Manchester, N.H. — New Hampshire primary night, of all nights, should see Tom Brokaw at the center of the action.
Instead, while a couple of hundred employees of NBC News and affiliated networks are fielding phones and typing away at laptops at the nearly 12,000-square-foot work space in the downtown Manchester Holiday Inn, Brokaw and a handful of producers are five miles away at the Bedford Village Inn, standing in an 18-foot-square box set up on the lawn.
Three sides are made of unadorned plywood and bags of insulation, the fourth a sheet of glass that NBC News' lead anchor stands in front of, so viewers see the quaint, yellow, snow-covered inn behind him that screams "New Hampshire." In the overheated booth are a dozen people including two cameramen and a makeup person to powder Brokaw's brow during commercial breaks.
If his physical setup feels surreally detached from the action, on air, Brokaw is everywhere: anchoring "NBC Nightly News," reporting news updates during NBC's prime time, talking with colleague Tim Russert to add a more serious note to the freewheeling panel discussions on MSNBC, working through the night's results on CNBC and interviewing Howard Dean for "Dateline NBC." It puts him on the air every 15 minutes over more than four hours, a stint that will end only when he and his staff rush for a plane to take them to South Carolina, ahead of a big storm, so he can anchor a presidential candidates' debate two days later, to be seen on MSNBC.
Four years earlier, Brokaw reminisces, he was in the same unglamorous booth interviewing George W. Bush, who had just lost the primary. Four years from now, he won't be here at all, eating cold, coagulated chicken potpie and obsessively smoothing his jacket.
As Brokaw kicks off his final year at "NBC Nightly News," one that will be dominated by the quadrennial rituals of campaign coverage, it's hard not to see a metaphor in the anchorman who is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
For nearly two years, the TV news industry has been contemplating the seismic event that is Brokaw's imminent retirement and what it will mean for dominant NBC News, even the future of network evening newscasts. Rumors -- perhaps wishful thinking by his friends? -- regularly circulate that he's having second thoughts and will change his mind; who would voluntarily give up that much power and fame? ABC and CBS executives are wondering what it will mean for their own competitive positions and are strategizing to take advantage of the coming upheaval. NBC is readying replacement Brian Williams.
Brokaw's departure will cap a year that is shaping up to represent an enormous changing of the guard in network television news. Don Hewitt, the creator of CBS' "60 Minutes," the granddaddy of television newsmagazines, steps down from day-to-day control of the show in May. Barbara Walters, the first female anchor of an evening newscast, recently announced she would retire from ABC's "20/20" in September to concentrate on specials; she had been talking to Brokaw about the decision for a year. It seems likely that there are more changes to come as an entire generation of TV news stars reaches, even surpasses, retirement age.
But it is Brokaw's departure, which was his idea -- he wants more personal freedom and time to work on documentary projects -- that will likely reverberate. Like his counterparts, Dan Rather of the "CBS Evening News" and Peter Jennings of "ABC World News Tonight," he has been in the anchor chair for two decades. For an entire generation that gets most of its news from television, his is one of the three omnipresent faces in moments of national crisis.
When each ascended to the chair, CNN was in its infancy, still struggling, and MSNBC, CNBC and Fox News Channel didn't even exist. Nor did the Internet, for the average person. Conventional wisdom is that no one will ever be able to replicate the sense of familiarity that many feel with each of the three men. And as long as they are there, the thinking goes, no owner would dare pull the plug on the nightly news. But when they leave, all bets are off, although how the newscasts would evolve or where they would move isn't clear.
Going out on top
Brokaw's departure is doubly intriguing because for several years now, he has been at the top of his game. Changes at "Nightly News" helped it surpass ABC's "World News Tonight" in 1997, and it has never lost the lead, although ABC has made demographic gains in the past year. Brokaw's books on "the greatest generation" -- the World War II veterans and their families -- were their own phenomenon, selling millions of copies. The stain of election night 2000 -- with its wrong projections -- has been erased by the hours of commendable coverage on Sept. 11, 2001. That terrorist attack and the fallout persuaded Brokaw to stick around for a couple of years more than he had originally planned.
