KCTS 9

This is a transcript of an interview with Aaron Brown on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on August 15, 2008.

EC: Aaron Brown, welcome home!

AB: Yes, nice to be home, I love being home, sunny out. Wait, it’s not sunny out. I’d be confused if it was sunny out.

EC: You’re back in Seattle, obviously to have this conversation with me and do other things, but let’s talk about Seattle, because this really was the place where you established yourself as a broadcast journalist.

AB: Seattle is, interesting to me, yes, it’s where I learned my craft, absolutely. And none of the things that have happened in my life, could’ve happened if I hadn’t learned my craft, the way I learned my craft, when I learned my craft in this city. Before an incredibly patient and forgiving audience in this city, but it’s also in a lot of ways where I grew up in the ways that matter. Where I became a man as opposed to a punk, which is really what I was when I got here. So it always feels like, when I get here, I always feel far more centered. This is where I belong, this is where I’m comfortable, and this is home.

EC: You grew up in Minnesota. How did a kid from Hopkins, Minnesota make it to Seattle?

AB: I was, I had been bopping around, was working in radio, I was in L.A., I was telling this story to someone; I was taking a job in Phoenix and I got to Phoenix and it was just too hot. It was 116 and I thought I can’t live this way. And I didn’t know where to live, and I thought I would start in the upper left hand corner of the country. I hadn’t been to Seattle; I didn’t know anything about Seattle. And I packed up this old Ford Maverick that I had and drove to Seattle. And I got here, and it was like a mind game, because it shouldn’t have been nice, but it was beautiful. It was a beautiful day here and I looked around and I checked into a motel in the University District because I had a Mobile credit card, and they took that. I wasn’t sure I was going to pay it, but they took the card. And I started to watch TV because I knew what I wanted to do. And KING at the time, it was an incredible time at KING, and I was watching and I said, that’s where I’m going to work. And I called them the next day to let them know that I had arrived. I kept calling them every week for four years--every Thursday morning at 10 o’clock for four years, until they finally hired me.

EC: How did you get into the door?

AB: That’s it, I mean, I wore them down. I had none of the things that KING wanted in truth. I didn’t have a fancy degree or any degree. I had no television experience, which thank God, KING was necessarily considered a problem. But I had incredible persistence; persistence is my deal. So I just kept calling the news director who was Norm Hefron and I kept calling Norm. And it intrigued me that at one point, I said, “Look, I’m going to work here. And your not interviewing me is just delaying the inevitable.” I’m sure he thought I was either a psycho or kind of cool. But in any case, for four years he took the call. And he’d say, “Well we don’t have anything, The Bullet family and Ansel insist that all the people we hire have degrees, preferably degrees from prestigious universities.” And it was always a reason why and finally on July the 6th (that was the day Jimmy Carter accepting the nomination, 1976), I remember this really well-- at quarter to 10, it was Thursday, the phone rang in the house I was living in, and I said to the person I was living with, “Don’t answer it, I want to hear it ring.” And I let it ring for four times, I finally answered it, because I knew, I don’t know how or why I knew, it was the call, and Norm, God bless him, said, “You Win!”. And I said, “When do I start?” And he said, "Don’t you want to know what the job is?” And I said, "Are you kidding me? I don’t have a job, okay. It is a job-- it is in the door-- I’ll be fine, I always believed, I still believe, I tell students this all the time: get in the door. All the good things can happen to you in the door. People see you, you work hard, they come to like you, and they see possibilities in you. None of those things they see outside the door. You get in the door-- I don’t care if you’re sweeping floors, cooking in the cafeteria, running cable---get in the door. Like sheet steel, but get in the door because then the world opens up, and that’s exactly what happened to me. I got in the door, I knew nothing about television, I was awful, and I knew nothing. But I worked really hard.

EC: So, you get in the door, I think you were an assignment guy?

AB: I was the night assignment. This is like being the Vice President, it doesn’t really mean anything; I was the night assignment editor which meant I listened to police scanners from about 3 to 1 in the morning, and I ripped wire copy, literally, there was wire copy to rip, actual paper. And I didn’t know what I was doing then either; if something happened, I would call somebody and tell them, I don’t ever remember anything happening. But I was in the door, and I was in the door 2 weeks before I started to say to the, you know, “I could go cover that.” And Norm would roll his eyes a little bit.

