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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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “The day that right after the Supreme Court had ruled against Nixon and was on a Monday, everybody was just frozen in place. What's going to happen? I got a call from Bob Griffin at 5 o'clock in the afternoon saying, Tom, you've been very patient with me and very courteous. I'm coming down as part of a delegation tonight that includes Barry Goldwater, and we're going to tell the president he has no choice but to resign. That was a big damn deal at that moment.”

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

  2. “Well, I'll tell you about that last 30 hours. I've got some anecdotes I haven't talked about much before. One of the things I did as a White House correspondent and no one else was doing, I would slip out of there once a month and go up to the hill to see what they were saying. And I would see Bob Griffin, who was the number two Republican leader in the Senate.”

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

  3. “One of the tapes, and I had taken it home at 11 o'clock at night, and Meredith has always pointed out, it has stains on it because she had left a plate of fried chicken for me to eat in the kitchen. I would eat the fried chicken and pick this thing up and you can still see the stains from the fried chicken.”

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

  4. “Nixon said No, Miss Broclaw, you have your scholarship wrong. I know that I'm doing the right thing. He was so rattled by his exchange with Dan. And so it was kind of an uncertain. The next day, Ziegler and others in the White House came, he said, you don't talk to the president that way. I said, what way? They said, you don't challenge. I said, yes, you do. I mean, I have worked on the scholarship of this. What's the last thing that you've done about executive privilege and how hard you've worked to find out what the underlying premise of it is about not having executive privilege during impeachment? So those days were... Very heady and very tough and very tense. The University of Iowa was taking my papers and it turns out I've got a lot more than I realize and we recently found the transcript of”

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

  5. “Well, I thought it was going to make me tough to ask my next question, which is what I was coming up next. You know, Dan attracted a lot of heat, sometimes very innocently and other times deliberately. I mean, he led with his chin on a number of occasions, but he was a bulldog reporter. He was tough to compete against. So I'm now up next. I got the last question and I asked this question about legal scholars say, but by then the room was so deflated because of the exchange that they just heard that it didn't get a lot of attention. And then people began to think about it.”

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

  6. “We went to all the best legal experts, including conservative ones at Yale and Harvard, and they said, in times of impeachment, executive privilege goes away. So that was my question. And Dan got up just before I did, and that was the famous change. Dan rather got up before I did, and the famous exchange was booing and cheering in the room, and the president said, are you running for something, Mr. Weather? And Dan said, no, sir, are you? And the room then turned on Dan. Sucked all the oxygen out of the room.”

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

  7. “money stream coming out of the Today Show. There were no competition. They're just making money by showing up in the morning. So I went back and I was there for the end of it as well. And then I didn't realize this, but somebody has written a story. I was the last correspondent to ask Nixon a question. At a White House press conference. And I'll give you, it's kind of an interesting story. We're going down to Houston where he was going to be talking to the National Association of Broadcasters. And we were told, as the White House press corps, that really the question should mostly come from the local reporters who will be gathered there as well. I'd been working hard on a story that Nixon kept saying that he had executive privilege he didn't have to give up his papers.”

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

  8. “Oh, yeah. Actually, they tried to get me to come to today before Watergate was resolved, and I wouldn't do it. I just said there's no way I'm leaving the story. Also, in those days, people forget this. The host of the today show how to read commercials. I said, there's no way I'm going to do this. You know, sell Alpo. That's not who I am. And they got it, but they had such a kind of a...”

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

  9. “He was oppressor and he said, you know, we thought you'd bring a fresher point of view, but you just bought into all this Washington liberal. I said, I'm just covering what you guys are doing on a daily basis. And he said, no, we were at lunch at a very popular restaurant at that time. And we're having this very strong exchange that Maitre D brings over a message from somebody in the cafe, and Ron grabs it before I can see it, and it turns out it's from Ethel Kennedy, and note says, so I guess we won't be seeing you at Hickory Hill for dinner tonight. It was a great moment in my life. I told you, Broken. I said, look, I've got pals on the other side as well, Ron.”

