What I Learned When I Almost Died

by Chris Licht

  Dad picked up.

  It was Carl Stern.

  “Just returning Chris’s call.”

  On the Vineyard, Carl had given me his number, probably secure in the thought that no nine-year-old would actually call a leading national television correspondent. But I did, because I felt Carl and I had much to discuss, being in the same business. I used to call Sue Simmons, too, one of the anchors of WNBC–New York’s evening news. I called Sue a lot, enough to become known to her as “Chris from Connecticut.” Mom says I once told Sue, “I’m going to work for NBC one day.” (Years later, my wife worked with Sue at WNBC, and mentioned to her that she was dating someone Sue knew, someone who used to telephone her as a kid. “Chris from Connecticut?” Sue said.)

  As my childhood fascination with broadcasting grew, I pictured myself as some kind of network “talent,” an anchor perhaps, certainly a reporter, a person on the air. When I went off to Syracuse University to study broadcasting, Stephanie handwrote a letter assuring her big brother, You’re going to be in Tom Brokaw’s seat one day.

  I might have had the voice for it. In the wee hours on weekends during high school, I earned four dollars an hour as a DJ on a fifty-thousand-watt rock station that blanketed Connecticut. This made me a bit of a celebrity among my peers, especially female, and I’d dedicate songs to my buddies who were out doing what more normal teenage males did on weekend nights, which was hang out. If you had been listening, my best friend Marc Nespoli says, you would have assumed from the dulcet pipes that I “was thirty, not eighteen.”

  After graduating from Syracuse, I settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to commence my television news ascent. The job there, working for a company that produced and sold medical stories that television stations could air as their own, was instructive and decent. But life in Allentown was slow death in obscurity.

  So when a friend suggested I move to Los Angeles to help with his production company, I leaped at the chance to work for nothing, which is what they paid me for the first couple of months. In time, I was working on a television pilot two floors above the newsroom of KNBC, the local NBC-owned station, and I would hang out down there, doing research if asked. I liked the energy of a newsroom. And there I got to know Jeff Kaufman.

  In the summer of 1995, Jeff was the executive producer of a nightly program about the trial of one Orenthal James Simpson, who was charged with the knife murders of his ex-wife and a friend of hers. With its threads of sex, race, violence, and police bias, the O.J. trial was big. You might have heard of it. Jeff’s live half-hour program recapped each day’s testimony, beginning at 7:30 P.M. One day, he asked if I wanted a full-time job as one of the show’s writers.

  I didn’t know how to write television copy, but that was a minor matter I kept to myself. This was a big show in a big city about big news. I accepted. Jeff butchered nearly every sentence I wrote during my early days, and I got schooled.

  The O.J. show was supervised each night by a certain line producer, except on Wednesdays, when he left early to teach a college class. He would designate a writer to sit in his chair during the show, which was not as big a risk as it sounds, because the trial always ended at five, giving us plenty of time to prepare for seven-thirty before he left. To be Line Producer for a Day was a babysitting job, a judgment-free exercise, so easy that one evening they gave the chore to me.

  Then, at 6:15 P.M., with the line producer now gone and Jeff off that day, the Fuhrman tapes were released.

  Mark Fuhrman was a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department who investigated the O.J. case. He is white. Simpson is black. Fuhrman’s racial attitudes were a major part of the defense’s case because Simpson’s lawyers believed the police were prejudiced against their client. Fuhrman had sworn in court he held no racial animus and hadn’t used the word nigger in a decade.

  But during taped interviews in recent years with a writer developing a screenplay about police officers, Fuhrman had used that very word several dozen times, and now the court had released some of the tapes, which the jury would be allowed to hear.

  That detonated our script. There had to be a rewrite. A camera crew had to scramble to get to the home of Fred Goldman, the father of Nicole Simpson’s murdered friend, so we could get his reaction to this development that was so damaging to the prosecution’s case. That evening’s program would be no babysitting affair. I was in charge, me, age twenty-three, training wheels still on and, at that moment, terrified.

