• May 10, 1999
• Vol. 51
• No. 17

Tom Broken: News Anchor

• 

From PEOPLE Magazine

Some work out to keep the glow of youth; Tom Brokaw exercises because of his South Dakota work ethic. "If I don't do something every day, my guilt switch goes on," says the NBC Nightly News anchor. He starts the day with a run in Central Park near the Manhattan duplex he shares with parenting-book author Meredith, his wife of 37 years. Afternoons, the 6-foot Brokaw, now a robust and craggy 59, hits the StairMaster in the NBC gym, and if he has insomnia, he pumps late-night iron at home. The sweating has kept him sleek. "He still has those boyish features," recalls his late-'70s Today cohost Jane Pauley, "and now he has that wonderful silver hair, that Johnny Carson thing." Magazine editor Tina Brown suggests that her friend Brokaw, whose book The Greatest Generation has sold more than 2 million copies, "wears his brilliance with such lightness and class, he's the intellectual Fred Astaire."

Brokaw pays little attention to such compliments or to his own appearance. He uses "whatever the hotels are giving away" on his anchorman locks and rarely watches tapes of his own broadcasts. When Brokaw was NBC's man in Washington some 25 years ago, he remembers, "Barbara Walters would say things like 'That Tom Brokaw is so cute,' and I'd say, 'Oh, Barbara, I'm a White House correspondent. Cute isn't dignified.' " Brokaw, who is known as the Prince by the suits at the peacock network, believes that viewers go more for gravitas than glamor. "The American people aren't looking for someone who is movie-star handsome," he says. "Or someone who is all cosmetics and has no intellectual firepower." But he also looks forward to the day when he can hang up the suit and tie and head to his Montana ranch for fishing and horseback riding. Or maybe, he says with an impish smile, "I'll grow a long ponytail, buy a big Harley, get a tattoo and just take off." Could we go along for the ride?