Tom Brokaw to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the spouse of a long-time colleague, last night on Dateline NBC (and again on Today this morning, and let’s safely assume, NBC Nightly News this evening): “Part of the problem for a lot of people is that a lot of these women have made very specific accusations about grabbing them sexually and making lewd suggestions. You’ve described it as playful and rowdy, and the kind of mischief that you engaged in when you were a younger man. But based on their descriptions, in many states, what you did would be criminal, it would be a sexual assault of some kind.”
VS.
Tom Brokaw on why the Paula Jones allegations, which became a very large legal problem for Bill Clinton: “Why didn’t we put it on earlier? It didn’t seem, I think to most people, entirely relevant to what was going on at the time. These are the kinds of charges raised about the President before. They had been played out in the Gennifer Flowers episode. The American public had made a kind of decision about his personal conduct and whether it had relevance in his personal life. And it seemed at that time it didn’t have the news weight.” That’s Brokaw on the CNBC show “Tim Russert,” May 9, 1994, on avoiding the Jones allegations for three months.