NBC’s Brokaw Splits Energy Between Debate and Gorbachev Talk

On Saturday, Tom Brokaw was in Moscow, taping an exclusive interview with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Tonight he’s in Washington to moderate a debate by 12 presidential candidates--six Democrats and six Republicans.

“Yeah, it’s a little schizophrenic,” the NBC anchorman said here Monday. “But it (the Gorbachev interview) helped me frame some of the questions (for the debate).”

“America’s Future: A Presidential Debate” is the name of the program at hand, which is being broadcast the night after NBC’s broadcast of Brokaw’s one-on-one chat with the Soviet leader.

Tonight’s two-hour program from Washington, arranged by NBC News, will air live, save in the Pacific Time Zone, where it will be broadcast on a tape-delayed basis beginning at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39.

“I was just sitting here thinking of how I can make it useful and at the same time make it exciting,” Brokaw said. He ruled out a rigid format of, say, five-minute orations by each candidate.

“No, I’m going to try to mix it up with them, try to play them one off the other, and try to get some spontaneity going,” he said. “I think the debates up to this point have been a little plodding.”

During his Gorbachev interview, Brokaw asked the Soviet Union’s Secretary General whether he would characterize any of the presidential candidates as someone with whom he would or wouldn’t want to deal.

But Gorbachev declined to discuss them by name or be specific, he said, and talked “just generally about the the process” of dealing with an American President.

The Soviet leader generally was reluctant during the interview to comment on the American election race and those in it, Brokaw said: “He said it would be irresponsible.”

The interview was due in large part to more than two years of work by Gordon Manning, an NBC News consultant and former vice president both of NBC News and before that CBS News.