countries in africa, they all get the athlete particular facilities, roads, trains, everything from china. when push comes to shove, there is still an amazing respect for the rule of law and the way tonight, the man with a front row seat to history who wrote the book about it. tom brokaw "anchor man anchor man." tonight i'll ask him about this generation of the end of the war. >> we're ending the war with a final march towards home. this is an extraordinary achievement. >> this is politics. >> the protests at home and around the world. and his new book, "the time of our lives," what he thinks america needs now.

>> this is what we can learn from our time. >> top of the hour, this is "piers morgan tonight." tom brokaw's one of my journalistic heroes. he says exactly the saying, the nbc anchor of nbc news for 22 years announcing his retirement in the wake of 9/11. he's now an author "the time of our lives." tom, welcome. >> piers, it's really good to be here. and that business about me being your hero, you're going to 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 your book with great fascination and also with an eye how this year, 2011, is going to rate in the news because to me, who is 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? >> well, it's been a chaotic year. 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 over the internet and all over the social media at all times. so there's really no escaping it. in the old days when there would be big events, you have a little more of a pace, i guess you would describe it. you hear something in the morning, spend the day at work, come home in the evening, and then take it in again and then 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 some kind of a news site that will pop up, people will be talking about it. having said 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, 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 not happy with him and some of the rhetoric is very similar to what we're hearing today. >> "time" magazine announced its person of the year and they went for a generic, the protester. what did you think of that choice? >> i thought it was a good call. there is a lot of anxiety and unhappiness 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 and as i've said on several occasions and i'm determined to repeat here tonight, the tea party played by the rules. they got angry, got to message, and stayed on message and they may not be what you think of is the best interest of the country but they are 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 not happy with the current condition of the political debate in this country. take a pace from the tea party and rally around what you believe in. >> do you see, tom, any kind of synergy between occupy wall treat, the arab spring uprisings? is there a common thread there? >> 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. 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 and a very small presence and in los angeles, slightly larger but, again, it didn't have the kind of an 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, the overwhelming majority, obviously, are on the 99% and there is that great concern about income and equality in this country. in the last three weeks i have been all over america. 19 cities altogether, and i've had a lot of high-income people come to me who say, we really have to do something about income and equality and that could cause a class war far and the consequences are not fun to contemplate. >> the nature, i guess, of the american dreams, certainly when

you grew up and born in 1940, you're 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, became a stronger country and a great sense of national unity and purpose to it and became the great manufacturing force. it's a very different crisis america faces right now because it's almost a crisis of, what is the american dream now? what is the identity? what kind of future are young americans going to be facing? >> well, 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 caught the best wave. after the war, our parents who had gone through all of the trials of the depression and world war ii, then came home to unprecedented working class prosperity and the united states was a colossus in the world. europe had been destroyed, japan had been destroyed, china was

one of those blank spots on the map that might as well have said beyond here serpents lie. we didn't know what was going on there. 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 real rules. we did learn our manufacturing and 40% of the gdp is made up of financial services. they don't make anything. they trade money. it's not a dishonorable profession but not in the 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 when you had smaller farms, now it's big agri business and more harvesting

procedures and so we have reduced our job foundation in this country to a perilous point and we need to think carefully how we get out of that. >> i want to play a clip for a speech by president obama in kansas which actually touches on that point. let's watch this. >> my grandparents served during world war ii. he was a soldier in patton's army. she was a worker on a bomber assembly line. they believed in 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. >> there's a problem, tom, with what the president was saying there, that that basic tenant of

what the american dream stood for, that anybody could make it. does that really exist anymore? i mean, a lot of people, i guess, are gifted and talented but are simply not able to realize their dream, their talent, under this current financial climate. >> well, i think with all due respect to the president, i think that was even true then. everyone could get a job but what he managed to overlook at that point was that, by the way, his grandparents that he was talking about were white people from kansas in the american south. they weren't getting very good jobs during that time of the post-war. those who were 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 and i think one of the lessons of the recent downturn

is that we have to build proportion back into our lives as well and build expectations back into our lives. that does not mean that we ought not have a job that pays a living wage. as i go across america, i find entrepreneurial people and high-tech manufacturers complain to me that they can't find workers with the skill set that they need. we need to work harder on education. the community colleges now are our growth industry because they are teaching young people how to weld, how to use computers in the workplace, how to reason, not just put a widget on a passing assembly line of some kind. 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, piers, in this country. this is an immigrant country and we've always been the best of our counterparts. we need to get back to that again.

