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The moderator for the second presidential debate shares his thoughts on last week's town hall meeting. (3:41)
 

Full interview. (12:46)
 

Tavis: Tom Brokaw is one of the most respected journalists in the business who last week, of course, moderated the second presidential debate and continues in his role as the interim moderator of "Meet the Press." He is, of course, also a bestselling author whose latest book is now out in paperback. The book is called "Boom: Talking about the Sixties." He joins us tonight from where else, New York. Tom Brokaw, nice to have you on, as always, sir.

Tom Brokaw: My pleasure, Mr. T, always nice to be with you.

Tavis: (Laughs) Glad to have you on. Let me start by asking - I know everybody else has talked about it, and my first time getting a chance face-to-face, at least via satellite feed, to ask you what you made of your turn last week as the moderator of the second presidential debate?

Brokaw: Well, those are very difficult circumstances, I think, for everybody. The stakes are very high for the candidates, obviously. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which has kind of grown up in an ad-hoc fashion, does a heroic effort in getting these debates put on, but it has no real authority and no contract with the campaign so they can say, "Look, you signed A and sub clause C."

It's all worked out in a rather informal fashion. The candidates generally get together and say, "Well, these are the rules that we're going to follow," and then the commission says, "No, you're coming here as our guests, and we also, by the way, have a moderator from one of the networks."

So it's a little tricky. It's got a lot of soft spots and some pretty hard points as well. And in this case I had guests in the studio and also questions from online. But because things were changing so rapidly in the economy, I wanted the right to ask follow-up questions to try to get at some of the most relevant and timely questions that were on the minds of the public, and in the end I think it worked out pretty well.

There was some grousing, I suppose, on both sides, but as I went across the country, most people said to me - they used the same expression - "Boy, that was like herding cats, wasn't it?" And I said, "Yeah - two cats running for president, right."

Tavis: Let me ask, that said, whether or not it's worth it as a moderator. You know you're going to catch hell on both sides when it's over, but you can't make everybody happy. So as a moderator, is it worth stepping up to the plate?

Brokaw: Well, I think so. I think Jim Lehrer, who was the first one to do this - because there were some issues in the beginning of all this. The candidate just wanted to have veto power, and some of us thought that was inappropriate. And Jim said, "Look, I'll go there because I think it's important for the country to have these debates."

And then when we talked a lot going into the weekend, Jim and I did, about the various conditions and he said, "Fair warning: No one will be happy when it's all over." And I called him today and said, "You could not have warned me enough, it turns out." (Laughter) In fact - but those are the consequences. I think the country is better off for it.

Could it be a lot better off with a better format? Yes, I think that that's possible and it's something that we ought to examine before the next election cycle. And we may not be able to get to a better format because the two campaigns have such strong and vested interest in running it the way they want to.

Tavis: Finally, you mentioned the Presidential Commission on Debates earlier, Tom. This is an unfair question, I warn you in advance. I'm like Jim Lehrer, I'm warning you here. It's an unfair question, but I'm asking because I respect your opinion and want your honest take on it, as I know you'll give me.

I personally think, and I've said this many places, that one of the ways that the debate commission failed this time is not picking a person of color or a woman to be a moderator. Here you have a campaign where all the ratings, all the revenue, all the energy, all the enthusiasm, generated by two women - Clinton and Palin - and a Black man, Obama. And with all due respect to you and Schaeffer and Lehrer, no person of color or woman at the table except for the - I'm not counting my friend Gwen Ifel, the vice presidential debate. I'm talking about at the top. What do you make of that?

Brokaw: I think that you're dead right, and one of the ways that I think that they ought to reexamine in the future what they want to do, in the beginning when these debates went on what they did was they had a panel. I was on a panel with Vice President Dan Quayle before he was vice president - I was on that famous panel when Lloyd Benson said, "I knew Jack Kennedy, he was a friend of mine. You're no Jack Kennedy."

Well, that was moderated by Judy Woodruff and it had three male panelists, but Judy was in charge. So that's probably something that we ought to look at again as well. But look, Tavis, I completely agree with you. We've got to get greater representation there.

One of the issues that we had the other day - these were all undecided voters in the Nashville area, and they were overwhelmingly white. Now, one can make the argument that a lot of the African American voters have already made up their mind because they have the first African American running for president. But we had no Hispanic voters to speak of. So there are a lot of things that need to be addressed.

But as I say, the commission does the very best it can with limited resources and no real standing except as an organization that is civic-minded wanting to put on these debates. So I would hope that public-spirited people would get involved in this debate in the next four years and see if it can be improved. And it may not be, but certainly on the issue of a moderator, that's an obvious one that should change.

Tavis: Well, thank you, as always, for your veracity, Tom, on that question. To the book, "Boom," I noticed, and I suspect you did, too, since it's your text, that - this is inside baseball, but the subtitle slightly changed on this book in paperback. Is there a reason for that?

