and his new book the time of our lives, what he thinks america needs now. >> this is what we can learn from another time. >> tom brokaw for the hour. this is "piers morgan tonight." tom brokaw is one of my journalistic heroes. he anchored the nbc "nightly news" for 22 years. he has also become awe celebrated author. his book "the time of our lives" and i'm thrilled to say that tom brokaw joins me now. welcome. >> it's very good to be here and that business about me being your hero, you'll get over that by the end of the hour, i promise. >> i doubt that very much. you're actually the perfect guy to ask this question. i read your book with great fascination. also with an eye to how this year 2011 is going to rate in the news peo to me who's a new boy to this news anchoring game, it seems like it's been the most incredible year for news that i can remember. but what do you think? >> it's been a chaotic year. i think part of the reason that we see it in the way that we do is that it never stops coming at us because of the new instrumentation. it's not just on cable television or broadcast television or talk radio. it's now all of the internet and all time all over the social media at all times. so there is really no escaping it. and the old days when there are big events, you had a little more of a pace, i suppose you would describe it. you would hear something in the morning and spend the day at work and come home in the evening. and then you take it in again and maybe read the morning paper the next day. now it goes on all day long. you can't escape it even at work if you go online, you're likely to get a news site that will pop-up as well. people will be talking about it. having said all that, however, this is one of the most fractious political years that i can remember. but i have been reading about the campaign of 1948. that was the first campaign in which harry truman was trying to be re-elected on his own terms running against tom dewey. he had third party candidates, people in the south who weren't happy about him. the rhetoric is similar to what we're hearing today. >> "time" magazine announced the person of the year which is always a pretty prestigious and controversial choice. they went for a generic, the protester. what did you think of that choice? >> i think it was a good call. i think that there is a lot of unhappiness and a lot of anxiety out there. by the way, i think one of the important developments in the protest movement, sometimes gets overlooked. and that's the tea party. the tea party began as a protest movement. as i've said on several occasions and determined to repeat here again tonight, the tea party played by the rules. they got angry. they got organized. they got to washington. they stayed on message. and they may not be what you think of as the best interest of the country, but they're driving the debate on the republican side now more than any other component of the republican party. and that's because they are determined to remain disciplined and faithful to what they believe in. i think it's an object lesson for other groups who want to get organized or other groups who are not happy with the current conditions of the political debate in this country. take a page from the tea party. go out and get organized. and rally around whatever you believe in. >> do you see any kind of synergy between occupy wall street, the arab spring uprisings? is there a common thread there or are they very different distinct protests? >> i think it's a very different -- first of all, occupy wall street is not calling for the overthrow of their government. and however many flaws that we have here, we still have a representative government. i think part of the problem with occupy wall street at the moment is that they don't seem to have a well defined core. i've been at the rallies downtown in new york and on wall street. in chicago there are only 20 protesters outside. it was a very small presence. and los angeles, slightly larger. but, again, it didn't have the kind of electricity that you would expect from that kind of a movement. certainly, they've landed on something that i think resonates with a lot of people. and that's the 1% versus 99%. most people -- overwhelming majority are on the 99%. and there is that great concern about income inequality in this country. and the course of the last three weeks, i've been all over america. 19 cities altogether. and i've had a lot of high income people come to me and say we really do have to do something about income inequality because that could trigger a class war in this country. and the consequences are not very pretty to contemplate. >> very interesting premise to the book, obviously, is about the nature, i guess, of the american dream. certainly when you grew up and born in 1940, you were a war child in that sense. coming out of the great depression, post war america, i think in some ways capitalized perhaps on all that happened there and became a stronger country and had a great sense of national unity and purpose to it and became this great manufacturing force. it's a very different crisis america faces now. it's almost a crisis of what is the american dream now? what is the identity? what kind of future young americans going to be facing? >> first of all, i was a member of the luckiest generation as my contemporaries and we've all agreed that we were the ones who really caught the best wave. after the war, our parents who had gone through all the trials of the depression and world war ii, then came home to unprecedented working class and middle class prosperity. the middle class was built. and the united states was a huge country in the world. europe had been destroyed. japan had been destroyed. china was a blank spot on the map that may as well have said beyond here serpents lie. we didn't know what was going on. so we were able to have the great industrial economy that enriched the middle class and gave it the foundation that we would like to recapture today. i think what has happened since then is that we're playing too much by the old rules and not enough by the new rules. we did lose our manufacturing base in this country. and we've not yet caught up to the reality of that when it comes to job creation. 