Humility
How do you tell your children you’ve lost your job? That’s a question I asked myself many times after things began to get bad with NBC in the spring and summer of 2014.
First some background. Let’s start with inauguration weekend, 2009. Barack Obama was about to be sworn in as America’s first black president, and Washington was bustling with preparations and parties. On Meet the Press that Sunday, I talked to President-elect Obama’s incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, about the big challenges Obama had inherited—economic turmoil and a multifront war on terror. And then I brought in a political round table to discuss whether President Obama would be able to live up to the high expectations.
It was a fun time to be settling into my new role. I’d just come on as moderator six weeks prior, and there was a satisfying symmetry to starting my new role while a new president was being sworn in, especially because I had covered the White House throughout Bush’s eight-year tenure.
After the show, Beth and I went down to an inauguration brunch that MSNBC was throwing near the White House. As we walked to the event, a couple of people leaned out of a car and yelled at me on the street, “Hey, David, love you! Love watching the show! Congratulations!” I waved back, feeling grateful if somewhat self-conscious about the new level of attention I was receiving. For her part, Beth found it hilarious. She couldn’t help but poke a little fun at me. She looked at me and said sarcastically, “Wow, it’s amazing how much better-looking and popular you’ve become since you got the job.”
“And how much of a better journalist!” I added, laughing.
Moderator of Meet the Press was a lofty perch to occupy, at a difficult time to take it on. I was succeeding Tim Russert, a man beloved by America. Because of his stature, there had been a great deal of intrigue about who would follow Tim on the show. Tom Brokaw even made an allusion to that at Tim’s memorial service at the Kennedy Center in June 2008, when fifteen hundred people gathered to say goodbye. In his opening tribute, Tom said that the assembled crowd included family, friends, “and the largest group—those who think they should be his successor on Meet the Press.” That got a big laugh.
I came into the job feeling plenty of pressure to live up to the standard Tim had set for the show. I was euphoric about the opportunity and excited about what I could do with the show. I was also aware that the effusive attention was a benefit that came with the job. That was why Beth and I laughed as we walked to the brunch that inauguration weekend: Yes, I had been given this platform, but it was important to remember that in no way did that mean I was now the smartest journalist in Washington or the most destined to succeed. I’d covered Washington and graduated to this position. Beth and I vowed to enjoy the ride, however long it lasted.
This was where my faith helped me. Being on a more spiritual path gave me a little bit of perspective. It made me feel more grounded, understanding that the job wasn’t everything and that there would be lots of highs and lows. So while I did not at all mind that people were shouting my name enthusiastically and saying nice things about me, I knew better than to get carried away by it all.
I also knew that my task—to succeed Tim so soon after his untimely death—was daunting. It’s like what Russell Baker said when asked if he’d like to succeed the venerable Alistair Cooke as host of the PBS show Masterpiece Theatre: “I’d like to be the man who succeeds the man who succeeds Alistair Cooke.” I would need to work hard to do justice to the longest-running program in American television history.
Before my first show, Jeff Zucker, then the president and CEO of NBC Universal, invited me to lunch with several others at the highest levels of the company. It was to be a big embrace, a way of saying, “We’ve chosen you to succeed Tim at this tough time: Now go forth and conquer.” Zucker took me up a back staircase to the fifty-third floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the building that houses NBC and its former parent, GE. Inside a private room, he brought me to GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who asked me, “So how are you thinking about all this?”
I said, “Well, I’m pretty scared.”
He said, “Good. You should be. Meet the Press is a show I watch.” He encouraged me to be who I am and to create my own identity for the program, suggesting that they knew it would not be easy, but they were behind me.
That was a refrain I heard often in the early days of my tenure: It was important to make the show my own, but to do so slowly. Clearly, Tim had a successful formula. It was a slow build for me, establishing my identity as moderator. At first I focused my energies on making sure the audience trusted me, and to living up to the gravitas and objectivity that we all admired Tim for. I was working with Tim’s longtime producer, Betsy Fischer, and we decided not to overhaul anything. We did not change the set or modify the theme music for the first two years I was on Meet the Press.
