Denver TV Critic Remembers Interviewing Brokaw -- In His Car, Struck in Traffic, Running Late for 'Nightly'

By: Erin Olson There is no experience quite like navigating city traffic while attempting to interview Tom Brokaw, who happens to be in the passenger seat -- a unique situation detailed in a column Tuesday by Denver's Rocky Mountain News broadcast critic Dusty Saunders.

Back in April 2000, Saunders was scheduled to interview Brokaw in a rented NBC car en route to a Nightly News broadcast after a roundtable on guns and violence, in which both Brokaw and then-President Bill Clinton participated.

It didn't quite work out that way: "Everything just kind of backed up," Saunders told E&P Tuesday evening. The roundtable was behind schedule, so Brokaw was running late when they left for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where he would anchor the broadcast.

Their luck didn't pick up from there. The president, his entourage, and fans clogged the parking lot where the NBC car was parked, so Saunders led Brokaw and one of his aides to his own car, which was filled with dirty tennis apparel. The trio ran into traffic problems almost immediately: First they hit a blocked-off road, and then Saunders was pulled over because one of his headlights was out.

"I was not agitated because I had interviewed him before," Saunders said. "I thought it was humorous at the time. And he was relaxed, he was very cool about the whole thing."

Still, Saunders knew Brokaw was on a rapidly approaching deadline as they hit one obstacle after another, and he was worried about how he would get his interview "without the benefit of note-taking," he wrote in his column.

But Saunders managed to deliver Brokaw to the studio with enough time for him to ask Brokaw a few questions. "After I let him off and got my interview," Saunders recalled, "I remember calling my wife and laughing and telling her, 'You won't believe what happened to me.'"