Attacked you. So there is that aspect of it. There is concern about catalytic for silly of a crisis between two countries and also all of a sudden one is being hit hard by cyber attack and this assumes is the other country, its rival it could be a third party. You have that kind of issue, another issue of the ability to get Nuclear Weapons and overtime they build up an arsenal at the North Koreans are doing missile flight times between israel and iran are five or six minutes. Early warning is the problem is what happens if a few of the israelis iranians confidence the Early Warning system is a corrupted that your system is an saying the israelis are attacking you have to launch a counterattack when in fact it is just a cyber war. So you know, how do you begin to supplement this problem . And it is a challenge. We will be interesting. Marshall has retired. Not scheduled to pick a new director for the office sometime soon. Its going to be done well. We can help the secretary of defense the office of net assessment will be the first to go to. On one of the enduring strengths of the offices even when some of these early assessments failed for marshall have the capacity overtime to come back to these issues and try a different approach to solving the problem. The decent way that this would go. I think that has been a real strength of the organization, simply preserving. Thank you for a great book. [applauding] thank you very much. Happy to sign books. Please check our website. Thank you very much. [applauding] book tv in primetime continues friday with books on science and technology. First, columnist and commentator Michelle Malkin on her book who bill that the all Inspiring Stories of american ticker premieres. And Margaret Lazarus dean on her book before bit of a notes in the last days of american spaceflight. Clicks coming up book tv in primetime features memoirs and biographies starting the journalist tom brokaw and his book the lucky life interrupted. Biography of abolitionist and suffer just followed by an interview with author and ghostwriter david ritz. Later Andrew Crippen average and barry watts talk about their biography of Andrew Marshall the head of the pentagons office of net assessment. Next journalist and author tom brokaw discusses his memoir a lucky life interrupted chronicling his year of treatment after being diagnosed with a blood cancer. From the musical and portsmouth, New Hampshire this is just over an hour. [applauding] good evening. It is great to have you here. I am patricia lynch, executive producer of writers on the stage amazing new director of the musical. We are just delighted that you are with us for another great author event here at the musical. Our guest tonights celebrated journalist tom brokaw visiting with his new book. [applauding] hot off the press, a lucky life interrupted. We are so large that this is actually going to be the only book related event he is doing in the country. [applauding] there is so much to say about this remarkable man, but he is asked me to keep it short and i will. You know he is a renowned author, award winner in many categories a favorite of television audiences, a familiar face, calling voice call for years and years and the anchor chair at nbc news and is the author of six bestsellers, including the greatest generation and many more also a native of south dakota and graduated from the university of south dakota with a degree in Political Science and began his journalism career in omaha and atlanta before joining nbc news. Mr. Brokaw was the sole anchor and managing editor of nbc nightly news with tom brokaw from 1983 until 2,005 i i am just giving you the bear highlights here. He still is producing longform documentaries and providing expertise during breaking news events and of course has won every major award in journalism. In 2014 he was awarded the president ial medal of the freedom. [applauding] tonight, tom brokaw will talk about a lucky life interrupted and his struggle over the past two years. How since 2013 he has had a cancer diagnose and treatment. After he discusss his new book for approximately 20 minutes, he will be interviewed by virginia prescott host of word of mouth, of course we are thrilled to have virginia and our team from New Hampshire public radio as our partner. [applause] throughout the coming hour, a wonderful house broadband band will be playing songs perfect for the night. If you have a question you would like virginia to ask tom brokaw please pass them out. As you know writers from the new england stage is a partnership between the music hall and New Hampshire public radio who will get to work right after the event producing a radio version of what you are seeing. We are grateful for their partnership and our sponsor the university of New Hampshire. Our serious sponsors are wells fargo, tree service and clipse communication. Evening sponsors are avery since and sea coast lie libraries. We want to thank our sponsor as well harvest capital. Lets give them all a hand. [applause] i want to mention cspan is with us filming for the show booktv. And i want to do a special shoutout to the transportation hospitality shown to us by our good friends. Back to tonight, truly this is a lucky night for all of us. Please welcome to the strange a very esteemed guest, tom brokaw. [applause] thank you very much. That is very generous of you. In fact, it was a little unsettling for me to