I remember a woman approaching me on the street about a year into my tenure and saying, “I was a huge fan of Tim. I loved Tim. I wasn’t so sure about you, but as I’ve watched you, I’ve come to think you’re doing a good job.” One woman told me that she thought I had grown in the job. That kind of viewer feedback meant a great deal to me, because it felt genuine, and I had worked hard for it. Within NBC, I was trying to prove myself as a leader of the Meet the Press crew and staff, to mature into the new role in which I had more leadership. For the first three years I moderated the show, Meet the Press remained in first place among the Sunday news programs.
Right from the start, it was the greatest job I ever had. It was high-impact journalism; viewers paid close attention to the interviews. I loved the chance to talk to people in long form, and the opportunity to hold leaders accountable for their decisions and policies. The show also gave me a unique ability to build up some expertise on stories over a period of months.
Our spring 2012 interview with Vice President Joe Biden was an example of that. For many months beforehand, I had been working with my producer, Chris Donovan, to prep questions about gay marriage. We knew the administration was going to change its position at some point. Chris researched and briefed me on it all the time. But we actually had not planned to ask Biden about it. With Biden, there were endless ways to make news. He’s an old-fashioned pol who talks a lot and freely. I had a list of questions about the economy and the election that I wanted to get through. On my outline, I had scrawled “gay marriage” in a bottom corner just in case it came up.
As it happened, during the taping, Biden gave me an opening I did not want to pass up. He quoted his grandfather Finnegan as saying that the Republican Party needed a better social policy.
“You raise social policy,” I said. “I’m curious. You know, the president has said that his views on gay marriage, on same-sex marriage, have evolved. But he’s opposed to it. You’re opposed to it. Have your views . . . evolved?”
He hedged a little, but after I continued to press him, he answered, “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction—beyond that.” Then he said that the TV show Will & Grace “probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.” I thought, Whoa, I think we are headed to news-making land here!
After the taping, Biden hung around chatting, and on the sidelines, I asked Chris what he thought. “Oh my God, he just totally changed the position on gay marriage,” he said.
This was Thursday, so the interview was not set to air for a few more days. During that time, the White House kept insisting that it had not changed its policy on gay marriage. But I heard from someone at the White House that Dan Pfeiffer, President Obama’s senior communications adviser, was reading through the transcript on the Thursday we taped, and screamed out in horror, “Will and fucking Grace?”
After the interview aired, it became a huge story: Biden had effectively backed same-sex marriage. On Monday morning, the story was on the front page of The New York Times. Three days later, President Obama announced that he had been “going through an evolution” on the issue of gay marriage, and if he were governor of a state, he would vote in favor.
When I was a student at American University, Nightline’s Ted Koppel came to speak on a panel discussion. At the reception afterward, I asked him for advice, and he told me: “It’s really important to listen closely during an interview.” I thought about that when I started at Meet the Press, and I thought about it as I talked to Joe Biden that day.
That was the show at its best, setting the standard for news and driving it through the cycle. It was also an increasingly rare occurrence. Politicians have become so much more scripted on these shows. Biden was an exception, which was also why he never returned to our set—though, believe me, we asked.
• • •
Six years after I became moderator of Meet the Press, I was facing the lowest moment of my professional career. I was about to leave the network for good.
The ratings had been slipping at Meet the Press, and I had a new boss at NBC News, Deborah Turness, who was pushing us hard to reimagine the show. Some of her ideas were pretty unorthodox. I had been trying new ideas at the show well before she came on board, but I thought it was essential that we retain the qualities of the program that had made it popular for so long.
Other elements were shifting, too. The TV landscape had changed. NBC and its parent company, Comcast, had seen sliding ratings on Today as well as Nightly News. The Sunday shows were struggling to retain their place as appointment viewing. Booking guests whom viewers really wanted to see had become more difficult.
By the time I made the announcement that I was leaving Meet the Press in August 2014, NBC and I had been in discussions for several weeks. I didn’t want to leave, but I was not happy. I was getting a lot of bad press about falling ratings, and many of the stories speculated on whether I would be replaced. It was frustrating, because I knew that people within NBC were leaking stories—saying I was about to be pushed out, in order to weaken my position, even as my bosses were telling me that was not the case. The press coverage seemed excessively personal, as though I had done something wrong.
That summer I decided to stay above the fray—I didn’t talk to reporters, either privately or publicly, to defend myself or to tell them what was going on behind the scenes. But I needed the network to stand behind me. I knew Washington and politics. Now that there was blood in the water, it would only get worse. I told my bosses that the attention was becoming too much about me. It was bad for the show and for what we were trying to do.
