The following is a special presentation of WTCI in Chattanooga, north Georgia, and the Tennessee Valley.

The Associated Press called him America's most literate correspondent.

He's a journalist, a photographer, a television host, and a witness to some of the nation's most historical events.

If you start thinking about all the what ifs, you miss out on an awful lot of of of of what is.

Hear more from the one and only Jack Perkins coming up on the A list.

Some of the men will go back to the mines because they feel.

It is all they can do.

Jack Perkins, reporter, war correspondent and anchorman.

He is a notable name for Americans everywhere.

Born in December of 1933, the early years of Perkins journalistic career were spent long before the advent of things like 24 hour news stations or the Internet.

Winner of numerous Emmy Awards, Perkins has covered stories as diverse as the 1972 Winter Olympics in Japan to an exclusive on camera interview with RFK.

assassin Sirhan Sirhan.

I thought he was the prince.

I thought he was the heir apparent to President Kennedy.

And I wish the hell that he could have made it.

When I saw him, I caught up with him at his winter cabin retreat where he shared with me insights on his most recent endeavors and thoughts on historic interviews.

Only he was able to obtain.

And of course, I had to find out what makes one of the most interesting journalists of our time choose this profession.

Hi, Jack.

Thanks for having us.

Don't say that around an airplane.

Never say that it all.

I will try to remember that.

Hey, we're thrilled to be here at your gorgeous cabin in Georgia.

Thank you.

It only took us a couple hours to figure out our way to navigate up and down the mountains here.

Yeah, it's a nice little hideout.

It's not that easy to find.

And that's why it's here.

Well, tell me about it.

A 40 year illustrious career in.

Network like the other ten years wasn't illustrious.

Well, you know, it was okay.

Yeah, you're right.

You're right.

The first ten years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Is this what you always wanted to do to be a journalist?

To sit in front of a fireplace and talk to a beautiful lady?

Yes, indeed.

It's all what I always wanted to do.

Tell me.

Tell me about it.

Tell me about how you first got started in this business.

Oh, it's embarrassing.

I. I fell into it.

I just.

I figuratively fell into journalism as a career because I won a, I used to be in speech tournaments in high school.

And I. I won a speech tournament whose prize was unheard of.

These days, it seems to me a full four year scholarship to University Western Reserve in Cleveland and a job at radio station of 50,000 watt CBS affiliate in Cleveland that those were the prizes.

That's a good prize.

Great prize.

But the the hook was none of the previous winners in the eight years we've been doing this contest had ever accepted the prizes.

They were already going to other colleges or had other plans or whatever.

And so I was the first one to accept.

So I showed up one day at the radio station and and here I am this this length lanky, gangly kid from Wooster, Ohio, asking these people at the radio station WGAR, renowned, you know, prestigious station, what should I do?

I'm here.

And they had no idea what I should do.

And we we don't know what to do with them.

We've never had to do this before.

And the news director spoke up, and I could use a kid around to change papers in the wire machines.

You won't remember wire machines.

You're much too young.

But there were such things, and they ran out of ink and paper.

So that's what I was hired for.

And I became through that, a newsman.

And then once you're a newsman and you become really pompous and pretentious, you start calling himself a journalist.

So that's how I became a journalist.

And what was your first big break after you got to take out the trash at the radio station?

What at the time was called the big the crime and the trial of the century, which was the murder of the wife of Dr. Sam Shepard in Cleveland, suburban Cleveland.

And I covered that to such an extent that and was so engrossed in that.

And it really was it was the biggest thing.

It was bigger than the O.J.

trial in its time.

And and I spent so much time covering that that that semester in college, I was inaugurated as president of the student council.

I was inaugurated into Omicron, Delta Kappa, the honors fraternity for great scholars and whatever.

And I got three FS, a D and a W in my classes and was impeached as president of the Student Council because I had never gone to a single meeting after six weeks.

So that was that was the price one paid.

But on the other hand, the benefit one got was a great sudden journalistic experience and reputation.

Perkins went on to become a correspondent with NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report, according to Archives.

The Huntley-Brinkley Report was NBC's flagship television news program launched in October of 1956.

It was eventually replaced in 1970 with NBC Nightly News.

Perkins stayed on and continued his work as a correspondent.

Now, when you decided this was your path, did you have a mentor, someone that was able to kind of guide you through this?

Oh, many, many.

