Tom Brokaw

When he entered the Oval Office - by fate, not by design - Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?

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.

My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.

My hope is that we would begin to have a dialogue in this country about the importance of civility. We can have strong differences, but it does seem to me that most of the country believes it's gone to critical mass in what I would call the professional class across the political spectrum - left and right.

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.

We don't play the celebrity business in our family.

I'm in remission. I need to get my physical conditioning to a higher level. I was always very fit. I need to get back to where I am very confident in my ability to bike a long way.

Most patients enter a doctor's office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor.

We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.

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've seen a lot of seasons, change in my time. It's been a very lucky life.

We were empty nesters, our last-born child having departed for Duke. Meredith decided we needed a dog to fill the vacuum. She heard about a litter in Colorado sired by Chopper, the legendary avalanche dog at the top of Aspen Mountain.

I've interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I've had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success.

I had fractures in my spine that had to be repaired that came as a big surprise; nobody warned me that I might get some really severe, threatening fractures. It was painful, and I lost two inches of height, bang!

The doctor didn't want me to play golf anymore and was worried about me fly-fishing. Golf is something I enjoy, but fly-fishing is a different thing: That's religion. Hunting is religion for me. I didn't want to give those up.

The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva's death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.

We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.

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.

Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.

In your pursuit of your passions, always be young. In your relationship with others, always be grown-up. Set a standard, and stay faithful to it.

In our family, where we began with no money, we like to say that we have discovered that God invented money so those who have it can help others.

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.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.

My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.

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.

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

In Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private.

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.

The greatest rewards of Jerry Ford's time were reserved for his fellow Americans and the nation he loved.

Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.

I would say that we have not completely cracked the code of the '60s. We are still finding our way through that time.

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?

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.

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.

The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.

My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.

In 1989, a lone and still-anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in front of a Chinese tank and gave the world an enduring image of the determination of China's young to change their nation. He didn't text message the tank or share a video on YouTube.

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.

ABC wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.

In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of $100 dollars a week because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor father I was making less.

John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment.

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience.

One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children.

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.

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.

You will not get a Google alert when you fall in love.

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.