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By the end of Monday no deal had yet emerged, but widespread reports claimed that an agreement was close. Jay remained under assault everywhere, nowhere more so than over at CBS, with Letterman banging away at him relentlessly. He featured a faux ad for Leno, citing how Jay stood for middle America, for traditional American values like “killing Indians because you want their land.”

By that night Jay had had enough and decided to deliver a manifesto (of sorts) of his own. After finishing his monologue he took his seat at the desk and announced that he wanted to give “my view of what has been going on here at NBC.ʺ It was, especially for Jay, an unusually long personal statement, not much of which was played for laughs. He recalled how NBC had come to him in 2004, even with his position as top dog in late night unchallenged, and told him to make way for Conan.

“Don’t blame Conan O’Brien,” Jay said. “Nice guy, good family guy, great guy.”

But he did seem to assign blame to other parties—“managers . . . who try to get something for their clients.” That said, Jay agreed that he had announced he would retire, mainly to “avoid what happened last time”—when he and Letterman had jousted for the crown.

He then recounted the history of the ten p.m. idea, which he explained he had resisted but ultimately accepted in order to keep his staff in their jobs. Meanwhile, he said, Conan’s show “was not doing well.” The hope that Jay at ten would help Conan didn’t work out.

Then NBC told him it wanted to make a change. Jay said he asked to be let out of his contract; NBC refused. He outlined the half-hour plan, with Conan sliding back, and described how NBC had all but guaranteed him that Conan would accept the proposal. But then, he said, he saw Conan’s statement declining to go along with it. NBC came back, Jay said, and asked, if Conan decided to walk, would Jay take The Tonight Show back? Jay agreed, he explained, again out of consideration for his staff.

“Through all of this, Conan O’Brien has been a gentleman,” Jay said. “He’s a good guy. I have no animosity towards him. This is all business. If you don’t get the ratings, they take you off the air.”

He concluded by telling the audience that the resolution might come the following day.

It didn’t, of course. The haggling over financing employee severance and the details of the limitations on Conan kept the issue unsettled yet again. But Jay’s statement—as so often with his efforts, viewed as forthright by friends and Machiavellian by foes—seemed to confirm he would return to his old Tonight spot when the Olympics came to an end on March1.

Given the heightened attention on everything relating to the NBC late-night tumult, Jay’s statement could hardly escape comment. And once again it was David Letterman doing the most commenting. The following night Dave devoted his own desk segment—the entirety of it, despite a scripted comedy piece resting on his desk throughout—to an apparently extemporaneous analysis of Jay’s “state of the network speech.”

Letterman began by saying he had known Jay for thirty-five years, and used to “buddy around” with him in the old days. “What we’re seeing now is sort of vintage Jay,” he observed, without defining what that was exactly. “It’s like, there he is; there’s the guy I used to know.”

The part of the Leno statement that really piqued Letterman’s interest was Jay’s urging to the audience: “Don’t blame Conan.” Dave found this especially worthy of comment, “I said to myself, ‘No one is blaming Conan.’ ” Later he begged the audience not to blame Conan. “I know a lot of you people think Conan pushed himself out of a job,” Letterman said. “He’s not that kind of guy. He wouldn’t do that to himself.”

In his fake sincere way, Dave jumped into advice mode. “You call Fox. You don’t say”—slipping into the high-pitched Jay voice—“ ‘I’ll be in the lobby if you need me.’ You don’t hang around. You go across the street and you punish NBC. . . . It’s an early Darwinian precept,” Letterman concluded.