My mother would be pleased and would continue to thank you from heaven. Just a look at the lucky life tom brokaw has led a fortunate life with a brilliant journalism career culminating as anchor of nbc news and bestselling author. You were living a glorious life. Tom given where i started in life, workingclass family weve moved around a lot. We ended up in ebix broke a big stroke of good luck. It took us a while to get connected but it was a match made in heaven. It has been going on for 15 straight years now. Then i was able to work my way up through the various wrongs of broadcast journalism. They were looking for young reporters because network news blew up overnight. They had to get correspondence. I was in atlanta and in the middle of the civil rights. Suddenly nbc wants to take you and put you in los angeles. I arrived just in time to cover Ronald Reagan running for governor of california. I called that wave as well. Politics was always in my blood. I loved it so much. California was a very dynamic place. I went there to cover watergate. Charlie all of a sudden the big stories tom biggest political story ever. It was good fortune. Charlie did the today show. Tom i made it a morning political forum. I would go to where the primaries would keep us going. I was very fortunate. Charlie you knew it was right time to retire as anchor of the evening news. It tom i didnt have a big game plan. There were things that i loved in life steelhead fishing loved in life. Steelhead fishing and that kind of thing. Charlie it wasnt bad when you got to go to south africa and saw the fall of the berlin wall. I filled it was the next generations turn. I wanted to have more time to write. I wrote the greatest generation, which accelerated my interest in writing. I didnt start writing a law of long pieces. I didnt have quite the confidence to do it. I didnt want to cheapen it some way. I friend said you can write, you should try it. The greatest generation gave me momentum and i wanted to write more books. Charlie and you have. Tom and i have. Charlie when did you know you were not well . Tom i had a long lead up. I have been bicycling with our mutual friend across south america and that i went to africa where she has a big project and i was covering the closing days of nelson mandela. Came back and was fishing in montana. They could kind of be relieved. A very well known orthopedist in new york. They said the same thing, they did a conventional xray. I had a very smart internist at the clinic. So he drew some blood and they ran the test and called me over. I thought maybe i had a parasite from the african trip. Theyve brought in a very wellknown hematologist. Spike in protein cells and so on. He turns to me and says you have a malignancy. You know people who have died from this. The first woman to run for president of the United States. I always wondered how he would react to that kind of news. He said it is incurable but it is treatable. I was kind of taking my temperature at the time and he said how long . Statistically five years, but i think he can beat that. We talked about what i was in for. I didnt ask the questions i probably shouldve as how this will affect my family, how this will affect my ability to move and do those things. We were on a short stick at that point. We were due to leave the next day. I wanted to get right of the right to the case. Now im a much charlie did you think they were wrong . Tom no, i knew i had cancer. The people who dont have cancer , you are sympathetic. You dont fully appreciate how invasive it is and how it takes it how it takes over your life until someone in your family gets it. I flew back to montana, broke the news to meredith. I thought i would resume my life. Charlie it was 150 miles away. Tom i could barely move and i got back to the ranch. I couldnt move out of my bed. Nothing worked. So they had to medevac me out of there. Thats when we really went to war. They said we are going to get you to sloan. That would be the best place for you. Here is what you are in for. And then began this long file. This part that i was unprepared for is how significantly important my family would be, not just for emotional support. She was keeping track and said you are not going to go to that speech tonight. My daughter came from San Francisco and joined the team. Charlie were you going to keep it from your children for a wild . Tom i try to from the beginning. I was trying to do with it and a calm fashion. A lot of difficult times. The last thing you are going to do is draw attention to yourself. Charlie the duchess described yourself as stoic throughout this, which is not necessarily good for them. Tom that is where jennifer would come in. She would step in front and say, he is in more pain than he is letting on. One of the things i read in the book is as a family you have to learn to manage her own cases you have to go in and not treat a doctor like he is the high priest in a mayan temple. He has to learn to speak the same language and say i dont understand what is going on here. Charlie thing you make this point clear, even though you are tom brokaw, you have access to a prominent figure in new york you can command almost anybody you want. Get them on the phone, i want you on my team. You still saw some of the imperfections in the system. Tom i have done documentaries on health care but i was still behind the curve and taking command did i begin to catch up and had a terrific oncologist. I had been talking to him on the phone. We could become the coach and offensive coordinator. Heather would be the quarterback. He has had more success than anyone else. Charlie therefore you put together the team. The imperfections in the system where what . Tom cancer is not math. Two plus two doesnt equal for when you have cancer. It is the greatest enemy that medicine has. A woman who was in a ken burns film said cancer doesnt care if you are a mother or a father it only cares about waging war on your body. Everything you throw at it will figure out a way to get around it in some fashion. Part of what i have learned is you have to keep asking the questions and saying, wait a minute they are trying Something Else overseer at one point. There was a determination that i would have to have stem cell transplant. Than i had other friends who are