by Chris Licht
At its core, the look and feel of Morning Joe reflects collaboration among Joe, Mika, and me. One of us will have an idea for a segment. We’ll massage it, play with it, add elements until, by the end, it’s tough to pin down authorship. More than anything, I try to keep Joe’s original vision fresh, to turn his sparks into cutting-edge television, to stay inside his head.
As the 2010 midterm elections approached, for example, I wanted to do something special on the day after the balloting. Why not, I thought, do the show from Studio 8H, the biggest at 30 Rock and the home of Saturday Night Live? Joe and Mika and our guests could sit on the stage before a live studio audience, which is what SNL always has but which morning shows rarely do. Using such a legendary venue would be an electric way of saying the election was a grand, historic event—and we’re the team to tell you about it. It would create buzz for us. And it did. People were clamoring for tickets. The New York Times took note.
Mike Barnicle, a former newspaper columnist in Boston and a regular on the show, calls me “Captain Intense,” possessed of a demonic desire to make MJ work. As a journalist, you want to expose problems and make things better. It sounds self-aggrandizing, and probably is, but MJ does that. It’s part of the solution. They watch at the White House; I know they do, because I get their e-mails. In the jargon of journalism, MJ can “drive the day,” meaning other news outlets pursue our insights or revelations.
I suppose I could be vice president of programming for the All-Reality Network, if there was one, and make huge piles of cash dreaming up Dancing with Convicts or Who Wants to Marry a Refugee? I could do that, but I would never want to. Getting up at 4 A.M. to do MJ each day, I don’t have to hold my nose.
But most of us, if we’re honest, are more than our noble ideals. Like most, I nurse ambitions, large ones. I like being a player on a big stage. It’s why I love New York City and did not like Allentown, Pennsylvania. I like to be at the core of news and sporting events and sophisticated gatherings, going places and doing things others can’t. Doing MJ puts me at the center of the big conversation. It’s a super-relevant existence.
I lived the show. I gave 100 percent, which means I was always shy a few percentage points to give to family. In retrospect, I know my obsession came at Jenny’s expense. She didn’t have all of me when I was at home. She almost never had a weekend with me that was not carved up by the BlackBerry, always the BlackBerry.
As our newborn was being taken to be circumcised, I was on the phone doing MJ work, obviously not fully in the moment of fresh fatherhood. Why did I even have it on? I skipped the wedding of one of my best friends because it was Sweeps Week. That failure is one of my all-time regrets, but it was an easy call at the time.
A mere three days after Andrew’s birth, I went back to work. The 2008 Democratic National Convention was under way in Denver and I was disappointed I couldn’t go because of the baby, so I worked double shifts at 30 Rock to help the coverage from there. The next week, I was off to the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, leaving Jenny alone in the first days of motherhood.
There were other problems, deeper and more wrenching. This part is not easy.
Anyone who meets me probably concludes I am not the retiring type but rather someone who is worldly, comfortable with command, comfortable around powerful people, and skilled in a television studio. All of that is true. But much of the time these past years, my stomach was an emotionally ensnarled place, a big knot.
I was not entirely sure where I stood at work. And I feared that my golden existence at the nexus of substantive and exciting things might end.
Doing a long, live, and barely scripted show every weekday doesn’t leave a lot of time for politeness and praise from the talent, Mika and Joe. Snap, do this now. Snap, don’t do that again. Snap, go away. There are eruptions of anger, and people stay mad for a while, and there are screwups.
Though Mika found me “a damn good producer,” I constantly craved reassurance. She thought I was headed for a meltdown, because I was racked with so much worry about whether she and Joe were happy and about whether there was anything else I needed to be racked with worry about. That’s why I worked so much, believing that is what I had to do to make sure everything was all right, and that I was in Joe and Mika’s good graces. That angst is common among executive producers, but knowing this was no help to me.
While I was pretty sure Joe considered me indispensable, I was nervous, looking over my shoulder, trying to shield myself and see where I stood in the firmament of NBC. To a degree, Joe says, all ambitious guys do that because we want to keep moving up. We gauge our position in the footrace. But sometimes Joe couldn’t tell if my proffered opinion about something reflected my true feeling or a safe one. Often, I covered my ass, out of fear.
If you love what you do, as I did, the thought of not doing it can be scary. For me, the fear was not about losing a paycheck. If they kicked me to the street, I’d land on my feet, because talent is always in demand. Instead, not being Joe and Mika’s executive producer was a scary notion because I would no longer be part of that big conversation I mentioned.
Solely because of Morning Joe, I had become friendly with Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, which until recently was NBC’s parent company. He had been advising me about my career. Would such a relationship have ever developed if I had stayed in local television? Probably not. Would it continue if I was no longer with MJ? Unlikely. If fired, I might wind up out of the loop at some backwater news show for nonplayers, the failures. That was my fear.
It’s no surprise, then, that in the rhythm of our day, I could go volcanic, firing off profanity-infused e-mails to those below me, often about minor things. I picked fights, too, just to mark territory. I had been working on being less prickly. Welch had told me to give more hugs if I wanted to keep doing big things, and I had been. But self-rehab is a long, slow process.
