance of it all. So I went from Sioux City to Omaha for two years in Omaha,

doing all kinds of things here morning, noon, and night, and bang, I get picked up by the biggest station in the south, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Next thing I know, I get picked up by the biggest station in the south, Atlanta, Georgia, in the height of the civil rights movement. Next thing I know, I'm covering Dr. King and everybody down there and feeding this stuff to NBC. Eight months after I'm in Atlanta, NBC comes and says, we want you to come to California and go to work for us. So it was bang, bang, bang. I get to California in 1966.

The first thing I do is start covering Ronald Reagan, who everybody said he can't win. And I got to know the whole team. And I was on the air on election night and doing all of this stuff. And then California, in those days especially, and I think it's still true, they don't ask about your pedigree. Can you do the job or not? We had a great life out there. The closest friends that we have to this day are people our age who came there at the same time. Warren Buffet's irreplaceable warrior, one of the greatest warriors in America,

came from a small town in Iowa at the same time we were there. There were other couples like that. California was on the rise. Everything was affordable. We bought a wonderful house up in the valley, up in the hills for $42,500. You know, and three couples would go out for dinner.

It would not be $100 for three couples, you know, if they had some of the best restaurants in town. And then I was doing a lot of work for NBC, and then, you know, we had a really good life there, and Meredith had a good life. She was a linguist. And then NBC came and said, time to move.

We've got to come back east. Chancellor had been trying to get me to do that. I said, yeah, why do I want to do that? So I became the White House correspondent. And the timing, again, was in Brokaw's favor. I caught Watergate. Boom. Yeah, is it?

I also read that it's rumored, I don't know if you've ever acknowledged it, or maybe it came from you, that you were offered but turned down an opportunity to be Nixon's press secretary. It was true. Your career would have went in a way different direction. No, there was no way I was going to do that. So you didn't even entertain the idea. No, I didn't even entertain it. I almost threw up when they made the offer.

Yeah, there's no one more reviled than a press secretary during a crisis. No, and it's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a journalist. I didn't want to be on the other side. I wanted to do what I was doing. And I ended up having a good Bob Haldeman who made the offer and was persistent. Finally, he went to jail,

and Watergate's over, and I'm in New York doing a kind of retrospective on Watergate. And I get this big bear hug from behind me. And I turn around and it's Bob Holden. And he said, hey, Tom, you know how many times I've watched you? And so I thought, God, I could have sent him to jail. So you remained friendly with Ronald Reagan.

Yeah. Like you speak well of him now. Mostly Nancy, but also Reagan. Yeah. Like, you speak well of him now. Mostly Nancy, but also Reagan. I didn't think he was up to the job when he got the job. I was worried about it. I thought he was successful in California because he had a strong state legislation. You learned how to work with him. And then I learned as president, because I became very, very close to Jim Baker, his chief of staff, who said he knew what

he knew, and that's where he spent his time. And what he didn't know, he didn't want to go there. He didn't want to fake it. So he said, we'd have these staff meetings at seven o'clock in the morning. Baker would run them, and then the president would show up at eight. And Baker would say, Mr. President, this is what we think you ought to do today. And this is the area that we ought to concentrate on. And he'd say, okay, Jim, but I don't like that part. And he said, well, he didn't like something. He really had strong reason for not liking it. He always knew who he was. So I came to admire him. We were different in a lot of philosophical things. I think he was still, you know, in the 30s when it came to race, for example. He didn't quite understand how that was going.

But I thought he was very important in standing up to the Russians and making a stand about the Berlin Wall. And he made the country optimistic, you know, that they came to believe that they could do what they needed to do and want to do it. He had that kind of cheerfulness about him. And he didn't, things rolled off his back. Sam Donaldson and I have talked about this a lot.

Sam came, we have the same feelings. We were the two that were invited to Nancy's funeral. In fact, I spoke and Sam was there as well, the only two correspondents, because we dealt with him in a way that we tried to see what he was up to and we had an appreciation of what he got right and also what he got wrong, we pulled the chain.

