What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [12]
Mika Brzezinski, on the outside, has a kind of crazed diva vibe. She is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, and she is hard-nosed, funny, and a fanatical worker, racing among a high-adrenaline job, two young daughters, a husband who works in television, books she writes and speaking engagements, and somewhere in there she sleeps but never for long. A former CBS network reporter and anchor, she has a deep grounding in television news.
On the inside, no one is more caring. No one will bust down more walls if they need busting. Jenny calls Mika a tornado. We call her “Mommy,” because she makes everything all right.
Joe Scarborough is much harder to read, more closed. Though he left Congress in 2001 after more than three terms in the House, he is still a politician who has flawless sensors and total recall of names, events, songs, and dates and perhaps still a politician’s wariness.
There’s no one more adept at detecting the glimmer of a rising political force or the stench of a loser. Joe has genius instincts for what makes good TV, right down to camera angles and set design, even though he has no background in such. If he could both host his show and run it from Control Room 3A, he would do so and he would be superb at both.
We are The Trifecta, Mika says, though I fully understand they matter more than I. With the success of the show, they have become a brand, serving as masters of ceremonies at dinners and making speeches across the country, and I help push and polish the brand, as well as execute the show they want. They are always in my thoughts. They might have assistants who worry about the details of their travel arrangements and their engagements, but if something goes wrong in their professional lives, it eventually comes to me.
Sometimes, Joe wants to talk about an issue or problem in his life. Maybe his family. I’ll listen for as long as he wants, because my role is to make his life easier. If we’re doing the show in Los Angeles and he calls my hotel room at 2 A.M. to say his throat feels constricted and he needs to get to a hospital—which actually happened—I drive him.
Doing such things might seem to contradict the glamorous notion that I have all this power to shape the show and the talent. But Mika and Joe are the show. I do what has to be done to help them make Morning Joe as good as possible.
Our relationship does not work in reverse. I’m expected to work as hard as I can without burdening them with how my son is misbehaving or with complaints about the superintendent of my apartment building or with doubts about how much they respect me. They are on television for three hours every day. I’m not. I cannot make my personal life one more thing they must deal with.
So when Joe and Mika strode into C2B late in the morning of April 28, the first thing I did was apologize. Not for being sick. I know that’s not something to apologize for. Instead, I was commiserating with them because their already crowded schedule now had to make room for the serious illness of a member of their team.
To Joe, I looked frightened. To Mika, I looked embarrassed at being the center of attention. I apparently looked like I could use comforting, too, because comfort is what Mika began to dispense. You don’t look different, she said. You don’t look like you’ve lost your mind. You are still with us here in the present, conscious, alert. You’re fine.
She didn’t know that. None of us did. She actually feared I might wind up damaged.
Louis, who had never left my side, was trying to keep up my spirits, too. In fact, he told me so many times that I was going to be okay I finally had to say, “Dude, I love you, but I need to hear that from a doctor.”
Joe said little. He looked very grim. He said later he could not be false by patting my shoulder and saying all would be well, because he thought my odds of getting out of this intact were miserable, no better than fifty-fifty.
Now Mika went into