On the morning of April 28, 2010, I was about to unload on someone in my usual way. I was listening to a voice mail on my BlackBerry about MSNBC’s transportation arrangements for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, three days away. We had a big table at the dinner, which is the journo-politico meal of the year. The voice mail blathered on about which of our big names would get which drivers to take them to and from the dinner.
It was already a bad day; Joe and I had had a disagreement during the show, a testy one, about camera angles. Mika had even written Joe a note while they were on the air saying, Take it easy on the guy. Now came this silly, silly issue. Cars. Drivers.
Why am I getting a phone call about this? Do people know how much bigger stuff I have to deal with? Does anybody know what I have to put up with?
I would have called someone about the nonsense. I would have dropped a generous dollop of profanity upon them in my dismissive, asshole way.
I would have.
But my brain went pop.
chapter five
Free Fall
The new doctor, the one who had just arrived in my cubicle, was Ryanne Mayersak, and she was in her fourth year as an emergency-room attending physician, the supervisor in charge of the other doctors during a shift. Actually, this was her second visit to me. The first had come after Migraine Doctor left but before Louis arrived, and Dr. Mayersak had done neurological tests on me similar to those everybody else had done or would do. She had even given me her educated guess about what my CAT scan would show.
I have no memory of her initial visit. It is a reflection of how badly things unfolded in the next few moments that my brain wound up deleting an entire encounter with a doctor who was giving critical information.
As she entered for what I thought was the first time, Dr. Mayersak saw I now had a visitor, and she assumed he was not family. (Louis had gotten as far into the ER as he had by saying he was my cousin.) Doctors don’t usually give sensitive information to anyone but the patient and his relatives. I told her not to worry about Louis.
She delivers a lot of bad news in the emergency room and has found that the best route is not an oblique one, but straight ahead. A patient needs to start processing it, adapting to it, and thinking of questions about it. There I lay on the hospital bed, waiting.
“We’ve looked at your CAT scan,” Dr. Mayersak said, “and you have a significant amount of bleeding in your brain.”
A word apparently swam into my consciousness, a word with the impact of a dropped anvil, because Dr. Mayersak thinks this exchange may have happened next:
“Do I have an aneurysm?”
“That’s possible.”
I couldn’t breathe.
Most of us don’t know the causes of aneurysms or their treatment, and I certainly didn’t, but I knew right away I was in deep trouble. Blood had escaped from my arterial system and into the enormously constricted spaces of my skull, squeezing the most vital organ we have. Blood was causing my headache. Blood might still be leaking.
I fought tears.
There’s a well-worn aphorism that all too often we don’t recognize the crucial moments until much later, as they recede in the rearview mirror. This one had announced itself with a jackboot to the gut. In this antiseptic, windowless room, in this big Washington hospital, with Louis standing there but my wife and son in New York, my life was pivoting toward a new compass point. I had free-ranging blood in my brain. There was no way I would come out of this the same.
Just a short time earlier, I had been doing a national television show in perfect health. Then, after experiencing sharp pain, I had been safely diagnosed with a migraine. I was out of there. I was done with the hospital. While migraines are unpleasant, I had been told things were, if not fine, then manageable. Now they were very much not fine, they were dangerously wrong. It was like being tricked.
“This is a critical situation,” Dr. Mayersak said.
I was in the right place, she said. You’ll get the best care. The neurological team had been paged and was on its way and would answer my questions. If I had any right now, she could try to help. The question I came up with reflected the condition of a man whose circuits were being scrambled by profound distress, because it was so deeply trivial and dumb.
“So you’re admitting me?”
New thoughts came. I clearly hadn’t died, but people with aneurysms don’t walk out of hospitals the next day. We’re just getting started here. More was coming. My schedule, all those places I had to be and people I had to see, all confidently recorded in the BlackBerry that now slept in the clear plastic bag, had been blown up and replaced by the unknown.
My immediate future would be here, in this hospital. The master of Control Room 3A had no control in C2B. He could not fix the problem he faced, because this was not the familiar terrain of live television but a place where he was dependent upon neurologists who were coming to treat him and he had no idea how that was done. How could this be happening? Don’t they know I am exempt from this sort of thing?
It was the greatest shock of my life.
Not since pneumonia sent my son to an emergency room when he was seven weeks old had I felt as powerless. Actually, I felt more powerless than I did then. I wasn’t an observer here, as I was when Andrew was hospitalized. It was me in the bed this time, not me standing beside it. My brain, my future.
To Dr. Mayersak, Louis looked more stunned than I did. He had imagined his producer was merely suffering from too much coffee or too few vitamins, and would be up and on his way. Louis’s stomach had dropped at the mention of bleeding, in part because he had been working at NBC’s Washington bureau on the day in 2008 when Meet the Press host Tim Russert had collapsed and died. Now Louis roped his emotions back into place.
“You’re going to be okay, Chris,” he said. “I promise. You’re going to be okay.”