Brokaw: Well, even the whole look of the book is different. And we did that in part because one of the things that I discovered as I walked around the country in bookstores and so on, you had to have a brighter color and you had to speak right to the public. And we had lines like "Reflections on the Sixties," "Voices of the Sixties." And talking about the '60s seemed to reflect the zeitgeist of the time and maybe spoke more directly to the people we hope who will pick this up.

Because I think - you and I talked about this book when it first came out - I think there are so many lessons in this book for what's going on today. The fact that we have an African American as the leading presidential candidate in the Democratic Party, the fact that we have a woman as a vice presidential candidate on the Republican side.

The fact that this country, in many ways, have the boomers now who are wondering what their future is going to be. Many of them were the people who disdained materialism and are now spending all day every day looking at their 401Ks and wondering whether they have any net worth. It all began in the '60s.

Tavis: This may be a crazy question; let me ask it, though. I think - and I'm glad you wrote the book, and as you said, we talked about it when it first came out on this program. So I love the text and I think there's value, of course, in excavating history, in going back and looking at what happened in the '60s.

The question is whether or not there is a down side to people today on the campaign trail or beyond drawing parallels to the '60s. Is there a down side? Is there some untruth that we need to talk about with regard to these parallels that are being drawn?

Brokaw: Well, listen, the fact is that everybody looks at the '60s through their own prism, and I know that traditional feminists would look at Sarah Palin and say, "That's not what we had in mind." But the fact is that she is a woman who has been very successful politically in a very male culture in Alaska in the political arena, and that she, whatever else you think about her, is independent and energetic and charismatic in her own way. And she stepped up, first as a mayor and then as a governor.

Before the '60s, we didn't have women in those positions in very many places in this country. In fact, as governor, in almost anyplace that you can think of. So the idea of the '60s was not to put everybody through the same ideological knothole and say, "If you don't go through that the way we want you to, then you can't be a part of either the civil rights movement or the women's movement."

The whole idea was to say, "We want to elevate everybody so that they can be judged for who they are and not just what they are."

Tavis: I could argue with you - I have no interest in doing so, but just for the sake of argument I could go back and forth with you about things relative to this text vis-à-vis the '60s and these parallels that are being drawn, lessons that we have not learned so well - exhibit A, of course, Vietnam-Iraq. Beyond that, are there things that you think that we have not learned from the '60s?

Brokaw: Well, I don't think we've put away racism by any means, and one of the things that happened in the '60s is that the country became polarized, and I think we talked about that the last time. Everybody kind of organized themselves around very narrow interests, left all the way across to the right. Maybe it was guns, maybe it was the issue of abortion, maybe it was teachers and their union and their loyalty to that.

Whatever it was, that became their litmus test for everything else, and they learned as a result of the '60s how to organize effectively and to bring pressure to bear on members of Congress and the United States Senate, for that matter, and test them all day long.

People who I know who were in office in the '60s and then stayed for a while, or people who came into office shortly after the '60s, many of them left because they said no one out there was interested in big picture. No one wanted me to represent the common interests of the people. They only wanted me to represent their interests.

And I think that that's part of the reason that we have some difficulty in our political arena today.

Tavis: Finally, Tom, given that you just a bit more chronologically gifted than I am, you've been around a little longer, you've done this a lot longer and a lot better than most of us could ever hope to, and given you have written this book, "Boom," about the '60s, I wonder if I can ask a personal question whether or not at this point in America's history, given all that's happening around us, you remain hopeful? And if so - about our future - tell me why.

Brokaw: Of course I remain hopeful. My whole life, and your whole life, if I may say that, is an example of constantly moving forward and life getting better and expanding opportunities for everybody. We're being tested at the moment, and the great challenge for this country is, in fact, how we meet that test. And it's not just what happens in the stock market or, for that matter, what happens on Main Street.

We're going through a turbulent passage now. And as I go across America, what I hear people saying to me, "I want to be asked to do more. I want to make more contributions to our society." We've been on a bit of a binge here about making money and being distracted by who has the larger house or - it used to be private airplanes, then it got to be yachts for the moneyed class.

A lot of people who couldn't afford to and kind of knew better went deep into debt because they wanted to have whatever the Joneses had next door or down the street. So I believe that this is truly a testing time for all of us, and one of the things that I hope for is the result of this campaign with an African American at the head of the ticket, a woman on the ticket, strong divisions between the two parties on where we ought to take the country, that we'll emerge from it with more tolerance in all of this for each other's opinions.

I think that we've been far, far too engaged in kind of food fights for narrow, ideological reasons without looking at what is the common ground of this country, which has always been the genius of America, that we are more than the sum of our parts in this immigrant nation.

Tavis: I have such great respect for Tom Brokaw; always delighted to have him on this program. His new book, out in paperback, I should say. It's called "Boom: Talking about the Sixties." Mr. Brokaw, you're always welcome here, sir. Thanks for your time.

Brokaw: Thanks, Tavis. Thank you very much.