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now we look at news and it's um um and and the people who bring us news and and I think the idea of impartiality, bipartisanship, we're almost to the point where people don't even give it lip service anymore. No, that's right. But you were of the era when you at least had to pretend. How much did you, because looking at the people you've known and the way you speak about, the way you just spoke about Reagan, for instance, the fact that you may have,

that someone within the Nixon administration looked at you, that you received a great award under Obama. Like I'd look at the resume and be like, oh, that must be like a fairly bipartisan, open-minded person. But did you find that because of your career, you had to foster that and bury your impulses and instincts

in order to maintain this aura of impartiality? Or did you naturally feel that way? No, I think it's the role of a journalist. You know, I had, as I've often said to people, I have very strong ideological, philosophical feelings, great interest in a lot of things that don't always match the people that I'm covering. My job is not to impose on my audience what I believe. My job is to find out what the president or a decision maker is about and how they arrived at that conclusion, whether it holds water or it doesn't hold water, and to be fair about it, the thing that I've had the greatest pride

in I suppose as a journalist is that over the years people have come up to me and say, you know, Brokaw, I don't agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I always believe that you have integrity, that you've arrived at this honestly, and that's what counts. And I'm also, I don't go in looking for a fight. I go in trying to find out what does the public need to know here, what's important to them. And part of that was I kept my parents in mind. I kept Main Street in mind because of how I'd grown up. What do they need to know here what's important to them and part of that was i kept my parents in mind i kept main street in mind because of how i'd grown up what do they need to know yeah you know wherever i was in the world i'd think is this going to play in yankton you know uh i remember looking at rivers in the middle east and thinking god it looks a little bit like the missouri so i carried that

with me wherever i went during the height of nightly news, there was a big three, like you, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings. What was your relationship like with those guys? Was it competitive or friendly or no relationship at all? No, it was a relationship. And we actually, we were very competitive, very competitive. And we got angry with each other from time to time. But at the end of the day, when I left nightly early, because I wanted to have a life beyond just being on the air at 630 every night,

it stunned a lot of people. Peter and Dan spoke at a testimonial to me. And Peter kind of nailed it. He came out and he said, people often ask, I have to make sure I get this right. People often ask, do you like each other? And he would say, not every day. But we all have respect for each other because we're committed journalists. At the end of the day, all three of us admire what the other one is doing.

And we've competed all over the world. And our social relationship was, Peter and I gave Dan a dinner at our house, for example, when he got in that jam, you know, about whether he reported on Bush. We had a dinner for him, because his life was disappearing before his eyes. And we put together some of his friends,

and Peter and I gave him a dinner and said, Dan, there is life after all of this, after all. And we all have to be aware of that. And I was heartbroken when Peter got sick and died as early as he did. I just made the decision to leave about a year before that. And he came to me, he called everybody Lad. Lad, what are you thinking?

And I said, Peter, I want another life. I mean, it's hard for me to improve of what I've been able to do. The last big story I covered was 9-11, and I want to go to South Dakota when the pheasant hunting isn't going on. I want to be able to spend more time in Montana. I want to travel to places not to be there on assignment, but just because I want to be there. spend more time in Montana. I want to travel to places not to be there on assignment,

but just because I want to be there. So I want a life. And, you know, you have to be careful about these jobs that the public adulation, the attention that you get, doesn't become toxic. And I was determined not to have it become toxic. I wanted to go out on my terms. What does it look like when it's toxic?

Well, when it's toxic is that you get to believe all the attention that you're getting is because you're a wonderful person. That's when it's toxic. All the attention you're getting often is because they think you can do something for them or they want to kind of rub shoulders

with you that's when it becomes toxic thank God I had Meredith at my side because it never got out of control she was always totally you know totally in sync with how life should be led

I remember when I was doing the Today Show and things got very difficult. NBC was a mess at one point. And I didn't know whether or not my career was going to go on. And I came home one night and I was quite anxious. I said, Tom, we have each other. We have these three fabulous girls. What are we worried about?

Look at us. We've come from yankton south dakota to where we are you'll always have a job don't worry about it you need to hear that a friend of mine recently sold his business and he described himself as being in the process of crawling into a deep dark hole willfully. He just wanted to check out, did you imagine, like looking where you now live on the edge of a creek surrounded by big cottonwoods,

very secluded. All along did you think, when I'm done, I will go and live on a dirt road and fish? No, I wanted her to be part of my life. I didn't want to give up on everything. I'm still kind of active now. I mean, I'm in touch with people at NBC every day. Oh, okay. Yeah, email. I was just I'm in touch with people at NBC every day. Oh, okay.