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

  10. “Big story, and I dealt with him constantly. And so I knew the people around him, and I also knew how they felt about him. They could never quite figure him out that he had this enormous ambition and this great political instinct and then this extraordinary dark side that nobody could ever completely penetrate. So my read on him was just that. And when I got there, I think that the White House mistakenly thought, oh, well, Tom is from California. He knows all it'll be okay. And about three months in, Ron Ziegler said, let's go to lunch. And we go to lunch. And he said.”

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

  11. “I've been a student of his for some time. You know, he had that, he did have a big California connection. I knew Bob Haldeman before he became Bob Haldeman because in California he was the UCLA alumni representative on the board of regents and was involved with Reagan in the firing of Clark Kerr of the university system.”

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

  12. “You know, there's a better way to find out what was going on, and that would be the Congressional Relations staff because they would have to carry the water up to the hill. So I went through it. There was a guy from South Dakota who was on the Congressional Relations Staff. He'd been a staffer for Karl Mart or for one of the others, and I took him to lunch, took him to the White House correspondence center. And I'm prepared to tell you it was the best pipe I ever had in politics. I knew everything that they were saying to the hill and what they were doing and why they were doing it. I had stuff on the earth that my colleagues said, where'd you get that?”

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

  13. “No, I didn't, and I wasn't cocky. I just, first of all, I knew a lot of the people in the Nixon White House had come from California. Right. So I had sources. And then I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone before. Everybody was playing with conventional sources.”

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

  14. “Right for stealing money to buy silverware. I mean, it was this cheap state house politics that he was involved in. So that happened right away. Then we have the seven-day war or six-day war in Israel. And that blew up, and Nixon was trying to handle that. Stuff was going on all around you. And then I broke a couple of pretty significant stories as the White House correspondent the first three months. The other part of the White House press corps shut up about me at that point.”

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

  15. “I get to Washington and the White House press corps and its genius wrote a letter to Dick Wall, the President of NBC News, and said, you cannot make this man a White House correspondent. He's come from California where he's done a lot of local reporting. These are the same people who are having their pocket specified by Richard Nixon every day and their clocks clean by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. And I got there, and because there was so much chaos at the beginning. I hadn't been there 20 minutes and the agnew thing happened. He had a resign that he was under investigation.”

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

  16. “Well, that was the other thing that was clear. They said, look, you're going to have a big long career here, and there are going to be a lot of stations along the way, and you've got to be our White House correspondent. I had a big reputation in California modestly for covering politics and doing well. The LA Times reprinted stuff that I did. My best friends were print reporters. And so I got to Washington”

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

  17. “We can assume a lot more. We'd been in there about six months, and they said, you've got to come east. I knew I had to do that. And so I arrived in the summer. Well, if you want to.”

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

  18. “Yeah, and there had been John Chancellor used to say, you've got to come east and be a grown up Tom because I would do all these things and then go back to my good life in California. And Meredith had a wonderful life out there. She was very well known in the community for the work that she was doing. And we just built a house on Venice Beach. And by the way, that house, including the lot, cost $110,000. I don't want to know how much it's worth today, by the way.”

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

  19. “Well, I guess there Watergate had kind of been underway and NBC was saying, you've got to come back and cover Watergate for us. And I had a great wife in California. We had just built a house.”

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

  20. “Woolly Brown was one of his lieutenants and there was a guy by the name of Moretti who, they had this whole cabre of people. And I saw Jess after about six months and we were in his office and he said, this SOB is a lot smarter than we realized. But we can do business with him because he cuts out all the political chaff when we go in there. And then we just sit down. What can we get done here? And we could get things done. And that was a real insight into Reagan's kind of...”

