Tom Brokaw was the first English-language reporter on the Berlin Wall's fall
On November 9, 1989, an East German spokesman fumbled through his notes at a press conference and said new travel rules applied immediately. East Berliners rushed the Wall. Tom Brokaw, who had been in the room and then interviewed the official, was the first English-language broadcaster to report that the Wall was falling.
Brokaw grew up moving around South Dakota behind his father, a construction foreman for the Army Corps of Engineers, before settling in Yankton for high school. He flunked out of the University of Iowa after a year, joking that he had majored in beer and co-eds, then graduated Phi Beta Kappa in political science from the University of South Dakota in 1962. Decades later Iowa gave him an honorary doctorate, which he said helped make up for his uneven freshman performance.
After local stations in Iowa, Nebraska and Atlanta, he joined NBC in 1966, covered Watergate as White House correspondent from 1973, and co-hosted the Today show with Jane Pauley from 1976. In 2017 he revealed a long-kept secret: in 1969 the Nixon White House had offered him the job of press secretary, and he turned it down at once. He became sole anchor of NBC Nightly News in 1983 and held the chair until December 2004, conducting the first one-on-one American TV interviews with Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin. He remains the only person to have hosted Today, Nightly News and Meet the Press.
Not every moment went well. His on-air speculation that the FBI could arrest Richard Jewell, wrongly suspected in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing, cost NBC a $500,000 settlement. On September 11, 2001, he anchored from mid-morning past midnight, and weeks later an anthrax-laced letter was sent to him; he was unharmed, though two colleagues were infected.
With Peter Jennings and Dan Rather he formed the era of star network anchors, and his broadcast led the ratings from late 1996 onward. His book The Greatest Generation celebrated Americans who lived through the Depression and the Second World War. He retired in 2021 after 55 years at NBC.
Source: Tom Brokaw