going through this and say we are working in an age when it takes a lot of time out of their life, and they are having Great Success with these drugs. I talked with dr. At a mayo clinic and said you have to do stem cells. So i decided to go. Charlie had it worked and had it not work. Tom that is something i learned. I would tell folks there is a time you would go online and get a senomyx information. Now all these Major Health Care systems have get a synonymy a tsunami of information. Now all these Major Health Care systems have information. Charlie the emotional side of this, i would assume you would never want someone to have say that you would never want to have someone say, poor tom. I would assume you would never want someone to say poor tom. It is an interesting phenomenon because while you were on your back there you wrote me this lovely note, because you have been watching a fair amount of television. I was flattered, really flattered. One of the loveliest notes i have ever seen. Then i started in asked to do things that you were scheduled to do. Thats when you told me. That was really early in the game. Tom we were close enough that you deserved to know. I didnt want you to be stunned by reading it when it leaked out. We were all part of the circle and noren kept it quiet for a long time. I said im not nora, this is as far as im going to go right now you charlie what is amazing to me that right now. Charlie as im going to go right now. Charlie i was stunned. Tom that meant a lot to me because we were so conscious traded we were so concentrated on it at home. I just had to worry about it and didnt want to just go out. I knew the people i really cared about were beginning to find out about it. They had the right perspective on it. That is what i cared about. I didnt want to put additional pressure on her, everyone calling and saying how can i help, how are you doing today . I have developed this routine, get a doctor who you know can be on your team. Also get one of those caring bridge sites so you can know everyone at the same time what is going on. Now the last line should be the last line should be now we are up to date. Charlie you talk about pain like you have never seen before. What is it like . Tom i have had broken bones other things like that. This painless systemic. This pain was systemic. It was concentrated in my spine. I would wake up and not be able to move in bed. I would be afraid of just turning my knee over. What happened originally was our daughter, who gave birth to an wonderful grandson i would to call the motions went into convulsions. If i needed to i would use a walker or cant. When i went out i also do not want to be in a walker. At most i wanted to be in a cane. I was trying to keep that going. Charlie there were moments of humor in this. You would rail at tom brady. Tom on 79th street there is an enormous poster of tom brady. So i walked down to a coffee shop i would be hunched over and i would look up and i would say, you. It would give me a look. Im fighting back, im a giant. I met him nine months later. I think you have been really helpful and heres how. He had a posse with him and they all exploded with laughter. He was great. I liked it so much id bet on him in the super bowl and it worked out great. Charlie hes in the news again. You were going down madison avenue and your hearing aid battery is dead. Topic i was doing therapy to walk again tom i was doing physical therapy to walk again. The battery went dead, so i leaned up against a falafel stand and was trying to change a battery. I thought this was so aesthetic so pathetic. Not even a guy who runs the falafel stand cares about what was going on. Charlie bank what is the emotional toll . Tom i think total charlie what is the emotional toll . Tom i think toll is the wrong word. Charlie big what is the reconfiguration . Charlie what is the reconfiguration . Tom they come to montana, they love it out there. One of them really loves the fish. I want that quality time. A friend said what is your tolerance for jerks . Although he used a more colorful term. I said is it i said is it i said zip. Charlie a friend said i have no time for pettiness. Tom thats how you feel. There is a certain amount of momentum in my life. I dont want to give up what im doing. I love journalism, it is rewarding. I went to normandy for the 70th anniversary. It is therapy for me. Charlie early on . Tom very early on. I had downtime at home. I felt i ought to be doing something. I had been a journalist all my life. I began keeping this journal because it was constructive and thought this could be helpful to other families. I didnt know whether i can turn it into a book or not. Charlie inquired in a firstperson story what is required and a firstperson story is authenticity. Tom i finally said to my editor the fact is i do know a lot of people. We also know a lot of people in the lower tier. Sort of classmates of mine. They were delectable and how they responded to it. I said i may be the only cancer victim who got a handwritten note from nancy reagan and a note from charles barkley. Charlie im pleased to hear that about charles. The president also called during this . Tom president clinton called and bush 41 wrote me a great note. Others did as well. That was very touching to me. A lot of my friends, many of whom you know it we ought to keep you around for the stories. Charlie there is this about your daughter, she was angry because she thought you were going to leave. Tom she just had this baby and set it to her mother, what is going on here . She set i got angry because i didnt want to lose you. For the first time it occurred to me that we might. At that point Archie Thomas broca was just six months old. I didnt want that to go away. Kelly bit what is the prognosis . Charlie what is the prognosis . Tom prognosis is good. I know a lot of people who were told 13 years in. They were on a chemo maintenance. Im taken the same drug but on a much lower dosage. They are doing fine. Charlie how do you feel . Tom the Biggest Issue is my back because of the damage was done to the spine and getting my back in shape again. I have some arthritis that creeped in as well. I went into the spinal unit and they had we can arrest for it. I dont need to get worse, it just needs to get better. Charlie