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

  21. “He had great intuition, David. At the beginning, I wasn't sure he was equipped to govern California, but there were a couple of things that I saw he got very good people around him. Mike Deaver was a perfect example of that, but the others that he had next to him as well. And he never overplayed his hand. He'd been in office about six months when Jess Unru, who was the Take No Prisoners head of the Democratic Party in Sacramento. He was Speaker of the Assembly. Very, very smart guy.”

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

  22. “Terry Brown's father, and in fact Jerry had just gotten out of the seminary at that point, and we all became part of a cadre of young reporters and political operatives, Republicans and Democrats alike, spaghetti dinners on Saturday night and talk about what was going on. So it was a very exciting time.”

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

  23. “Beyond exhilarating, I got to know both sides well. I'm so in touch. We've talked about this with Stu Spencer, who is the genius behind the Reagan campaign and organizing it. Spencer Roberts was the name of the firm. He was a guy who had come out of the war and was working in county government doing recreational stuff that interested in politics. Got to know him right away, rode the buses with Reagan around Orange County and other places. When he was a very uncertain candidate because he had been so protected in show business that he'd never been exposed to going out there and doing it on your own, so it was always carefully managed. Pat Brown, as a personality, was irresistible.”

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

  24. “I didn't know anything about negotiation. I just didn't want to go to Los Angeles. And then they jacked everything up. They gave me more money than I thought possible to earn as a correspondent, and they gave me the Sunday Night News and LA, and they said you're going to be our principal backup for network reporting. And so we went. And I got there at the peak of the change.”

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

  25. “Yeah, six months after I got to Atlanta, I've been on Nightly News so much that they came and said, we want to hire you and come to Los Angeles. I mean, that was beyond my wildest expectation. I flew out and refused the job. It was in the middle of a smog alert of some kind. I don't want to raise my family here. I wanted to be a Washington correspondent. So I went back to Atlanta and they thought I was being a very clever negotiator.”

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

  26. “And Bernice and I can. And the next night, Vernon is serving the soup course. And the banker announces to his family, you know, Vernon, I've never had an N-word work for me who could read before. That's where we were at that time. So there he was in the house, good relationship in terms of personal relationships, but occupying a separate, separate place altogether.”

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

  27. “They were daily and the hostility, you know, the interesting thing to go from Omaha, deeply segregated city where there's no relationship between the blacks and the whites down to the south where there was some relationship. Maids were in the homes. People were doing the maintenance lawn work around the houses and that kind of thing. But then the line was drawn at some point. You know, Vernon Jordan tells a great story about coming back from college and working for the big white banker in the summertime as a waiter in his house. And the banker found Vernon in the library reading one. I said, what are you doing here, Vernon? He said, well, I go to college. And he said, you go to college?”

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

  28. “And I was a white guy, so that wasn't going to happen to him. But the difference was not just pigmentation, but also his beliefs. I later called him, and I was writing about that time, and I said, Julian, I've never seen anybody more cool, calm, and organized than you were. And he said, Broke, I'll tell you how cool I was. I went down to this holding room and I broke out in hives from the bottom of my feet to my neck.”

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

  29. “He was a leader. But at any rate, the story became that the state legislature in Georgia decided not to cede him, that he wouldn't get that seat. And the federal government got involved. He had FBI protection. I was standing in the Capitol the day that he was going to try to take his seat. And he came walking down the hall with a court owner of FBI agents around him. And by then we'd gotten to know each other well enough. He kind of looked over and nodded. We're exactly the same age. And it was for me a great lesson in moral strength that he was standing up to it. We were both 25 years old.”

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

  30. “At the height of it, and when Dr. King would come back and preach at Ebenezer Baptist, I got to know his father. In him? And him. I didn't get to know him. He's kind of a distant figure. I heard him preach. I got to know Andy in those days and other people. And I was on duty the night that the SNCC came out with a statement that they were going to be sympathetic to the goals of the Viet Cong. And Joy and Bon Was just elected to the state legislature at that point. And it blew up the South and especially Atlanta. Julie and I were the same age. I didn't know him, but I got to know him during the course of that week because he was under enormous pressure to deny.”

