Name: Tom Brokaw Anchors The Nightly News | Letterman
Uploaded: 2022-02-06T11:06:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Brokaw Anchors The Nightly News | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Brokaw Anchors The Nightly News | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-06. Transcript available.

That, of course, is Mr. Tom Brokaw, and next Monday, Paul, he becomes the anchorman
of
the NBC Nightly News.
Please welcome, with a different haircut, I hope, Tom Brokaw.
You have what appears to be a shepherd's crook.
What it is is actually a symbol of the honored prophet from the Omaha Press
Club presented
to me March 19th, 1982.
It's the first time I'd ever gotten the hook right after the speech.
Well, congratulations.
That's a high honor, I'm sure.
That film that you showed just moments ago, all prints had been burned and
purchased with
this new high salary that you're about to ask me about, I thought.
I'm prepared to negotiate for the rights to that.
There it is again.
Right there.
I was never that young or that serious.
You don't, you know, it's not as stupid looking as it could have been.
Oh.
No, no.
I don't mean that.
I think it's real close, though.
No, you were a good looking, you were a guy that would have been in the AV club
in high
school, and that's what that looks like, you know?
You know, but that's not mine, I look like a complete duck.
You look pretty good there.
All right, let's talk about, I'm very excited about, I've been a big fan of
yours on the
Today Show and before that when you were, I guess, a Washington correspondent,
and I thought
you were tremendous in Detroit a couple of years ago at the Democratic
Convention.
And I'm very excited about your new position, and let's talk about the dough
since you brought
it up.
Big money here.
I brought it up because I read it right here.
Yeah.
It's right here.
Yeah, a lot of money.
The highest paid newscaster in history.
Well, that's what somebody said.
I'm not sure that's true.
Well, who would be even close?
Well, there are a lot of folks making big money in this business these days.
It would be you, Gabe Pressman, and that's it, I guess.
As far as he goes, so far as I can tell.
I bet Paul Harvey makes more than all of us.
Paul Harvey might, yeah.
You're originally from South Dakota.
I am.
Now, those are, how does that make you feel, having a lot of money?
Well, go ahead and complete that thought.
What kind of roots are those?
Well, I think they're similar to mine.
I came from the heart of Indiana, and well, how does that make you feel?
It's plain folks' country.
Well, I think it helps, actually, because I think that you grow up not
measuring your
life by money, and I think that there are other values that are out there that
have become
very important to you, and I think that if you have those values kind of firmly
fixed
in your life, your compass point's pretty well set, I think that the money can
come along
and not change those values, not corrupt you, if you will, and I think that's
going to
be helpful to me.
Is there, I assume it's a multi-year contract, is there any kind of security
there for you,
or is it?
There is all that.
Well, look, let me just say one thing about the money.
When I went from making $5,000 a year in Omaha to making $10,000 a year in
Atlanta, I thought
I'd struck it rich.
I mean, given the fact where I came from in South Dakota and so on, where
people don't
make a lot of money, some of them do, obviously. But where money, again, is not
the way that
you measure your excellence. So after that, I was just grateful for whatever
came along.
I've always liked the work. I am paid a lot of money. A lot of us are these
days. But
after all, well, maybe this one is. I'm not sure. These networks are not
pension funds for
widows and orphans, but maybe NBC is. I'm not sure about it. But the fact is
that a lot of money
is generated from the newscasts that we do and that kind of thing. And what you
just hope
that you can keep your eye fixed on those qualities that brought you into this
profession in the
first place and not let all that dough get in the way of it. You can only wear
one suit
at a time, I think. Eat one meal at a time. I still don't hire yachts and go to
the Caribbean.
I go backpacking instead and do those kinds of things that have always
interested me.
Speaking of going places, you just got back from a really strange, well, maybe
not strange,
but a really interesting situation in El Salvador. What was that like?
It's a little five-day package tour. I won with the NBC credit, but they had a
drawing.
You get to go to El Salvador for five days. Quite seriously, it is a tiny
country, but
it is important not just for the people who live there, but for all of us in
terms of what's
happening in Central America. It's about as complicated a political situation
as I have ever encountered.
And I think all the reporters who have been there feel that more strongly every
day. There
is a pervasive fear and a kind of pervasive terror about El Salvador that's
almost indescribable.
