and he said, god, i was blindsided by this stuff. now, i've got my camera crew and all my producers there and everybody. and i said, well, you know, joe, it's been around for a while. he said, yeah, i'm thinking about getting a federal study. i said don't go there. it's in every woman's magazine every week. you don't have to do that. that was, for me, the quintessential joe moment, and it was not -- it was not that he was unprepared for the topic at hand, but he just loves to talk ability whatever happens to be on his mind at that time. and there are, you know, there are lots of people who are -- they're not impressive. i'll tell you about putin. i interviewed gorbachev and we really did become quite close. putin, i interviewed twice. your mother was at the dinner that i gave for him, and your dad was there as well, and your mother had done the thing on the banking system in russia. >> wonderful "vanity fair"

article, she's here right now. god bless her. thank you, mother. >> we had a big dinner at 21, and he never cracked a smile. did he? and the first time i interviewed him in moscow, same thing. i didn't look into his eyes and see the soul of a christian. i saw a russian nationalist who had been a kgb agent. he was very tough and very determined. and you must remember, he was a guy who carried out orders and worked for people who had more standing than he did. so you get these different kinds. on the other hand, the most remarkable man i interviewed under the most remarkable circumstances was nelson mandela. when he came out of prison, i was with him 24 hours after he had been released. for 25 years he had been in prison. it was if he had just gotten back from a trip to zurech representing his country in some

way, in his backyard in soweto. he was charming, completely versed in the western media and who we were and what we were interested in. and one of my treasured pictures of the two of us laughing as we're sitting there. you know, he had never met me before, obviously, but i had a soundman who had one of these boom mikes with a big, fuzzy thing on it to cut down on the wind. i said, mr. mandela, this is not a weapon. it's a microphone. he said, i'm so glad to hear it. i thought it was a shotgun pointed at me. we broke up in laughter. i thought, that was one of the moments that you kind of live for. >> you absolutely remember those, without a doubt. my father and you, you would have a descripter, brought this up when you mentioned john edwards. no socks for a politician. what did that mean? real quickly. what does no socks mean. >> tim and i had a lot of short hand when we talked. and there was a candidate

running, i can't get too close to it, the identification of it, democrat who was running in the midwest. and tim said, how is he going to do? i said, i can make a couple calls to find out. it was a guy who had a place in the east as well. he had gotten infatuated with the eastern seaboard south where luke spends a lot of time on nantucket. so i called one of my friends in the midwest, and i said, how is he going to do? he said, one line, he said, he doesn't wear socks. and it was that summer kind of thing that you see in the eastern seaboard. you can't do that in farm country. >> right. >> so that became for tim and me, shorthand for a candidate who didn't have a clue about where they were going. how are they going to do? he doesn't wear socks. okay. >> and i use that to this day. it's a great descripter for those kinds of candidates. let's open it up to the audience. shelby. >> shelby coffey, mr. brokaw.

you delivered a wonderful eulogy for our friend ben bradley at the washington national cathedral this week, and i wondered, it was great for the cathedral. you're now in a temple of free speech, so if you had another couple anecdotes about ben and what it was like to be with ben, kind of resemble being with james bond, we'd love to hear those. >> so question from shelby there, any more anecdotes about ben bradley? you eulogized him yesterday. you couldn't do them in a church. >> and i talked about it. i actually left out one whole paragraph about the business about his profanity, and about, you know, and i really had kind of euphemistically figured out how to do it, and i kind of skipped over it, and it's just as well. but a couple stories. what i said was he had his own personal system that involved

digits on his hand he would use to express himself to people when they didn't agree with him. but a british friend of mine had read, who didn't know him, had read all the obituaries and came to me said and i have been reading all these obituaries of benjamin bradley, the profanity, overstated? i said impossible. impossible. >> i really think it grew out of his war experience. i really think, ben and i talked a lot about what it was like for this harvard graduate to be in an area with kids from the farm and the inner city and all these places, and i remember this story vividly. he was on the phillip, and they were in the thick of it, and they had a kid onshore who was an artillery spotter for him. he was down, really out there by himself in the jungle. giving him japanese locations. and they would talk to him radio, clandestinely, and the kid said i have to get out of

