“With all due respect, it's 2 1/2 years from now, and you're trying to throw my going away party,” says Mr. Brokaw, 62, who recently announced that he will hand off the NBC Nightly News to Brian Williams after the 2004 presidential election.

        Clearly Mr. Brokaw, after 40 years of reporting the news, is uncomfortable being the news. But he's the first of the Big Three anchors to circle a retirement date on his calendar.

        “I thought that I was announcing that I was staying (at NBC), but I kept reading that I was leaving,” he says at an NBC reception for the Television Critics Association meeting here this month.

        One could argue that Mr. Brokaw, CBS' Dan Rather, 70, and ABC's Peter Jennings, who turns 64 today, are the greatest generation of TV news anchors. They are TV's Mount Rushmore, the faces of network news for more than two decades. But Mr. Brokaw doesn't see it that way.

        “I was frankly stunned it got as much attention as it did,” he says. “I said to people: Look, there are Americans out there who have real things to worry about — (not) about some younger white guy and some older white guy getting paid more than the minimum wage.”

        It's also a big deal because a year ago, viewers were wondering if Mr. Brokaw was planning to leave the Nightly News. He took off almost the whole summer to recharge his batteries after the presidential election and to complete An Album of Memories, his third book about World War II veterans, a sequel to The Greatest Generation and The Greatest Generation Speaks.

        Mr. Brokaw, a South Dakota native, now admits he contemplated his NBC future while vacationing last summer in Montana.

        “I was thinking: What else can I do with my life other than appear every night at 6:30 p.m.? And 9-11 changed all of that,” he says.

        All the facets from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack — including someone trying to kill him and U.S. political leaders with anthrax sent through the mail — got his juices pumping again.

        “This (is) the biggest story in my time,” says Mr. Brokaw, who started at Omaha's KMTV-TV in 1962.

        “Certainly this is ... as complex an assignment as I have ever encountered in so many ways. I've been energized by it. I'm bewildered by it in many ways.

        “We have not encountered these kinds of conditions before. We're not at war against a sovereign nation... Islam remains a mystery to most people in this country. It's a very complex subject.”

        On Sept. 11, Mr. Brokaw will anchor and report parts of NBC's daylong coverage marking the one-year anniversary of the terrorist strike. NBC will broadcast a six-hour Today show (7 a.m.-1 p.m.), followed by Mr. Brokaw anchoring 1-4 p.m., and Mr. Williams from 4-6:30 p.m.

        Mr. Brokaw's Nightly News will be expanded to an hour (6:30-7:30 p.m.). From 9-11 p.m., while the other networks air news specials, Mr. Brokaw will host a two-hour Concert for America (9-11 p.m.) featuring pop, rock, country and classical musicians and First Lady Laura Bush.

        About half of NBC's coverage on Sept. 11 will be a memorial to those who lost their lives through victims' friends and families. The rest will be “what we've learned since then, what we did know at the time, and what we need to know as we go into the future,” he says.

        Including anthrax.

        “What I learned about anthrax was just how completely unprepared we were for biological warfare. And what I know, ever more, is that we're still not prepared for biological warfare,” he says.

        NBC News has hired a child psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Koplewicz, as an on-air and behind-the scenes consultant to be sensitive to young children who may watch the “America Remembers” coverage. Mr. Brokaw says he's attuned to how TV coverage of 9-11 impacts viewers of all ages through his daughters, one a psychiatric therapist in New York, and another in San Francisco who didn't want her two children watching TV news about the terrorist attacks.

        Sept. 11 also reinforced for Mr. Brokaw the importance of his job, after seeing the audience increase for all three networks' half-hour evening newscasts. More than 30 million Americans watch Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Jennings or Mr. Rather each night, compared to the 3 million viewers for all prime-time cable news programs, according to CBS statistics presented to TV critics here.

        “The object lesson of the last nine months has been that there is a real place for the network news,” he says. “People turn to us when there are big events like 9-11, or trouble in the economy.

        “I'm really proud of the fact that these three network evening broadcasts are still viable ... I happen to think that when I leave the chair, and Brian sits in there, it will continue to be an important public service.

        “I grew up with the notion that you ought to have one place every night that you can turn to to find out what went on, and I think it's part of the connective tissue of who we are.”

        To many Americans, it's also important who delivers the nightly news. That's why Mr. Brokaw's departure date, albeit far off, is big news — even though he promises to remain on the air at NBC.

        “I don't expect to go sit in a rocking chair at the Old Anchorman's Home somewhere, and have a drool cup at my side. I want to continue working,” he says.

        He wants to do quarterly one-hour news specials, like Sunday's report on corporate greed, after leaving Nightly News.

        “I have active interests,” he says. “I want to write some more books. I'll have plenty to do.”
       

        TV Critic John Kiesewetter is reporting from the summer press tour. E-mail: jkiesewetter@enquirer.com Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/kiese

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