A Lucky Life Interrupted

by Tom Brokaw

  Vivian and Charlotte are known affectionately as The Hooligans, a pair of vivacious, energetic city kids with a lot to say at high volume. During one visit I explained to them the definition of decibels as a subtle way to remind them to keep it to a low roar. It must have worked. On their next visit, on a day when I wasn’t feeling so perky, Vivian walked in and announced solemnly, “Tom, we’ll keep the decibels down.”

  These are the moments when family is the best treatment. I was reminded of the almost tragic case of Kevin Pearce, an American snowboarder headed for the medal round of the Vancouver Winter Olympics when he suffered a traumatic head injury during training. He was treated first in Utah and then medivaced to a brain treatment center in Denver where he was joined by his three brothers, mother, and dad.

  His father is Simon Pearce, the celebrated glass artisan, who, with his wife, Pia, raised their boys in a family compound in a bucolic corner of Vermont. The boys lived in a remodeled barn out back, which quickly became a training gym—cum—bedroom and boy cave.

  When it seemed Kevin would recover from his head injury the family decided to share their story, so I flew to Denver with my producer Jack Felling to accommodate them. It was not just another sports tearjerker. Pia and Simon and their boys, Adam, Andrew, and David, who has Down syndrome, talked intelligently and movingly about the shared experience of near death for Kevin. One moment he seemed indestructible, the daring Kevin, and the next he’s being choppered with traumatic head injuries first to a Utah hospital and then to the highly regarded Craig Hospital in Denver, which specializes in severe neuro-rehabilitation.

  The family wanted me to know that David patrolled the corridors of Kevin’s hospital, collaring every physician who passed by, saying, “Kevin is my brother. You’ve got to save him.” Adam, the brother closest to Kevin, pushed him hard during the recovery therapy, even as he admitted he didn’t know how it would turn out. It was hard, he said, shaking his head slowly, to see his vital, daredevil brother staring blankly into the distance.

  Kevin later admitted there were times when he hated his family during the long, grueling hours of therapy. He didn’t fully appreciate the extent of his injuries and he wanted his old life back, now. He didn’t get all of his motor skills back, but the recovery was sufficient for Kevin and his brothers to form a foundation called LoveYourBrain to help people with brain injuries. It was a long way from that Denver hospitalization when Pia, tucked into Simon’s arms, said, “I didn’t know whether we’d get a miracle.” When Jack and I wrapped our shooting I called Dick Ebersol, the executive producer of NBC Sports Olympic coverage, and said, “This is a story about family that will resonate with everyone. I think it should go in prime time.”

  That’s not an easy call, because the commitment is to the Olympic events of the day, and that is the expectation of the audience. But Dick has a matchless eye for what connects and gave us a prime-time slot. I appeared with Bob Costas, NBC’s All-Pro sports commentator, and, as I recall, I asked him not to preview it, because I wanted his first reaction to be on the air. Unusual for Bob, he was momentarily speechless, letting what we had just witnessed sink in.

  The Pearces are the kind of people I have in mind when I am regularly asked about my most memorable interviews. Interrogators expect I’ll respond, “Gorbachev, Reagan, Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Deng Xiaoping,” or other defining leaders of our time. However, I am most deeply moved and remember the occasion with greatest clarity when the subject is the lone white physician living in and tending to the two or three thousand black people in a squatters’ camp north of Cape Town, South Africa, or the brave Swiss nurse from the International Red Cross who provided me with a file of the “disappeared” peasant boys who had been grabbed by the junta during the El Salvador civil war.

  These were the middle-of-the-action stories that I thought were important and perfectly cast for television because they brought the events visually, audibly, and emotionally into your homes and hearts. Reuven Frank, one of the founding fathers of NBC News, said it best: “Television news is a medium that can transmit the experience of a news event unlike any other.” His unspoken caution to correspondents and producers: There are times to step aside and let the experience speak for itself.