My relationship with Meet the Press during that last year was like a marriage that you know is bad but you can’t leave. I was miserable, but I needed to be told the company didn’t support me before I could come to terms with the end. Although NBC backed me initially, the network decided late in the summer that it would not commit to me in the long term. Clearly, that was the signal that it was time to go. Could I have done something else at the network? In theory, yes. But as the damaging leaks kept coming, it became clear to me that they weren’t interested in that. It never came up as an option.
The last gasp came suddenly, and the timing was bad: Beth and I were setting off on a day of travel to pick up our kids from camp in New Hampshire. Just before the plane doors closed and I had to power down my phone, my agent called to tell me that NBC had decided it didn’t want to risk another “Ann Curry moment,” which has become a byword in the TV business for an on-air embarrassment, after Curry’s long and tearful farewell from her job as Today show cohost. Because of this ill-conceived concern, NBC decided not to let me have a final show. They wanted this to be my last day. I was furious when I heard that. I felt like they were snuffing me out.
As Beth drove our rental car through the bucolic New England farmlands, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to be able to say goodbye to the Meet the Press viewers. I had one of my first friends in TV news on my mind. Nolan Snook was a salesman for a station I worked at in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had a memorable shock of white hair, and he had come from big-market television, so he knew the ropes. He told me that jobs in the news business are fleeting. “Just remember, David,” he told me, “they’ve given you a forum. Everything you have in your relationship with the public is based on this forum. And they can take it away at any time.”
I was not going to be able to control the messaging. My cell signal kept going in and out after we turned off the interstate and onto a country road, and at some point along Route 104, I saw on my Twitter feed that NBC had leaked that I was out at Meet the Press.
This goodbye was never going to be easy. I’d been working in TV news since I was eighteen. Since I graduated from school, I had rarely been off the air longer than a week, other than vacations. I worked every summer during college, and I got my first job, in Albuquerque, before I graduated. I had my sights set solidly on a job at the network for eight years until I got it, and I had planned each stage of the journey I’d take to get there. After that, it was a new set of goals. And Meet the Press was a destination that had exceeded my expectations.
After a career spent entirely in TV news, I had come to rely on being on the air. It was my way to measure how good a week I had. Other people assess their professional achievements through meetings attended, classes taught, or surgical operations conducted; for me, it’s always been about airtime. When I was a reporter, being on the air a lot was shorthand for being in the middle of covering a big story. The equivalent at Meet the Press was how well spent my hourlong show was each week, and how much pickup the interviews got. Now, in the middle of my life, I would have to completely recalibrate my ideas about productivity and worth.
Sitting in the car that day, watching the tweets stack up about my rumored departure, I was far from at peace with all of it. I had spent so much time planning out my career. It hurt to see how far out of my control this ending was. There was also the feeling that I’d be seen as a failure. I’d had a big setback, and everyone was going to know it.
It was one of these moments people talk about: Something bad is happening to you, and you are watching yourself in slow motion from the outside. I had feared this moment would come. As the ratings slid and the press got worse, I had played out the scenario in my head. Now it was real. And one of the things I was conscious of was that I should handle it well.
I was thinking about the question that Erica once asked me: “Who would you be if you lost it all?” When she asked, I was so attached to my position—and the influence that accompanied it—that it was hard to imagine feeling that my life had purpose without the job. But I’d had six years to contemplate the answer to the question, so I was prepared, at least in this way: I had come to believe that my job was not my entire identity. I felt fuller than that.
I took a deep breath and made a point of considering the ways my life would not change. I was a lucky guy. I might be losing my job, but unlike a lot of people in this position, I had enough money, and my wife would remain a senior partner at a big law firm. This loss hurt, but it was not a crisis that would undermine our ability to take care of our children.
As we drove, Beth reached out and touched my knee. She cried a bit, seeing how upset I was. It was always going to hurt when the ending became official and public, she reminded me. Still, this had hit her harder than I’d expected it would. Beth is the steely one. “Scrutiny is part of the job and merely the flip side to the positive feedback you get,” she would always say. Often she’d joke that no one walked up to her on the street to tell her they loved her work as a lawyer. “Keep your head down and do the job” was her frequent counsel.
This was different, though. Beth could see that it was not a matter of my ego. She thought that NBC had left me to twist in the wind; the long and public nature of my departure seemed unnecessary. As we reached the final leg of the drive, she pulled over so we could collect ourselves before seeing the kids. She hugged me and told me that she was proud of me for how I was handling myself.
