Tom Brokaw Talks Blood Cancer Battle, NBC News Exit: ‘I Had to Walk Away’
Never Give Up is the title of Tom Brokaw’s new book — and, it seems, his attitude toward his struggle with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer.
The former NBC News anchor, now 83, sat down with his former Today co-host Jane Pauley for an interview that aired on CBS News Sunday Morning on Sunday, June 25. And he reflected on the nearly-decade-long battle he has waged since his 2013 cancer diagnosis.
“I’ve had a bad experience,” Brokaw told Pauley. “I kept thinking bad things wouldn’t happen to me. But as I grew older, I began to develop this condition. And what you try to do is control it as much as you can. And I’ve had to change my life in some way.”
Brokaw was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at the Mayo Clinic in August 2013, as his then-employer reported the following year. As the clinic explains, multiple myeloma occurs when cancerous plasma cells develop in one’s bone marrow and produce abnormal proteins. Symptoms of the disease include bone pain, nausea, fatigue, weakness and numbness in one’s legs, and mental fogginess or confusion.
And so Brokaw announced his retirement from NBC News in January 2021, closing out a 55-year-career that saw him anchor all three of the company’s primary news shows: Today, NBC Nightly News, and Meet the Press.
“I really had to give up my daily activity with NBC,” he told Pauley on Sunday. “I had to walk away from them, as they were walking away from me. I just wasn’t the same person. And so for the first time in my life, I was kind of out there, you know, in a place I had never been in my life.”
With newscasting behind him, Brokaw has been focusing on time with his wife, Meredith, and their three children and five grandchildren. And he’s been recollecting his upbringing in South Dakota, sharing stories of his family history in Never Give Up, which Random House released earlier this month.
One of his life lessons from his childhood is “that you get things done by getting things done,” he said on Sunday.
“As my family and friends will all tell you,” he quipped. “I never run out of gas.”