>> do you think the average american, based on the spending that we saw over the thanksgiving holiday, for example, which i found really quite alarming, because i couldn't imagine your generation post war facing that kind of financial restraint, just ignoring reality and going on this spending spree. >> well, we were kind of a transition our parents had a very large thrift gene and 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, how well we could 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. and thin 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 which you ever a negative savings rate. i find that hard to and like you i'm paid very well for what i do and i'm able to keep myself comfortable and my kids who are hardworking and have that thrift gene passed down from their grand parents but at the same time, their needs if they really get critical, they've got dad around to help out. they like to established 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 a 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. when we come back, i want to talk about the republican nomination battle which is getting rather bruising, rather ugly, and rather personal, as it always seems to. [ female announcer ] help i need a holiday party idea. mmm... pillsbury crescent wrapped brie

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for a hot dog cart. my mother said, "well, maybe we ought to buy this hot dog cart and set it up someplace." so my parents went to bank of america. they met with the branch manager and they said, "look, we've got this little hot dog cart, and it's on a really good corner. let's see if we can buy the property." and the branch manager said, "all right, i will take a chance with the two of you." and we've been loyal to bank of america for the last 71 years.

the health policies, energy policies, which of those will be your highest priority your first year in office and which will follow in sequence, senator mccain? >> that's tom brokaw moderating the nbc presidential debate just a month before the 2008 election. tom is back with me now. tom, you've been in that moderating position a few times. what do you make of the way that the republican race is going, the debates, in particular? >> well, frankly, i'm a big advocate of as many debates as we can because you find out about candidates during that

time. i 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 commercials for mortgages on television. i don't know what's going do happen in the next month or so. it's important for all of us, journalists, especially, not a vote has been cast so far and very often these polls are a snapshot of a given time. now when people have to go into that booth and determine who they want as their candidate and envision who they want in the oval office, the dna changes as people make decisions.

>> it's interesting that you look at the poll numbers for somebody like jon huntsman, for example, which remain very, very low. if you talk to most intelligent people in washington or in the media, they are all surprised by this. is it unfeasible that someone like him could actually come from a very low base and still win the nomination? >> well, i think he has some hopes that 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 groups that are really defining that selection process at this time. you know, he hopes that he will do well in new hampshire and stay alive and then downstream he will have some success and my own guess is that he probably is beginning to hope that if it become as broker 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, as impressive as his credentials are, can catapult to the top. he takes position not in line with many of the people who are driving the republican debate on climate change, for example. he believes it's real and he believes it's true and there are a lot of people who have contrary points of view. >> what is clear is that although newt gingrich, who's the current front-runner, would prefer this to be a very civilized affair, mitt romney took off the gloves and called gingrich zany, suggested that he's ill-suited temperamentally to. >> newt gingrich has been a lot of things to a lot of people over the years and whatever you think of him, he's a tenacious and very nibble politician. there are very few people who follow this closely who thought that what happened last summer when all of his key campaign workers walked out on him and

next thing you know we're talking about half a million dollars in tiffany bills that he had run up but he's republican side on 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 a 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 are gone to him and said, you've 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, first in iowa and then in new hampshire and then in south carolina and in florida. the calendar works pretty well for newt gingrich. if he can do well in iowa and 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 at the moment, you could have ron paul winning in iowa, romney winning in new hampshire and gingrich winning in south carolina or florida. >> yes, he could. and then there's a certain amount of momentum that takes hold. it depends on the organization, how much money he's able to attract, whether the rest of the republican party are represented by his opponents will rally behind him or whether they will go to someone else and try to encourage them to get into the race. where newt gingrich has a problem, and this showed up in the poll next week, is downstream. say he gets the nomination. then all of 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 right now by 11 points, it's a margin of error between barack obama and mitt romney and a lot of

republicans are looking at those numbers and saying, look, i admire how well he's doing but it's not the best interest of the party for the long run. >> you've been quite scared thinking about donald trump and his planned debate which has obviously now been scrapped. what did you have against that? >> listen, i didn't have any -- i've known donald trump for a long time. he's part and parcel of the city of new york and he's been one of those larger than life figures. he's a shameless life promoter. i had a note from him today with that underlined saying, thanks for the nice words. my problem with it was -- and i'm sorry, piers, but i thought he got way too much attention for saying that he's 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 is 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, 20 million homes in peril or in foreclosure or under some stressful conditions and the families in those homes? what are we going to do about the jobless american. we've got systematic issues that we need to deal with rather than whether donald trump is going to run a debate or not and it turned out to be a moot point because most of the candidates didn't want to show up. he's been doing this for a long, long time. god bless him. 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. let's take another break, tom. when i 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. really, head & shoulders is for more than dandruff?