  —

  For much of 2013 I had been working on a two-hour documentary on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the unwelcome appearance of cancer was not helpful. Still, I was able to participate in the screening, editing, and writing of the project while keeping my condition from the rest of the team. As I kept up the “It’s my back” cover story I picked the feel-good days to record my on-camera appearances and the narration.

  A week before Where Were You? The Day JFK Died was scheduled to air I made the rounds promoting it: Late Show with David Letterman, Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Morning Joe on MSNBC, Today, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, while still taking the daily dose of chemotherapy. It may have been an American television first.

  Meredith and some on my medical team were worried that those appearances were risky, given the heavy drug diet I was on. I was not. I practiced walking across our living room so when I hit the Letterman stage I could be sure of my steadiness. On Jon Stewart’s show I asked to be seated when introduced—“bad back, you know”—because I didn’t want to risk the big step up to the set. It all went well because, as I reminded family and a few friends, “ego in my business is a powerful drug.” It was also therapeutic, getting me back to what I’ve done for most of my life.

  Letterman is a friend and I thought he should know, so I called the morning after my appearance. He was stunned and has been very attentive since then, calling to check up, suggest dinner, discuss our mutual concerns about the environment.

  The JFK documentary was well received, especially a segment in which Marie Tippit, the widow of the Dallas policeman shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald shortly after Kennedy’s murder, brought to the interview with her a letter on pale blue stationery that I immediately recognized as belonging to Jacqueline Kennedy. From time to time Mrs. Kennedy and I had exchanged notes on books we discovered. It all started when I sent her Cyra McFadden’s hilarious send-up of flower child and aging hippie life in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

  Just one week after the deaths of their two husbands Mrs. Kennedy, then just thirty-four and deeply grieving, wrote this to Mrs. Tippit:

  What can I say to you—my husband’s death is responsible for you losing your husband. Wasn’t one life enough to take on that day?

  I lit a flame for Jack at Arlington that will burn forever. I consider it burns for your husband, too, and so will everyone else who ever sees it.

  With my inexpressible sympathy,

  Jacqueline Kennedy

  Caroline Kennedy, a New York neighbor, had control over the letter since it had been written by her mother and Jacqueline had left instructions it was not to be released. After a few cordial conversations Caroline gave me permission to use the letter on air, understanding the historical importance and the admirable sentiment.

  As a young man I was bedazzled by Jack Kennedy’s personal style and his literary gifts, supplemented by the magical pen of Theodore Sorensen. As I grew older and we came to know more about his personal life and presidential policies, especially his initial reservations about the civil rights movement, his Vietnam policies, and his determination to assassinate Castro, I was much more tempered in my enthusiasm.

  Indisputably, the Cuban missile crisis was his finest moment, and perhaps the lessons learned would have been a template for his second-term policies in Vietnam, but we’ll never know. That imaginative management of what could have been a nuclear showdown occurred months before his murder in Dallas, and in a way it was his exit line, so it took a prominent place in the instant analysis of his presidency.

  So much of political success is symbolic, and JFK brought to the White House a highly charged atmosphere that inspired
a generation of America’s young to step into the arena. His aura, even when I disagreed with him, made public service and Washington exciting, a destination for a young journalist and political junkie from South Dakota. Ironically, my big Washington assignment was as White House correspondent for NBC News in the last year of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Watergate.

  Nixon lost the White House to Kennedy in 1960 and the California governor’s race in 1962. He seemed to be through as a national candidate until Kennedy’s assassination and Lyndon Johnson’s troubled presidency. Winning in 1968, he was reelected by a historic landslide in 1972 and then began a long, tortured journey of self-inflicted wounds to an ignominious end as the first president to resign from office, remembered for Watergate and Vietnam. This is the same President Nixon who wisely saw opening relations with China as a bold strategic move, opened nuclear arms talks with Moscow, established the Environmental Protection Agency, and started welfare reform. He will always be one of American history’s most enigmatic figures.