here, i need a break. they had no idea who he was, so they sent a zodiac in after him, pulled him out at nighttime, and ben said he was about 5'3", he couldn't have weighed more than 120 pounds. he was from some small town in texas. he was our link. a guy who put himself way out front so we could hit the target, and it made a huge impression on him, and then on the way home, ben said, they all gathered on the fantail and talk about what they want to do when they get back. he was hearing aspirations and dreams he had never heard before because of how he had grown up. he wanted to be a journalist, and there were school teachers and farmers and all these other people. it was a real education. but one of my favorite social stories about him is that -- well, i have another one like that. here he comes out of that brahman background, goes to war, goes to paris, invents "newsweek" conducts the greatest

journalistic investigation on the greatest political scandal in the nation's history and everyone loved him at the post. i have been in journalism for 52 years. i never knew reporters who swooned around their boss. and it was in part because of how he handled them. this must have been the second year i was in washington. i was invited to a party, and i got there late. i had been at the office, and i walked in. meredith said to me, you have any idea who you're seated next to tonight? i said, no. she said, it's jan morris, the writer who has just had a sex change operation. now ms. jan morris. i kind of vaguely read about it. and i say, oh, my god. and we're immediately sat at the dinner, and she couldn't have been more charming. she said, i have been watching you cover watergate. how has that effected you? and i said, not thinking, it's changed my life. now, i'm just, you know, i'm red in the face. how do i get out of it?

and ben overhears this, and he bails me out. he leans over and says to her, when was the last time we saw each other? was it in algeria? i thought, why can't i say something like that? that's who he was. he never -- he was always joyful. woodward and i talked about him a lot because bob and i come from the same kind of midwestern protestant guilt, and he said ben never, ever looked back. he only looked forward. if they made a mistake, he'd say, okay, clean it up and we go on. instead of anguishing over it, he'd say, okay, got to keep going, guys, and that's what they would do. so he was really quite remarkable. >> who else do we have in the audience? there, come on up to the microphone here. don't fall down the stairs. oh, great. let's do this.

we'll come right back. go ahead. sure. >> i was just wondering, since you have retired, there's been a lot of changes in the way journalism is presented, like the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and sort of celebrity news personalities and just much more controversial sort of loud personalities. i'm curious like what you think of these new personalities and the tv shows, perhaps, you watch to get the news now. >> the question is, in our current day and age, we have this sort of celebrity journalist driven cable news machine, a lot more opinion on news, not like it used to be in a capacity also derived from social media. what does that mean for the country, and what do you watch as a media consumer? >> i surprise some people. i think we have so many more choices now than we have ever had. representing so many different points of view. but you can't be a couch potato

anymore. you have to be much more aggressive as a consumer about what you watch and test it for its credibility. is it good for the country? i think free expression is good for the country, but at the somtime, i think there's a lot of mischief, and i think there's a lot of deliberate destructive mischief that goes on out there. my recommendation to audiences is kind of create, if you will, your own virtual newspaper. i get up in the morning and i, you know, i have a friend who runs the financial times. i like to check in, see what's doing there. then i run the traps on the standard american establishment papers. i read the post and the wall street journal and the "new york times" right away. i go to the counsel of foreign relations where i'm a board member and we have a very good overnight look at what's going on, and there are terrific websites that are attached to think tanks or groups of one kind or another. i love the idea i can in a

keystroke read the dallas times herald. i want to see what that paper is saying and i can get it from them. but i have to be proactive about it. i just can't take what comes at me. we have a ranch in montana and a wonderful couple working for us, but they're real ranching, isolated family in a rural area, and they're quite apolitical, and about twice a week, karen comes across the bridge, her eyes are about this big, and she'll say to me, you're not going to believe what i read on the internet this morning. my answer is always the same, karen, you're right. i'm not going to believe what you read. and you have to have that attitude a little more, i think. >> it's a very important point. in this day and age, everyone thinks it's easier to be a media consumer, and that's not necessarily true because you really have to separate fact from fiction and be much more cognizant of who is delivering you the product. over here, what do we have? >> mr. brokaw, i really enjoy your time here this evening.