“I know. I’m just scared. This is really scary.”
He reached out and took my hand.
“Thanks, man.”
“Breathe,” he said.
chapter six
The Superheroes
At the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, as I learned later, Mika seized Joe’s arm as he stepped off the stage, his speech now done. In three years together on the air, Mika and Joe have had quite a few low points and tribulations, but he had never seen the depth of apprehension now sketched on her face.
“We have to go,” she said. “Louis says Chris has an aneurysm.”
“Chris has a brain aneurysm? Our Chris?”
“Yes, our Chris. We have to go now.”
In the car to George Washington, Joe kept repeating his disbelieving question, “Our Chris?” Otherwise, they rode in paralyzed silence. Mika thought the news could kill Joe. She thought the aneurysm could kill me. She saw me as so chronically healthy and resilient, no matter how much she and Joe got on my case about decisions or miscues. Now my head was way wrong. She was speeding to a hospital where things might not end well. People die of this.
Mika Brzezinski, on the outside, has a kind of crazed diva vibe. She is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, and she is hard-nosed, funny, and a fanatical worker, racing among a high-adrenaline job, two young daughters, a husband who works in television, books she writes and speaking engagements, and somewhere in there she sleeps but never for long. A former CBS network reporter and anchor, she has a deep grounding in television news.
On the inside, no one is more caring. No one will bust down more walls if they need busting. Jenny calls Mika a tornado. We call her “Mommy,” because she makes everything all right.
Joe Scarborough is much harder to read, more closed. Though he left Congress in 2001 after more than three terms in the House, he is still a politician who has flawless sensors and total recall of names, events, songs, and dates and perhaps still a politician’s wariness.
There’s no one more adept at detecting the glimmer of a rising political force or the stench of a loser. Joe has genius instincts for what makes good TV, right down to camera angles and set design, even though he has no background in such. If he could both host his show and run it from Control Room 3A, he would do so and he would be superb at both.
We are The Trifecta, Mika says, though I fully understand they matter more than I. With the success of the show, they have become a brand, serving as masters of ceremonies at dinners and making speeches across the country, and I help push and polish the brand, as well as execute the show they want. They are always in my thoughts. They might have assistants who worry about the details of their travel arrangements and their engagements, but if something goes wrong in their professional lives, it eventually comes to me.
Sometimes, Joe wants to talk about an issue or problem in his life. Maybe his family. I’ll listen for as long as he wants, because my role is to make his life easier. If we’re doing the show in Los Angeles and he calls my hotel room at 2 A.M. to say his throat feels constricted and he needs to get to a hospital—which actually happened—I drive him.
Doing such things might seem to contradict the glamorous notion that I have all this power to shape the show and the talent. But Mika and Joe are the show. I do what has to be done to help them make Morning Joe as good as possible.
Our relationship does not work in reverse. I’m expected to work as hard as I can without burdening them with how my son is misbehaving or with complaints about the superintendent of my apartment building or with doubts about how much they respect me. They are on television for three hours every day. I’m not. I cannot make my personal life one more thing they must deal with.
So when Joe and Mika strode into C2B late in the morning of April 28, the first thing I did was apologize. Not for being sick. I know that’s not something to apologize for. Instead, I was commiserating with them because their already crowded schedule now had to make room for the serious illness of a member of their team.
To Joe, I looked frightened. To Mika, I looked e
mbarrassed at being the center of attention. I apparently looked like I could use comforting, too, because comfort is what Mika began to dispense. You don’t look different, she said. You don’t look like you’ve lost your mind. You are still with us here in the present, conscious, alert. You’re fine.
She didn’t know that. None of us did. She actually feared I might wind up damaged.
Louis, who had never left my side, was trying to keep up my spirits, too. In fact, he told me so many times that I was going to be okay I finally had to say, “Dude, I love you, but I need to hear that from a doctor.”
Joe said little. He looked very grim. He said later he could not be false by patting my shoulder and saying all would be well, because he thought my odds of getting out of this intact were miserable, no better than fifty-fifty.
Now Mika went into full Mika-mode.
She was all over her cell phone, calling the hospital CEO, calling hospital public relations officials, calling Jenny, calling Mom and Dad, reaching out to anyone who might help in the saving of me. She never stopped dialing.
Mika and Joe were swirling like superheroes who had arrived to confront the arch-villain in my head and to beat him senseless. They were becoming my executive producers. Just as I did for them and the show every morning, they had put on headsets of a sort and were working to make me come out right.
Mika pointed at her chest, then her butt.
“Mommy,” she said, “is kicking ass.”
My head was still pounding. I had no idea whether my brain was still bleeding. My wife was still a couple of hundred miles away. But this, this flattening of doors and taking of names, was starting to sink deeply into my heart.
So this is how much they care.
I could tell this wasn’t Joe simply reverting to Congressman Scarborough. He wasn’t making an obligatory stop to give a hospitalized constituent his best wishes for a full recovery and, after a two-minute visit, moving on to a ribbon cutting at a Pensacola strip mall. He was in this fight. He cared far more than I had assumed.