The Time of Our Lives (24 page)

THE PRESENT

The rapid rise of social networking on computers and smartphones is another sign of how swiftly our world is changing. At first I dismissed it as an electronic form of junior high note passing and wondered why I had to have new “friends” letting me know their latest thoughts. After all, I have trouble enough keeping up with the long roll call of email that demands my attention every waking hour, wherever I am in the world.

The popularity of social networking should not be a surprise in a culture where everyone seems to be surgically attached to some kind of cellphone all day and into the night. One study determined that 90 percent of Americans with cellphones were constantly within three feet of them. A Stanford law student stopped me as I was walking across that campus and said, “Mr. Brokaw, you’ve written about other generations. What about our generation? We seem to be redefining the meaning of ‘friend’ without understanding what real friendship means.”

In a play on Descartes’s timeless observation “I think, therefore I am,” we now are a society that proclaims “I’m online, therefore I am.”

No one understood that better than Barack Obama, who became the first truly online all-star presidential candidate. He had profiles on fifteen different social networks, including not just Facebook but also networks tying together Asian, Hispanic, African, and other ethnic groups.

At its peak the My.BarackObama.com website had eight and a half million monthly visitors—that is, prospective voters who went to the trouble of finding his website and exploring it.

Just as the television ad once changed the presidential campaign, the digital age with all of its current and future variations means that no prospective voter can escape detection. Beyond politics and commerce, it’s difficult to quantify just how much of the messaging is at best vapid. Twitter accounts don’t come with a twaddle alert.

But I have become persuaded that social networking represents something deeper than just staying in touch. Consciously and unconsciously it is an acknowledgment that the world is a more complicated place and it is better to have several minds working on a problem than one. Pick any area of everyday life and compare it to the routines of, say, thirty years ago.

Grocery shopping is now an exercise in reading the fine print on the content label: Can it really have that much sodium? Is this bottle made from recycled material and can it be redeemed? Gone are the days when you went to the family physician and did whatever he said. Should I buy the hybrid car or wait for the electric plug-in? Why can’t I get into this public school? I live here!

Now, go to the next level of decision making. Do I wait until I am forty to have a baby? Will I ever be able to pay off this second mortgage or student debt or pay for my mother who needs live-in care at age ninety-one and whose doctor says she’ll probably live to be one hundred? What’s the family plan if there’s another terrorist attack?

THE PAST

I often think back to my days as a waterfront instructor at a Boy Scout summer camp.

When it was time for a group swim, the buddy system went into effect. You swam with a buddy and watched each other. When I blew the whistle, every pair of swimmers had to raise joined hands so I could see that no one was missing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but life is richer and problems are easier if you have a buddy.

There are manifold examples, large and small, through history, none more telling than Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt leading the Western alliance to victory in World War II, two men from aristocratic families with a common capacity to mobilize their spoken language as a fighting force. They also shared a ravenous appetite for the challenges of public service when the stakes for their countries could not have been higher.

President Roosevelt is said to have commented to Churchill at the beginning of their joint effort to defeat Germany and Japan, “I love sharing this decade with you.”

In turn, they were married to strong, smart women who knew when to nudge their spouses back from their excesses, not always successfully but often just enough to keep their reputations intact and their policies on track.

In my lifetime there have been so many examples of partners not just complementing each other but creating a whole greater than their two parts. What would Hewlett have been without Packard, Huntley without Brinkley, McCartney without Lennon, Woodward without Bernstein? Butch without Sundance, Redford without Newman?

And vice versa for all.

Partners range from the laboratories to the playing fields.

Francis Crick and James Watson worked together to crack the DNA code, one of the most important scientific achievements, ever. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at Stanford and teamed up to create Google. Joe Montana was my idea of the best all-time National Football League quarterback, but without Jerry Rice, who knows?

Fred Astaire was a portrait of grace on his own but with Ginger Rogers in his arms he soared beyond whatever the choreographer had in mind. As my former NBC colleague Linda Ellerbe so pointedly put it, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did and she did it in high heels while dancing backward.” (The late Texas governor Ann Richards used the quote so often she got credit for originating it, but it was Linda’s first.)

This lesson in the importance of productive partnerships and the often dissonant qualities that produce them came into personal focus for me during one of the most difficult assignments of my reporting career: Watergate.

I was the White House correspondent for NBC News, all but surgically attached to the White House press room from the summer of 1973 to August 1974, when Richard Nixon became the first American president forced to resign the office.

It was a tense and demanding assignment for a journalist and nothing short of a constitutional crisis for the country. America was transformed into a vast courtroom filled with citizens suddenly confronted with the possibility their president was a crook, despite his emphatic denials. The legal arguments were often complex and the political battles were nothing short of hand-to-hand combat for the most powerful piece of real estate in the world, the Oval Office.

I’d arrive at the press room early and leave late every day that we weren’t traveling to Russia, Paris, Florida for the weekend, or Nixon rallies in Arizona and at Walt Disney World. To many in those audiences, still faithful to the president, the White House press corps, not Richard Nixon, was the enemy. Others wanted us to simply proclaim him guilty and throw him out.

Sometime in the fall of 1973 I struck up a friendship with a fellow Midwesterner, Fred Zimmerman of
The Wall Street Journal
by way of Kansas City. We were an unlikely pair. He was a chess whiz and a laconic newspaperman. I was a gregarious television journalist without the patience for the intricacies of chess. We shared a passion for cool jazz and the American literature of our generation. We sat side by side on long trips and ended long days with Scotch on the rocks.