  Kennedy and Nixon shared wartime duty in the Pacific and there the similarity ended, except each man, for entirely different reasons, was denied a full term to which he had been elected. To many, Kennedy’s legacy as a man who changed the essential DNA of the presidency is a secure pathway to enduring greatness. The enthusiasts stumble through the endless sexual affairs and drug injections for his aching back and Addison’s disease.

  For all of his cultivated press coverage, most of it adoring, there was much we didn’t know. A hundred years from now, with the clarity of hindsight and critical judgment, we may be closer to a conclusion on his presidency. Certainly his lively, wealthy family has been involved in so many triumphs, tragedies, self-inflicted catastrophes, and dubious enterprises that it could constitute its own Shakespearean chapter on America.

  As a patient with severe back pain I do wonder how JFK endured his, along with the nagging knowledge that Addison’s remained a controlled but not conquered disease.

  As for me, my pain became sufficiently manageable that I could keep some long-standing personal commitments. MD Anderson, the celebrated Houston cancer center, honored former secretary of state James Baker at a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser where he was interviewed onstage by one of my favorite colleagues, Bob Schieffer of CBS News. The organizers sent a private plane so I could emcee the evening at the Kennedy Center. I made a point of reminding the audience that I am on the Mayo board and that the great work of all these cancer treatment centers was not a contest but instead a common assault on our common foe: cancer. However, I did not disclose my own condition except to Baker and Schieffer, both of whom had had experiences with cancer. Bob and Pat Schieffer and Jim and Susan Baker have become close friends over the years, and I didn’t want them to hear my news on the gossip circuit.

  The Bakers and Brokaws have an annual quail-hunting outing with our wives and other friends, so I wanted Jim to know the goal was to get the cancer under control before the birds were out of season. Those kinds of plans kept me focused on the future and better times. Multiple myeloma was now as much a part of my consciousness as days of the week and news of the day.

  Which raised other questions. Did I pay sufficient attention to friends when they had their own encounters with some form of this pernicious invader? It is so often a hidden disease and deeply personal, the failure of your body to defend you against its mysteries. I have learned that when friends and relatives have cancer you can be sympathetic but you cannot be truly empathetic until you have it yourself.

  As word began to slowly spread about my condition I was again reminded that a life in journalism has many dividends, not the least of which are the colleagues with whom you share common interests. The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman offered to come to my home and brief me on his recent trip to the Middle East. Rick Atkinson, the definitive American military historian, reminded me of a lecture tour we would conduct in Normandy on the seventieth anniversary of the landing, saying he would keep my seat warm and my martini cold. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, lost a family member to multiple myeloma and brought to our friendship informed empathy and welcome discussions about writers, reporting, and literary trends.

  Herbert Allen, of the legendary Wall Street family firm, is the patron of our global bicycle trips and a longtime friend. He scheduled evening walks, assessing my physical progress and reminding me of upcoming excursions. As he put it in his brotherly-love sort of way, “We don’t miss you as much as we miss your stories.” Herbert and the writer Tom McGuane, a Montana neighbor and friend, are my age, and I could read in their touchingly solicitous notes an unspoken line: If this could happen to Tom, am I next? Cancer is an unwelcome companion to the so-called golden years.

  In or out of journalism I am drawn to those with an adventure gene that never runs down. Yvon Chouinard, who turned his genius for rock climbing and passion for surfing, mountaineering, and fly-fishing into Patagonia stores, the retail outfitting chain that made functional outdoor clothing fashionable, called to plot the years he figures we have left. We laughed at memories of close calls and excursions into remote corners of the planet in times gone by.

  A New York financial whiz and big-time foodie called regularly with offers of home-cooked meals. An NBC colleague baked cookies for grandchildren visits.

  Two friends who are cancer survivors kept track of my treatment and knew when to call and what questions to ask.

  A high school pal became the Brokaw correspondent for two other buddies from those long-ago days.