EC: You’re kind of a pushy guy.

AB: I kind of knew where I was headed; I don’t know pushy, and I don’t think of myself as pushy, though I did read about myself here in Seattle, that my colleagues thought I was a very ambitious guy, and I was thinking gee, I don’t think that. And Charlotte, my wife, looked at me and said, “Are you nuts? You’re the most focused directed person I’ve ever known in my life, you know exactly where you are going!” So I went huh, I’ve never thought about myself that way.

EC: So from assignment editor to reporter.

AB: I was the assistant assignment editor, then the assignment editor quit and I was such a bad assistant assignment editor. KING, they kind of failed you up, so they made me the assignment editor. I did that badly, really badly, in a job that matters if you do it badly. So they said, “It’s just easier to make him a reporter. If he’s really awful we won’t put him on the air.” But I could write, and I was surrounded by people there at that time who were good writers and who appreciated good writing.

EC: You eventually became anchor, and obviously you made quite a name for yourself as an anchor--the 11 o’clock news--having worked at KING with you at that time was by far the highest rated game in town. You made a name for yourself. But I have to admit, when you became an anchor, a lot of people were wondering, why is that guy an anchor?

AB: Yes, that’s true [laughs] and probably still wonder that. Um, I know how to talk to people, ok, I’ve never felt – I understand that anchors are leading men. And, I’m a character actor in that sense.

EC: The Peter Falk type?

AB: You know I-- I always used to say at ABC, “If they made a movie about Peter, Carrie Grant would’ve played Peter just sort of your classic leading man. And Peter Falk would play me.”

EC: We go from KING. You know you make your mark there, and you eventually get a great financial opportunity, and go to KIRO to spend a few years there. After KIRO, you go national; you get an opportunity to go to ABC to do an overnight show. You’re the guy that starts the show as the anchor. Going from local television where you’re kind of the big fish in this pond here, to part of really this huge thing.

AB: I was a minnow. I was a minnow back there.

EC: How was that adjustment for you?

AB: Well, it was, uh, I, you know there were times early in the period where I thought, “What are you doing here, what have I done?” Leaving here was hard. But I had this sense of what a full life should be, and what matters in life. And one thing I always thought, believed, and now, is that you shouldn’t be afraid to take risks in life. You know Kipling said, “Success and failure are the great imposters.” Kipling got it exactly right. Success and failure are incredibly overrated, overvalued. Failure is, is not nearly as bad as never having tried. And so, I was sort of buoyed by the fact I was taking this risk, for significantly less money, because I wanted to know if I was good enough to play in that league. It was a tough league, and there were incredibly talented people there. And I wanted to find out if it turned out I wasn’t good enough, then I wasn’t good enough. No harm. You know, nobody died, no tragedy, and I’d answered an important life question. So, I was excited about it and I felt, I thought we’d be in New York 2 years, I didn’t really see it playing out the way it played out. I won’t lie and say I was absolutely shocked at how it played out either; I just thought we’d probably be out there a couple years, and I’d go do local TV somewhere again.

EC: Well, what happened was you went from doing this overnight show to then becoming a correspondent on world news tonight. You developed a relationship with Peter Jennings. And, was he a mentor?

AB: Um, yeah, in a lot of ways he was. I mean, Peter was um, um, it’s difficult in some ways to talk about Peter because it’s inconceivable to me that he is not with us. Peter believed in me. Peter gave me incredible opportunities. Network programs run or they did run; I don’t know how they quite work now. Those anchors, those 3 anchors—Peter, Tom, and Dan--were incredibly powerful influential people in their organizations. If they didn’t want you on the air, you weren’t on the air, period. If they did want you on the air, you were on the air a lot. Peter wanted me on the air.