arrive here in New Hampshire. My body clock was off because it has been three years since i have been here and i generally come every four years so i will be back for the first in the nation primary. I really do love your state. I started coming here in 1972 and coming every four years since then and once in a while in between. I believe that iowa and the midwest and New Hampshire in the northeast are the two Perfect Place do is launch our president ial campaign. Not everyone agrees with me but the fact is in these two states you take your citizenship seriously, work hard for what you have and you represent in the regions you are located part of the wolf of america. The hardshores of New Hampshire where the first settlers came and the deep ridge soil of iowa as people started migrating across the country and settle first on farms and then small villages. Between these two states i think we have a representation of who we are. So i always find it reassuring to go back to iowa and then come immediately to New Hampshire and watch the great president ial process play out. Next year, of course i will have to be careful. I dont know how i will stay out of the way of all of the republicans running for president ial nomination. I honestly dont. [applause] let me just quickly tell you about the First Campaign i had to cover in New Hampshire. It was the mayor of los angeles at the time by the name of sam yorty. He was more republican than democrat but decided to run in the democratic primary in 1972. But he was determined not to put in too much time on the trail. He would campaign between 11 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon and have a long nap. I was a Junior Member of the nbc coverage time and i grew seniority. And one day i was mentally and physically exhausted by chasing after him knowing he wasnt going anywhere. When a colleague, a competitor from cbs came downing down the hall at the Head Quarters in manchester he was waving the Los Angeles Times newspaper and he said this will cheer you up. The Los Angeles Times newspaper in those days had a political cartoonist who had one three pulitzer prizes. And harry reid a cartoon that consisted of he had trees of in New Hampshire and buckets on a spigot beneath him and posters of sam on all of the trees and the caption red simply the sap is running in New Hampshire and in fact it did get me through the next 48 hours. I thought i would take a few moments of your time and tell you why i am here. It is an unexpected reason for my appearance in New Hampshire. I have had the luckiest life of anyone i know. In the last 52 years of my life and before that my friends said you were born on a lucky star. I had wonderful working class parents. We moved around a lot but my parents gave me the best attention and their goal in life was to make it possible for me to go to college. When i was 15 i moved to the Metro Metro Metro metro metropolitan area in south dakotas. I walked in and saw the daughter of a doctor in the class. She was a stunning beauty and great student. We quickly became fast friends although we were never high school sweethearts. And pardon me there were two reasons for that. She thought i fooled around too much and i thought she didnt fool around enough. We stayed close and i went off the rail in college deciding that drinking beer and chasing girls would be my major. And that didnt work out and meredith wrote me a letter saying i dont want to see or hear from you again because of what you are doing. And i went to another friend who said do you believe this and they said she is right. I did a turn around and got my grades better and computed to school. And meredith came to me saying i was out of line and reached too far. I said i had it coming and she said why dont we have a cup of coffee. Nine months later we were getting married and that was 53 years ago. So that worked out pretty well. [applause] and that was a part of my long, lucky strike that included three fabulous daughters who have their own families now. I caught the wave in network news at just the right time with the skills i had. So it has been a long lucky life and you begin to think that lucky strike will just continue. So i like to read from the beginning of this book giving you the premise of why i wrote it and what we were going through. In the seasons of life i have had more than my fair share of summers. A long run of sunny days and nights filled with lucky stars uninterupted by personality calamity rewarded in ways in the great planes. Our eldest daughter jennifer reflecting her training as an emergency medical room physician was along for the ride. But given her training she worried. Dad, she would say we never had anything go really wrong in our family i wonder if we can handle it. We were about to find out. In the year 2013 typically i let my birthday blow by i was 73 and more focused on a bike trip i was taking across argentina and chile with a group of friends. And then going to africa where my wife has a project teaching native woman to can tomatoes and sell them. And i would cover the final days of Nelson Mandelas life and going into the bush with a friend of mine as well. I had a persistent backache and that wasnt unusual because i have been a rock climbing and i am an avid bicyclist. But this ache wouldnt go away. I came back and had a doctor look at it. And he said tom, it is your lifestyle. This is not surprising to me. It