YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Brokaw

lines on the record
96
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2016-09-29
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2016-09-29
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  1. “Tim and I thought that was one of the most important things we ever did. Tim and I came from common roots, working class families. His great relationship with his dad, my relationship with him, I got to places we never expected to get to, but always knew that we had other obligations and we were connected to people who, like you, Susan, had going through this terrible, difficult experience, but with exceptional bravery and the right kind of attitude, and your daughter was, I think, about her a lot, how brave she is and how lucky I have been with my children. They all feel the same way, however. We've had a great life.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Some days it does, and then some days I think to myself, Brokaw get a grip. Why are you getting on another airplane to go to something you really don't have to do? But that is a result of momentum of how I've lived my entire life. I mean, I was gone for an entire month this summer. I had two trips to Brazil for the Olympics, and I had Cleveland and Philadelphia. And we have a ranch in Montana, and I got back, and the river had been shut down because of a parasite. And then I developed a huge kidney stone. God is saying, broke, I've had a pretty good life up to this point. Now I'm in charge for a while.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I don't wake up every day, though, David and think I'm going to die of this cancer. My wine has been, I don't know about death because I've never died. I do know a lot about living, and that's what I'm concentrating on. I'm concentrating on living.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And the other side of a journalist always, and I'm always looking at it journalistically about what I can learn what I need to know.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Every day. You feel it physically. And if you don't feel it physically, you feel it emotionally. You can get up after having a great day the day before and get up in the morning and think, God, I got cancer. And I'm going to have to go in and take 20 pulls today to deal with it, including, I'm on chemo right now. I took a pill this morning that's effectively a poison against the cancer. And thank God it's working. So it's hard to describe how it never leaves your mental and physical system. It's always there. It's gotten better at the beginning. I was bewildered by what I was going through, but I tried to mask that a little bit. It helped to be a journalist, quite honestly, because I'm used to dealing with difficult circumstances, and I always had a kind of a binary way of looking at life. On the one side, I would be Tombroka, the outdoorsman, and the interested in history.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But once you get diagnosed, you enter what I call the cancer ecosystem. You become part of a different universe, both with your own experience and what's going on in your body, the relationship that you have with your family, and the relationship that you have with other cancer patients and with the medical system. And it's been instructive. And it's fascinating. I'd rather not have cancer. No question about it. I have a cancer that is incurable but treatable, and I'm on the treatable part of it right now, and that's working well. On the other hand, I've had two friends in the course of these three years who have the same diagnosis as I do, and they both died. I am at three years into a five-year lifespan that you have of multiple islands. That's the cold statistical lifespan. My doctors all say you're doing so well, you're going to die, but it's not going to be multiple. We think you're going to go beyond that. And it preoccupies you.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, Sunday in the New York Times, I have a piece on the op-ed section about three years into it. And what I say is that you never, ever can completely appreciate a diagnosis of cancer if you're on the outside looking in.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, he was coming back and forth. Anyhow, I took her to a party in Montana near our ranch. And we had guys like the writer Tom McGuayne, musician De Bruce, and Michael Keaton, who was at his house. She was a rock star when she walked in. It was thrilling for me because they said, I learned so much from you. I mean, you're so good at what you do. And she's young, and she'd not been known before, but she is good. And they've been working every day for the last nine, ten months. So it's a great crowd.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, I think I do think, and we've talked about this, I do think that we have to emphasize the reporting part of it a lot more.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, it's diffused. There's so many of them now. Dan Peter and I had a great, great run. We had satellites available. We were all reporters. We could jump on the plane and go around the world and report what was going on. And as Peter said when I was leaving the job, people often ask whether we're friends. And Peter says, yes, because we don't see each other that much. But he said, we have this mutual regard for our reporting instincts. And I think we always thought of ourselves as reporters first and then anchors second. And I think the country saw it that way. Now there's a different job description, frankly, for being an anchor. And there are a lot of them. So it's hard to for one to break out over the other. You've got traditional broadcasts out west like Leicester and NBC, but then you've got all the cable anchors as well. It's hard for people sometimes to sort out.