What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [7]
At last, a doctor came in.
A new one.
chapter four
Captain Intense
On April 3, 2007, the University of Tennessee defeated Rutgers University to capture the NCAA women’s basketball championship, and the next morning Don Imus declared on his national radio show that the losing team’s players, most of them African-American, were tattooed, rough, “nappy-headed hos.” His CBS show died a short time later.
Imus’s suicide-by-slur left MSNBC, the cable network, with a Grand Canyon in its morning lineup. Even though Imus had worked for CBS radio, he had done his show at MSNBC’s studios in Secaucus, New Jersey, enabling the network to simulcast it, as easy a way to fill three hours as there is. Now he was gone, but the three hours remained, waiting to be filled by . . . Nobody knew.
On a rainy afternoon in the midst of this uncertainty, as I worked in my apartment in New York, in the room that would become Andrew’s after he was born the following year, Joe Scarborough called.
“This Imus stuff is crazy,” he said.
At the time, we were doing Scarborough Country, a nightly, hour-long collection of politics and pop culture in prime time on MSNBC. Its future seemed uncertain, because the network was starting to slant leftward in the evenings and Joe is a conservative former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida.
“I’ve just sent you a PDF,” he said, “and I want to do this.”
The PDF attachment to his e-mail contained a proposal for a unique news show that would slide into the vacant Imus slot. It would not offer a conventional morning buffet of fashion, food, and weight-loss tips spliced with twelve-year-olds plucked out of wells or teen-actor graduates of the Betty Ford Clinic. It would serve witty, nonideological conversation among smart guests about politics, business, and culture. Above all, it would exude intelligence. Willie Geist, who became one of its hosts along with Mika and Joe, came to call it “Fantasy Breakfast” because the sharpest minds you can imagine show up at your house for eggs and issues.
Signing off on Joe’s idea, Phil Griffin, who was then senior vice president of NBC News, offered a piece of advice. Joe ought to bring me from Scarborough Country as his executive producer. In the few years the show had been alive, Joe had chewed through several producers, but he and I had meshed, so much so that Joe says I scrubbed away his reputation around the network as a difficult piece of work.
Joe wants a producer who’s organized, has vision, and gets the impossible done. He wants someone with “rocket fuel” in his veins. He wants a killer. I like to think I fit all the criteria. A killer producer never takes no for an answer. A killer relentlessly pushes to land the guest who seems too tough to get, pushes his team to make each segment shine more than the one before, pushes the hosts and himself, pushes every problem toward solution. He does not allow anyone within the building or beyond its walls to thwart him or the show. Hell no. We’re Morning Joe. Don’t tell me I cannot have what I need. I need a yes.
Not long before my brain episode, a reporter from GQ captured me in action pretty well. During a Morning Joe one day, Mika and Joe were supposed to talk with Hillary Clinton by satellite, but CNN’s morning host, John Roberts, was interviewing her by satellite, too, right before us, and he was running long. The GQ reporter picked up the scene in our control room:
“I’m gonna fucking punch John Roberts myself,” says Licht. “Fuck, they’re giving it to us a minute and a half late. Fucking assholes.” He instructs another producer to tell Fox News, where Hillary is going next, that she may be a bit late, “because unlike CNN, I’m not a douchebag!” Then he starts flipping out because