Yeah, email. I was just on with Andrea on the air with her when the president was going to Mount Rushmore because I wanted to tell the Lakota story. And I said, put me on. I've got something to say. And I got an enormous reaction because almost no one knew

that the Black Hills were really ceded to the Lakota people in 1860. And Custer rode in and brought gold miners, and they ran the tribes out and sent them out to the reservations. And then in 1980, U.S. Supreme Court ruled that was illegal, and they have just compensation coming. So they started a fund, and the Indians will not accept it. They want the land, they don't want the money,

and they've got more than a billion dollars, frankly, in funds that have been put away for them. And I told that story on the air. I said, this is what you need to know about where we are now. A huge reaction. Almost no one knew about that. Growing up in Igloo and Pigtickstown, and Yankton, you spent your whole childhood in reservations

or on the edge of reservations. So you were very exposed to those people and that culture. Did you feel an obligation in your career to cover that more, cover it differently, educate people on reservations? I have a lot. I've done a lot. When the Today Show was doing every state one year, and they were doing kind of on the cheap.

I said, I'm not going to do it. If you want me to do it, I won't do it on the cheap. I'm going to South Dakota. And I got my friend Gerald Onefeather to come to be my representative of the Lakota tribe and talked about the history of them. I went back and wrote a big magazine piece about growing up among tribes in South Dakota

for the Los Angeles Times when we were doing the Olympics in Australia. I went back and found Billy Mills, who was a great long-distance runner, who was a Lakota Sioux, who has a foundation now, I think, in Colorado. And he came up, and I did a story about him. But the story, by and large, is heartbreaking, frankly.

Meredith and I actively support a little junior college on the Pine Ridge Res. One of my friends, Jerry Onefeather, who was a classmate of mine at the University of South Dakota. A serious political science student. He was in the library when I was at the bar. I mean, that tells you the difference. And we put a scholarship in his name there. And they've used it

to get a lot of other contributions. We lost Jerry a few years ago, but if you'll permit me, I'll tell one quick story about him. I hadn't seen him in a number of years. And he was a really serious, typical kind of Sioux warrior type. And he continued to get a master's degree in political science. So our eldest daughter was a physician, was thinking about doing a summer internship at the reservation on Pine Ridge.

So we were there driving around. It got dark. And I said, we could go find my friend Jerry Onefeather. And Mary said, they all know where he lives. So he stopped us and he said, oh, you go two miles north, you go one mile east, you go another half mile, and that's Jerry Onefeather's house. So that's what we did.

And it was dark when we got there, but his mother was outside, native dress. And she said, oh, I know who you are. I said, well, where's Jerry? She said, he has new babies in that house over there. So I went over, opened the door to the house, walked in, not knocking. Beautiful young Indian woman at the stove cooking dinner. And over on the sofa was my friend Jerry Onefeather with a baby.

And I said, hey, jerry how's it going he looked at me and he looked at his wife and he said i told you i knew him that's great do you uh this i i'm trying to think of how to ask this question because I don't fully understand it myself. But all I hear about, all I hear about, and I even tell people about it, is how ripped apart we are as a nation right now. Partisan, you know, partisanship, right? If you read the news, watch the news, that's your understanding of what is going on right now in this country.

But if you just go about your daily existence, I'm not talking the last month. I just mean like in recent years. You go about your daily existence. I'm not talking the last month. I just mean like in recent years. You go about your daily existence, I feel that every day you still encounter examples of human decency. Like decency being all around you. And so I find myself struggling to reconcile what I understand to be going on with what I see going on. Well, what you see on television and other areas is a distillation of the toxic environment, if you will, that we're living in and the incendiary quality of the time that we're living in. Because that's what news is.

You know, here's, they don't, oh, everything's great. Yeah, here's a nice guy that helped a guy out when his car broke down. You got to talk about what needs to be corrected and what's going wrong. Yeah, I got you. So, but I think what I do believe as a student of journalism, and especially this time, is that the screen is so crowded, frankly now, with everybody who wants to claim a place of some kind, that it does get out of proportion. And I think the biggest challenge for whoever the next president is, whether it's this one or

whether it's Joe, is they're going to have to find a way to pull the country back together again. And that's going to mean they're going to have to reach across party lines. I saw it. I actually was called to the White House when President Obama was first elected by friends of mine who were on his staff, and they were off to an uncertain start. And there was an intellectual African-American guy from Harvard who was a liberal Democrat who had not served in Washington. And things were not going very well at the beginning.

