Tom Brokaw

I think part of the appeal of Mr. Brokaw has been "brand loyalty" perhaps. The "NBC Nightly News" started from New York City partly with George Murray, whose mother Margaret Myers is 101, who was an award winning television producer, producing "NBC Nightly News from New York" for many years in the 1960's often in Houston, TX for NASA's Gemini launches and in then Saigon, South Vietnam). He won an award for a production of "The Vanishing Americans" about the plight of native peoples in America. His last produced coverage that I know of was both the Democratic and Republican Conventions in 1976 for CBS. He died in Mexico City where his wife, an Avon executive, was introducing the Avon line there. He is buried in Pennsylvania. I last saw him at a wedding when the Red Cross was handing out blankets to flood victims in Paterson, NJ. He had been an Army Captain in the Korean Conflict and later worked for the Signal Corps making training films before becoming a film editor at NBC. After they found he could also direct, he directed "Huntley and Brinkley" before becoming a news producer of "NBC Nightly News from New York". At his eulogy in the UN Chapel, I'm told, Edwin Newman, a noted television journalist and writer, read a letter George Murray had to read to his crew in Vietnam, apologizing for the many months of work and risks they had taken, in putting together a report on the "common soldiers' view" of the conflict there. It was canceled by "higher-ups" and my suspicion is, that although there were other productions shown by other networks in a similar theme, it was canceled because General Westmoreland, the "chief of chiefs" so to speak, was suing the NBC network over its news coverage, which suspected that "body counts" were being manipulated by the military. General Westmoreland, with whom I share a birthday (March 26) took personal umbrage over it and sued for millions and millions of dollars. Gee, I thought the military was there to serve, not make us want to kill all the lawyers. So I think it may also include NBC's role in our collective history which also makes us listen to Mr. Brokaw, and maybe even the threat of losing the last of the prairie grasslands he's from contributed to our interest.