  With major help from another writer whom I thank to this day, the overhaul of the script came together. But would the camera crew get to Fred Goldman’s place in time? The show began. The crew arrived at Goldman’s. It began setting up. Five minutes left in the show. Three. There! We went live from the Goldman home, with two minutes to spare.

  The adrenaline rush was nothing like I had ever felt. The show was so good that when we had finished, the news director wanted to thank the brilliant soul who had led the effort. He refused to believe it was the Syracuse kid. In fact, he was annoyed I had been put in charge in the first place.

  That night changed everything. No more Tom Brokaw. No more aiming to be in front of a camera.

  I knew instantly that the feeling of control and creation I had experienced made me happy. I liked sculpting the chaos. To have a vision and see it broadcast on TV, well, there was nothing better than that, I thought. Being on-air talent could not possibly be as wonderful, because you only command the slice of the whole involving you. Being a producer meant having the entire show in your hands.

  We all went to a restaurant and got drunk to celebrate.

  Producing was what I wanted.

  chapter three

  A Migraine Guy

  Not long after my text entered cyberspace on its way to Mika Brzezinski, a doctor came to my cubicle in the emergency room of George Washington University Hospital and asked me to hold out my arms, push my fists against her hands, and other tasks to discern whether my very disagreeable brain was still in clear communication with the rest of me. She was calm, if detached.

  “Look, you’re not exhibiting any signs of anything neurologically wrong with you,” she said after a few minutes of this, “and I think what you’re experiencing is a stress migraine. Do you have a stressful job?”

  I told her my job at MJ. It was pretty clear she had never heard of the show.

  “Well, we’re going to get you something for the pain, and then when I come back, I’m going to give you some tips on how to manage your stress.”

  “So I’m not going to get a CAT scan?”

  “No, you don’t need a CAT scan.”

  A migraine made sense. My nausea had faded, and there were no other symptoms. No fever, and nothing was numb, immobile, or weak. And migraines can be extremely discomforting, and I certainly was extremely discomforted. A migraine this must be.

  The satisfaction of a diagnosis was tempered almost immediately by the knowledge that migraines are not one-and-done. In time, there’s another, then another, now and forever. How annoying, I thought. I’m now a migraine guy. Who wants membership in this club?

  The doctor left. But soon a woman in a black polo shirt came in. The shirt had writing on the back, like TRAUMA TEAM or TRAUMA UNIT, I can’t remember. An entirely different aura surrounded her, one of great urgency. She ran through similar neurological tests. I would soon be a leading American authority on those tests.

  “Mr. Licht,” she said, “I’m going to give you a shot for the pain. Then we’re going to take you down and get you a CAT scan.”

  I read nothing into it. They were merely being safe about their migraine hypothesis. Anyway, Dad had said to get a scan, so this was good.

  What I didn’t know was that the doctor in charge of the morning shift in the emergency room had been told the migraine diagnosis for the patient in C2B and thought my problem might be something else. With any patient in the ER, the supervisor’s job is to consider the worst possibilities, and she was troubled by the swift, deva
stating onset of my pain. She wanted more tests and had ordered a nurse to my room with pain medication.

  Black Polo gave me the shot. Now down the hall I went to get the CAT scan, which took no time at all, and now back I came to C2B. It was nearly 11 A.M.

  In the midst of all this, a text had arrived on my BlackBerry.

  Shall I call Jenny?

  It was Mika. But I was no longer tethered to my phone. I had turned it off and dumped it into the plastic bag with my clothes, a sign of just how awful my head was feeling, because I never put myself out of reach of the known world. Normally, Mr. BlackBerry and I were conjoined twins.

  Mika got no reply.

  She texted again, a minute later.

  I am sending Louis. And telling Joe when he gets offstage. We need to hear from you or we will be there.

  Again, silence.