Sure.

Sure.

I mean, you know, first of all, you have people present in your life whom you admire and respect and follow, right?

In the early days, it was the news director of that radio station.

Once I joined NBC, it was David Brinkley with whom I worked and for whom I had nothing but the greatest admiration as the greatest writer television news has ever created So I had mentors.

And you also have people you copy, right?

Good evening.

I'm Admiral and this is Channel 13 and 80 something rather different.

I went through my radio days.

Being Edward Murrow, being Paul Harvey being Edward P morgan, being lots of other lots of other names that you wouldn't recognize today, probably because you're very impressionable when you're starting in a career.

And until finally you establish enough of yourself that it comes out and maybe some poor chap down the road will end up trying to copy you.

So what was the turning point?

Do you remember that time in your career where you stopped being an Edward Murrow lookalike or sound alike and said, This is Jack Perkins?

I don't remember a moment at.

A time or when as a turning point for you maybe.

I don't know that it was a turning point.

It was it was not a it was, if not a turn as much as just a gentle veering into the acknowledgment of being yourself and working around.

Brinkley was a big factor in that.

Although his was the most conspicuously, shall we say, catching style of speaking as you're going to run across a lot of people who were accidentally copying him.

But still, his biggest lesson about Brinkley was he was himself.

And that was the important thing.

He was himself.

He didn't make up when he went on the air on the Huntley Brinkley report in those early years out of Washington, D.C., he didn't sit in a great fancy studio with lights and then desks and tables and everything else and world maps.

And he sat literally in front of a four by eight piece of plywood on stands at a draft French table in a stool with no makeup, because that was David Brinkley.

Right.

That's what you got.

Complete sincerity, complete honesty.

And whoa, That was a lesson.

That was an interesting lesson.

Have there been others or is there a modern day David Brinkley?

No.

No.

Never again.

No.

A profound statement by a humble man.

There may never be another Jack Perkins either.

Talking with him about his experiences as a journalist, I can only imagine what it was like to stand in his shoes at critical moments in our nation's history.

Like the Chicago Democratic Convention.

And the police riots there.

And I was I was standing with a with a handkerchief on top of our NBC mobile unit with a handkerchief.

Somebody down on the ground at hand had kindly handed me when the tear gas got very thick and I put it to my face so I could breathe through it and not realizing it until afterwards.

And I continued to talk and report the scene as people were were all crying.

The whole world is watching.

The whole world is watching as police beat the demonstrators to the ground and spread that tear gas.

And I realized only afterwards that the handkerchief that the gentleman had given a kind of trying to give me was soaked in his urine because that's what the troops used to do in the First World War.

When mustard gas came, you peed on a handkerchief to breathe through it.

And that were we tended to filter it, I guess.

Depending on your age, a story you either remember vividly or have probably read about is the assassination of Robert F Kennedy.

Perkins was there at the Ambassador Hotel doing live remotes for NBC and then at the Good Samaritan Hospital, as so many held a vigil for the young leader of the.

Oh, my God.

Senator Kennedy has been shot in the head.

I'm right here.

Grandpa Johnson, has I heard of a man who apparently has fired the shot?

He has fired the shot.

He still has the gun.

There going to be quite a moment.

I hope they can get the gun out of the van.

They very careful kept the gun.

Yes, I got.

I had I had spent the previous three years in in Vietnam and came back was was reassigned to the states to cover the to cover the campaign in 68.

And the campaign in 68, of course, included so many horrendous things from the assassination of RFK.

Right.

And standing vigil outside Good Samaritan Hospital as he lay dying inside.

And then the trial of Sirhan Sirhan doing at the end of the trial with him found guilty, doing an interview with Sirhan Sirhan, who, of course, claimed that he didn't know what he had done and he wished it hadn't he hadn't done it.

I didn't do it, but I wish I didn't.

I hadn't you know, it was kind of right.

And yours was the only interview.

That he did was it was because it was the day after the trial was officially recorded and the day before he was moved to a maximum security at at San Quentin.

Take me back to take.

You back.

To when Robert F Kennedy was shot.

I understand you were doing live remotes.

A doctor Doctor, right here in Cleveland.

Yes.

And he was shot in the Ambassador Hotel, of course, back in the kitchen.

My and was the body was immediately taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, and that's where the vigil began.