still wouldnt go away. I went to the mayo clinic and the doctor there had the same conclusion. You are a 73yearold man and you are hammering hard all day long. But my primary care physician, a wonderful man from buffalo, new york city from the name andrew mica. I know many of you are familiar with buffalo and know it was the great home of tim ruser. He loved the idea we grew up in the working Class Community of buffalo, new york. When i said the dr. Mica that was the home of tim and he said i know. The two worst things that happened to buffalo. The death of tim and wide right in 91 which is when they got beat in the super bowl by the Dallas Cowboys. At any rate the doctor said something is going on and drew blood. I am on the board of the mayo clinic and had other things to worry about. I went off and got my house in order for the Board Meeting the next day and businesses we had to do that night as well. And mica said to me why dont you come to my office this afternoon after lunch. I will have one of my colleagues and there are things we ought to go over. I really thought i probably had a parasite which i pick up from time to time when i travel in the third world. I went over and dr. Mica did have a startled expression on his face when i look back. And this chicagoan came in who is a head of the clinic and sat down in front of a computer screen and began reading off numbers that sounded like an sat test to me. I didnt understand what he was talking about. And then this is what happened as he finished his play by play, he turned to me and uttered a phrase i was completely not prepared for, you have a maligancy, saying i had a cancer of the plasma cells in the bone marrow adding you know others who have died from this, Frank Reynolds and the first woman to run for Vice President of the United States she lived with it for 12 years when the Life Expectancy was shorter. It is treatable but it is not curable. You are making progress. 50 of the progress that has been made has been made in the last five years. I want to review your order overnight to make sure we have this right. Life expectancy i asked . He said well statistically five years but we think you can beat that. Frankly i appreciated that unconditional, straight ahead style. As a scientist in a difficult discipline he was a numbers guy. He may have been absent the day they had a seminar on bedside manners but that was not so much an issue as it may have been for others. I was a journalist. I was looking for facts. Not a cheerful demeanor. I think all of us have wondered what would happen when he hear that kind of diagnose. Well, i quickly learned. I stayed calm and my initial thought was my family is going to be okay. We just had had a review of our financial situation and i had the good fortune to be in a career that paid me well my children were in good shape all having their own children and embarked on careers and meredith was in very good health. I wondered however, how all of this would end. I knew i wouldnt get answers that day. The doctors wanted to review the test one more time and we will talk to you into the morning. So i walked out of this office calm as i could possibly be as a journalist looking in on tom brokaw the person wondering shouldnt you be more angry . Shouldnt you be more terrified . Shouldnt you be more puzzled . But in fact i felt i was in the hands of the best hospital in the world the mayo clinic my family was going to be okay and whatever it took i was confidant i could get the resources to deal with it. The next day they confirmed the diagnose. I did have a bone marrow disease where the plasma sells run amuck. I didnt understand what i was in for still. I got on a charter plane and went back to montana and didnt arrive until midnight of the second day. I have not told meredith because i didnt want to tell her over the phone. We drove back to my ranch house and i poured a stiff drink and sat at the bed side and said there is something i havent told you. I have a cancer that is going to change our lives. Meredith gave me what i always called her steely hard stare as if she could not quite absorb it. I went on to say to her well get through this together as we have Everything Else but i have no idea how it is going to end. We hugged. And with that long life of emotional connection and calibration, 53 years of marriage we fell asleep in each others arms. The next day i did one of the dum dumbest things i did. I made plans to go fishing with friends 155 miles away in montana. I jumped in a car with a bag of ice on my back and drove to the fishing spot. By the second day i was curled up in a cabin in pain and couldnt really breathe. We made our way back to the ranch. I didnt tell our friends yet still. I was in the bed upstairs so immobilized by the pain i would roll out and crawl on my hands and knees not wanting to wake everybody. And everything the mayo clinic threw at us in terms of pain pills did no good. I had to be med vack out of montana. We have great cowboy emts in montana. They came up to our bedroom with a narrow starecase and shot me up full of demerol and loaded me into an evacuation chair and hoisted be down the stairs and we had a 60 mile gravel road. I was not in the best shape mentally but i do remember my gps system. We are coming out of big timber now. You know the railroad tracks. It will be bumpy. We are going in the upper grade out of livingston. We are not far