the word you first used to your friends, it is containable. I think you used that expression. We have it in the corner. Tom from the early stages on they have told me you are going to have to do stem cell. By december my primary care physician said i was doing so well on drugs. We are going to step it up and go to war. Cooperation with heather, they added another drug and we did go to war. Charlie could someone who is not tom brokaw get this today . And how do we make this more real . Tom i have been talking to Health Care People about it via the the ceo of the clinic thinks im doing a real service by being real candid about what people need to know and how do they get there. Medicare part d, which is a funded part of descriptions 500 a pill. You take two of them a day when you are in the middle of this treatment. Medicare part d will take care of it for people who are medicare eligible. Finding the money to get that done is very tricky. The other piece of it is it is pretty much a confined culture. There are variations on the treatment. Very big treatment center. They dont know that much some believe more strongly in a cocktail of prescription drugs and stem cells. You dont have that many choices. You and i have a close friend who has a brother that is not doing well. He seems physically fit but doesnt respond. It is cancer doing what it does. If it decides to clear more in your body can do everything to do that. Charlie a friend of mine who is a leader in the tech world said that cancer may be curable and there are varieties of it and one has a genetic factor. You may be incurable in 10 years. It may be curable and 10 years. Tom they use the cells from our body, reengineer them, and reinsert them. That is as far as i can go because that is as much as i know about it. Those cells attack the cancer cells. There is universal assignment about this in the Cancer Community and everybody is pushing hard to get this done. I do hope it will be accelerated. We do have an issue with Clinical Trials and how long they take. There is an astonishing story. There was a woman who had multiple myeloma. They were out of hope. So they brought her to the clinic and said we have an idea of a measles vaccine that comes from your own system. 10,000 times, which you wouldnt normally get from measles. It may work from this didnt from this. She said im out of hope, try anything. They had tremors terrible fever, hallucinations. Next day the cancer was gone. She was living cancer free. That was a hail mary that worked for her. This is your last hope. You are going to learn something from this. She said im going to be the person you do this too. Charlie and that was success with the poliovirus. You want to learn to play chess. Tom i would like to write a short story that gets published. I used to carry copies of check off with me wherever i would go. I would go and read any of them. My friend has a great new book out about short stories. Out of all this i got to know donald hall in a penpal kind of way. He wrote a beautiful haunting book about her death and then a poem about it. Through that i got to know the novelist who lives down in nashville. That was a wonderful bonus for me. I wanted to have more of those kinds of relationships. I dont have to chase the big story every day. Charlie what is your journalism future . Tom my future in me doing some kind of my future nbc wants me to do some kind of perspective. I did the end of the vietnam war , which was 40 years ago. I will do meet the press with my friend. The time when he wants me there. But im not that with my friend from time to time charlie i think is as relevant as they wear when you were there . Tom i think when you talked about the big three, they are not as many competitors. The other good fortune for us was we were all three reporters. That is what we cared about. We can jump on airplanes and get anywhere. Cnn was the get big cable competition. That has now changed a lot. Obviously the screen is filled with all of these outlets. Here is what i think anchor his are always the most relevant. Daytoday anchors are competing with everyone else. When the big event happens, a lawyer or 9 11, there still is actually thankfully, not just a tendency but an instinct to turn to the anchors. The ones that they trust and ahead of big news organizations that is where they go. That was the most important part of my job. When it is really big dan peter and i were there, when we went to work. Charlie what is the best story when you look back . Tom two of them i think in my lifetime. 9 11 was the hardest single time i ever had. That was so dramatic traumatic. I think the story that will be there a thousand years from now was the collapse of the soviet union. And that retooling of china. Those were seismic events. Charlie our life that been connected in a number of ways. I remember not long ago walking into mayor bloombergs foundation headquarters, there was an event there. You were there. I saw meredith first. I had just found out that you are receiving that medal of freedom. She said, it wasnt public. And i went over and said to you congratulations. I know this in ways i should know, but i know this. And you said, its the big one. Its the one that means so much to me. Because its about country . Charlie tom yes, i think it rises above all the others. I think it is testimony. Stevie wonder was there and 3m and killed in the Mississippi Movement were represented. We all came from different places. We are all the embodiment of the American Dream in one way or another. This is an knowledge meant of that weird so i accepted it in my own mind. Not just on behalf of my own Nuclear Family but my parents and narrated parents my wifes parents. Charlie now the Big Decisions for nbc news in the next couple of weeks i suspect. What is your role and what is your advice . Tom im involved in the dialogue but im not making the big calls. Im flattered they want to know what i think. I think its fair to say a lot of people come to me. They are concerned about what will happen. I try to ensure them, however it turns out there will be an nbc news and they have to do their work every day. People will still have a high regard, and they can separate those stories from the kind of work they do. It has obviously been a very difficult time for everybody.