  Maureen Orth, the magazine journalist and Tim Russert’s widow, closed each of her notes to me saying she was remembering me in her prayers. Personally, I’d drifted from a prayerful life, but I was deeply touched by friends who keep the faith in a quiet way and offered their prayers as well.

  —

  All of this attention reminded me of a conversation with a friend who had an aggressive form of breast cancer. I flashed back more than thirty years to a Sunday when I drove my new, fast car to the home of Marc and Maria Kusnetz in the Catskills. Marc and I were a team at NBC News, correspondent and producer, traveling the world to document the collapse of the Soviet Union, the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and the contra wars in Central America. We had a professional and personal association as close and important as family, the white-bread boy from South Dakota and the wiry, kinetic hippie carryover from Queens and Columbia University. His wife had been battling breast cancer, and Marc and I had been involved in a frontal attack on all there was to know about the best treatment. Unfortunately, her cancer was advanced and she came from a family with a history of unhappy outcomes from breast cancer.

  Following graduation from Columbia’s esteemed journalism school Marc spent a year on the hippie trail of love, drugs, and adventure in India and the subcontinent before coming home and meeting Maria, a serene Italian American beauty, yin to his yang.

  After giving their sons a spin through the mountain roads in my new car I invited just Maria to join me. We laughed hard and hung on as I accelerated through hairpin turns and tried to put her condition behind us. She was in remission so I asked how it was going. I’ll never forget how she stared out the window and said in a low, even voice. “Okay, I guess, but I know it’s still there, the cancer. I can feel it.”

  It was a time when cancer counselors were in a fuzzy, feel-good mode, urging patients to “imagine a little elf with a stiff brush, just scrubbing away those cancer cells.” Maria knew better. She didn’t feel a brush. She felt cancer. We sat silently for a while and then drove on. She was right. Within a few months, she was gone.

  I can still hear Maria’s voice. Now I think more about the years I’ve had that Maria and other cancer victims were denied. With my diagnosis I quickly adopted a new attitude about age and years.

  —

  Seventy-three turned to seventy-four and neither seems like just another number to me any longer. As the birthday years climb, so does the cancer risk graph. Geor
ge Johnson, a former reporter at The New York Times, wrote a widely praised book called The Cancer Chronicles, and followed it in the Sunday Times with an article entitled “Why Everyone Seems to Have Cancer.” It appeared five months into my case, a time during which I learned of three other friends with cancer, one of them a surrogate son in his midforties.

  Johnson got to the heart of the matter quickly. While cancer death rates are going down modestly, the death rates for the two other prominent killers—heart disease and stroke—have declined dramatically. From 1958 to 2011 death from heart disease dropped by 69 percent. Stroke death rates, down 79 percent. Cancer in the same period?

  Off just 12 percent.

  Why? In heart disease cases, Johnson points out, changes in diet, exercise, and drugs to control cholesterol have been enormously beneficial, and if they fail, there are the mechanical fixes: new valves or pacemakers, bypass surgery and stents.

  Cancer death rates benefited from the crusade against smoking (a particularly lethal form for my generation; I’ve lost eleven friends or acquaintances to lung cancer), but after that, very few preventative measures to significantly reduce cancer have been successful.

  Johnson describes cancer as “not so much a disease as a phenomenon, the result of a basic evolutionary compromise. As a body lives and grows, its cells are constantly dividing, copying their DNA—this vast genetic library—and bequeathing it to the daughter cells. They in turn pass it to their own progeny: copies of copies of copies. Along the way, errors inevitably occur. Some are caused by carcinogens but most are random misprints.”

  Cell mutation is a biological wonder but it is not perfect. Johnson describes how “every so often a certain combination will give an individual cell too much power. It begins to evolve independently of the rest of the body….It grows into a cancerous tumor.” He reminds us that age becomes the catalyst for cancer. “As people age their cells amass more potentially cancerous mutations. Given a long enough life, cancer will eventually kill you—unless you die first of something else.”