away. They got me through the trip and to the mayo clinic. Then i was transferred to new york and handed off to a brilliant young doctor and a group of senior residents came in. With doctors, they want to be reas reassuring but i would rather have the truth. They said nine months you will be back out doing our old thing. That was kind of uplifting for me. It was dead wrong it turns out. I went through a really difficult time. I had four compressions in my spine that the doctor missed and they are repaired with something where they put a needle in your spine and fill the fractures with cement. That was tough enough but when i came out and the nurse said remember being six feet and 511 . You are now 59. You lost two inches in height. That was tough on my vanity but we have a wicked sense of humor in our family. My daughters came back to new york standing eyeball to eyeball and said dad, you are still the man in the family but you a lot shorter than you used to be. That began a process that went on all through the winter months of 20132014. I was in and out of the hospital every week getting additional chemotherapy and ken anderson was one of the great specialist in the world. Then i had a terrible fall in upstate new york and opened up an eight inch gash over my left eye that went all the way to the skull. What kept me going is our youngest daughter gave birth the first grandson in the family. I was around meredith three daughters and two of those daughters each had two girls and then suddenly we got a boy. He came for first. And our youngest daughter sarah said when i realized how sick you were i was terrified and then angry because he needs you to teach him how to throw a baseball and show to fly fish in a couple years and that was another motivation. I went through another long spring keeping it from as many papal people as possible. I was continuing to work but mostly from home on my computer finishing a film and preparing for other projects i hoped i would be able to do. When i was doing that documentary i went on the David Letterman show and john stewart show to promote it. Dave is a close friend and i told him the next morning and he has been very attentive since then. John was a close friend but i didnt want to spread it around and i didnt tell him. But then it came out and ge got an email from john saying you are one tough sob. I had no idea you had cancer. I had wrote back saying john there was no reason to trouble you with my difficulties. He wrote back saying you cannot be jewish. If i had gas i would trouble you with my difficulties. I learned a lot about life going to the hospital two ear thee times a week. I wanted this book to be a guide book for patients families and the medical community as well because i think there are things we can all learn. First of all, it is helpful if the physicians who diagnose you tell you what you are going to go through. Dont sugar coat it. Take you aside and say look, this is going to be tough moreover it is going to involve your family because if one member gets cancer all members of the family get cancer and that happened in our family. Since then i have also said to other cancer victims, get a doctor who is not involved directly in your case and make him or her your boot man. My daughter jennifer was that. She was an interpreter, a notetaker, asked the right questions at the right time got in my face when i thought i was going to move out more swiftly than i did. I hope this book will be if you will, a kind of manual. What has been very heartening to me is that since the book came out and the documentary we did on thursday on nbc involving my family first time they have been on television they thought this lesson was so important they agreed to go on television and talk in a personally meaningful way about what it is like to have a loved one go through cancer and what their individual roles could be. I have wonderful grandchildren including two who live on the upper side of new york who are seven and nine. They are called the hooligans because they go through life with an extroidinary amount extraordinary amount of energy and they busted into the house loud and excited about what they were learning. I called them into the bedroom and said hooligans, do you know the meaning of decimals . And they call me tom because they saw me on television. It is unsettling hearing six year olds saying tom, can you pass the sushi . I said decibels are how we measure the volume of noise. Think about that. They took tin. And five days later they came in sidebyside and i was laying in my bed. They looked at me and said tom, we will keep the decibels down today. And in fact they did. Now we have emerged into the sunshine because my cancer is in remission. [applause] and we hope we can keep it there. What i have learned so much is not just the peopletopeople aspect of being a cancer patient but the medical miracles that are being performed every day. We are on the cusp of making extraordinary progress in cancer cancer. It will be very welcome and that work is being done late at night by technicians and Laboratory Experts of all kind who come from all over the world because america still is the destination for the greatest work and medical science that we have. Here i am at this stage in my life now at 75 having celebrated two birthdays since i was diagnosed. And this is what i write at the end has cancer changed me . Am i better person . That is for others to judge. All i know is that in Family Access to excellant care, the resources to pay for it the chance to remain a journalist and with a cohort of interesting friends i remain a lucky guy. So far the early reassurance of my disease is holding up. I will die some day but it is not like to be the result of this disease. I think about mortality in ways i did not before the diagnose. It no longer seems a faint distant reality in part because i have experienced the ruthless nature of cancer. At the age of 75 i moved into the neighborhood of life in which there are few long term leases. It is not enough to rage rage rage against life. It is a time to quitely saver the advantages of a lucky life. Life what is left . Bring it is on. Thank you all very much. [applause] [applause] good evening, how about that . Complete remission for tom brokaw. Fantastic news. The dimmer switch is not completely dimmed on your lucky life. I must say there are no guarantees with cancer. I had a friend i was going through this cancer with the wife of a colleague and we were tracking each other and i was having breakfast with her husband and midway through she had a stroke and didnt make it. So there are no assurances and one thing cancer treats you is just that. You take life every day and you have your goals and you have as well the ability to kind of shift away from things that no longer count. One of my friends walking back from dinner and he said how is your tolerance for jerks although he used a more colorful term. And i said zip. I am at a point where i only deal with the people i care about. You a fellow New Hampshire resident and friend of mine is ken burns who did a documentary about cancer during the beginning in the greek ages and one of the doctors says cancer doesnt care if you a mother, father or have children it only cares about waging a wage war on your body so be on guard. Never in the book do you shake your shift at the stars saying why me. We know you are not jewish i didnt do the why me thing. I was the journalist on the outside looking in. I thought why am i not saying why me . I thought i had such a good life and this is an accident really of the composition of my body and then i get a wonderful note from my friend a friend of mine with abc and he wrote to me sam donaldson, and when sam writes is it like you can hear him talking. And it said thomas i know you are thinking why me and a better question at our age is why not me . He survived a serious case of melanoma. Lets go back to the time you found out. It was two days before you saw your wife and i heard you say i thought i would work on my documentary. That is being able to compartmentalize. How did you learn that . When i jump on to a plane i have to wonder about things and i am good about compartmentalizing and i knew we had to get that were closing on the time. So i didnt want to go home and curl up in the fetal position in the hotel. I thought if i worked that will be distracting so i would work for half an hour and go for another instrument and google the disease and with every pass i would find out a little more. I didnt want to know way too much the first night because i didnt know what i was reading. I thought what if there is something in there that terrifies me. A friend called the only one at the mayo clinic board who figured something was up because i wasnt at the Board Meeting. And he came over we had a martini and i said ron i dont know where this is going to go. And he said i was terrified that night for you and i feel better. I went to the Board Meeting and didnt tell my fellow board members. I had a report i had to do and i did tell the head of the mayo clinic. I am more of a private person in terms of what is going on in my life. I am always poking and discussing public lives but i dont want people messing around in my life. We learn a lot about you in the book but you have an inability to overshare. I have friends who have encouraged me to write the stories i tell over the years. And i said they are better in the telling than they would be in the writing and my stories are never about be. When they are, i am mocking myself and as long as i can remember i have been doing that. That is how i came to be a journalist. I see everything around me in a journalistic since. I saw the people coming here and what was it like on the early days on the iraq rocky shores of New Hampshire. What makes me wife crazy is i have a constant moving memory. I can remember what a teacher or friend said to me in second grade because may be vanity but i thought if i mind involved it must be important. And you have still been married 53 years with that much of a memory. And she is the cool compartmentalized, anything that requires Great Organization she is there. It is a great fit. It seems to be working pretty well. In the book you write about suddenly aware of your own mortality which struck me because you have been you know at the aftermath of earthquakes and disasters and interviewed dictators and so much of your reporting has been about wars political wars and actual wars and danger zones. It seemed you existed in a mortality zone for a long time but it is interesting you dont see yourself in that world. I think i was successful covering wars is because i didnt think it would happen to me. I think if you go in with a fear factor it is different. One of my friends wrote to me today, and we have been all over the world in the worst possible places and he wrote something about me and said you always have been a bit nutty, tomb and we have to deal with that. I remember in pakistan during the big earthquake there was a big American Military instillation and they assigned a navy poa officer to me a lieutenant commander, and he said you are nuts. I am going where you are going. He went back in his car and went back to Head Quarters. So. Somebody is asking about your career. Growing up in los angeles you were a familiar site on kndc i left la and was surprised to see you on the national news. Did the events of 1968 or watergate intrigue you the most . 