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “If we have to blow it up to start over again, let's blow it up. I mean, that's how a lot of people feel. And it's exaggerated the MOAs in the American system is exaggerated by social media. I mean, it runs contrary a lot of what they're doing to what the facts are.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “No, well, hard for me to see that in Trump, frankly. But on the other hand, you cannot underestimate his kind of visceral appeal to a lot of people.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “But he'd been governor of California for eight years, so he had a way to measure him, and also one of the telltale signs about the Reagan political career, he surrounded himself with really smart people. George Schultz and Cap Weinberger were at opposite ends of the spectrum two really smart people. Jim Baker as chief of staff is the gold standard, frankly. He'd worked against him, but Reagan and his team knew to bring Baker in because of how good he was.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And then you also have to have a big vision about what you want, not just for this country, but the place for America in the world given our history and the future of where we're going to be. I don't think there's much evidence that he thought that through very well”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, what I think is without getting into that is that people always underestimate even those of us who are prose, like you going into the White House. The difference between what you knew before you got there and when you got inside, how complex it is, how tough it is, how the stuff comes in 24-7 through the door, through the windows, over the transom about decisions that you have to make have great consequences.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Oh, she knew she was hitting every button. And he just, look, he's got an enormous ego. He just thinks because he won the Republican nomination with a record number of votes he can do no wrong. And that's a commentary on political naivete, frankly.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “While one was, I thought, two things I think we learn is that when she gets prepared, she's the best lawyer in the room, highly skillful performance in my judgment. And one of the things you always look at everything at a candidate, including the kind of facial expressions and the tone of her personality. And up to then, she had been, I thought, far too stern in all of her performance. Everything was furrowed brow and kind of lecturing with her finger out there. This time she turned around with somebody entirely different. He started, like he'd kind of listened to some of his advisors, but then he played to his worst instincts.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, he's my pal and he's my colleague, and we had talked beforehand. You know, I might have chosen a different way of going about it, but when you stop and think about it, we got insights into both of them that night about where they are and where they're going. He really did want to be a facilitator rather than just a fact-checker. You can never do that job perfectly, Having Mender. I remember running into you going into Nashville and you're saying, are we going to be okay? Because I had said something about Obama's absence of military command experience, and you were nervous about it. So you get worked by everybody. Yeah.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Right, exactly, so we're just drawn to the candle at the moment and the Roman candle in this case. And we've got to get beyond that on television. On the other hand, you know, you look at the Sunday morning shows and some of the interviews and the stuff that has been done, and they've been held to it on both sides, by the way. I thought that Senator Clinton made a big mistake by saying at that fundraiser, it's a basket full of deplorables. That only irritates and divides the country. It doesn't unite the country in some way. That was the wrong thing to say. Somebody said, well, it's true. And I said, if you're a hardware store owner in a small town in Iowa and Main Street, and you're not happy with her and you're kind of looking at him, then she says that, guess where you're going to go? You're going to go to him”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And you do that. Here is my issue with our coverage this year. Um, We were covering the flame and not the ignition process. But what has started this flame across America? There's not been enough detailed coverage, for example, of the real impact of immigration and the details of it. Not nearly enough coverage about job creation in America.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “He did, but also the obligation as if he would say something outrageous that would be newsworthy. So you had to go cover what he was doing”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think it does, sir, you know, what he's done is taken the dialogue that used to occur the true in the morning at the end of the bar between two guys that had a little too much to drink, and he's made it a political dialogue for him. And a lot of people will say he tells it like it is. I know he's not always right, but by God it's about time we heard this simultaneously. I think Washington has separated itself from Main Street America. Big time, big time. You know, a lot of us, I don't have tell you, it's pursuit of money and special interest, and they don't feel connected to their constituencies in the way they once did. And gerrymandering has made it possible for them to do almost anything they want to do and they're going to get re-elected.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “For 14 years was no small base. Big reality television store. And even without that, Donald Trump worked constantly. You know, at promoting his own brand personally and otherwise. And so I have this river guide friend in Idaho, I have this great phrase about difficult clients. He would say they're half cocked in the ticked off position, OLA didn't say ticked off. He used the other expression. That's kind of where the country is.