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

  31. “I was 25 when they hired me, and I got to Atlanta, did the 11 o'clock news, and every night after the news I was on an airplane, Haneyville, Alabama or America's Georgia.”

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

  32. “One of his friends that I was on the Aran Omaha and I was doing the morning news, but that I had a certain qualification hired me to do the 11 o'clock news in Atlanta.”

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

  33. “So in the 64 election, the station was owned by a seed company and they had a twin-engine airplane. He'd say, something's going on. Get the plane and go over there and come back and do a report for us. Hubert Humphrey comes back to South Dakota for the first time since he's nominated for vice president Tom. Get up there. You know the state. You probably know a lot of people around him do that. And it was very rarely rich experience for me. And in those days, we would be a kind of outpost for Huntley Brinkley. We would feed them stories. So my reputation began to take hold at a certain level. And then in 1964, I got this magical calm late at night from the news director of a huge station in Atlanta called WSB. It was the biggest station in the south. It was in the thick of the civil rights movement. They were constantly feeding stuff to Huntley Brinkley. And he had heard through some...”

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

  34. “There's nothing more important Then I went from there or got married and got a job, an entry level job, an Omaha, Nebraska for $100 a week in the news department had a wonderful news director. He hired me. He said, I've never had anybody walking here who knew as much about politics as you did. And we needed somebody like that on the staff.”

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

  35. “It was a breakthrough. We had never dated because the line on our friends among the two of us was that you didn't date because she thought you fooled around too much and you thought she didn't fool around enough. But we understood each other. I did a big turnaround and one day in the library she came over and said look, Tom, I went too far, and I said no, I really needed to hear that, and especially from you. She said, well, let's go have a cup of coffee. So we went and had a cup of coffee. And one year later, we were married. Now, that stunned her friends and my friends. No one saw this coming. And it's been an astonishingly rich life for the two of us. And still deeply in love and, you know, have a robust appetite for going out there and taking on life.”

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

  36. “And I did And that began to turn me around. Then I could commute to the University of South Dakota. But the most important thing that happened was that I had this great friend in high school by the name of Meredith Ald, who was all everything. She's a doctor's daughter. She was a straight A student. She was an all-state course. She was a girls nation. When I was Boy State Governor, by the way, and she had the best kind of take on life. She wrote me this devastating letter in the course of all that, saying, I want to hear from you again. We weren't really dating, but we were great pals. She was breaking off our friendship because of my behavior and said, no one can understand what you're doing. Your parents are terribly disappointed with good reason. And I'm just not interested in having a relationship with you anymore. Big turnar”

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

  37. “Well, my dad did something really important. I was going to go to California and get a job. I didn't know what that meant, but I was going to go to California. He stood in the kitchen doorway. And one of the things you did not do in life was take on my father physically. I knew better. And so I kind of hung out and got a couple of, I could always get a job in a radio station, for example. And then one morning, my mother and I always got up and watched the Today show together before she went to work. And there was a guy on the television station in Sioux City, Iowa, who was god-awful during the morning cut-ins. And she said, you're so much better than he is. I'm driving you to Sioux City today. You're going to get his job.”

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

  38. “Yeah, my mother's analysis was they were, my parents were just befuddled by it because neither of them had gone to calories. It's safe for me to go to college, and then I'm down there burning it at both ends of the day and dropped out of Iowa and went back to South Dakota, had another raucous year, and dropped out of school altogether.”