1968 was one of the great years that will be in bold print at the front chapters of history books because the Counter Culture kicked in that at time. It is when johnson stepped down dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were killed we had the riots in chicago and it led to the election of Richard Nixon and his reelection by a landslide proportion. But nixon was always his worst enemy and became the greatest scandal in America History in which he was forced to resign. I could not say one or the other was more important. They were kind of of a piece. And i was again, lucky to be in the middle of them. 1968 was a huge year but 1989 was a huge year and this was the year you were the only Network Newscaster at the berlin wall for the fall. I love to hear you tell the story because it began with a tip from a friend didnt it . We didnt think the wall was going to come down. There was not a lot going on and lets go there. My motto has been it is never a mistake to go. Just get on the airplane and go. Something will happen. So i didnt think i would be the only one in the world the night the wall fell. An east german official who made the announcement it was a mistake the way he made that announce announcement. I am rushing over to the wall and we have satellite capacity and i am thinking there is no bigger story in the world. This is the end of the cold war. This is the symbolic end of the cold war. The bbc doesnt have anybody there. Not even German Television has live capacity. I am a big outdoors man and i had a ratty coat and i dont want to offend regional sensibility. It was a radical ll bean coat ratty i had it a long time and it looked awful. I saw myself in it and thought this video tape is going to be around forever. I looked off to my right and one of my colleagues had just come from london where he bought himself a beautiful blue top coat and i said give me your coat right now. He did and i gave him mine. I looked splended at the berlin wall i am hear to tell you. You have been there for many events. You were the first to do a Network Human Rights abuse report on what was going on in tibet and interview the dalia lama and you were there for 9 11. And you say the most memorable ones are like the pierce family in vermont whose family was dealing with a head injury. I remember being in south africa before the end of the par tide and there was a squatter camp with 2,000 People Living in the worst conditions with one doctor who was a white man from a prominent war family in johannesburg. He broke away from his family and came down to help the people. I dont think any greater moral clarity i have seen in anyone. He was working 23 hours a day trying to keep these people alive. The pierces many of you in this area especially know about them. Their father is one of the greatest glass artisans in the world. One of the boys they had was a worldclass snow border with a good shot at a gold medal and he had a traumatic brain injury before the olympics in vancouver. We didnt know if he would survive. And half way through the olympics we got a call from the family and they said first for the first time we are encouraged and if you want to come see sev kevin now would be the time. I flew there denver where he was in this great Rehab Facility and i was overwhelmed by the quality of the family pulling this young man across the line and making him well. His brothers were so emegsotional saying you dont know what it is like to go in and see your brothers and know if they will make it more. The youngest son is a down syndrome child who was going up and down the hall ways of the hospital grabbing every doctor saying that is my brother, you have to save my brother. And his parents were so appropriate in their emotion saying we didnt know how this was going to turn out. I called back to vancouver to the executive producer of the olymp olympics and i said prime time tomorrow we have to do this story about family and values and athletes. And everybody watching will be terribly moved by this. He said i will take your word for it. Went back and got the broadcast in order and i was on with bob costice and he said i think i should see it. And i said i want you to see it and react to it. We played the broadcast and bob, for maybe the first time in his life, was speechless for two minutes. It was that moving. That is the kind of thing that keeps me going. You made the calls and that was your job as manager and editor . I had the line at the Sports Department and they liked me to do essays. I did them on canada and we found the guy who rescued John F Kennedy and during the olympics in greece we found an africanamerican who should have won the medal of honor during world war ii and didnt. We put that on the air. This last olympics i could