And for the next, I guess it was almost 24 hours, the vigil continued there with us broadcasting almost constantly because the nation was so eager to know where we weren't in the day of of round the clock news networks in those days.

But we were in certainly in a time of round the clock needing to know what had happened and what it meant.

So the broadcasts were pretty were pretty continuous.

I've been told, though, that your specific broadcasts that day, that people who were otherwise shocked and dismayed found comfort in what you were saying, that your words were actually poetic, compassionate.

Well, do you remember what you said?

You remember what was going through your mind when you were trying to kind of capture that moment?

I don't remember what I said.

Not at all.

I was offered the chance to look at a tape somebody had found online somewhere.

Good gracious, you a wonderful that you can find everything online.

After I'm dead, I'll still live my life.

But I don't remember what I said.

No, And I'm flattered.

If someone if someone had said something like that, that it brought them comfort.

I'm delighted.

When Sirhan Sirhan went to trial for the murder of RFK, Perkin sat in that courtroom and later obtained the first exclusive interview with the convicted assassin.

When you interviewed Sirhan Sirhan, how did that come about?

What was that interview like?

He started when he sat down by.

I said, how would you like me to call you?

And he said, you can use either my first name or my last name.

On May 18th of last year, you were sitting in writing in your room there, the writing, the remaining there.

The writings of Sirhan Sirhan is the vernacular for the writings of me.

No, I'm not mentally ill, but I'm not perfect either.

If you had three wishes, what would they be?

The first was the I wish that Senator Kennedy were still alive.

I wish that every day that I've been stricken, one, that there should be peace in the Middle East.

And he still is in jail today.

He's still in jail.

He goes up for parole every whatever it is years and is denied once again.

And right.

I will remain there through the rest of his unnatural life.

Have you ever thought about the course of American history, how that would have been different had Robert F Kennedy won the nomination, gone on to to go up against Richard Nixon?

Do you ever think about how that might have changed the course of history if he would have won?

No, because, you know, if you start thinking about all the what ifs, you miss out on an awful lot of of what he has.

So what does a career journalist do in retirement?

Perkins did take some time off, and he's even stepped away from his journalistic roots to try a different form of storytelling.

Perkins says he devotes a great deal of his time to create original photography and poetry.

His most recent book is called Island Prayers, Photographs and Poems of Praise.

So what is nowadays?

Now you are living in Florida and with your lovely wife, Mary Jo, of 50 years.

Almost almost 50 years in October.

Right?

Right.

All right.

And so I heard you've become now a poet, Tiger for Is that the correct thing.

For that's what I choose to call it.

When I when I retired from NBC and we moved to an island off the coast of Maine, an island with no public utilities, no solar panels on the roof, and and, you know, really a life of no no one else on the island.

So really a life of of as being as self-reliant as a person can be.

And that was wonderful.

But I decided that I wanted to finally have a chance to pursue photography, fine art photography as as I had been inspired to do, working on a piece on Ansel Adams some years before spending a week with him up in Carmel.

And so I began studying that.

I took some classes at Maine, photographic workshops.

I really worked hard on large format photography, and then I realized that wasn't enough because I, having spent my entire life in television, most of my career in television, which is a medium of bringing words and pictures together.

Right.

I, I still wanted words to be involved, but I didn't want it to be journalistic words.

Journalism was a far removed from what I wanted.

And so as far removed from it as I could get, I found was poetry.

So I began working in poetic forms, and I would create a photograph and be inspired by this, by that scene to write a poem.

And I started putting them together.

I put out a book of photographs and poems up in when we lived in Maine.

It went over very well.

And then when I moved to Florida, I did another book of photography and poetry and began to call it poetry holography just because why not?

And now I'm working on a third one.

And so it's I find that a great means of expression now for me.

Oh, give me a place on the water.

It needn't be much.

A cabin that clings at the end of some teetering boards.

A home that, as a home should do, affords retreat, a place to feel a gentle touch.

While the world out there festers and roils.

And the air is rent with cries of deceit and defeat and regret.

I contrive to put all that behind and let old boards carry me home.

Peace lives there.

And I heard you're writing a memoir on your life.

Yes, I am.

And without the pretense that anyone really cares, except maybe my family.

And so I am.

I am.

I am satisfying myself with the understanding that it will be for my family.

And if any other strangers want to come along and take a look at it, why, that's fine.

But as long as my family knows who that guy was who was around back then doing something or other, we never quite understood.