and you may not remember, but i have sent you some pictures previously when you were in town for the tenth anniversary of the fall of the wall. pictures of you in berlin because at the time, i was a young army intelligence officer and assigned there from december of '88 until may of '92, so this evening, i brought you additional photographs attesting to the fact you were there, and also for the 20th anniversary, i published a book, but it's from the perspective of what the role the western allies play, which really hasn't been documented in many ways. so i would be honored if you would accept this from me, and again, i enjoy the fact that you came here this evening. and i had a chance this time to see you. >> well, thank you very much for your service. god bless you. i mean, a young army intelligence officer who was in berlin at the time of the fall of the wall and has just written

a book about the role that western allies had in the fall of the wall that is too often overlooked. what do you think in terms of some western allies not getting their due diligence in terms of the fall of the wall. >> it was brought on by the people in the ger. what was overlooked was what was happening in the week before. there were hundreds of thousands people out there demanding change, and there was a strike, and it spread quickly to the satellite states. so i give the generational -- it was a generational change going on in the east. they were willing to push back and making it harder and harder for them to be controlled. i had just gotten back, as i indicated earlier, and i interviewed a number of key people, a photographer who was clandestinely getting out video to the west to say here's where we are and this is what's going on and we do need your help, so it really was a revolt that came from the bottom up.

and at a news conference, for example, the east german press, which had been necessarily kind of toady like, they were very aggressive that day, that afternoon, and they were pushing him hard on policies, about the press and whether they would have the freedom to travel or not. and that was unusual for them. and when he made the announcement, not my interview, but when he made the announcement in the room, it was stunning because everybody kind of nodded off at that point. he had been droning on for an hour, and then he pulls this piece of paper out and reads it, and it seems to us it was saying you could come and go through any entrance. it turns out they did have stipulations on it and they honestly thought in their kind of bewildered way of looking at the world that the east germans would go to the west and then return to their old lives, come back to the east again. when he left the news conference

and drove out to the compound where the bureau members all lived, they had gone to sleep. and here, their world was crumbling around them. a wonderful new book out by a harvard historian call ed "the collapse." it's a wonderful new book, in part because she gives nbc credit for how we covered it. she has unbelievable detail about what was going on behind the scenes. it's quite riveting. the narrative take said you all the way through it. we'll be doing some things at harvard this fall with that. >> yes, sir. >> how do you account for the news media's failure to challenge the basis for the invasion of iraq? . a no go to something that's got obviously a lot of attention paid to it. there's the documentary.

>> you know, that's that's been around for a while. my personal judgment, i was in there a lot beforehand. i didn't know about weapons of mass destruction, and no one really did. the u.n. couldn't quite figure out whether they had them or didn't have them. could they have been hidden? there were all these bunkers all over the country. what i did think was, and i said this on the air, was that we'll be successful militarily in the short-term, but then the country will begin to break up into its tribal feastms, and it's going to be a lot hoarder to hold it together than we knew. the state department had another point of view about the consequences of the invasion, but never said no, there should be no invasion. colin powell went to the u.n. and held up the little file or talked about the file. so it was when the drum beats of war start in this country, and it was especially after 9/11, there's this kind of emotional

tide. the only person who really spoke out, who had great credibility in this area, was brent scrocroft. we put him on the air and had him talk about it a lot, but you weren't getting much out of congress. a lot of people were voting for it at the time. there's so much that was unknowable. in fact, it was six or seven months later, i was over there with david kaye, and he thought that they had gotten so many computer print-outs, he thought they were going to find the cache of weapons of mass destruction, and two weeks later, he said they're not there. my own judgment is that, a, saddam was trying to persuade iran that he was prepared to fight back with weapons of mass destruction. and that his colonels and the others around him were coming up with plans, getting money for it, and i think there were secret bank accounts all over zurich now with money they got for weapons of mass destruction.

