Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.
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.
I'm not going to sit on the porch of the old anchorman's home with a drool cup.
I'm a guy who's had great good fortune in his life. And everything has kind of gone in my direction.
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.
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.
We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.
Don't overstate Fox News. It's still much smaller than the least of the network niches.
It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.
Our obligation at the network is where do we fit into that and how can we best capitalize on that to make sure that our piece of that remains important to those young people.
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 think people of my generation became journalists - you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers - because we wanted to report the big stories.
Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was, and he didn't require consultants or gurus to change him.
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.
I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.
I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women's movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles?
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.
While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.
I'm the father of three daughters, and they're all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point.
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.
Barack Obama's name will be the one on the peace prize, but his speech and his manner could become a gift for generations to come.
I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I'd say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.
Our friend, Timothy J. Russert, was a man who awoke every morning as if he had just won the lottery the day before. He was determined to take full advantage of his good fortune that he couldn't quite believe and share it with everyone around him.
You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.
In one way or another, President Obama's critics will dog him all the way to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and even his admirers will continue to have doubts about his accomplishments if not his promise.
We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.
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.
I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.
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.'
