After 55 years with the network, Tom Brokaw is retiring from NBC News.
Brokaw, who anchored NBC Nightly News from 1983 to 2004, had been working as a political analyst and contributor to NBC News programming after stepping down from the network’s flagship evening newscast.
“During one of the most complex and consequential eras in American history, a new generation of NBC News journalists, producers and technicians is providing America with timely, insightful and critically important information, 24/7. I could not be more proud of them,” said Brokaw in a statement.
Brokaw joined the Los Angeles bureau of NBC News in 1966 (in 2014, NBC renamed the L.A. bureau after him), moving to NBC’s D.C. bureau in 1973 as its White House correspondent. He became the co-anchor of Today in 1976 before taking over Nightly News.
In 2018, Brokaw was accused of sexual harassment by former NBC anchor Linda Vester, who said he made an unwanted advance in the early 1990s. Brokaw strenuously denied the claims and wrote that he was “ambushed and then perp-walked” by the coverage.
An Emmy, Peabody, Dupont and Edward R. Murrow award winner, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Brokaw was the only American TV correspondent to report from Berlin as the Berlin wall fell and the first U.S. reporter to interview Mikhail Gorbachev. He also wrote the nonfiction book The Greatest Generation in 1998, coining the phrase that has become synonymous for those who fought in World War II.