Then we drove in to Camp Merrowvista. The campers’ duffel bags were lined up in tidy piles on one side of the grass field serving as a parking lot. There were signs directing parents to pick up their kids on the playground. I was eager to reunite with our kids, but I wanted to issue a public statement as quickly as I could, before an official statement came from NBC. Before I did that, I had to call my agent and others. I asked the camp office to loan me a phone, since I still had no cell signal, and they offered me a spare office.
Hanging up the phone, I heard the kids screaming and laughing outside, and I realized that I couldn’t ask for a better way to experience this low moment in my career. Being so far from the Washington and New York media circus made it easier to start letting go. My world was about to explode all over social media, but I was free to enjoy my more serene surroundings. After twenty years as a fairly hard-driving, ambitious, and competitive journalist, I was about to experience a change. Who knew what would happen next.
I set off to find Max and Ava, who were hanging out in one of the cabins. I gave them big hugs, and Max didn’t waste any time in asking how our team had done in the Little League World Series qualifying tournament that summer. It had been killing him not to know; they are cut off from the Internet up at camp. At the age of twelve, Max has every intention of playing basketball or baseball at the college level. Nothing matters as much as his teams.
I had to break the bad news that the team had lost. A setback, but next summer would be Max’s opportunity to compete on the team, so, like a presidential candidate eyeing the next cycle he was already making plans to succeed where others had fallen short. I was pleased that I’d remembered to check the score, but for Max, that was not enough. He wanted details, like who was pitching and whether there had been any home runs. As his briefer, I was never prepared enough to satisfy my son’s demands.
Then I found Jed, playing Frisbee on the basketball court with some other kids, and he jumped into my arms. I told them I would join them at dinner before the Grand Council Meeting, the final event of camp.
Walking back up to the office, I thought about how I would explain to the kids what had happened. I would need to do it pretty quickly. Once we got back to Washington and they returned to school, someone was likely to talk, and they could explore for themselves what people had written about me. I wanted to be the one to tell them, I just wasn’t sure how I would break the news. Part of my reluctance was plain embarrassment. The kids were old enough to worry about me, and that wasn’t a good feeling. But I also knew that this was the kind of moment when I could teach my otherwise pampered children that setbacks happen and you have to persevere.
I was thinking about them, and about how I wanted to handle myself when a lot of people were paying attention as I sat down to write the words that would make it official on Twitter. To the degree that I had thought about losing my job, I had not envisioned myself sitting alone on a campground in the mountains of New Hampshire, sending out a forty-seven-word announcement. But I specifically remember thinking, Here’s my chance. This was a moment to ask myself what God expected of me, and to act in a way that would serve as a model for my kids. Though I was alone I felt that I was being watched, in a larger way. I wrote: “I leave NBC as I came—humbled and grateful. I love journalism and serving as moderator of MTP was the highest honor there is. I have great respect for my colleagues at NBC News and wish them all well. To the viewers, I say thank you.”
Okay, so it was a tweet. I don’t want to blow it out of proportion; it wasn’t the most profound thing anyone has ever said. But in a way, the experience did feel profound. With those few words, I felt like I was able to publicly transcend the bitterness I was feeling. (Still, I don’t want to sound like a martyr here: Clearly, I would rather not have had the experience at all.)
Moments afterward, NBC issued its press release announcing my replacement. I called my executive producer from the camp phone and asked him to gather the Meet the Press staff so I could say goodbye to them all on speakerphone. It was important to me that they heard from me right away. I wanted to thank them and to apologize for how it was ending. I told them that I was proud of what we’d done and urged them to continue doing their best work.
Supportive messages and calls began coming in, from colleagues like Today show coanchor Matt Lauer and Phil Griffin, my best friend at NBC, a thirty-year veteran of the network who is now the president of MSNBC. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J. P. Morgan, called right away—and this is a guy with throat cancer—to say: “The people who respected you before will respect you now.”
As gratifying as it was to receive these messages shoring me up, I could hear that the Grand Council Meeting was about to start, so I shut the door to the office and left the Twitter stream behind. My phone battery was now dead; I was completely cut off for the next couple of hours.
