Would you like to have lunch with acclaimed anchor and author Tom Brokaw and help support cancer research all at the same time? Of course you would. Brokaw is the Tony Bennett of newsmen: ageless, eternally laid-back, and impossibly smooth. He began his reporting career covering the civil rights movement of the 1960s and became NBC’s main Washington correspondent at about the same time President Richard Nixon was erasing several minutes of tape. He became a full-fledged television star in 1976 as the co-host of Today, a personality-driven morning show also featuring media superstar Jane Pauley. But it was his groundbreaking interviews with subjects such as Soviet prime minister Mikhail Gorbachev that helped him into his position as anchor of NBC Nightly News and elevated Brokaw to the upper tier of the talking-head pantheon. His reporting on the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001, contained the defining pronouncement of 21st-century America: “This is war,” Brokaw announced, before anybody was fully aware of what exactly had taken place or what it all might mean. “This is a declaration and execution of an attack on the United States.”
By the time he retired in 2004, NBC Nightly News was, for the first time in the network’s history, the number-one nightly news program in the country.
On Thursday at the Peabody, Brokaw will reflect on his 40 years in front of the cameras and in front of the nation. The talk benefits the Methodist Healthcare Cancer Center.
Tom Brokaw, Thursday, November 15th, 11:45 a.m. at The Peabody hotel. $100. Call 516-0500 for more information.