The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  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.

  CHAPTER 15

  Balancing the Book of Life

  FACT: When Richard Nixon opened the door to China in 1972, the Chinese were living a nineteenth-century way of life and were in the midst of a cruel so-called Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s attempt to reignite the fires of Communist passion. Less than half a century later, China has become the second-largest economy in the world, pressing for number one, and scholars are projecting that the twenty-first century will be for China what the twentieth was for the United States.

  QUESTION: Are you ready to concede the title?

  THE PAST

  After almost a half century as a journalist I have an abiding faith in the wisdom of the American people to get it right for the long haul. I’ve been on the streets of urban and rural America when I thought violent racism and rage against a distant war might so shatter us that we would not be healed for ge
nerations to come. I had a close-up view of a felonious president taking the republic to the edge of a constitutional crisis before he was forced to resign. Other presidents tested the limits of their power and the patience of the voters with their personal failings or political hubris, inadequacies, and grave misjudgments.

  In what may have been the most consequential confrontation in history, we won the Cold War and helped manage the largely peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union, a monumental achievement. Conversely, we were completely unprepared for the deadly realities of Islamic rage, and for more than a decade we’ve been struggling to find an effective response.

  We have a challenge of a similar if not greater magnitude in filling the sinkhole that opened suddenly and swallowed whole sectors of the economy, exposing the fatal frailties of venerated financial institutions, ripping away the foundation of the American Dream—home ownership—and exposing the folly that the boom would go on forever.

  We’ve recovered from every one of the earlier assaults on what our forefathers called “the general welfare of the people” because of the resilience of the citizens of this immigrant nation. Even in the darkest moments, wisdom and resolve crossed class lines, from blue-collar communities to the paneled halls of our most elite institutions.

  There are new realities now for America that cannot be vanquished solely with the comforting thought “We’re still the greatest country in the world. We’ll get out of this somehow.” In fact, it will require more than national pride.

  When we emerged from other recessions in the 1980s and ’90s, we did not have China and India coming up fast on the inside track. The historic advances of China can be summed up in one startling statistic: In 2005, China’s economy was half the size of Japan’s, which at the time was the second largest in the world. By 2010, just five years later, China had passed Japan and had its sights fixed clearly on the United States as the number one global economy.

  Moreover, in the earlier recoveries at the end of the twentieth century the baby boomers were at the peak of their spending power. Now they are entering the age of taking instead of spending, receiving Medicare and Social Security. As life spans are extended, who will take care of the parents and grandparents and at what cost?

  THE PRESENT

  Many voices are warning of the coming collision between expectations and costs in fulfilling the commitments of the so-called entitlement programs. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish-born Harvard professor of financial and economic history, is an outrider on this subject, shouting out to the aging herd of boomers, “What now?”

  He puts their dilemma in stark terms. “There’s been a very substantial number of people, coming up to retirement, who’ve had absolutely no income growth over the last ten or twenty years—white-collar and blue-collar alike.”

  Ferguson’s speech cadence goes up a notch when he says, “Americans talk sometimes as if they don’t have a welfare state. I find that bizarre! You have a huge welfare state in the form of Medicare and Social Security. The costs of these systems are completely out of control. While the prices of most things have come down in terms of inflation, the cost of health care for the elderly has been explosive.”

  Here are some numbers to keep in mind. Almost one-third of all Medicare expenditures every year go to the 5 percent of the beneficiaries who are afflicted with terminal illnesses or are dying of old age. So when health care costs are debated it is a cheap shot to attack necessary end-of-life discussions as “death panels for Grandma.”

  In Oregon, a state with a program for physician-assisted dying, a study found that patients who requested the advice of doctors were primarily interested in dying at home and being in control of their circumstances. Other studies have shown that dying patients who discuss their options openly with a physician account for about 60 percent less in costs in their final week of life, to say nothing of the emotional costs that are saved when the family is on board with the plan.

  Apart from the end-of-life decisions, Ferguson likes to remind his students and others, “We have institutions set up for life expectancy closer to seventy than the mideighties and still we’re organized to have people stop work in their early to mid-sixties.”

