Please join us for a career retrospective with Tom Brokaw.
Moderated by Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker Staff Writer and CNN Senior Analyst.
PANELIST BIO
Tom Brokaw has spent his entire distinguished journalism career with NBC News beginning in 1966 in the Los Angeles bureau where he covered Ronald Reagan’s first run for public office, the rise of the Sixties counter culture, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the 1968 presidential campaign.
From Los Angeles, Brokaw went to Washington as the White House correspondent during Watergate and as the principal back up for John Chancellor as anchor of NBC Nightly News. Next stop: New York and the TODAY show followed by his appointment as anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.
He took over Meet the Press for the 2008 campaign when his close friend and colleague Tim Russert died.
In addition to his daily newsgathering responsibilities, Brokaw reported on more than thirty documentaries covering subjects ranging from AIDS, Los Angeles gangs, race, education, medicine, immigration and global warming.
He has an impressive list of firsts, including the first interview with Mikhail Gorbachev; the first network report on human rights abuses in Tibet accompanied by an exclusive interview with the Dali Lama; the only American network anchor to report from Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down.
In 1998 Brokaw published his first book, The Greatest Generation, one of the most popular nonfiction books of the 20th century. He followed that with six other books, including Boom! The Voices of the Sixties , The Time of Our Lives, and, most recently, A Lucky Life Interrupted : A Memior.
He is also a popular essayist for publications ranging from The New York Times to Rolling Stone and a wide assortment of other periodicals and newspapers.
Brokaw has won every major award in his craft, including Peabody, Duponts, Emmys and lifetime achievement recognition. In November of 2014 Brokaw was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, the highest civilian award given to those who made “meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”
MODERATOR BIO
Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker and senior analyst for CNN, is one of the most recognized and admired legal journalists in the country. His most recent book, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, was published by Doubleday in 2016 and became an immediate New York Times best-seller. His book, The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, was the basis for the acclaimed ten-part limited series, American Crime Story, starring John Travolta and Cuba Gooding, Jr., on the FX Network, in early 2016.
His book, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, was published by Doubleday in 2012 and was also a New York Times best-seller. The Oath followed The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, which was also a best-seller and earned the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Prize for Nonfiction from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Toobin, who is also a noted lecturer, has written several other critically acclaimed, best-selling books including A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President, and Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election.Previously, Toobin served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. He also served as an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, an experience that provided the basis for his first book, Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case—United States v. Oliver North.
Toobin earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