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Some point. And then social media has a huge impact on all of this because you can't sort out the authentic from the provocative about what to believe and what not to believe. And they keep stirring it up. Remember that Donald Trump was the best known of the candidates when he ran for all the offices.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “In my adult lifetime, I don't remember a time when America, the fabric of America, had become so unraveled. And I think there are a lot of things that are going on. It's part of what I talked about earlier, about the recession, the consequences of it, and how it struck at home and the expectations people have had. And then I've always said that the American dream did have limits. In my generation, you could always easily live better than your parents and have a better life. That gets harder as you go on. How many houses can you have? How many college degrees can you have? And so there was uncertainty about that. The world is much smaller now. They think it's going to happen to them. I have a friend in small town Iowa who's, I think he packs and carries every day because he thinks that the terrorists are going to come get him.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Republicans and Democrats. I was just in Eisenhower project. There are a lot of white guys in those days. They came out of there. They may have been working class Democrats, but they...”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Absolutely. They came back from the war, haunted by what they'd seen, troubled by the friends that they had lost, and determined to make up the years that they had to give to the war. Bob Dolo says, I take five years off my life because of the five years I was in the war. And a lot of people felt that way. And then they had opportunity here. And we were building America again in the industrial renewal of this country was really exceptional. I lived in a town that was made up, I would guess, 95% of World War II veterans. It was a corbin engineers project building a big dam. And I just wrote about it recently. And what I said was I never heard a war story. Nobody ever told war stories. And they'd all been in horrendous battles. But the American legion was the power of the community. They did everything. And the veterans just at the end of the day went down to the Legion Hall, organized the baseball teams and the Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I think what happened is that people shifted into another gear watching that day and looking at what was happening. It was just shock and horror, shock and awe as we were seeing this country being attacked. Now they begin to think, as they've said to me later, about the consequences of this, what it's going to mean beyond trying to find bodies and figure out what and how it happened, but how it's going to change our place in the world. And what I really believe, David, is that I think we're in an unmoored place in this country right now. There are so many deep divisions and people are trying to figure out where they fit into it and what's happened to the country. I think it began with 9-11 because 9-11 undid a sense of security. We realized how vulnerable we were in a modern world, followed immediately by a disastrous invasion of Iraq, followed immediately by the greatest recession since the Depression, followed by the housing crisis and the loss of jobs.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Everyone tells me it was very defining for them. It was not just after the plane hit, it was after the second tower was still. And I wrote about the greatest generation. I'd looked at World War II. I'd just written an essay, by the way, for the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And I remember thinking that morning, this is our Pearl Harbor. And intuitively, about an hour and 20 minutes or whatever was after I'd been on the air, and the country was in shock as we were in a way. We didn't know what was going to happen next. I just looked into the camera and said, this will change us. We're at war. And a lot of people said it was a huge wake-up call for them, that they began to rethink about what the future is going to be about. And I did it intuitively, David, but I think that's what reporters have to do.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “That was a higher wire. You did high wire. You didn't want to get it wrong and you didn't want to be so exuberant that you were losing sight of what your role was to be a professional correspondent and tell people what was going on.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Forget about the script. I'm just going to have to work my way through this. You just have to follow my verbal cues. And I must say that it went off pretty well. There's a BBC correspondent who teaches a course in television news who says, I use that performance by you as an example of what you have to do from time to time.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I was hugely astonishing not only that, I was the only correspondent in the world with live satellite capacity that night. Not even the Germans were able to do what we did. Certainly CBS and ABC didn't do it at that point, and I don't remember, I think CNN was going, but it didn't have satellite capacity then either. We had a worldwide exclusive of historic proportions. Berlin Wall is coming down, which is the symbol of the division between the East and the West. The Soviet Union is going to be over. And so the last thought I had was before I went on the air was, don't screw this one up, Broko. It's going to be around a long time. I just said to the producers back in New York.