  At the Marriott Wardman Park, where Joe was about to start his speech, Mika had not read my initial text as conveying a minor, if somewhat unusual, problem. She has tremendous instincts about situations and people and had gotten a dark feeling from my text, which only got darker when she received no answer to hers. She didn’t tell Joe; he was about to take the stage.

  “Louis, I think we have a serious problem.”

  Louis Burgdorf, who more or less pummeled me into hiring him after he graduated from college a couple of years ago, is Mika’s and Joe’s personal aide, and he is usually at their side when they make an appearance.

  “I’ll stay with Joe,” she told him. “We’ll do the speech. I want you to go to the hospital.”

  And now, a ride on the Washington Metro later, he came down a hall of the emergency room as I stood there waiting to use a bathroom. Seeing him was a big comfort. Migraine diagnosis or not, this was no fun.

  When we got back to C2B, I climbed aboard my hospital bed and perched there in my goofy gown, which was not what I was wearing when Louis last saw me earlier in the day. He was concerned that there were no nurses, doctors, or technicians, and that I was in such distress and looked so pale.

  “My head hurts,” I told him. “You don’t know. I feel like someone’s stabbing me.”

  To illustrate, I ran my fingertips from the front of my head to the back.

  Now Louis’s phone was getting short Mika bursts.

  What is happening?

  Have you heard anything?

  Where is Chris? Has he seen a doctor?

  ????

  Whether or not I mentioned the migraine diagnosis to Louis, I can’t remember. There’s a lot about that day I can’t remember. But there wasn’t much definitive to tell the outside world in any case. We were still awaiting my CAT-scan results, even if I still thought I had nothing but a migraine. I did ask Louis to call Jenny in New York, because talking to her myself seemed to require far more clarity and concentration than I was likely to have.

  Minutes passed. More minutes passed. It seemed as if the hospital had forgotten about C2B. In reality, getting a CAT scan evaluated and uploaded to a hospital’s computer system can take time, depending on the demand and the severity of the cases within the emergency room, which, at George Washington, has three dozen patient cubicles. Its emergency room sees seventy-two thousand patients a year, nearly two hundred a day, the second greatest volume in Washington.

  At last, a doctor came in.

  A new one.

  chapter four

  Captain Intense

  On April 3, 2007, the University of Tennessee defeated Rutgers University to capture the NCAA women’s basketball championship, and the next morning Don Imus declared on his national radio show that the losing team’s players, most of them African-American, were tattooed, rough, “nappy-headed hos.” His CBS show died a short time later.

  Imus’s suicide-by-slur left MSNBC, the cable network, with a Grand Canyon in its morning lineup. Even though Imus had worked for CBS radio, he had done his show at MSNBC’s studios in Secaucus, New Jersey, enabling the network to simulcast it, as easy a way to fill three hours as there is. Now he was gone, but the three hours remained, waiting to be filled by . . . Nobody knew.

  On a rainy afternoon in the midst of this uncertainty, as I worked in my apartment in New York, in the room that would become Andrew’s after he was born the following year, Joe Scarborough called.

  “This Imus stuff is crazy,” he said.

  At the time, we were doing Scarborough Country, a nightly, hour-long collection of politics and pop culture in prime time on MSNBC. Its future seemed uncertain, because the network was starting to slant leftward in the evenings and Joe is a conservative former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida.

  “I’ve just sent you a PDF,” he said, “and I want to do this.”

  The PDF attachment to his e-mail contained a proposal for a unique news show that would slide into the vacant Imus slot. It would not offer a conventional morning buffet of fashion, food, and weight-loss tips spliced with twelve-year-olds plucked out of wells or teen-actor graduates of the Betty Ford Clinic. It would serve witty, nonideological conversation among smart guests about politics, business, and culture. Above all, it would exude intelligence. Willie Geist, who became one of its hosts along with Mika and Joe, came to call it “Fantasy Breakfast” because the sharpest minds you can imagine show up at your house for eggs and issues.