there was never a danger, in my judgment, of a mushroom cloud that we heard a lot about. >> i was going to ask. there never seems to be a compelling reason for us to do it now versus wait until they either came up or discovered something. we were not threatened, the united states. >> no direct threat. no impetus to do it immediately. it was sort of a rush. >> he was in a box. i mean, and we had on a box. >> saddam was on a box. >> at the time. rumsfeld will say we couldn't take a chance because he was getting closer and closer to our overflights. that's now the resize erevised it, and rumsfeld now is saying, intelligence, boy, when colin powell went to the u.n., that kind of told us those were not facts. that's what passes for intelligence. there's a lot of sliding away from it from people who were in fact thought he was a grave threat from the moment they arrived in this administration.

they had him in their crosshairs. the other thing, having been in there a lot, two things became very clear to me, first of all, the country was a lot more broke than they thought it was. it was going to be really hard once we took control to try to make it work again. the second thing was there was a complete misinterpretation about the sunnis and shiite and how they would fight each other. he was a sunni. shiite, larger population. i went out to a shiite university. this was a month before the war began. and ditched my minder and had 1,000 kids who were sitting, the american culture, listening to voa and they were all about john denver, and it was a graduation day. and we're having a wonderful time together. and at the end, i said to this one particularly voluble young man, what are you going to do now that you have graduated? his eyes went cold and he said i'm going to join jihad and fight the united states. i said, i'm the united states. i'm going to fight bush.

and then i went down to a suk in baghdad, and it snakes through the heart of the city for two miles. if you wanted a wind-up for a 1948 studebaker window, you could find one there, and they were all really tough shiite. and i had been there a couple times. now they knew me, and then they would corner me when i walked in. they say, you know, we don't need you telling us what to do. but i said, saddam, sunni. and they said, yes, it's our country. it's not about him. it's our country. i came back and my exchanges with members of the administration, trying to figure out what is going on, i said, this is what i have been hearing. oh, tom, they have to tell you that. i have been doing this a long time. i know when they have to tell me something and when they don't. they would call up people like chalabi who had not been there for 20 years or other experts who had been stuck in princeton and hadn't been there for 20

years. and they said, these guys know what is going on, and i said, not like in the streets. but they were so determined to conduct the war that they were going to go ahead anyway, and people who were assigned to get in there immediately after they got to baghdad, including -- he had been a principal aide to james baker, said we had no idea about how broken this was. now, the state department had issued a big paper about the enormous task of trying to put it back together again, but there was such division between the defense department and the vice president's office and the state department that they weren't listening to each other. >> and on that point, there's a famous "meet the press" clip of my father interviewing dick cheney. he asked the question, what if we are received not as liberators but as occupiers? and cheney's simple response is that's not going to happen. and that was sort of the response of not only the

administration but those who backed the war in congress and the democratic side as well. so the media did put that out there. i think there in retrospect, it probably could have been covered more thoroughly. everything in hindsight is 20/20. people forget it's a post-9/11 mindset, but that was out there. last one. >> in some circles, there's a belief that the berlin wall came down largely because of ronald reagan. others don't really understand that. what's your attitude on ronald reagan's involvement? >> so, the belief that the berlin wall came down because of ronald reagan? and the pope, we could say, but ronald reagan specifically? >> they were all players, and they all kept the pressure on. the enduring legacy of ronald reagan is he came in a real hawk about how to take down the soviet union with star wars and all that, and then was persuaded seeing what was going on over there by among others, nancy, by

the way, and soviet analysts, that the system was crumbling from within, and it couldn't be sustained, and we could continue to put economic pressure on them and make them spend money on sdi, and that was what that was all about. and it was clear that they couldn't pull that off. now, gorbachev, who i admire, was a guy who didn't give up on communism. that was the one flaw, that's why he -- you know, he lost a lot of his inner circle because he wanted to keep the system in place that he knew they would have to change. you couldn't have both. but he was the best guy to be dealing with at that time, and we had never dealt with anybody like that before. so i do think that reagan and the pope had a role in all of this, but there are a lot of players on the other side as well, who were doing smart a perfect example in poland, your dad and i were there when the president was there and there when the pope was there.