AB: Peter to me is the best anchor man ever born. He was an incredibly talented person. I never met anyone who under pressure performed better, and he taught me a lot about, the importance of being measured. That the story is what matters, don’t get ahead of the story, you don’t need to hype the story. Peter was very, he wouldn’t undersell the story, and he wouldn’t oversell the story. And I think that particularly coming out of local TV, where there is a tendency to make every accident on I-5 the biggest thing since Mt. Saint Helens erupted you know. Dramatic this and important that. I think I learned from Peter how to be measured. And that, when my moment came in life where it really mattered that I knew what I was doing, to be calm and measured where the things that I think I did best.

EC: So, you go from ABC, and you’re offered the opportunity to go to CNN. To do a show called News Night, and in essence you’re going to be the top dog there. You’re also going to be the main face, breaking news and all of this. As you join, although it’s been reported that it was your very first day on the job, and you say no it wasn’t.

AB: It’s a great story though.

EC: Yeah, that works, I like that (laughs)

AB: I hate killing a good story.

EC: It wasn’t your first day on the job, but pretty close. 911 happens, Aaron Brown is on the scene, and suddenly you are covering what is one of the most tragic and difficult stories in our nation’s history.

AB: Yeah.

AB: I remember I was--I had been driving in when it happened, and I knew we were going to do television. This was a huge, going to be a huge day, obviously. I remember running across Eighth Avenue--I was at 34th and 8th in New York which is where our building was. I was running across the street to get there. And I stopped literally in the middle of Eighth Avenue and I said, “Calm down. Because whatever happens, whatever is going to happen, whatever this day is going to be the most important thing for you, is to be calm.” I felt like those were magic words somehow. That I know how weird this will sound to people hearing it, it says, “I’m a fairly calm person. And the crazier things get, the calmer I tend to be.” With that said, this was beyond crazy. And I just felt this wave of calm. EC: And that’s why I was wondering, how did you do it? How did you center yourself, because frankly that’s…?

AB: I don’t know, I am, God did, I don’t know. I, I’m not a mechanical anchor. I’m just me. I went up there and for 16, 17 hours, or, 3 months in truth, just did the job that I had prepared my whole life to do. I think that the, I don’t talk about this much; it’s difficult for people to comprehend in some ways. Is that a reporter’s life is more than anything else rich in ambivalence. On the one hand, you don’t want these tragedies to happen. No reporter wishes a 911 to happen, no reporter wishes earthquake in China happens, or cyclone in Burma happens. No reporter wishes any of these things to happen. The other side of you, when they happen, wants to be there. And there’s certain exhilaration in telling the story. And, so, on the one hand, I, you know, I worry people will misunderstand this, but it was an exhilarating experience. This was the biggest story of my life, before the biggest audience in the history of television, period. And I knew that. And I was aware of that. I was also aware because I’m not just a reporter: I’m a father, I’m a New Yorker, I’m an American. My country had been attacked, and my city had been attacked. My child’s life I knew was never going to be the same. I knew, in the weird way you know things that people from my neighborhood where we live in New York were not going to come home, ever. And so, you’re kind of split down the middle. And the side of you that has a job to do, do the job. And you do it as well as you can. It’s one of those days where nothing else you’ve done matters, and nothing else you will do matters. This is professionally your life, right now. This is it. This is what you spent your whole life thinking about, dreaming about, and preparing to do. That’s one side. And the other side, your heart’s broken. And so when the day ended, for me it was about 1 a.m. in the morning; I’d been on my feet a long time. They were a little worried about me. I hadn’t eaten; I hadn’t had much to drink. They kind of walked me off to the room, and I just sat down in a chair, and just sobbed at all that had happened, and all that I believed, was about to happen to the country. And it’s every bit as bad as I thought it would be.

EC: You spent, 4 years at CNN?

AB: Yeah a little longer than that.

EC: After that, I mean hey, pretty good run for a while there.

AB: Oh my God, I’ve had the most blessed life imaginable. I mean, I was kid from Hopkins, Minnesota, with no education, and I, I’ve had this starting in many ways here, starting here in 1976 at KING, I’ve had the most extraordinary experience a reporter could imagine. I have been-- I’ve covered literally almost every major story of my lifetime with the exception of Oklahoma City. And that’s because I was doing something else I couldn’t do it. I begged to do it you know, I kept saying, this OJ Simpson thing’s a little overrated. Uh, but I was out there doing that. I’ve covered everything, I’ve--people would say, when I left CNN, people would say to me, I thought this was the weirdest thing, they’d say, “Don’t worry, it’ll work out.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” It will, and it has worked out, it has worked out as well as anything could possibly work out. Far more than I ever could have dreamed it would work out. I’ve had an incredibly charmed life. And I’m, just smart enough to know it.

