Tom Brokaw

Tom Brokaw, born in 1940, American television journalist, the longtime anchor of the NBC Nightly News. Born in Webster, South Dakota, Brokaw graduated from the University of South Dakota in 1962. He had an interest in radio as a child and at the age of 15 took an after-school job as an announcer at a local station. He worked his way through college as a radio reporter, then in 1962 joined a National Broadcasting Company (NBC) affiliate in Omaha, Nebraska, as a newscaster and morning news editor.

In 1965 Brokaw worked in Atlanta, Georgia, as an editor and anchor for WSB-TV, and the following year he was hired for the same positions at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, California. He then anchored NBC's First Tuesday, a prime-time newsmagazine, from 1971 to 1973. As NBC's White House correspondent and anchor of the Saturday Night News from 1973 to 1976, he covered the Watergate scandal and its aftermath. He was a floor reporter for NBC at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1976 and 1980.

Brokaw began hosting NBC's Today Show in 1976 and took an active part in its planning and production. He also received special news assignments, such as reporting on the SALT II accord signed in Vienna, Austria, in 1979 (see Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). In 1981 Brokaw became coanchor of the NBC Nightly News with Roger Mudd. Two years later he was made sole anchor of the program. One of the highlights of Brokaw’s tenure was his on-site report on the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1998 he published The Greatest Generation, a book that looks at the generation of Americans that came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, during the Great Depression and World War II.