>> i have pictures of you guys with beers which are at my mom's house, which is great. >> when the pope was there, there was a big movement on the left in poland about the church was hand in glove with the rulers. and in fact, the church was a pipeline. what the pope was doing was sending messages through the catholic hierarchy in poland to we're not going to have blood in the streets, and they were -- the church was very important about bringing that out peacefully. i'll tell you one quick story that some of you may remember. the polish president who has just died. david ignatius, help me out with this? >> ouelletsky? >> so, i had interviewed gorbachev, and so i go to poland, and i have an interview

with -- >> who is a history major here? >> anyhow, he's a man who had also kept the lid on things. and he came into the room. and he was a stately, career military guy in poland, came from a distinguished family. in shaded glasses, and he said to me, i had a producer from chicago with me who was a kind of unmade bed of a man, had a hilarious sense of humor, and he said to me, i have been interviewed by walter cronkite in translation, and i have been interviewed by barbara walters, by the editor of the "new york times," now, i'm about to be interviewed by the most important american journalist at all, because i just interviewed gorbachev, mr. tom brokaw, and my producer said, no wonder this guy is in so much trouble. >> that's great.

one last one to end the night on. and thank you so much for coming, everybody. you have been a wonderful audience. and we're going to get this flight out of here on time. real quickly, one reason for optimism for the future of the united states and the biggest reason for pesism that keeps you up at night? >> a big reason for opt mrcimis we're the most inventive country in the world and people are still desperate to come here and bring those skills with them. i have been dealing with health issues for the last year. at the hospital in new york, i have yet to meet a native born american, and these are the best people there are, all the scientists and the people in the corridors have come here from everywhere, from china and russia and from south america because this is where they want to live and where they can exercise the skills that they have developed over the years. that's just a snapshot of how we're constantly renewing this american dream. there's no other immigrant

nation in the history of the world like what we have. and we need to figure out how we're going to deal with immigration and how we can keep that going on, it seems to me. the reason for pessimism is the withdrawal of people from taking an active role in their own destiny. i think there's something going on. i can't codify it completely, but i think there's such a rejection of washington that federalism as we have known and is important to us, is in some peril. if you go around the country, we have become a country of urban nations. seattle is an urban nation. it has its own culture, its own economy, its own freight policies with the pacific rim. and it's a place where there's such vibrancy in terms of getting things done, and the political system at the municipal and county level works so well. in san francisco, it's still

developing, but there are great universities and medical systems and the money coming out of silicon valley is really recharging it. what is the mantra in silicon valley? be disruptive, find new ways to do things. don't be afraid. los angeles is an urban nation, south american urban nation. texas is an energy urban nation with what they've got going on. move across the country, it's true in all of these big metropolitan areas getting ever larger every year. atlanta, miami, all the way up the eastern seaboard. not quite as true yet as far north as it is in the west where there's it is in the west where there's constant renewal going on. but these are big seismic shifts in the country. that will have consequences it seems to me. >> tom brokaw, living legend. [ applause ] >> each week, "reel america"

brings you archival films that helped to tell the story of the 20th century. "on the firing line" is a 1936 film featuring communities around the world where victims of tuberculosis are being treated. according to the cdc, in the early 1900s, one out of every seven people in the united states and europe died of tuberculosis. tb declined until the 1970's and 1980's. since 1993, tuberculosis has again been in decline. although, various drug resistant strains continue to be a serious health concern. ♪