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including the important pivotal state of florida, now we have awarded that to vice president al gore. nbc news is now taking florida out of vice president gore's column.

>> from the network's point of vie, for the wrong reasons at the beginning when we moved it over to the al gore column and then at the end when it moved back to george w. bush's column and it took him up over the top. >> that is tom brokaw. coverage in the year 2000. that was a terrible moment for disciples like me. >> it was the longest political night of my career. i would like to think that i wasn't alone in making a mistake. there were a lot of bad calls that night. but i'd like to say that when we first called florida for al gore, i got a call instantly from the bush white house down in texas and from karl rove who went on the air and said, that's not what we're hearing down there and i have a high regard for karl rove's ability to count votes and lay the ground on aelects day going into that night and i turned to tim russert, my late and beloved colleague and said, we have a problem here, i think, and they

began to do the double-check, i think, and we were into a long, difficult process that winds up in the u.s. supreme court and i had never been through anything like that before and i hope never to go through it again and, by the way, to be perfectly walkish for a moment, i think it cries out for election reform in this country. and it's uneven rules from state to state to state and if nothing else we should have faith in the integrity of our election system. >> i completely agree. let's turn to barack obama. how good of a president do you think he has been so far? do you think he could get better, do you think? has he been more on balance as a success than a failure? >> first of all, i think it's very hard to judge the greatness of a president midterm and that's kind of where we are. it really requires the longer reach of history. for example, harry truman, i

referred to that earlier. during his time in office, a lot of people referred to his failure in office and one of the strongest american history. president obama i think disappointed a lot of his followers and enthusiastic voters and the independents and more moderate republican who voted for him because they don't think that he showed enough leadership skills on the really difficult issues of the day and didn't have his priorities worked out in advance. they really did believe that there would be a recovery and the joblessness in this country, that it was going to be a u or a v and it turned out to be an l. in other words, we went down and then went that way. he made a big investment in health care, which was very controversial and very complex. the first stimulus bill was really written by the congress and nancy pelosi.

it didn't have the impact that a lot of people had hoped it would have in this economy. so it was a steep learning curve, as it is for almost every president. and now we'll see how he does in the next year. he has had successes. i think it's fair to say that it's bold move to try to rescue the automobile industry in this country in detroit worked out for the most part and a lot of the t.a.r.p. programs that he inherited under the bush administration, who probably saved this country from going into a great depression, a lot of those programs that he continued are now being paid back at a profit. most of all, what i hear from people is that he doesn't have a passion for leadership and a kind of bold idea about where he wants to take the country and how he wants to take the country to that place. i think that's been a big issue for a lot of his admirers and then he gave openings, obviously, to those on the other side. it's going to be a tough patch for him but the conditions are

tough. and he knows that. next there's going to be a referendum on the economy and probably on president barack obama. but we'll see who he is running against and we'll see what the conditions are come the fall 2012. >> you've interviewed many presidents over the years. who do you think has been the most impressive of all of them? >> you know, you're not going to trap me into that. i think they've all had considerable strengths. i was at a february panel this past year about ronald reagan, a very spirited discussion. i started covering president reagan in 1966 when he was running for the nomination of governor and a lot of people thought that he would be the easier one to beat. they were more worried about george christopher, the now forgotten mayor of san francisco. ronald reagan became one of the defining political figures of my lifetime and of the 20th century. the debate that night was, was he a great president or was he

just great at being president? there was greatness in how he stood down the soviet union. no question about that. some of the other issues still in play is the deregulation of the federal government. there are a lot of kind of cutting taxes and borrowing money and deficits at the end. we'll have to work all of that out. i never thought i could see someone who would survive as many challenges to his personal as bill clinton did when he was in office. but he was about as nibble as anybody that i had ever seen, quite honestly. there was a moment in american life when we owed so much to watergate. i covered richard nixon and it was a real test for america to come out of that and in plain spoken man from grand rapids helped us get through it. first of all, our long national nightmare is over and working to pull the country back to an

he'll keel again and i think he was quite successful at it in the short time that he had. let's take another break, tom. let's come back and talk war. i want to know what you think about iraq, afghanistan, how barack obama dealt with moammar gadhafi and whether the knew way of war seems to suit america better. i habe a cohd. yeah, i toog nyguil bud i'm stild stubbed up. [ male announcer ] truth is, nyquil doesn't un-stuff your nose. really? [ male announcer ] alka-seltzer plus liquid gels fights your worst cold symptoms, plus it relieves your stuffy nose. [ deep breath ] thank you! that's the cold truth!