And now we have a better understanding of what he was, what he thought, what he believed.

I want to pass along my my history as well as my faith and my love of what I've been able to be involved in.

How will your time with Annie play out in those memoirs?

Tell me about your memories with biography and and so some of the great television episodes you did.

Well, it was it was a wonderful time, you know?

We had retired to Maine.

I wasn't looking for work.

I got a call from the folks at Annie asked, would I be interested in hosting a program?

And I said, I'll I'll I'll be interested talking about anything as long as it would not take me either too often or for too long away from our island, because we loved our new lives there so much.

The latest project, Pulling Him Out of Retirement, is a PBS program produced in Tampa, Florida, called a Gulf Coast Journal.

Perkins takes viewers through some of the most beautiful and interesting places on the Gulf Coast and also shines a spotlight on real people and their lives.

In this long running Emmy Award winning series Dear Journal.

Been thinking this month about the earth, the ground beneath our feet, the soil from dust.

We come in to dust.

We shall return, the Bible tells us.

And it's true, that the Earth affects everything we are and do, beginning with the very food we eat.

Gulf Coast Journal and its Mission magazine show, a monthly magazine show that just looks at some of the fun things and interesting people and fascinating places around where we are.

Anderson, it's nice to be able to work on a program where we're dealing with completely non-controversial subjects and we're not trying to excoriate anyone or catch anyone.

We're not playing gotcha.

We're just playing.

This is wonderful.

And it's right here.

And here in the Tennessee Valley.

You may remember Jack hosting WTC his very own home for the holidays.

Hello, welcome to WTC is home for the holidays.

I'm Jack Perkins.

What sort of legacy do you hope to leave for your family or for journalists everywhere?

Not for journalists, I know.

I don't intend to leave any legacy for journalists, but for family.

I hope to leave a legacy of a of a man who later than he should have.

But at least sooner than he needed to, found his faith in God and found the ways to exercise and express that the books I told you I had just more recently done is mostly well, the subtitle is Photographs and Poems of Praise.

So that legacy I, I want to embed in them.

Well, I think it already is.

What's the best piece of advice you could give your own children?

Well, I missed out on I missed out on advice to one child who to whom I was saying, you know, just because you've been out with her a couple of times doesn't mean that this is the one, you know, be patient and wait.

He said, Dad, didn't you marry the first girl you dated?

I say, Well, never mind.

And then the other kid.

The advice to him would have been, Don't get into television.

But by the time I got around to giving it, he already was.

So that was too late.

I'm not very good at giving advice to my children.

I think I let my wife do that.

How is it different back then?

I think we take it for granted these days that journalism, almost anybody can be a journalist.

I can walk outside and throw a story on YouTube and immediately, you know, if I'm blogging, even I've become a political analyst.

But back then, I mean, it actually took grit.

It took hard work.

It took research.

Not that it doesn't now, but how was it different back then compared to journalists today?

Well, let me answer by not answering it mainly to say that that when I've been invited to speak to a journalism school or something, the first thing I've encouraged anyone interested in getting into reporting television, newspapers, not newspapers.

Today, there aren't any is, you know, go to a good college and don't major in journalism.

They don't even major in journalism or they major in communication and much more fancy.

Don't do that.

Else you'll end up knowing fully how to communicate.

But having nothing inside to communicate.

Yeah.

Major in something else.

Political science, sociology, economics, history, any of those things I ended up with with a dual major in political science and religion.

I want to know what both sides were doing.

You know, So don't study journalism.

Use journalism as as the tool to to communicate what you have learned otherwise and what you're able to pick up.

Otherwise, which is ironic for someone who is called by the Associated Press, America's most literate network correspondent.

Well, thank you for remembering that.

I must have stuck that in a biography that you found.

And the one interview you still would like to do if you had the chance.

That would be with you.

Well.

Then I just did it.

Now I can die.

I don't want to die happy.

No, now I can.

Not any time.

Now I can live happily.

Well, we're thrilled that you've let us into your beautiful home and into your wonderful life.

Thanks, Jack, for having us.

Thank you.

Be sure to join me next week as I introduce you to Mona Golubic, an internationally acclaimed concert pianist and author.

Find out how telling her mother's courageous story has changed her own life.

Coming up on the LIST next Thursday night at 830, I'm Allison Leibovitz.

See you then.