And so I went down. I had lunch with my friend. And then he said, well, I have the president come in. It was a setup. I said, look, I don't advise presidents to him. I said, you know, that's not what I do. I'm a journalist. I cover.

But in this case, just's not what I do. I'm a journalist. I cover. But in this case, just make a couple of observations. While you got me. Yeah. If, you know, I think if you, he said, look, these guys, Haley Barber is a real Republican from

Mississippi, you know, really tough, smart guy, can be dot dead charming, but also, you know, his philosophy is what he's going to pursue. He's sitting in here, he's just saying nice things, walks outside and beats my brains in. I said, that's what he does. That's what, you know, that's what his job is. What if you surprised everybody and said you want to go to the state of Kansas and speak to a joint session of the legislature about the common problems that we all have.

And get yourself schooled on what Kansas is all about before you go out there. Why are they that way? And try to get a dialogue going. Reach across the party lines. Didn't work. No. And then there was another episode

quite similar to that with him later on. And I always believed it was in part because he's a brilliant guy, no question about it, and he also has a strong sense of who he is. Extraordinary background, you know, with his mother and his father and the whole thing. But everybody I've ever known who spent time with him when he was an undergraduate in California, when he was at Harvard, all say the same thing, which everybody I've ever known who spent time with him when he was an undergraduate in California, when he was at Harvard, all say the same thing, which I agree with.

He's got a great mind. Didn't have enough boots on the ground experience in my judgment. For example, in the first two years, they lost the House. He was barely getting started, but the Republicans took the House. So at the end of that election, instead of having people come to the White House for dinner, he had them come to a hotel, the Jefferson Hotel, and put on a dinner there.

Wrong thing to do. Bring them into the system. Show them the White House. I used to watch Bill Clinton, who was a master at this, get these guys who were uncertain about him. And he'd invite them over. He'd want to go for a morning jog. And they'd go for a morning.

And then they'd come back into the Oval Office. And they were blown away by it. So for all of his great strengths, and they were considerable, he was never really comfortable being a Paul. It was not just my conclusion. I knew staff around him. But I'm not taking anything away from him. He was elected twice, he's a brilliant guy, he'll be well remembered for his integrity,

his personality, his wife, his children. I mean, he's an extraordinary example of what we want for American leadership. But then it also requires an ability to say, maybe they have to change a little bit to get them to see it my way. Yeah. You don't think that,

you think it was more of a personality trait rather than being like he's criticized as being an elitist? No, I think it's personality trait. I mean, everybody who knew him at Harvard, everybody who knew him when he was in the state legislature in Illinois, said the same thing. And I understood why.

You know, he found a way to present himself that was acceptable to the people that he needed to get him elected. Yeah. And it's just not his nature, you know, to pick a fight, to go off and particularly just find a way to pick a fight. He can be drop-dead charming. I mean, I was at a big event in New York recently, and it was a Kennedy thing.

He spotted me, and he turned around and said, hey, Tom. He sat down. He said, how's it going? What's going on? And so on. But it was not a Paul's Paul kind of thing. It was just he was genuinely interested

in what we were doing. Do you picture that will, as a country, pull out of this? God, I hope so. It's not going to be easy. There are huge changes going on. They're going on politically, culturally, socially, economically, and it's going to take, and I know that there are very smart people who are thinking about this.

How are we going to stitch us back together again? How are you going to create a new environment? And then what are the parts of that environment? The blueprint is not clear to me at this point. We have to get through the election. I remember talking to Bill Gates about, I don't know, a month ago. I talked to him a couple of times when the epidemic started. And I said, Bill, I've been on the air.

He said, no, I understand. it was very nice what you're doing bill and melinda are geniuses that what they've been doing in terms of attacking that i said make them i mean with like the work the gates foundation does yeah and i said to make them the head of a new larger reaching out kind of apparatus and, Tom, you got to wait till the election is over. And he's right. You know, when the election is still going on, the stakes are so big about who gets to sit in the White House that you got to get through that first before you can go to the next step. Yeah.

When you asked Spencer if he was a... A Mennonite. A Mennonite. A Mennonite. Was it because of his stunning beard or because of where he's from? No, it's just that area. Oh, that neck of the woods. My hometown's called Menno. Is that right?