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it's harder to end a war than to begin one. indeed, everything that american troops have done in iraq, all the fighting, all the dying, the bleeding, and the building and the training and the partnering, all of it has led to this moment of success. >> that's president obama marking the end of the iraq war with a tribute to the troops who fought in the war and conflict. tom, i think you've been pretty voice ferous in that decision to go to war in iraq. when you saw president obama really trying to make it out as a victory and that it would all be worth it, did you agree with that? >> well, i think it's a complex question, by the way. what i think is, however we feel about the decision to go to war in iraq and put the biggest emphasis on that as opposed to afghanistan and how we conducted that war and how unprepared we were for the realties on the ground with ieds and tribal

uprisings that occurred, the decision to unravel the party that had been loyal to suddam hussein, i think you have to give great credit to the american military. these are all volunteers and represent less than 1% of the population and they went willingly and in many instances a brilliant job of adapting to the new warfare on the ground. it was never more true a great battle when the first shot is fired. combat took over very early in iraq and it's been a terribly difficult trial because of the political complexity of that part of the world. iraq was much more broken than anybody realized. they not only had to fight the bad guys but try to repair the country simultaneously. i agreed with the president's line that it's a lot harder to end the war than to start one.

that was true in vietnam and korea and here. these are things that we ought to be talking about a lot more in this campaign. when we go to war, there's always somebody talking about the decision that involves blood and treasure. we ought to have a discussion during the presidential campaign about the consequences of going to war and the blood and treasurer and the consequences and we ought to think about earning hearts and minds rather than militarily. >> certainly libya was a very, very interesting exercise in the way that america could do these kinds of wars, for want of a better phrase going forward, in the sense that they had a bad guy who had a bad regime as suddam hussein had done for decades. but rather than leading the international coalition forces, the americans took a back seat

and no american soldiers lost their lives. gadhafi was taken out. what do you think about the changing manner in which the military is now deploying itself? >> that was a major call for the nato force and primarily it was their power and some strategic and tactical and there was an uprising in gadhafi that started in that country. we didn't that have in iraq. saddam hussein and the sheer terror on the streets in iraq because they didn't know whether they would be eliminated and the kind of terror attack techniques that he he unleashed on people, the most innocent people in iraq for the smallest, slight however he perceived it.

so those are two different circumstances. a lot of people believed that he did have weapons of mass destruction. president clinton did, in fact. i was over there with a u.n. weapons inspection and i would fly over later acres and acres and miles and miles of igloos and general petraeus said, we don't know what's in there. well, it turned out, not much because he was trying to persuade iran that he had weapons of mass destruction and my own belief is that some of his colonels indicated that they were getting money from him and stored away somewhere. >> this comes back, i guess, to this whole declaration of a war on terror. i mean, can a war on terror actually exist? this is an ongoing unendable kind of conflict. wouldn't it be better to say we're going to tackle terrorism

head on and treat afghanistan rather than a war as an anti terrorism operation? >> well, war should not be reduced to a semantic exercise of some kind. in fact, general mcchrystal who lost his job because of a press flap and it was a great loss for this country, i think, a man by the name of henry hankcrumb who had seen the war coming in afghanistan, saw the threat of al qaeda and the taliban early on and led the successful effort to drive the al qaeda out of afghanistan in the early stages unfortunately they didn't have the kind of prominence that we probably should have allowed them to continue on the way through. nobody ever believed that afghanistan could be brought to heel. we have 2,000 years of history. i guess merchant is almost too long but a man who is a shop keeper in a very remote part of

afghanistan, i was there with the special forces embedded with him for a week and we went into that village and when the americans turned away, i got them to go back to the merchant and said to him, what do you think about their presence and they were determined to have him believe in the afghan security forces and telling people what to do and probably pretty close. >> i think you're right. the love of at least five good women has been the secret to your success. for a limited time, passages malibu

will be giving away free copies of the alcoholism & addiction cure. to get yours, go to ssagesmalibubook.com. tonight, east germany threw open the gates of the country, the gates that have been closed for almost 30 years. east germany actually attacked the wall. >> tom brokaw in the 1996 news. are you upset about the green jacket, looking back on that? >> i had to trade jackets with my colleague because i got to thinking, this is probably going to be on videotape for a while. i ought to get dressed up for a