40% of the gdp is made up of financial services. they don't make anything. they trade money. i mean it's not a dishonorable profession, but it is not in the best interest of a broad sweep of america to have so much concentration in financial services without having high-tech manufacturing without having job opportunities that used to exist in the agriculture sector when you had smaller farms you had more people working on them. now it's big business and more harvesting procedures. we have reduced our job foundation in this country to a perilous point. and we need to think carefully about how we get out of that. >> i want to play a clip from a speech by president obama in kansas which actually touches on that very point. let's watch this. >> my grandparents served during world war ii. he was a soldier in patten's army. she was a worker on a bomber assembly line. they believed in an america where hard work paid off and responsibility was rewarded. and anyone could make it if they tried. no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out. >> is there a problem with what the president is saying there that that basic tenant of what the american dream stood for that anybody can make it, does that really exist anymore? a lot of people are gifted and talented but are simply not able to realize their dream, their talent under this current financial climb it climate. >> with all due respect to the president, i think that was even true then. i mean, everyone could get a job. but what he managed to overlook at that point was that, by the way, his grandparents were white people from kansas in the american south. they were not getting very good jobs during the post war years. a lot gravitated to detroit so they could find work. those left in the south lived below the poverty line for a long time and not just african-american people, a lot of poor white people did as well. so we have had a rising tide in this country. and what has gotten us used to is a big appetite for consumption. and i think one of the lessons of this recent down turn is that we have to build proportion back into our eyes as well and build expectation back into our lives. that does not mean that we ought not to have a job that pays a living wage. there are too few of them now. as i go across america, i find a lot of very entrepreneurial people who are starting their new businesses. a lot of high-tech manufacturers complaining to me that they can't find workers with the skill sets that they need. we need to work harder on education. the community colleges now are our growth industry because they're teaching young people how to weld, how to use computers in the workplace and how to reason. so these are big tasks. and we ought not to underestimate how hard the job ahead of us is and it's going to require all of us -- we've always been at our best in this country. this is an immigrant nation and we're always at our best when we're more than the sum of our parts. we need to get back to that again. >> tell me, do you think the average american -- i base this purely on the frenetic spending we saw over the thanksgiving holiday, for example. i found that quite alarming. i couldn't imagine your generation post war facing that kind of financial restraint at the time ever doing that. just sort of ignoring the reality and just going on with crazy spending sprees. >> well, we were kind of a transition generation in that regard. our parents in some ways had a very large, what i call, thrift gene. that was based on their experiences in the depression and then later in the war. my generation got a little giddy about how much money we were able to earn and how well we would live and how we could spend it. now at this stage in our lives, we're looking back. we're losing our parents. and we're realizing the soundness of those values. then you have succeeding generations who got credit cards and debt was not something that you worried about. it was just a reality of life. we got to a point in this country in which we had a negative savings rate. i found that hard to imagine. now, having said that, like you, i won the lottery, you know, i'm paid very well for what i do. and i have enough money to keep myself comfortable and also my kids who are hard-working and have that thrift gene passed down from their grandparents. but at the same time, their needs if they really get critical, they've got dad around to help out. they like to stand on their own and they think about it. but in much of the country, there was this determination to have as many toys as you possibly could. one of my friends who is very successful businessman says we have to change in this country. we have to wake up in the morning and determine what we need not just what we want. >> very good point. let's take a little break, tom. we're going to talk about the republican nomination battle. it's getting rather ugly and rather personal as it always seems to. passport? 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[ male announcer ] we are insurance. ♪ we are farmers ♪ bum, ba-da-bum, bum, bum, bum ♪ >> health policies, energy policies and reform. what are going to be your policies in what order? which will be your highest priority your first year in office and which will follow in sequence, senator mccain? >> that's tom brokaw. moderating the presidential debate a month before the 2008 election. tom, you've been in that moderating position a few time. what do you make of the way the republican race is going, the debates in particular? >> well, frankly i'm a big advocate of as many debates as we can have along primary seasons. you find out about candidates touring that time. i would like to remind people that four years ago for all the excitement now generated by the shifting polls that four years ago rudy giuliani was leading and fred thompson was a very strong number two. rudy giuliani is now giving speeches for money and fred thompson is doing reverse mortgages on television. so fates can change very swiftly. you have to keep that in mind. i don't know what's going to happen for the next month or so. it's important for all of us to remember not a vote has been cast so far. and very often these polls that we talk about at nbc and "wall street journal" just had a new one out this week and it was pretty dramatic. these are snapshots of a given time. now