Brokaw: ‘Places like this bring hope’

Former NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw speaks at a news conference on Friday as Ken Cowan, M.D., Ph.D., director of UNMC’s Eppley Cancer Center, looks on.

UNMC’s Eppley Cancer Center is a place where hope lives, legendary newsman Tom Brokaw said Friday.

“I don’t know any family in America who does not have some kind of unsettling and ultimately difficult experience with cancer,” said Brokaw, who was in town for Friday’s Ambassador of Hope Gala at Omaha’s Qwest Center. “But these kinds of institutions give us hope when people are diagnosed with cancer now.”

Proceeds from the Ambassador of Hope Gala benefit research at UNMC’s Eppley Cancer Center.

Brokaw was joined at a news conference at the Nebraska Medical Center on Friday by former U.S. Sen. and Nebraska Gov. Bob Kerrey, UNMC Chancellor Harold Maurer, M.D., and Eppley Cancer Center director, Ken Cowan, M.D., Ph. D.

The newsman, who was later to receive the Ambassador of Hope award at the gala, said he recently lost friends to the disease, including fellow journalists R.W. Apple of The New York Times, who died last week of thoracic cancer, and ABC news’ Peter Jennings — a person Brokaw considered a friend, colleague and rival.

“I still have not gotten over the fact that we lost Peter as quickly as we did,” Brokaw said.

Jennings died in August 2005 of lung cancer after announcing he had the disease in April of that year.

Former NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw speaks with cancer survivor Bob Husz at a news conference in Omaha on Friday. Brokaw was in town for Friday’s Ambassador of Hope Gala, which benefits UNMC’s Eppley Cancer Center.

On Friday, with 10 cancer survivors standing to his left, Brokaw lauded the work that’s being done at UNMC to fight cancer.

Brokaw, who worked at Omaha television station KMTV 3 in the 1960s, said he realized even then the Med Center’s importance to the city and state.

Over the years, some of his friends received important treatment here, which made accepting the Ambassador of Hope award and the request to speak at the gala a no brainer, Brokaw said.

Brokaw came to fame during his tenure as anchor of the “NBC Nightly News” from 1983 to 2004. The program was consistently the highest-rated evening news show during Brokaw’s run as anchor.

Dr. Cowan said he was glad to have Brokaw’s help in fighting cancer – a disease the doctor said one in two Americans would have during their lifetime.

Kerrey, a longtime friend of Brokaw, also thanked the newsman for helping UNMC, an institution that has a far-reaching effect on Nebraska.

“I regard it as the most important institution in the state,” Kerrey said.