while. i spent a lot of times in the outdoors, the wilderness, so i tend to travel with those kinds of jackets wherever i go and suddenly i find myself in this historic moment wearing that fairly battered jacket. it's a proud relic of a very important night for me. by the way, i was going to say something, piers, in the book i talk about that night because it really is symptomatic of how quickly things can change. the wall came down, germany was united, berlin is the most cosmopolitan city in central europe. germany, in so many ways, is the heart now of the european economy and the most sensible piece of the euro zone at the time. when i was there, just 1990, they still had communist ruling the other half. they did all of that by having a big, bold idea of unification. first home at coal and then the success of prime ministers in that country. so i think that's a lesson to

this country. we're at a crossroads as well and in the book i talk about how we can take on the challenges before us but we have to do that by finding a way to work together. >> when you look at all the incredible things that you've witnessed, tom, over the last few decades, which to you is the standout moment, the one that if you had the chance to relive it and to be there again you would take? >> well, unfortunately i don't want to relive some of them. the single hardest week i had and the single hardest day by far was 9/11. in part was because we didn't know what to expect next. when you go to war you have an indication war is likely to happen. even with hurricanes you can kind of see them coming, but in this case it was just out of the sky on a clear, bright september morning this utter terror was visited upon this country, launched us into a war, changed the nation profoundly. we had islamic rage in a way that we had underestimated.

that was a very difficult time for me. in a wider sense i suppose the biggest story of my lifetime internationally was the collapse of the soviet union and the rise of the chinese economy. they were linked to one another when the soviet union came down because gorbachev could no longer control what was going on he was much more progressive and enlightend. there were millions liberated and in the stands south of the soviet union. in 1989 tieneman square happened. the chinese government knew they had to do something. they chose economic freedom for the generations that were coming along. those were seismic events that will play out over the long reach of history. those are two of the events that i think had a profound effect on me. then in this country vietnam, the division over t and the success of the civil rights movement. those were two events that really changed who we are and

howie see ourselves. >> are you still a complete news junkie? >> of course. yeah, of course. i get up every morning and read lots of publications. i'm interested in how things work. sometimes my interests are too small city catholic. i range across too many parts of the spectrum. i really ought to be spending more time on one or the other. i'm fascinated by scientific developments these days, especially in the medical field. i am utterly fascinated by what's going on in this global economy. greece can get a headache, we're in danger of getting pneumonia. those are the kinds of things i think we have to be very keen and aware of. then i'm, you know, keeping my eye on china. can they pull this off? this is an enormous task, and there are some small trouble signs on the horizon over there. there's a lot to pay attention to, but most of all i'm always interested in what grows up out

of main street america, how this country defines itself much more from the ground up than from the top down. >> i meant to let you off the hook there about the five great women. i'll get into that after this break. let you sweat a bit more. this is $100,000. we asked total strangers to watch it for us. thank you so much, i appreciate it, i'll be right back. they didn't take a dime. how much in fees does your bank take to watch your money ? if your bank takes more money than a stranger, you need an ally. ally bank. no nonsense. just people sense.

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>> our special guest tom brokaw, author of "the time of our lives." it's time to get stuck into the great loves of our lives. i am of course referring to your wife of many years, to your three beautiful daughters, and also to your remarkable mother who died very recently at a grand age, i think 93 or 94. a remarkable life and career. tell me about these women. they said behind every great man is a great woman. >> i'm a failed member of the -- if not failed, i'm a flawed member of the male species but i'm surrounded by these awesome women. we did lose my mother. we're all at peace with it. she was five days short of being 94.

she went from living in a little house on the prairie quite literally. no electricity, no plumbing, one room school, then went through all the transitions through the last almost 100 years with great grace. always the best advice for our three daughters who are raised in an entirely different kind of an environment. they were raised in the world. they traveled the world. they looked to grandma jean. she was very perceptive about the news and then of course in our household, mer re dit who has been such a tower of strength to not only our daughters but to everyone who knows her as well. we have known each other since we were 15. it took me a while to persuade her that maybe we could have this life together. she was a little bit skeptical, i think, of me during our high school years. she once as a cheerleader ga me a sailor cap. i was a basketball player. i had a girl in every port as she described it.

at any rate, we worked it out. we'll have been 50 years next summer. i am so grateful that i've had the chance to live with these women, but most of all to learn from them. i grew up in a testosterone household of all men with the exception of my mother. i've learned that women go through much tougher physiological changes, they go through more difficult emotional changes, they give birth, they become mothers and they become career people as well. most guys couldn't handle all those roles. >> tom, it's been a fabulous interview. thank you so much for your candor and for your i think really wide-ranging overview of where things are. it's never quite as bad as people think it is is my taking away from this interview. >> thank you very much, piers. i think that that's absolutely the case. we still have so much strength in this country. the great character of america, the rule of law, the economy. people still want to come here and realize the american dream. we have to, all s,