Name: Tom Brokaw's 1st Appearance on Letterman, March 31, 1982
Uploaded: 2019-04-13T04:07:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Brokaw's 1st Appearance on Letterman, March 31, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Brokaw's 1st Appearance on Letterman, March 31, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-13. Transcript available.

When this documentary was made in 1963 by KMTV in Omaha, Nebraska, very few
people realized
that the reporter on it would someday be the highest paid newsman on television.
Good evening. It is hard to say where and when the United Nations had its
beginning.
In a real sense, the origins of any world body lie far back in history.
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.
This is actually a symbol of the honored prophet from the Omaha Press Club
presented to me March 19, 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.
Yeah, I thought. I was, uh...
I'm prepared to negotiate for the rights to that. There it is again, right
there.
You, uh...
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, I think...
No, no, I don't mean that, but, um...
I think it's real close, though.
No, you were a good looking...
You were a guy that would have been in the A.V. 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, uh...
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, uh, in Detroit a couple of years ago at the
Democratic Convention,
and I'm very excited about your new position, and, uh...
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.
One of the things...
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.
That would be as far as he goes, so far as I can tell.
Does, does...
I bet Paul Harvey makes more than all of us.
Paul Harvey might, yeah.
Uh, you're originally from South Dakota.
I am.
Now, those are, uh...
Does...
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.
Yeah.
I came from the heart of Indiana, and, 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, uh, and I think that's
going to
be helpful to me.
Is there, um, I assume it's a multi-year contract, is there any kind of
security there for you,
or is it...
Yeah, there, 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.
Yeah.
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 you,
that you measure your excellence, so I, 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.
Yeah.
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.
Right.
What was that like?
It's a little five-day package tour on one with the NBC Credit Levita 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 fired not too far from the
hotel.
The first night that I was there, there was a pretty severe firefight 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 M-16 on the floor above you firing down the street at
the same time.
Now, is it, 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, it's, most of the
parties are kind
of what we would think of as being right of center, more conservative than
there are the moderates.
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, 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'll tell you what the election, and I think that we probably didn't do as good
a job as we
should have done it, but explain 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.
And, 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 the people from the Netherlands were killed.
Yes, there 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, you know, 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 is a lot of anxiety buildup 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, right?
I understand our role in all of that.
It is not necessarily a measure of excellence, Albert.
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, you're money in the bank, and good luck to you.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you very much for being here.
This gentleman, of course, Mr. Tom Brokaw, the new writer, NBC News.
We'll be right back with Andy Aaron.