Tom Brokaw Opens Up About Battle with Incurable Blood Cancer

Tom Brokaw, 83, is opening up about his 10-year battle with blood cancer in a new interview with Jane Pauley for “CBS News Sunday Morning.”

The acclaimed journalist was diagnosed with an incurable form of multiple myeloma, telling Pauley how his doctors didn’t think he would live to see his 83rd birthday.

“I’ve had a bad experience,” Brokaw told Pauley, with whom he co-hosted NBC’s “Today” show from 1976-1981. “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.”

Brokaw, who has received journalism’s highest honors — including Peabody Awards and Emmys — also revealed how the cancer forced him to stop doing what he loves so much.

“I’ve had to change my life in some way. I really had to give up my daily activity with NBC. You know, 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.”

Elsewhere in the episode airing Sunday, Brokaw discusses his new book, “Never Give Up: A Prairie Family’s Story,” about his hardworking parents and how he and his wife Meredith played matchmaker by helping to introduce Jane to her future husband, cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

“I said… ‘Boy, Garry is really a good friend, he’s at the office a lot,” Tom said. “And Meredith said, ‘It’s not about you, he wants to meet Jane.’ I said, ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.’”