22 years ago in TIME

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, Roy B. White and Rebecca Winters

When TOM BROKAW steps down from the NBC Nightly News anchor's chair in 2004, he will have been with the peacock network for 36 years. In 1980, three years before he took over as anchor of the evening news show, Brokaw was fighting a morning-show ratings war as host of Today, beating CBS's Charles Kuralt and running neck and neck with ABC's David Hartman.

Tom Brokaw [is] NBC's Mr. Clean, an experienced journalist with the snub nose and boyish good looks of the class president, the boy most likely to succeed...Brokaw, 40, has something of the manner of a friendly corporate lawyer...[His] problem is certainly not laziness. Married to his college girlfriend, a former Miss South Dakota, he was NBC's White House correspondent for three years. He now lives with his wife and three daughters in Manhattan. He often jogs four miles in Central Park before he leaves for the office at 5 a.m., and recently he has taken on the added job of writing and delivering the news on Today, a chore that used to be handled by Floyd Kalber. Brokaw's drawback rather is something he cannot do much about: his frosty demeanor. It is a failing that he readily admits--and dismisses. Says he: "When you're on for two hours, five days a week, if you try to be something that you are not, it will show through." --TIME, Dec. 1, 1980