You convey something that the public either trusts or it does not trust, and it has to do with the content and how you handle the news, but it also just has something to do with your persona.

The real test of an anchor is when there's a very big event. Sept. 11 is the quintessential example of that, and that day it took everything that I knew as an anchor, as a citizen, as a father, as a husband, to get through it.

I had gone to all the big stories of the '80s, which was one of the most fertile times in American journalism, around the world and here as well.

I was at MSNBC; I was constantly saying to them during Bridgegate, 'You've convicted Governor Christie without one iota of fact attaching him to the decision to stall the traffic on the bridge. Why don't we wait until the federal government or the state government... completes its investigation.'

I guess the issue that I have with all the news organizations that have a political MO, if you will, attached to them is that they sometimes jump to conclusions about what this will mean. Get ahead of themselves.

I have no problem whatsoever with a kind of political overview or an ideological overview for any of these outlets as long as it's transparent. We know where Breitbart stands, we know where Fox stands, where MSNBC stands. So, people go in with an understanding of that.

I'm a working journalist. I'm interested in all points of view, and I draw conclusions based on facts, not just on opinions.

There are lots of dimensions to being a cancer patient. The overwhelming one is that it takes over your life.

I was on the board of the Mayo Clinic. I was diagnosed there, and I could pick up the phone and get a hold of whoever I wanted to. What I learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case.

I had four compression fractures in my spine. They were repaired, but it cost me two inches of height.

I played high school basketball at six feet, then I went to 5-11 in my 50's, and then, bang, I went down to 5-9.

I'm a guy who's had great good fortune in his life. And everything has kind of gone in my direction.

My family is not only attractive - I can say that because I'm paterfamilias - but they're really smart, and they're very, very compassionate.

I had good care going. I had Meredith and the family. And I didn't want to become the object of some kind of pity, most of all. I didn't want to show up on the Internet, 'Tom Brokaw has cancer.'

I've been lucky from my earliest memory on. I happened to be born to the right parents, and the lives we led - working class, migratory - suited my personality. I had an adventurous mindset, and we lived on an Army base, then in South Dakota - it was a dynamic environment.

I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.

I believe you make your own luck. My motto is 'It's always a mistake not to go.'

Cancer has given me a dose of humility. I'm much more empathetic. It's a club I would rather not have joined, but it is a club.

My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.

My hope is that we would begin to have a dialogue in this country about the importance of civility. We can have strong differences, but it does seem to me that most of the country believes it's gone to critical mass in what I would call the professional class across the political spectrum - left and right.

One of the advantages of being a national journalist of some recognition is that you come across high-profile people, and many become your friends.

I started writing a journal, and I was learning so much along the way. How to deal with your family, how to deal with your friends.

We don't play the celebrity business in our family.

I'm in remission. I need to get my physical conditioning to a higher level. I was always very fit. I need to get back to where I am very confident in my ability to bike a long way.

The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything - meals, jobs, clothing.

Most patients enter a doctor's office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor.

We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.

Oklahoma residents are known for not backing down from a fight in the political arena, on the gridiron, NBA courts or rodeo arenas, but in their reaction to the bombing, they knew intuitively they would not find restoration in rage.

I've seen a lot of seasons, change in my time. It's been a very lucky life.

The cancer is in remission, and I will shortly go on a drug maintenance regimen to keep it there.

We were empty nesters, our last-born child having departed for Duke. Meredith decided we needed a dog to fill the vacuum. She heard about a litter in Colorado sired by Chopper, the legendary avalanche dog at the top of Aspen Mountain.

I've interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I've had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success.

I had fractures in my spine that had to be repaired that came as a big surprise; nobody warned me that I might get some really severe, threatening fractures. It was painful, and I lost two inches of height, bang!

The doctor didn't want me to play golf anymore and was worried about me fly-fishing. Golf is something I enjoy, but fly-fishing is a different thing: That's religion. Hunting is religion for me. I didn't want to give those up.

When you walk into a doctor's office, you've got to have the same attitude you would about anything else. You've got to ask tough questions, and you've got to not be afraid to challenge their credentials.

There's a lot of arrogance in the medical community. There are good, reliable websites you can go to for information - the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins.

The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva's death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.

We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.

I was a young man working in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1960s when I received a call, and I was summoned to Atlanta to work at WSB. It was, for me, the beginning of a real education about the South.

Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.

In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up. Set a standard, and stay faithful to it.

In our family, where we began with no money, we like to say that we have discovered that God invented money so those who have it can help others.

I am simply the most conspicuous part of a large, thoroughly dedicated and professional staff that extends from just behind these cameras, across this country and around the world, in too many instances, in places of grave danger and personal hardship. They're family to me.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.

My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.

My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

In Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private.