Brokaw: McCain was ‘always authentic’

Veteran NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw paid tribute to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) following the announcement of the senator’s death Saturday afternoon. 

“The thing about John was he was always authentic in what he had to say,” Brokaw said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“He could be very self critical, very quickly,” Brokaw said. “We got along extremely well for a while and then he got angry with me about what was never quite clear, but then he came to me about two years ago and said, look, I was wrong, we’ve got to get back to square one again.”{mosads}

“I don’t know another politician who could talk like that,” Brokaw said.

Brokaw was the last NBC journalist to have an interview with McCain for the network. In the interview, the senator expressed concerns about the future, but said he still thought of the U.S. as “a shining city on a hill.”

According to Brokaw, McCain said during the interview that things were “much worse” in 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy were assassinated.

“I think we’re missing that in our public life these days, the kind of authenticity that he brought to the arena,” Brokaw said. 

McCain died at age 81 on Saturday after battling an aggressive form of brain cancer.

McCain, long seen as a giant of the Senate and a maverick within his party, was widely respected on and off the hill by lawmakers across the political spectrum.