Talking his way to the top

A Long Way From Home

Growing Up in the American Heartland

Tom Brokaw

Random House: 238 pp., $24.95

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The tale of the boy or girl who leaves home in the vast bleakness of the Great Plains to seek fame and fortune in the bright lights of the big city is one of the enduring American stories.

Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchorman, has done his turn on this classic form in “A Long Way From Home,” which is breezy and straightforward if not deep or original, much like the assertive TV newsman himself, whose bass-baritone voice is more familiar to the nation than most politicians’.

Much of Brokaw’s book reads like the autobiography of the Eagle Scout he was. He was born in 1940 to working-class parents in South Dakota and became quick of mind and a good and endless talker. He excelled at nearly everything he undertook.

“As the firstborn, and someone with big ambitions,” he writes, “I was always determined to be at the head of whatever parade happened to be passing through my life at any given time.”

His father, Red, a construction worker and overseer, was a short-tempered man whose upbringing had not blessed him with the patience and sensitivity the raising of three sons required. His mother, Jean, now a widow who lives in Southern California, supplied the finesse. And the humor. When her son sent her a copy of his book, she told him, “In some parts your ego is showing, but mostly it’s fine.”

In the small towns in which he lived, Brokaw had it all: Eagle Scout and the Order of the Arrow (a sort of Phi Beta Kappa for Scouts -- he liked wearing the white scarf that is the order’s sign of honor), high school class president, South Dakota governor for a day in Boys’ State, star high school football and basketball player. In the summer and after school there was work, in construction, in jobs on the Missouri River. It was, he writes, “a Tom Sawyer boyhood.”

And inevitably, there was a stint as a small-town radio announcer.

There was even, at 17, a trip to New York, won because he had been governor at Boys’ State. He says he tried to see everything in the city because he didn’t know when he would be back.

As you might guess, the young Brokaw was riding so high he was riding for a fall. That came in his senior year at high school and as a freshman at the University of Iowa. “When I turned eighteen,” he writes, “I began a steady descent into a pattern of self-deception, deceit and irresponsibility.” He goofed off at work and at school, drank too much and spent a lot of time chasing girls, who readily fell for him.

All except one, Meredith Auld, Miss South Dakota of 1959. He pursued, she rebuffed until, with a push from his father, some thoughtful advice from older friends and a few stern warnings, he left Iowa, straightened himself out and graduated from the University of South Dakota. He and Auld were married, he at 21, she at 20. And so they remain.

They have lived in New York for more than 25 years. In his apartment on Park Avenue he has a library, from which he watched the towers of the World Trade Center fall. Then, of course, he went straight to the studio.

He wonders what it would have been like if he had stayed in South Dakota: “When I read ‘Main Street,’ Sinclair Lewis’ novel of Gopher Prairie, Minn., his withering description of the boorish and small-minded culture that can suffocate unconventional attitudes and free spirits was uncomfortably close to a truth I was reluctant to fully embrace.”

Still, he asserts, “the early bearings I took as a child on the prairie, surrounded by working people and the communities they established, often in difficult circumstances, have been a steadying and reassuring presence.”

“As for me,” Brokaw says, “I will always be a child of the Great Plains and a direct descendant of those who bent their backs against the soil and hard times and held true to their bearings.”