  If the arithmetic isn’t changed, Ferguson warns, the United States will end up like a Latin American economy because our finances are permanently off-kilter. He reckons if nothing is done, the unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare will reach $100 trillion by 2050. Ferguson is part of a large chorus of people warning of the destructive effect of an aging population and an unreformed entitlements program. It’s been the stuff of think tanks and academic abstracts for years. Former U.S. Commerce secretary Peter Peterson has been a nag on the subject for as long as his friends can remember. When he finally cashed out on Wall Street, he set aside a considerable chunk of his fortune to make the public more aware of the long-term consequences of delaying resolution until an uncertain date in the future.

  It’s a subject that appears regularly on the Sunday talk shows and in opinion columns. Major health care delivery systems, such as the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, warn they won’t be able to remain economically healthy if Medicare isn’t reformed for the long haul. Nonetheless, the subject has been politically radioactive because older generations of recipients are militant defenders of the status quo.

  It wasn’t until the spring of 2011 that the debate took a new turn when Republican congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a politician with the face of a choirboy and the resolve of a Marine drill sergeant, proposed a radical new plan and forced a vote in the House of Representatives.

  Ryan’s proposal touched off an immediate backlash from Medicare recipients and leading Republicans quietly took a step back, but it was the prelude to an even larger, more divisive battle to come over how to reduce the national debt.

  By July 2011, President Obama and congressional Republicans and Democrats were in an ugly, drawn-out fight over a plan on how to cut federal spending. The contentious feud moved from the White House to the Capitol, from the cable networks to the editorial pages, back and forth for most of the month with the exchanges becoming more acrimonious with every passing day.

  They were trying to formulate a plan of some kind before August 2, when the United States had to temporarily raise its debt limit so it could pay due bills. But the far larger influence was the Tea Party Republicans in the House and Senate who would not be moved on the issue of raising additional revenue in any form to help with the balance sheet.

  Tea Party members and their sympathizers did not represent a numerical majority in the Congress but through their determination and discipline they defined the debate and dictated the outcome.

  The stumble-to-the-finish-line compromise was so patched together and the process was so maddening that America’s creditworthiness was downgraded by S&P for the first time in U.S. history. That in turn set off wild gyrations in the markets.

  Tea Party members put all the blame on the administration, further infuriating their critics. The larger political lesson, I think, is that the Tea Party demonstrated the power of discipline. As I said on Meet the Press, they played by the rules. They got angry, they got organized, and “they got here”—Washington, where they did exactly as promised. What that means for the long-term interests of the country and the political system will be a front-and-center issue in the 2012 presidential campaign.

  A significant part of that debate will be the role of entitlement programs in our national future, rightly so.

  The summer Meredith and I were married, 1962, her father’s physician partners gave us a series of dinners and the discussion was often about the early stages of the Medicare debate in Congress. To a man, they were adamantly opposed. They reflected the view of the American Medical Association that it was an attempt by the government to take over medicine.

  At the time, my beloved grandmother Ethel was beginning to have health problems that would eventually lead to long-term care. Neither she nor my parents had t
he financial resources to make that kind of a commitment, so I became the lone voice at the table advocating Medicare.

  There I was, a brash twenty-two-year-old, not yet with a job, arguing with my future father-in-law and other pillars of the community that the least we can do as a society is take care of the elderly indigent when they become ill. Occasionally the discussions became pretty heated, so my mother took me aside and said, “If you don’t shut up, Dr. Auld will call off this wedding.”

  Thankfully, he did not, and three years later Medicare passed, the backbone of what President Lyndon Johnson called his Great Society program. By modern standards, it was limited in scope. It did not cover doctor’s visits or prescription drugs, long-term catastrophic care, or the many expensive procedures that became routine with the rapid advances in medical technology.

  Still, it was a bonanza for the medical community. Physicians were guaranteed payment for treating a class of patients that had heretofore been a financially risky proposition: the elderly poor. In the early stages of the program doctors formed partnerships and opened X-ray and other testing centers to which they would refer their Medicare patients, a practice that gave them a double dip out of the payment system.

  On the patient side, it was not just the elderly poor who benefitted. Wealthy Medicare recipients took full advantage of the program. A friend, one of the country’s leading hand surgeons and a man interested in health care reform, was exasperated when he told me, “Some of my patients are among the richest people in the country and it’s not unusual for them to say, ‘I just want you to do what Medicare covers.’ ”