not go. But we did the astronauts who worked together on the soviet and u. S. Space programs. Dick and i are close so if i called saying it is your chose but we should put this in prime time. His whole mission was to do the olymp olympics but he said lets do it. Isnt that when it was announced you had cancer officially . During that last olympic . I kept it secret from almost everyone although my closest friends, a couple figured it out, and i began to tell some of them because i got tired of lying why did you keep it secret . I didnt want to be on the internet tom brokaw cancer patient. I wanted to have a normal life and not have people pointing at me saying that guy has cancer. Especially here in the northeast i will tell you a story that helped keep me going. In the fall of 13 we had a terrible fall and winter with ice and sleet and snow. I was in tough, tough shape. I had to force myself out of bed in the morning. And i didnt want to show up in the streets with a cane or walker. So i would stumble down to 79th street to a coffee shop and get a bagel. There was an enormous poster of tom brady advertising ugg boots with his pictureperfect face and great body. I would walk up to it look at it and Say Something i cannot repeat in public and it would kind of give me a lift and i would keep on going. I met him a year later. We were both guest of under armor. And he said i want you to meet tom brady and i said i have a story to tell him. He came over and said i have watched grow a long time and i said i had cancer and you helped me and i told the posse of guys around him and he just roared with laughter. I am a giants fan but he won me over and i made a bet on him in the super bowl and they pulled it off. [applause] what made you decide to go public and tell the world . What made you decide to tell the world you got cancer . Somebody got it first. One of the news sites . You didnt give nbc i they went and asked him. It was like seven or eight months after that. Nbc put out a statement that we are confidant tom will recover and getting the best care and continuing to work for us. And i said yes in fact i have this disease and we with focused on the treatment and i want to continue to do that in privacy, please, if you will allow it. And i must say i was treated well. On cnn and one or two other places they did a quick description of what the disease was and what we can expect. And new york being new york we lived there longer than anywhere else, if i went out after that cops stopped be on the street saying are you going to be okay . Or hard hat construction workers or other people. It is that manhattan is family quality they have about it. There was a coffee shop around the corner and you get very dehydrated with all of the drugs i was taking and i would walk the dog at night and about 8 50 they close at 9 00 and i would come back around and they would have a strawberry shake friday me so i could take it back to the house. I was treated well. At the beginning you were on a pill that was 500 a day. It was actually 1000 a day. 500 a pill. People who are poor and fall below a certain line and are medicare eligible can get that pill. But if somebody is in their 40s and not on medicare and in a different place in life it is very very difficult. I had excellent coverage my my job. But that is not available to everybody. You do. And you wonder several times throughout the book what if i were a farmer in kansas or a singerworking mother not a ho high profile patient with a great plan and resources to cover it and access to star oncologist. So are you in remission because you are tom brokaw . I am in remission because i have the right chromosomes and the right dna. I think that probably a lot of these hospitals do take in cases, saying we will work it out. In my case we didnt know about my internal construct and it turned out to be well. They kept throwing drugs at me one which was an offshoot banned in the 50s because it caused miscarriages but it was figured it is a good thing for blood conditions. They added another drug that came from that drug and they said we are going to go to war and pump it up because you can handle it. I didnt have to do stem cell. They did extract my stem cell but i didnt have to go through all of that. Let me just say we have eight doctors in our family my wifes whole side of infamily are physicians and i grew up in the medical community, but until you become a patient and get injected into the culture itself you have no keen appreciation how important the people at the bottom are. The nurses, technicians, the orderallys and the people that come in and make sure you are comfortable. And i made a lot of friends during this. I wasntent back to a lot and didnt know what to expect. I was asking where they went to state and one went to Florida State and i said what will you do about that quarterback there . I connected with them because i admired them. You recommend people getting a jennifer in your case or get a supporter and you tell people to be upfront about their pain and not stoic. How about you . I was too stoic in terms of describing pain. I have a high threshold for pain. And when i had the back issue, and invasive doctors on a scale of 110 where are you and i would say 23 and my daughter would be behind me rolling my eyes and my wife would be saying it is much worse. And he said you have a severe spinal fracture and you are telling me you are a