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So he broke off, went upstairs, locked himself in his office. We had the interview appointment with him, and my tiny, tiny producer just threw herself against the door not to let anybody in. We got from him the full details of what was going on and what this would mean, ran out. A bunch of print reporters were on the platform and I said, guys, it's over. This thing is coming down tonight. And because here it is. So I ran back. We had the satellite in place. And I went out to Brandenburg Gate and the West German students were on top of the wall getting hosed off periodically trying to encourage the issue to come over. And the E-Shermans were so wary they thought they'd get shot if they tried to get on top of the wall. And then finally one of them did, and that was the beginning of that dramatic, dramatic night.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So I said, look, I'll just pre tape this. And the next day I had this wonderful bureau chief in Frankfurt who said I've arranged an interview with Gunther Schabowski, who was the propaganda chief for the East. Tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday afternoon. So we went out and did a bunch of stuff. Go to the news conference where Shabowski is presiding. And he's droning on. And the East German press by then had become quite aggressive. And then at about five o'clock in the afternoon German time, somebody hands him a note and he says, oh, well, the Politburo has decided that members of the GDR can exit and re-enter through any of the portals of the wall. I remember had this German cameraman who'd been there forever and he turned to me and we later said it was like getting a message from Venus. We couldn't believe what we were hearing. And he didn't really know what he was saying, Shabowski didn't.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I was, and that was an amazing, agreeable set of circumstances. I was in New York and we had a really smart foreign editor in those areas. And Jerry came to me and he said, you know, there's nothing going on here. It's bubbling up in Berlin. Why don't you just go over to Berlin and spend a couple of days and we'll put that on the air? We didn't know the wall was going to come down. So I flew to Berlin and got in The next day easily into the eastern sector, which had not been allowed before, and started doing some interesting stories, but they were not worthy of a break-in of any kind. We had a satellite ordered in those days you had to order them.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Absolutely, and he did as he so almost maslessly could do, said just the right things about the family. I actually had a friend on board the challenger, Judy Rosnik, who had been my expert astronaut on earlier launches where they would send somebody from NASA over to work with us, and we would have bets on launch time and other things. And then I knew she was on board, and it was a hard, hard day”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Don Regan was the chief of staff, and he was briefing us on what the president was going to say that night. This was how bad his antenna were. Pap Buchanan got him, left the table, and hurrying, came back, and handed Regan a note, and he said, Regan said to us, oh, the challenger has blown up just shortly after liftoff at Cape Canaveral. Now back to empowering neighborhoods. Peter and I were knocking over furniture running through the White House press office. I could see John Palmer on the air with it. We got in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, trying desperately to flag down a car. And Peter turned to me again and said, where's Dan? And I said, I don't know, but we've got to get back to where we were. It was a long day. And it was one of those moments in which television, whatever else you think about it, does become the family hearth. Everybody gathers around it to find out what is going on in feel connected to it.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Let's start with the challenger explosion. I was in the White House that day getting briefed on the State of the Union address that was coming up that night. They would bring us down to Juneau and kind of give us a fill, the anchorman. And Peter and I were there. Dan was not there. And Peter said, where's Dan? I said, I think he just stayed in New York.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “No, she was as He didn't have a gang that would come down and sit around and have a drink with him. He would occasionally get tipped down and others, and then they'd tell stories, you know, the great old Irish stories. But that was a rarer occasion.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Right, and she saw this as an opportunity with others as well George Schultz and Baker and others for him to become this truly historic figure by making a deal with the Russians, and just little things that she would do. Now, I don't think you should do that. That same instinct that he had about I wouldn't take off my coat she had as well.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Huge huge I mean, the baker and everybody else that we make big decisions and then we'd run the pipeline through Nancy to make sure that she was on board with us. And he said her instincts.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So, about two months later, I get a call and say, okay, you're going to be invited to the state dinner for the president of Mexico. President, this is not on his radar screen. She's still seething about what you said. You have to figure out what you're going to say to her in the receiving line. So we go down, and Barth and I received in line, Merth's getting more nervous than I have figured out, I said, I haven't figured it out. I'll figure it out. So we get right up to her and spontaneously throw my hands back. She's going to look at me really still and laugh. And I say, Nancy, back to square one. And she laughed, threw her hands back, and said, back to square one, this is how good she was. The next day in my office in New York, from the White House photographer, arrived that picture of the two of us with Nancy saying, Back to Square one, Tom, love Nancy.