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

  39. “While I was through high school, and then I came out of high school a real whiz kid, and I went immediately off the road at the University of Iowa. My line has been, I had a double major, pi phi's and delta gammas. They still have a booth reserved in the biggest bar in town now with a brass black. It says permanently reserved for Tom Broco, who spent most of his freshman year here in 1958. But I was working at the radio station there. I was the outstanding ROTC cadet. When I kind of locked down and did things, they had an accelerated writing program for freshman honors students. And I went in there and aced it. The rest of the stuff I just didn't show up for much. There was just too many other temptations.”

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

  40. “And it was filled with drama, and it was the first real kind of. Overwhelming television news experience in politics. We had Huntley and Brinkley who were so good at what they did, a new generation now moving into the White House and running against each other. It was beyond exciting, even for those of us out there in the Great Plains. And my friends now say, I remember you thinking that you could go to work for NBC News as a political correspondent. I'd say, yeah, well, that's what I wanted to do.”

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

  41. “I think that the difference between us, for example, and Great Britain, you know, we don't have that class system. You don't have to be in a position from the time of birth on. And I had good fortune along the way. The night of the 1960 election was for me a turning point. I've stayed up until nine in the morning to watch everything that was going on. And at the end of that cycle, I thought, that's what I want to do. I want to be a correspondent for NBC and I want to cover politics. Wow.”

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

  42. “Do you want to be a newsman? My friends all say, look, we could see where you were going. You were always interested in public affairs and politics. And it was a town with a very high degree of intellectual accomplishment. We had, in the three years I was at that high school, we had two people go to Harvard on Fulbright Scholarships, one to West Point, two to the Air Force Academy, and these were just the guys. If the women had been in the pool, then we would have blown the lights out because they were the brightest people in town. So there was a sense that you could take on big challenges and accomplish them.”

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

  43. “You know, I don't know, quite honestly. I mean, because here I was completely new in this town, and people still talk about it. God, you came in here as if you own the place. And they kind of heard about me at the radio station and said, you know, we'd like to do this teenage disc jockey show. Why don't you come up here and try out? So, with my then girlfriend, we ran the show, and then that led to a succession of jobs at that station in the summertime, and so on.”

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

  44. “Well, because everybody went to sleep that Dewey was going to win that election. Out in South Carolina, they didn't see the little guy with the mustaches, their salvation. And I was eight years old, and it was the beginning of the mother and I would talk about politics from that time on, about what was going on in the world. So that was my foundation, David. I was a Gabby kid. I was interested in what was going on in these working class towns where we lived. Then we moved to a town where they had a radio station. And I was 15, and I arrived in town and within two months I was on the air at night after basketball practice doing a teenage disc jockey show and reading the news.”

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

  45. “And she wanted to be a journalist, oddly enough, graduated from high school at 16, but couldn't afford to go to college. It cost $100 a year. And they married, and it was a real yin and yang relationship. Dad was can do, go out and earn the money, very sensitive to people who, for one reason or another, had gone through his experience. I mean, for example, I grew up in a household in white bread America in which the biggest, three biggest heroes were Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Joe Lewis. Not because my dad was a sports fan, because he knew what they had to do to get to where they were. My mother, on the other hand, was a reader of books and of someone who paid a lot of attention to what was going on in the world, got the news through radio in those days. My earliest experience with politics is my mother woke me up on the morning of Harry Truman's election and said we won. And it was almost a defiant proclamation”

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

  46. “Well, I think it's the American story. I'm not unique. I think so many people have started just as I did and made their way to the social, political, and cultural and financial capital of the world in New York City or to Washington, D.C. or wherever. In my case, I had a very working class upbringing. My dad was really abandoned by his family in the third grade, went out to kind of live on his own, was taken in by a Swedish immigrant who taught him how to drive a team of horses to liver cold, dig a well, and then he made a transition to heavy equipment as a construction operator. And he was a genius at it. He just had an intuitive touch. And he courted my mother, who was at the opposite end of the scale. She was from an Irish-American family, very bookish. They were all college-educated. But unfortunately, they were in the farm business at the height of the Depression, and it went under. But my dad pursued mother.”

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