My wife and the kids were sitting on the grass, holding paper plates of salad and pasta. When I sat down with them, Beth gave me a big hug. We didn’t talk about it—now was not the time—but Jed must have been able to tell that something was going on: He presented me with a big soothing M&M’s cookie from the buffet. I felt a dizzying mix of emotions: sad and distressed but also proud of myself, and perhaps most of all, happy to be able to walk away from the drama and relax with my family. Here were the two things that mattered to me most: my work and my family. One door had just closed, but my family life was stronger than ever.
Beth and I and the other parents gathered around the firepit and watched the campers excitedly file onto the stage for their final celebration. It was a slightly out-of-body experience, to disappear into the narrow and consuming world of my kids’ camp at the end of a day I could not forget if I wanted to. But it also felt good not to have to talk or think about it all, and I was grateful for the time to let my emotions simmer down.
Sitting there on a rough bench on the side of a hill in New Hampshire, I found myself paying special attention to the camp director’s speech. He referred to the camp motto: “My own self, at my very best, all the time.” I was struck at that moment by how much those words meant to me. Just as I hoped my kids were growing and maturing through the Camp Merrowvista experience, so was I. I had spent months struggling to be my own self in my work by steering Meet the Press in the way I thought best. I’d had to battle different personalities at the network, and it had been a challenge to be my best self when it mattered most.
Now I felt angry, wronged, embarrassed. But what was the camp director telling these kids—and all of us parents—about personal growth? That we have to remind ourselves to find the way to be our best selves every day. That this is hard work and it doesn’t stop. That summer, Max had fought with a kid in his cabin, but the two of them had learned to get along, even if they were not going to be the best of friends.
As the smoke rose into the clear summer sky, I felt almost as though the camp director were preaching to me. As hellish as the day had been, I hoped that the final battle with NBC represented my becoming the best I could be. I had tried to be my best self in a bad situation. I would leave this New Hampshire hillside having reclaimed my children—and a piece of myself.
• • •
It was all coming together: Here was the time for me to live out so many of the lessons I’d been learning on my spiritual journey. I’d been contemplating living a more spiritual, meaningful existence, and now was the time to walk the walk. In a way, that day up in New Hampshire clarified many of the discoveries I had been making about life and faith.
It is our job in the world to strive to be our best self all the time. But the time when it matters most is when things are hard. That is the true test of our character. In the months since I left NBC, I’ve come to a conclusion: If I do not change as a result of this experience, then it was not worth it. That’s not to say the way that I left was my choice. But it happened as it happened, and I am determined to be the better for it.
One day, as the long, drawn-out drama of my departure from NBC was coming to a head, I met the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore at his Capitol Hill office. It was already feeling inevitable that I would leave, and Erica’s question “Who would you be?” was weighing on my mind. I asked Dr. Moore how he would answer someone who came to him asking, “Who does God expect me to be?”
Dr. Moore answered me with his own questions. “The fundamental question here is ‘Who are you?’ ” he said. “Whether you have a national profile, or you are the guy running a hardware store in a small town, you are ultimately facing the same question, which is: Do you define yourself by your work or as someone created in the image of God? Are you the owner of the hardware store or someone who must give an account to God?”
He quoted Matthew 26, in which one of Jesus’ followers lashes out at the men who come to arrest him, cutting off one man’s ear with a sword. “Put your sword back into its place,” Jesus tells his follower. “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
Dr. Moore said that one of the ways he likes to interpret that Scripture is in terms of ambition. Jesus was reminding his follower that kindness and humanity matter above all. Anyone who views himself primarily in terms of ambition can start to dehumanize, “to become the sort of person who claws and fights to keep what they want,” he said.
Those words held some truth for me. It’s no secret that TV news is a rough business. And I’m as guilty as the rest of putting myself first on the route to the top. I’m a product of it—TV news is the only industry I have ever been a part of, other than the hospitality industry, if you count working at a restaurant in high school. My effort to rise above the rancor of the TV business has been a long, shaky process. I think sometimes about a day during my final spring at NBC when Erica came over to study with me in my office at Meet the Press.
She overheard me on the phone, complaining about a lack of support from my bosses, and when I hung up, she said, “David, you are using all these warlike themes in your speech.” Defensively, I said something like “Well, they’re going after me, what else can I do?” But as I thought through the conversation I’d just had, I realized I had said, “I may be bloodied, but I’m still standing” and “I just gotta hunker down and get through this.” She was right: Many of my instincts are from the survival bunker.