The friendship evolved. We compared notes daily and shared information and impressions. On rare lunch outings we’d order hamburgers and chew over the latest White House machinations. Often I’d say, “Fred, what they did today just doesn’t make sense.” Fred would look up from his burger, arch an eyebrow, and say, “Until you remember he’s guilty.”

Oh, yeah, that. But we never allowed each other to go into print or on the air with that proclamation. We knew not just the presidency was at stake but also the reputation of American journalism. Fred had my back and I had his.

Fred’s reputation as a meticulous reporter helped get him through an ordeal that was at once hilarious and bizarre. Shortly after President Nixon told a Walt Disney World audience in the fall of 1973, “I’m not a crook,” he went outside to work the rope line of lined-up spectators who were hoping to shake his hand.

One was a burly Air Force sergeant there with his daughter. In a completely Nixonian moment, the president leaned over, greeted the little girl, and then looked up into the lights at the sergeant and said, “Are you the girl’s mother?” The startled Air Force veteran said, “No, I’m her father!”

Nixon, now realizing his mistake, said, “Of course you are,” and reached up to pat the man’s face, but in his typical physical clumsiness, the pat became a slap. The sergeant was dumbfounded and Nixon moved on.

Fred was the pool reporter, representing the rest of the White House press, and he dutifully and in a straightforward way reported the incident to the rest of us. The White House press office went ballistic, denying it had happened. Because it was Fred, the rest of us believed it, and later the sergeant confirmed Fred’s account.

You see? Watergate wasn’t all constitutional arguments.

Fred and I have stayed in touch. He’s long been retired from
The Wall Street Journal
and is now a scholar of classic Greek history and language at the University of North Carolina, one more example of our different interests. However, when we occasionally get together we quickly rediscover the rhythms of our relationship and fall into spirited discussions about what is going on in the world.

From those White House days forward I have examined successful enterprises through a different prism. More often than not, there is a thriving partnership at work even if one of the partners is much less visible than the other.

Ronald Reagan was one of the most successful American politicians of the twentieth century and yet for all of his obvious personal skills he was helped immeasurably by two strong partners. One was his wife, Nancy, who was tenacious and insightful in protecting and promoting her husband’s career and public image. The other was his first chief of staff, James Baker, scion of a Houston banking and law firm family. Baker had worked for his friend George H. W. Bush in his 1980 primary campaign against Reagan. It was Nancy’s idea to bring Baker over to their side when Reagan won the election. It was a brilliant choice, with Baker keeping a low profile as he fine-tuned the daily and long-term White House operations so Reagan could be Reagan, the masterful player on the big stage.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is a towering figure in American history, with a legacy that can be summed up in one sweeping sentence: He liberated America, white as well as black, from the shameful shackles of segregation. The power of his oratory, his commitment to a philosophy of nonviolence, and his faith in the rule of law were three pillars of his enduring achievement. Dr. King also depended on the legal skills of Thurgood Marshall, later the first African American to become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Within the civil rights movement, the quiet managerial efficiencies of Andrew Young, the boyish son of a New Orleans dentist, kept the focus on the larger goal.

THE PROMISE

Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns are the first chairwoman and the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and their unique standing atop Xerox is a tribute to their individual skills but also to their shared views and experiences as women, mothers, and wives in a space heretofore reserved mostly for men. As they rose through the ranks of Xerox, they didn’t spend Monday morning comparing Saturday’s golf scores but instead talked about how to fit day care and matrimonial priorities into their already crowded schedules.

I have spent more than forty-five years in a collegial profession, journalism. While I’ve been in front of the camera, the audiences couldn’t see the producers, cameramen and women, film and video editors, researchers, and technicians who always knew something I didn’t: how the picture got from where I worked to where you saw it. To me it was magic, and I left it at that.

Broadcast journalism is an intensely personal business, in that we bump up against one another all day long, all over the world, in war zones and garden spots alike. We work through the night in distant time zones and watch each other’s backs in hostile neighborhoods. I could not have had even a small measure of whatever success I’ve achieved without these brothers and sisters doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes wherever the news took us, but there was another partner as well on what came to be called Team Brokaw: Meredith, my partner of almost a half century.

She’s modest, controlled, understated, and gifted in the precision arts such as bridge, knitting, cooking, and horseback riding. She’s been a successful retailer and author. Meredith is also musical and has a keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of novels.

She’s married to a man who has spent their married life in one corner of the vanity business, not immune to the trappings of celebrity. His one brief pass at bridge was described by an instructor as “cowboy,” and his musical tone deafness is legendary within the family.

Apart from her willingness to still laugh at my jokes, her greatest strength has been as a female role model for our three daughters and as a woman not at all dependent on her husband’s lowercase celebrity. I am not kidding when people ask how my wife deals with my public role and I respond, “When I get home at night it’s a relief when Meredith remembers what I do for a living.”

We’ve been fortunate through our long marriage to almost always be in the right place at the right time—a serendipitous fate—but we’ve also managed to be more than the sum of our parts, an unexpected dividend we could not have imagined when we fell in love almost a half century ago. We’re not so
dependent
on each other as we are
complementary
in our relationship, a critical difference.