Yeah. You ever think about shaving your mustache off and going with more of an Amish look? It naturally happened when my beard first started coming in. So accidentally, that was a period of time, but no. Yeah, this is an unusual group because you're the only one with a beard. Beards have taken over America, frankly. They have. My Wall Street buddies are all bearded now.

They're not clean shaven. It's happening in a way that I'm always interested in how these trends start and how it becomes. I have a theory about it. I think it had to do with the war on terror and that when the special forces soldiers started growing up, going in, and they were trying to assimilate a little bit in appearance to Northern Alliance soldiers and things,

that they started growing beards. And I think that that took off the, that it was a certain like toughness to having one. Yeah. I think that could have been it. Although I'm trying to think of a kind of iconic public figures in our lifetime who are not growing beards now because they can't because of. Well, that'd be me.

I could grow a chin one. Yeah. I don't have any. But I mean, like Harrison Ford doesn't have a beard, for example, or a lot of the big stars don't have beards. Nobody in our business on television has gone there I don't think that's a good point yeah one last one for you

in terms like I've I don't know how I've always known this but I've always known that you were a hunter and an angler it's like if someone asked me like name a fact about you know I'd be like ah tom brokaw i know he likes to hunt fish uh when you list your you know how you self-identify right people say like what are you like what makes you tick um how toward the top or toward

the bottom when you're rattling off, where do you throw that in? Oh, and I like to hunt and fish. Is that right away? Is it way down below golfing? Where does it sit? I don't know. For one thing, I seldom self-identify. Are you leery of people who do?

No, I know who I am. I know what my interests are. The last third of my life, I've become a writer of some note, and that's very important to me. But I don't say, I'm Tom Brokaw, I'm a writer. What I generally say is that I'm Tom Brokaw, I'm a journalist. And journalism gives you a big tent in which you can insert a lot of different things. And then when it comes to my interests,

I'm like that kid who wanted to see the floor of the post office. I wanted to see what's going on. I wanted to turn over rocks and do things, go around the world. When Meredith and I finally got together, it stunned everybody. She was a doctor's daughter and really straight arrow

and her eye's been through this kind of wild period. She always had the best answer. Her sister came to her and said, why Tom? She said, it's going to be interesting. Yeah. It's going to be interesting. I want to hit you with one last one. One last one

is I asked you about this key to 58 years of marriage and it seemed like the answer basically is try to marry someone really good. What is... Do you have a bit of life advice that you dispel? About couples?

No, just in general. Like a thing you found. A thing you found to be true that would be of value to people that are now in their 20s and 30s. Get up every morning determined to learn something that's new. Take a chance. Don't be afraid to lean out over the precipice a little far, don't fall, but take a chance. I think that's a big, big part of it.

But also, what you need to do is to understand that proportion is an important part of life. Don't get carried away with getting in debt, drinking too much, reaching too far. One of the reasons that our marriage works so well is that we have that kind of balance, the two of us. I have a guy who gets on the airplane and flies off to a war zone, bang, like that, and Meredith is back there saying,

we're gonna keep everything in balance. On the other hand, she went off to Africa to do a project in AIDS and ended up creating a fantastic business in southwestern, southeastern Africa for small villages of tomato plants. So break the rules. Do things, but always know that there's a downside. You've got to be careful.

You know, it's not going to happen without you using good judgment. What value do you most highly rate for yourself or that's most important? Well, you know, I think, I think honesty is the greatest value. I just think you have to be honest about who you are, how you deal with people,

and how they can rely on you or not rely. And we all stumble from time to time. I've stumbled. Everybody I know has stumbled at one point or another. But you have to look at the big picture. Where does that all fit in then? The stumbles ought not to define your entire life, for example. On the other hand, some small achievement ought not to be out of proportion either.

You know, that's kind of what's expected. I am what I am. You know, and a lot of young correspondents come to me now and we have a great, great group of young correspondents. I'm really proud of them. You know who Richard Engel is? No, I don't. Fearless correspondent that works for us.

And I helped recruit him to where we are. We stay in touch. And we stay in touch because I can kind of help him with proportion in your life. Yeah. A lot of the young people who are at NBC now, I've come up through all the ranks, and I'm so proud of them, and I try to help them. But I don't try to say do it my way. I just say use your head.

Well, Tom, your story is like an inspiration for like a kid that grew up in rural South Dakota that wanted to work in media. So I'm thrilled to be sitting here with the guy from the nightly news that was from South Dakota. It was a pleasure to meet you and see your ranch. Well, one of the things that I say, I'm always more comfortable when I'm here with somebody from South Dakota because we're rooted in the same culture in a lot of ways.