  Signing off on Joe’s idea, Phil Griffin, who was then senior vice president of NBC News, offered a piece of advice. Joe ought to bring me from Scarborough Country as his executive producer. In the few years the show had been alive, Joe had chewed through several producers, but he and I had meshed, so much so that Joe says I scrubbed away his reputation around the network as a difficult piece of work.

  Joe wants a producer who’s organized, has vision, and gets the impossible done. He wants someone with “rocket fuel” in his veins. He wants a killer. I like to think I fit all the criteria. A killer producer never takes no for an answer. A killer relentlessly pushes to land the guest who seems too tough to get, pushes his team to make each segment shine more than the one before, pushes the hosts and himself, pushes every problem toward solution. He does not allow anyone within the building or beyond its walls to thwart him or the show. Hell no. We’re Morning Joe. Don’t tell me I cannot have what I need. I need a yes.

  Not long before my brain episode, a reporter from GQ captured me in action pretty well. During a Morning Joe one day, Mika and Joe were supposed to talk with Hillary Clinton by satellite, but CNN’s morning host, John Roberts, was interviewing her by satellite, too, right before us, and he was running long. The GQ reporter picked up the scene in our control room:

  “I’m gonna fucking punch John Roberts myself,” says Licht. “Fuck, they’re giving it to us a minute and a half late. Fucking assholes.” He instructs another producer to tell Fox News, where Hillary is going next, that she may be a bit late, “because unlike CNN, I’m not a douchebag!” Then he starts flipping out because there’s only one feed from Haiti and it’s going to the freaking Today show.

  As a result of that little episode, by the way, we have a new rule: no reporters in the control room.

  One summer, Joe’s twenty-one-year-old son, Joey, was an intern on the third floor of 30 Rock, where Morning Joe lives, and after a while Joe asked if Joey had formed any impressions of me.

  “Oh, Chris is great,” Joey replied. “He’s great.”

  “Well,” Joe said, “I’ve heard that he can be an asshole. That’s the word people use.”

  “In the control room,” Joey said, “Chris is an asshole. But you need that. There is so much chaos going on in there.”

  Control Room 3A is a few dozen feet down the hall from the gentility of the Morning Joe set. It is my domain. It is not always genteel. It is a dark, low-hanging universe of dozens upon dozens of flat-screen monitors; of consoles and headsets and fatigue and snap decisions; of telephones, jumbo coffees, and chatter, which can morph into shouts, profane shouts, if a teleprompter freezes or Mika’s mike is left on during a
commercial break or a guest is sonorous. A dialect is spoken in 3A, but it is only tangentially English, things like “We’re about thirty heavy” or “Animate now to the hard out.”

  This is live television, the most difficult kind, because the first take is the only one. The planned sequence of segments is a malleable thing because we may drop a guest as we go, we may add one, we may be surprised by what one says, we may have breaking news, we may lose a satellite feed, we may change songs leading into commercial, we may have to remind those on the set what to say or what not to.

  They are the most fun hours of my day. To stand in the shower and come up with an idea for that morning’s show and see it take shape is the legal high of being an executive producer. So is opting in midshow to try to hunt down a traveling congressman for a live shot and pulling it off; whispering in Joe’s earpiece and hearing the nugget come out of his mouth seconds later; keeping those on the set cool and calm while we in the control room douse a metaphorical fire.

  Each day, however, I make hundreds of decisions that go far beyond the mere technical challenges of running a control room. While I get a huge amount of help from the MJ team, particularly my senior staff, the buck stops with me. In large part, I assembled the small, dedicated team that puts out the show each day. If a controversy brews up because of something said on the air, damage control falls to me. If a newspaper calls to check out a rumor about the show, I have to weigh how to handle it. I make sure the mix of guests is stimulating and smart. If I have doubts about the authenticity of a news item we’re about to air, I hold it, which I did recently regarding unsubstantiated reports a black employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been fired for racist remarks. I wanted confirmation from the Obama administration, which we got and aired, a decision that left Joe pretty pleased because unlike others, we hadn’t jumped to any conclusions.