to them. It was like a fraternity and a sorority; they all knew each other. One night at a party, a director asked, “My God, who is that woman?” He was looking over my shoulder at Meredith, and Shirley MacLaine said, “That’s his wife.” That was the kind of familiarity they had with us. Meredith and I grew up together, so I sort of took for granted what a showstopper she was, but that’s happened wherever we’ve gone. Same thing when we went to Washington; everyone wanted to know who she was, so Town & Country featured her as a new woman in Washington.
PHOTOGRAPHY PROVIDED BY RON GALELLA, LTD.
MT: Your career spans so much history with so many amazing highs. When you look back, what stands out in your mind? TB: A friend of mine called it the Brokaw luck story. He said, “I’ve never known anybody who was just at the right place at the right time like you were.” And that’s true. I moved to Yankton from this little working-class town. I worked at the radio station, which gave me a real lift — to be in this larger town with real standing in the state of South Dakota. That raised my visibility, I suppose. I don’t believe I had this coming because I am who I am; I was a lucky guy a lot of the time. I went to the University of Iowa, which was a big deal, and I went off the rails. I dropped out after a year, went back to South Dakota, dropped out there after a year. I was completely afloat. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wasn’t interested in going to class every day, and I was trying to figure out what the hell I was about. Meredith ran into my mother, who was befuddled by what I was going through. And Meredith got so pissed off that I had put my mother in this position that she wrote me a devastating letter saying, “I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to hear from you again. I don’t know what you’re doing with your life and neither do your friends, so don’t bother to call.” That was a big wake-up call. So I did a big turnaround. I was working full-time at a television station in Sioux City, Iowa, which was in commuting distance of the University of South Dakota. So I was getting up at 5 in the morning, driving up to the university and going to class from 8 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon, racing back to the television station, working until midnight, getting up, and doing it all over again. Meredith took notice and asked me to go for a cup of coffee. A year later, we were getting married, and the two most surprised groups in South Dakota were her friends and my friends. They didn’t see it coming. Somebody asked her, “Why Tom?” She said, “I don’t know that we’ll ever have any money, but it’s going to be
a lot of fun and it’s going to be interesting.” It worked out. MT: It’s been pretty interesting. Your latest book is about the fall of Richard Nixon. What can we learn from our country’s political past? TB: I was just writing about this yesterday. I think the most extraordinarily powerful tool and the most destructive development in modern life is the current media. Everybody has a voice — and I think it’s great for people to have a voice — but there’s no way to verify what’s true and what’s not. It has no context; it’s just a 24/7 rage about what’s pissing people off across the board from the left to the right. It could be a unifying factor, but it’s a dividing factor, frankly. And that really troubles me as much as anything. I don’t know how we get beyond that. I don’t know what leader can come along and say, “Look, we’re all in this together. We’ve got to find a way to work together.” Ronald Reagan was the best example of that in my lifetime. I was not a huge fan when he first started running, not for president but for governor of California. Then I saw how skilled
“This is the most unsettling time I’ve ever experienced in national politics.”
he was as governor at putting together that big, big state. When he ran for president, I said, “Watch; he knows how to put people together.” He had a really core set of beliefs, but he also had an engaging way about him. He had been a movie star. He knew how you had to win people with your personality and how you went about your life. They would be for you or against you, and he had people for him. He also had the courage to have a really good staff. My friend Jim Baker was his chief of staff. We don’t have a Reagan out there now who can pull it together. Bill Clinton also had that capability, by the way, but then he got tangled up with Monica, which took a fair amount out of his résumé. We need people who see the presidency as a coveted prize but who understand that the objective is to bring the country together for common goals and to outline those goals in a way so people can see why it’s important that we do this. And when we do it, everybody gets credit; everybody gets a part of it. I’ve always recommended people read Reagan’s diaries; he recorded diaries every night. When you read them, you realize how intuitive he was. He once got in a big fight about tax cuts with Jack Kemp, who was a very strong conservative. And Reagan wrote in his diary that night, “I would rather get 75% of what I want than demand 100% and go down with the flags flying.” I’ve always thought that summed up who he was. He gets 75%, he can go forward. He holds out for 100%, they go under. And not enough people understood that about him. Baker and I have talked about this a lot because he was there every day. The other thing about Reagan was that he came in every morning with a well-organized set of objectives that he would work toward that day. And he would listen to people if they’d say, “Mr. President, I don’t think that’s going to work.” He’d say, “Well, tell me why.” Then if they could make the case, fine. But if he felt strongly about something and they couldn’t make the case, he’d say, “Well, I’m sorry, guys; we’re going to go my way.” And as Baker has said, 90% of the time he was right. MT: How optimistic are you that there’s someone like that, man or woman, in our near future? TB: Well, this is obviously the most unsettling time I’ve ever experienced in national politics, and I’m not saying that just from an ideological point of view. I’m not saying that as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m saying that as a journalist and as a citizen and as a grandfather. If you strip away all the chaos that’s going on in Washington — I am all over this country, and the country still works. It is very instructive for
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