“I don’t hear you using the language of love,” Erica said. It seemed almost laughable to me then, the idea of speaking the language of love when I was being made a target by the press and undermined by superiors who seemed to have only a tepid interest in dealing with the problems at the show. But then Erica quoted Proverbs 4:26: “Consider the path of your feet, and all your paths will be established.”
I did not know right away what she meant by those words, but we really studied them that afternoon and considered their meaning. If you’re inside a maze on the ground floor, Erica told me, you have a single perspective. But if you can climb up to the balcony, you can see much more; you can figure out where you’re headed.
Later, she told me that what she wanted to help me do was “create the habits and language of mindfulness. Then you will have that language, even when others are speaking to you using a different vocabulary, of meanness.” She reminded me that I should try to speak my new spiritual language all the time, not just at home, when I feel like being the good dad and making pancakes for the kids. With my colleagues and my boss, too.
“Consider the path of your feet, and all your paths will be established.” Your feet must be pointed in the right direction at all times. I printed out those words and kept them on my desktop computer at NBC as a reminder throughout the last months.
• • •
The night when we picked up the kids from camp in New Hampshire, we all stayed at an inn in the town of Tuftonboro. In the morning, Beth went down to the lobby before the rest of us, and she overheard some people talking about how I had lost my job the previous day. She went over and very politely informed them that they were talking about her husband. “We haven’t told our kids yet,” she said. “So if you wouldn’t mind keeping your voices down when you are talking about that . . .”
They were very apologetic, she said. I know Beth was feeling protective of me in the moment, but she was especially worried about the kids. She and I had talked about how I should break the news to them, and we’d decided that I should do it as soon as I could, but also casually, so as not to make it into a big deal.
To get to the airport in Manchester, we wanted to take a slightly longer route along the prettier back roads. To make sure we had enough time, I had to rush Max out of the café where we had breakfast before he was able to finish his crepes. He was a little cranky about that and, like the other two, antsy about a day of travel before getting home. We piled into the rental car, where they were cramped and uncomfortable. They started talking over one another and accusing one another of interrupting. “They were so sweet to each other yesterday at camp!” I said wistfully to Beth. “What happened?”
Amid all the bickering, my cell phone rang, and I could see it was Matt Lauer. He’d left a message the day before and had said he would try me again, but I was surprised by his persistence. I asked the kids to pipe down, as I had an important call. On the phone, Matt was very gracious. He told me he felt bad about what happened, and he had every confidence that I’d be successful in whatever I did next. Later on, both the chairman of NBC, Steve Burke, and the CEO of Comcast, Brian Roberts, reached out to me. For that I will always be grateful.
Before I hung up with Matt, I said that it meant a great deal to me that he had gotten ahold of me right away. We’d never been close; I’d found him hard to get to know. But that made it even classier that he’d reached out to me.
“Who was that, Dad?” Max asked from the backseat when I put my phone down.
I shot Beth a look and then caught Max’s eye in the rearview mirror and said, “Matt Lauer.”
Max knew exactly whom I meant. He is a fan of the Today show and would often inform me that it was more interesting than Meet the Press. “Why was he calling you?” Max said.
I took a breath and looked straight ahead as I told them that he was calling because I was leaving NBC. “I’m no longer going to be doing Meet the Press,” I announced.
They all looked surprised, which is not especially easy to achieve with our world-wise kids. Max spoke up first with a down-to-business question. “Do we have to sell our house?”
I explained that we’d been very fortunate, and had been smart about saving our money, so we didn’t need to worry about that.
Then Ava asked, “Did you get fired?”
I had not entirely decided how I wanted to answer that question. I should have known I’d need an answer, because Ava is a straight shooter, and there is no getting anything past her. I wanted to tell the kids what had actually happened without sugarcoating it. But I was aware that in a child’s mind, people get fired because they are in the wrong, and I needed to make it clear that was not the case with me.
So I said, “Well, not exactly. We agreed that I should leave. Not because I did anything wrong, but because they wanted someone else to do the job.”
They absorbed that information in silence. I think they were taking in the magnitude of it and were also unsure how to respond appropriately. I wanted to seize the moment to get across the most important point. So I continued, “You guys have seen some of the good parts of my job and me being well known, how people want my autograph or my picture. There is another side, too. People criticize me in public and write some negative things about me.
“But the big thing is I want you all to learn that not everything works out the way you planned. That’s what has happened to me. But you have to persevere.”