When I'm out there, was it Dalai Lama? You know, when I was Deng Xiaoping in Beijing, or when I was Gorbachev in Russia, or when I was, you know, in South Africa, when things are going on, I always think, what do they want to know on Main Street in Yankton? What is it that's important to them? Well, I'm doing this, but what is it that I can do that will make their world a little more clear for them? And I think that served me pretty well.

My friends who grew up in the narrow eastern seaboard, for example, are always stunned when we go out to the Midwest and I take them to a coffee shop. I take them to a smaller town and I tell him, give me 20 minutes. I'll tell you where the Republicans are having coffee and where the Democrats are having coffee. And that is universal. You can find out how the world divides itself. And that's important to be able to know that. Is there kind of a follow-up question on that?

But you've gotten to cover a lot of great big events and stories in your career. Was there a – and people might rate that or you might be able to rate it as like the biggest story and then on down. But is there a story that you covered from your personal perspective like very well and something that you did as a journalist where you said, boy, I really nailed it when I covered that event? Yeah, the Berlin Wall. I owned it. There was nobody else there. And it was a defining event of the 20th century. And I had a colleague in New York who was our foreign editor. And Jerry said to me, not much going on here. Why don't you go to Germany? They were beginning to spill out of the borders. And I said, that's a good idea. So I went over and I got there and there was not much going on.

So we started, you know, doing stories about how you could go in and out of East Germany. Now, the next day, there was this big news conference with a guy by the name of Guter Schabowski. And at the end, he was given a piece of paper and he said, oh, and it turns out he misinterpreted it. And he said, members of the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, are allowed now to go out. So the next day, this news conference, Guter Schabowski says, you can go wherever you want to go.

And it was like lightning had hit this room where we were and nobody thought, is that true? Can that be true? And I had a prior appointment with him. And so I went upstairs and my producer, this wonderful woman, threw herself against the door to keep other reporters out. I said, say to my camera, what's going on?

And he tells it, you know, and then we put that on the air and the world blew up. It was chaotic. At first, the guards thought they had to shoot the people who were going to come across. And I was the only one in the world who had a satellite to get out that night. And it was a clean kill.

And it was because others had made preparations. Broadcast journalism is not a one-man sport it's a you know it's a team effort so everybody did their job and we were uh you know it was the biggest single triumph of my lifetime in terms of a scoop as you were changed the world. Here's the other part of the story that's fun. So the next day, we continued to work, and I guess I didn't get a chance to talk to Meredith until I got back. And so when I got back, I said to her,

well, what did you think? She said, you're not gonna believe this., I said to her, well, what did you think? She said, you're not going to believe this. And I said, what? She said, we had apartment, our apartment was, some work was being done. So Tim Russell had an apartment in New York and we were using that. So she said, I was, you know, Tim, the Marines. And I went out to a play and I came home, took the dogs out for a walk, didn't turn on television. And I had no idea that

this was going on and the next morning I went for a walk in the park with the dogs and everybody came up with tears in their eyes and saying my god you must be so proud that's the most thrilling thing I've ever seen I had no idea what they were talking about that's great so all right well Tom Brokaw thank you very much for joining us. Glad to do it. Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time, especially letting us come into your beautiful home here. So here's to that prospective healing of the country that I hope will come.

Well, I think that's the most important thing. This is the greatest test for America since the Civil War. That's the last word I'd like to say. When we went through the Depression, everybody was in the same boat and pulling on the same levers, as it were, to try to survive. World War II was a classic example of America being more than the sum of its parts,

how good it was and what it did. The 60s were very divisive in America, but we emerged from them and learned from them. This is a double whammy. We've got a fatal disease in the air that people are inhaling, and we don't have control of it yet. And thousands of people are dying.

We also have a toxic political environment in which the current president of the United States is doing all that he can to divide the country, not to unite it. And therefore, the challenge is for all of us, not just on the right, although I think more of them have to step up, or on the left by taking advantage of what's going on.

We all have to find a way to work together and there are some truths that are hard and people are having a hard time facing up to them. But unless we do, you know, this great, great experiment is going to be in a lot of trouble and there's no need for that. Thank you. End of trouble. There's no need for that. Thank you. End of preach. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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