three. We need you to com plain he said. And the oncologist said com plain plain. That is how we find out. And physician to physician can tell them what you are not able to tell them. Jennifer would say look dad was in a lot of pain last night, and we dont know where it came from or there is something called night sweats and she would say they come and go how can we deal with that. She was an interpreter for the physician. What i suggested to Health Care Facilities is try to get on boots man in an apartment. If families come in and had no idea what this is going through say here is the card of a guy who is a retired doctor and he can probably help you translate this. Or have a counter score card here is what you can expect. Most clinicians make the diagnose, and do a uturn and try to deal with it. They dont take time to talk about what you are going to go through. And i think health care has to be more holistic than is it. They should say this is going to be tough and the family has to sit down and talk about their moves. They are interested in healing and working weekends to just make the big bucks. That is what i hope the book helps do. Reading the book i cannot help but think i was a family and we watched nbc nightly news with the brinkley huntly report before you. And then for us we gathered around you brought, you know creditability to stories and made them real for us. As far as i was concerned you were the voice of god you know . You need to check with my family if you believe i was the voice of god. Is that what this book is about . If tom brokaw can get cancer then you can get cancer anybody can get cancer. And everybody will at some point in the family. 1600 people died today of cancer. A million 600 people are diagnosed with cancer every year. I am hearing from families and Cancer Patients with all kinds of cancer. There is a senior admiral in the Defense Department who has the disease i have and he got in touch with me. A football coach for the Dallas Cowboys got in touch with me. And other patients have a different regimen they are going through and sharing that and said what do you think and i said if it is working, stay where you are. And i am hearing as well from clinicians that are wanting to know how i reaccounted to reacted to certain drugs put together. It is a consulting game. It really is a team sport dealing with cancer. And everybody has to share what they know. A number of questions by the way about the Bryan Williams situation and what impact that will have on nightly news reporters. Im told that you have said all that you would like to say on that. I ask your forbearance on this. This is a serious issue and is serious for bryan and his family and nbc news. We have a process in place and its moving forward and the will be a resolution. Exactly when i cant say but i dont want to prejudge anything. What is a little bit maddening is all those media sites out there everybody thinks they know and things that were attributed to me are completely wrong about my relationship with brian. When he first took the job i was the guy who got them into that place. We had a cordial relationship. He had a different view than i did and thats not unusual. I stayed back from that and he was extremely good on the air but there are issues that have to be dealt with in the process is in place to deal with those. Would you like to be the network news anchor in the age of twitter . Im thinking of calling the 2000 election for al gore early in the evening for example. Recall that for both of them at one time or another. You are an equal opportunity anchor that night but would that be forgiven now . I think it was forgiven that night because the chaos was in the system. We werent making this up. We were doing the best we could. When we said it was gore than karl rove came out on the grounds of the Governors Mansion in texas and i said to tim if he thinks gore hasnt got it hes probably got reason or leaving that we had better be careful about this. There might look like laura had lost they were on their way to the memorial in nashville and he came back toward him and bill bailey who was his Campaign Manager called me from the car and said what the hell is going on . I said you tell me i dont know at this point. Finally at 3 00 in the morning i said we not only have egg on our face we have it all over our suits at this point. What source do you rely on for accurate news . Which source do you rely on for accurate news . Im really quite universal. I get up in the morning and read the major newspapers. Ive read the wall street journal, the Washington Post and the new york times. I go on line and read the Financial Times of london edited by a friend of mine which is also by the way a perfect demonstration of how lucky we are to have all these new systems. The Financial Times gives me the best overnight foreign reporting and the council on Foreign Relations has a wonderful site that they have paid overnight for them port and foreign developments and then i breeze through the political sites salon from the far left to the far right that i want to know what they are saying. I read politico faithfully. Its a very good political cheat sheet as it were. They have very strong reporters doing the overnight thing about what did hillary say today and is that going to hold up . How did jeb get into so much trouble and can it get out of it . Whats going on New Hampshire at this moment