At some point later, Jed asked, “Did they make fun of you, Daddy?”
“Yes, they did,” I answered, grateful that I could look straight ahead on the highway rather than having to meet his eye.
As is so often the case with kids, I couldn’t tell how much my news affected them. I was glad I had been able to tell them immediately, without having to make a big deal out of it in a formal sit-down conversation.
Just a little while later, Ava and her brothers were fighting again, which I took as a sign that they were not overly traumatized by my news. Beth and I told Ava to cool it, and she leaned in toward us, chin protruding with the strength of her grievance. “But it’s really hard for me to keep my self-control when they’re saying mean things about me!”
It was all I could do not to laugh. “Oh, yes, it’s hard,” I told her. “It definitely is hard. But you can do it. Ask me how I know.”
• • •
Leaving my job at NBC was a humbling experience. It was good for me—I mean it. I have to laugh about how the hits keep on coming: for instance, the people who have come up to me in the months since I have been off the show, to tell me that they love me on Meet the Press and never miss a single week. It’s all I can do not to blurt out, “Well, you can’t love me that much if you haven’t noticed I’ve been gone for months now!”
My departure from NBC made for some awkward interactions initially. Often I’d be playing a guessing game, trying to work out whether someone knew I wasn’t on the show anymore. When I was on the American University campus for an event, a student stopped me and said, “I know you must be really busy prepping for this Sunday’s show, but could you take a picture with me?” I didn’t want to go into it, so I just said yes and posed with him, feeling like a bit of an imposter.
I always appreciate viewers like the woman who did a double take at me from across a clothing shop and yelled, “Big mistake! And I don’t watch anymore.” I told her that I was trying to be classy about the whole thing but assured her, “You don’t have to be!”
I have to admit, however, that losing my job was more than a humbling moment. Over time, I’ve had to grapple with a real loss of identity. That pain and sense of loss is not something that even my spiritual search has helped me completely overcome. But I know that being grounded in faith and humility from this period will help me find my new identity—my true identity.
I may have been on my spiritual journey for many years, but I have not yet arrived at the final destination. The experience of leaving NBC showed me how much I have to do before I get there. There’s a very specific way that I have resolved to change. I want to get better at developing and sustaining community.
I think I could have done more, across my career, to build a supportive network of journalists, coworkers, and friends. I should have been the kind of colleague whom people wanted to stick their necks out for, to stand up for. But in a fickle town and an often venomous business, I don’t think I was that guy for many people. Some of my colleagues saw me as just out for myself, because I was openly ambitious and succeeded young. I regret that. When I left NBC, what stung more than the outright negativity was the indifference shown by so many. Many people thought it was par for the course in the TV news business for one guy to go out and another to come in. But it was not a seamless, happy transition. And yet I heard from very few colleagues at NBC. Now I think that if I had given more, perhaps I would have gotten more in return.
Nevertheless, I received an outpouring of support: emails from fans I’d never met and people I had lost touch with from my childhood in California; calls from administration officials and senators; kind letters from colleagues in the journalism world.
One day that summer, after an especially bad pounding in the press, I received an email from a guy you could call the consummate Washington insider. He began by telling me that he once found out through the media that he was being fired from his job running a presidential campaign. No one ever told him to his face that he was losing his job. Then he wrote:
I learned from this experience three lessons that I pass along to you for whatever value they have. Number one, life isn’t always fair, sometimes you get screwed and it’s not your fault and it just sucks. Two, you learn who your real friends are and who your fake friends are and the love and support of the former is a treasure beyond measure for life. And three, the pendulum always swings back, and quality people come out on top, most often even better than before, in ways you can never imagine. You are sharp enough to know all of this and much more, but I wanted to send you this reminder of these truths, and let you know that I’m thinking of you and wishing you the best.
Reading that, I realized I had been given a gift of knowing who really cared about me at a time when it was not popular to care about me. It taught me something about the community I do have. The letter was especially moving to me because this is a guy I don’t know very well. He just wanted to demonstrate that he was in my community and was moved to share his own humbling experience in the hope of making me feel better. I’d like to think I would do the same.
The day I left NBC, Erica wrote me a simple note. She suggested that at this tough time, I should put my trust in God and in all those who love and care about me. She closed with a prayer from Isaiah: “I am He, I am He who will sustain you. I have made you, and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.”