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Well, they didn't, they didn't. One of the things that happened, I talked about this when misses Reagan died. Reagan had kind of built his career on the fact I had been a poor boy from the Midwest and I struggled to get to where I am. And so I gave an interview, unfortunately, to Mother Jones, in which I said, that's so overblown. He did have a difficult childhood. He got a really good job in Iowa and radio. He was a big star-making. And then in his mid-20s, he goes to California, becomes a contract player for Warner Bros. and making a lot of money. So this thing. Nancy got furious with me, and so Dev called me, and Baker called me and said, Stay out of her eyesight for a long time. And we'll let you know when it's safe to come back.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “And he just stiffs me the entire interview. Just doesn't give me any news at all. And I was furious when I called him up afterwards and I said, Strauss, even though we're friends, we have a professional relationship. And when I ask you a question, you have an obligation to try to answer it at least. He lowered his voice. He had called me Ashley, and he had said, Brok, everybody down here is telling us about telling me how well we did this more typical Bob Stroud. Yeah, right. And then I lit into him, and I finished and he lowered his voice as brokaw. You listen to me. I've taken that chicken program of yours, and that baby face of yours, and I've given it real maturity in the morning. Well, I was laughing so hard by the time he finished. I thought, how do you deal with Strauss?”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “We did a lot of news. We did a lot of news. This is a story that I think you'll appreciate. During the primary season when Jimmy Carter was challenged by Teddy Kennedy, I had that really wired because I knew Bob Strauss extremely well, who was with the president, and I knew Steve Smith was the family member working with Teddy. So I could kind of dial the two of them up in one way or the other. Carter did not win Pennsylvania going against Kennedy. It was a big blow to him. They thought they could put him away in Pennsylvania, and they couldn't. So the next morning I have Bob”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “With a very different kind of morning show, and they were doing really well, and we kind of got caught flat footed by that for two years. It was a struggle. We slipped into second place. And then when Reagan was running for president in that year, I went to every primary in the country. I was on the today show in the morning and then on special events at night, and then the next morning again, and we just smothered the coverage politically. And that's what I did. And we made a big comeback. And Jane Paulie had found her place then. We made a big recovery and it was really important.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “I did the Today Show, and they said, look, you're going to be the nightly news anchor at some point. You need to do this. We need you to do this. And I brought my White House instincts there. And in those days, because we had no competition, we could kind of do what we wanted. And I converted it into another platform for my political reporting. ABC at the same time was coming out with...”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “and lifts off. And one of his principal counselors turned to me and said, I'm going to go fishing. I always remember that why. I'm going to go fishing. I go back to the office. And David Brinkley says to me, did you think that he was going to pull out Derringer and shoot himself when he was up there? I said, what are you talking about? Because I was in the room seeing everything. And he said, Come down to the control room and take a look at the television picture. So on television isolation, you saw you penetrated Nixon's psyche at that point. It was on the screen. You didn't see the staff wandering around and people sitting around talking about what they were going to do. And it always was for me a very instructive lesson in the difference between television reality and real reality.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Well, we did a lead nightly news that night Anyhow And then there was this kind of surreal atmosphere in the White House about what was going to happen and why it was going to happen. My source in the congressional relations called me and he was in a terrible fury because he thought that he understood finally that he'd been a source of a lot of stuff that I'd been using. So everybody was at a very tense place. Now the day that we're in the East Room of the White House and the president's coming out with his family and makes that speech. And at the back of the room were a lot of staffers. I remember Ron Ziegler teasing Tom Gerald the ABC correspondent about a terrible haircut he'd gotten. Now here is the president of the United States about to resign and he's talking about Tom Gerald's haircut. And people were kind of hanging around. It was as if there was this enormous relief. It's over. And then Nixon comes out and makes that speech. Then he goes out to the helicopter and raises his hands in defiance in the victory sign.”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “So I called New York and I was very unhappy with the guy. I said, you've got to get a second source. I said, this is golden. I don't need a second source. He said, get a second source. So I thought, how do I do that? I called up Barry Goldwater Jr., who was a member of the House. And I'd known from California and I said, Barry, Tom, what's going on? I said, man, this is really something, isn't it? This thing about your dad coming down, yeah, man, I can't believe it. He called me today, and I said, thank you very much, hung up the phone. Hung up the phone, called New York back and said, I got it. I've got two sources. So we went on”

    2016-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 83 - Tom Brokaw · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source