People disappear from the streets. They're snatched from the streets by right-wing
death squads,
by security forces. The guerrillas are at work a lot. In the few days that I
was there, I don't
know, untold numbers of people were killed. It was routine to wake up with
automatic weapons
fire not too far from the hotel. The first night that I was there, there was a
pretty severe
fire fight all night long, four blocks down the street from my room, and I
thought that
it sounded close. And my cameraman, who was in the next room, or in the next
building actually,
he said it sounded close because there was a guy with an M16 on the floor above
you firing
down the street at the same time.
To somebody going in there, if I were to go there tomorrow, would it be readily
apparent
to me who were the good guys and who were the bad guys?
No. It's not readily apparent to me who were the good guys and the bad guys.
Not that I'm more
discerning than you are, but it's very hard to sort it out. The political
situation from
a structured point of view, most of the parties are kind of what we would think
of as being
right of center, more conservative. Then there are the moderates. Then they're
in the hills,
there's not just one band of rebels, although they operate under one umbrella
now. There
are five or six different factions with different heroes. Kim Il-Sung, the
president of North Korea,
North Korea is the hero to one. Others are inclined toward Castro. Others are
kind of Maoist. Others
are just pure Marxist-Leninist. So it's a very complicated situation.
And again, briefly, maybe it can't be done briefly, but the election, what did
the results
of that mean?
I think that we probably didn't do as good a job as we should have done about
explaining
what was going on. What they were electing was not a president. They were electing
a congress,
if you will, a constituent assembly, they called it. Sixty people who would
come together, they
would name an interim president and fix a date for an election down the road a
ways. Well,
what was important was that the parties or the party that had the control of
that constituent
assembly would effectively control El Salvador. But it's still a while before
they have still
another election. I mean, one of the lesser known candidates can be the interim
president,
and then they have an election a year from now, and the people of El Salvador
can elect still
somebody else a president. So we're going to be there a while.
And of course, last night on the news, there was an NBC video crew that was
actually fired
upon us.
I was coming out of El Salvador at the time that happened. They were on the
phone when
I was... I thought that was a good time to leave. Well, they're firing at us
now. I think
I'll go home, I said to my brave camera crew.
Was there ever an explanation for this? I know a couple of weeks ago that
people from the Netherlands
were killed.
Yes, they were. There was no official explanation. We immediately protested the
army. There is a good
deal of resentment on the part of many military men, and also the far more
conservative political
figures of the press, because they don't think that we're doing a fair or
responsible job
of reporting what's going on. They think, in effect, that we're too sympathetic
to the
rebel forces. And it's a very emotional climate down there.
It's not a good place to be if you're going to live there, but I mean, it's
even tenuous
if you're dangerous...
If you're just in there temporarily. And there's a lot of anxiety build up on
the reporters
who have to spend a month, six weeks in there. And they confess that. They just
say, "Look,
it's not fun to be here."
So you're back now, and you won't be traveling much, I guess, because you begin
Monday.
I'm going to become a gentleman journalist next week, yes.
Are you going to miss that? Are you going to miss being in Washington, being in
El Salvador,
here and there?
I will miss that, because I do get a kind of a twitch if I don't buckle up
after about
two days, you know, get on the airplane and go. But at the same time, I've
looked forward
to this kind of an assignment for a long time. And the time will come, we hope
in the not-too-distant
future, when Roger and I will each be able to get away on selected stories to
do them.
That's the attraction of having a two-man anchor.
Yeah. We talked lightly about the money that you're going to be paid for this
in the beginning,
but people may not understand the kind of pressure that you're walking into
here. Maybe it's not
a great deal of pressure, but every minute that you're on the air now is going
to be closely monitored.
Is that bothering you?
Well, yes. I keep saying to people, well, don't try to measure the success of
this program
by the ratings of the first week. There is this kind of fascination that we
help feed
with the ratings. I understand our role in all of that. It is not necessarily a
measure of excellence,
however. What we're going to try to do is a very good news program first, and
we hope that that will
attract the ratings. We expect that that will be the case. Yeah, I'll know
better next week.
I think what Dan Rather underwent in the last year, for example, probably took
the heat off
the rest of us a lot. I think that was a very difficult situation that he
stepped into.
Yeah, that's amazing. As far as I'm concerned, your money in the bank, and good
luck to you.
Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for being here.
This gentleman, of course, Mr. Tom Brokaw, the new anchor man for NBC News.
We'll be right back with Andy Aaron.