as we move closer when people have to go into that booth, ready to determine who they want as their candidate, who they can envision in the oval office, the dna changes when people make decisions. >> i mean it's interesting that you look at the poll numbers for somebody like john huntsman, for example, which remains very, very low. if you talk to most intelligent people in washington or in the media, they're all surprised by this. and is it unfeasible that someone like him could actually come from a very low base and still win the nomination? >> i think he has some hopes he can do that. he is a man with a very impressive resume. he was a strong and successful governor of a conservative state, utah. he has a strong conservative record. but in the republican primaries, he seems not to fit the group that are really defining that selection process at this time. you know, he hopes that he'll do well in new hampshire and stay alive. and then down stream he'll have some success. and my own guess is that he probably is beginning to hope that if it becomes a brokered convention he can have a voice in that. but it's tough now just looking at the playing field how to see how jon huntsman how impressive his credentials are can kind of catapult to the top. he takes positions not in line with many of the people who are driving republican debate on climate change, for example. he believes it's real. he believes it's true. and there are a lot of people who are going to be picking the republican candidate who have contrary points of view. >> i mean what is clear is that although newt gingrich who is the current front-runner prefer this to be a very civilized affair, mitt romney took the gloves off today, gave an interview to the "new york times" calling gingrich zany and suggesting he is ill constituted to be a president. i mean where i come from, being zany is seen as bit of a vote winner. >> newt gingrich is a lot of things to a lot of people over the years. but whatever you think of him, he is a tenacious and very nimble politician. there are very, very few people who follow this carefully, present company included, who thought he could survive what happened last summer when the key campaign workers walked out on him and then we're talking about a half million dollars in tiffany bills that had been run up. but he was impressive to the people who pay attention on the republican side during the debates. he knows how to speak directly to that base because he helped invent it, in fact. but, again, it's worth remembering now the vote has been cast. and what you're seeing now from romney is that a lot of members of what you would call the traditional republican establishment have gone to him and said you got to get a lot tougher against this guy because he's in danger of just rolling over the top of you. that's how politics is played in this country. and we're about to see it play out after the first of the year in iowa and then in new hampshire and then carolina -- south carolina and florida. the calendar works well for newt gingrich. if he can do well in iowa and then at least be in the hunt in new hampshire then go south to south carolina and then go to florida, who knows? >> i mean what you could have, judging by the polls, you could have ron paul winning in iowa. you could have romney winning in new hampshire. and you could have gingrich winning in south carolina or florida. >> yes, you could. and then there is a certain amount of momentum that takes hold. it depends on organization, how much money he's able to attract. whether the rest of the party -- republican party represented by his opponents will rally behind him or go to somebody else to get them into the race. where newt gingrich has a problem and this showed up in our poll this week, is down stream. say he gets the nomination. then all the indications are that he would have a hard time winning in the general election. you can see it right there. mitt romney does much better against barack obama than newt gingrich does. gingrich loses to obama by 11 points right now. it's a margin of error between barack obama and mitt romney. a lot of republicans are looking at those numbers and saying, look, i admire how well he's doing. it's not in the best interest of the party for the long run. >> you've been scathing about donald trump and his planned debate which is obviously now been scrapped. what did you have against that? >> i -- listen, i didn't have anything -- i have known donald trump for a long time. he is a part and parcel to the city of new york and he's always been one of the larger than life figures. i said he's a shameless self promoter. i don't think anybody can object with that. i had a note from him today with that underlined saying thanks for the nice words. my problem with it was -- my problem with it was -- and i'm sorry, piers, but i thought he got way too much attention for saying he was going to moderate a debate in iowa. it should have been one line. but he was here. he was all over the cable networks because he is donald trump. i think that's a little too easy. we ought to be working harder at covering the tough issues that are out there. what are we going to do about housing in this country with 20 million homes that are in peril or in foreclosure or under some kind of stressful condition and the families that are stuck in those homes? what are we going to do about joblessness in this country? it's not going to be just a matter of cutting the federal budget. that's not going to open up factories across the country. we've got some systemic issues that we need to be dealing with more than whether donald trump is going to run a debate or not. and by the way, you know, it turned out to be a mute point. most of the candidates didn't want to show up. donald trump will continue in this fashion. he's been doing this for a long, long time. god bless him. you know, he's protected by the first amendment just like the rest of us. >> well, he can come on this show and debate with me any time. always available. i made that clear to him. let's take another break, tom. when we come back, i want to talk to you about barack obama. whether he's been in your expert opinion more of a success than a failure as president so far. 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