EC: In 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. The shuttle burns up on re-entry. You were at a Golf Tournament. And much was made of the fact when you didn’t come on the air right away when all the other anchors did. And set the record straight on that because it seemed to be, some people said you were unwilling to come back.

AB: Um, well, first of all I was not unwilling to come back. I was in a place it was difficult to get out of, I was in Palm Springs. Um, I didn’t know about it, literally didn’t know about it until, I mean I was on West Coast time, and no one called. So I didn’t know about it for a long time. And immediately I tried to find a flight out. And I think that the mistake I made; I couldn’t get a flight out and I didn’t have authority to charter a plane out. What I should have done is just gone back to the hotel and waited it out. And that was a bad decision. I felt this obligation to the charity that was sponsoring the event to be there. And I was trying to both. I was literally on my phone, trying to make flight reservations, and I was trying to fulfill an obligation I felt I had to the charity. But one of the things I learned from experience, particularly at that level, is that once something gets written, it is. And there’s just not a whole lot you can do about it. Um, I remember once, it’s a little bit tangential but it makes the point-- there was an drudged item once about a memo I had written and something I had said in that memo. Literally none of it was true. I wrote no memo, I said nothing, but there it was. Then people started to write about it, and seven years later, people still refer to it. And none of it was true. But what I learned is, denying it gives particularly people who write about TV excuse to write the story again. So, you become trapped a bit by the business you’re in. And, you just have to accept it. I learned when I went back to New York that you’re in the big leagues. And in the big leagues one of the things that happens is people throw fast balls at your head. You know, it’s just, that’s big league. And, if you don’t want that, then don’t show up. Don’t, but you can’t whine about it. And, expect somehow that people are gonna care because they don’t.

EC: You’re back in the business, in a whole different type of world, and you’re away from the uh 24-7, the constant push of cable and daily news. As the host of Wide Angle, covering international affairs, Human stories, global stories…

AB: I was not eager to television again. Not because I felt bitter or anything, I just had done it. But I had said, if I’m gonna do it again, it’s gonna be serious, it’s gonna be, uh, it’s gonna be good work, it’s not gonna be, silly stuff… and, um, through um, you know, old friends and this and that. Somebody asked me if I’d be interested in doing this. And we talked a long time about it, I thought a long time about it, and I thought, this is a perfect job for me. This is exactly what I ought to do. It allows me to do the other things I want to do, and I have a--the program is literally as many PBS programs are-- in fact, it’s unlike anything else on TV. It’s a look at, kind of complicated international questions, but it’s not an academic exercise. These are gonna be very compelling television. You know this; I described it like the blog, the Wide Angle Blog--is “It’s not eating your vegetables” television. It’s not you know, let’s serve them brussels sprouts and tell them it’s good for them. These are really good films with very compelling characters, and week to week, uh, I think people are gonna look forward to, if they haven’t seen the program, I hope will check out, that’s really interesting stuff.

AB: Um, and to be able to participate in helping shape those programs. I’m a pretty good editor, I know a little about TV not a lot about long form TV, so it’s a good experience for me to learn long form TV. And, it’s a wonderful young energetic staff. And I’m having the time of my life, and it’s going too fast. I mean it’s gonna be over, our season starts July 1st, but a lot of the work goes on before, it’s gonna be over and I’m gonna go, wow, that went way too quickly. Um, so, yeah, am I excited about it, do I feel like once again I’ve pulled a rabbit out of a hat? Yeah, I do. How does that happen, I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m blessed that it does.

EC: Hey I thank you for your time.

AB: Thank you, it’s…

AB: It’s nice to sit with you and to be home again.

EC: Come back anytime.

AB: Thank you I will. Thank you.

EC: Alright.