Distinctly Montana Magazine

I learn more from just watching the complexity of the wilderness and the grass and the animals that are around than I do from almost anything else. the ranch. I saw a big rattlesnake again the other day— there's a fair amount of them around—and we always let them go unless they come right into our yard where they would be a danger to our grandchildren or if they are on the path down to the pond where we swim. Other than that we let them go because we think that they are part of the whole cycle of life here. It's always renewing to me to come west out of the urban areas where I spend so much of my time and breathe the clean air and see the grasses grow or in the cases when we have drought how devastat- ing that can be and how on guard you have to be. I just have a new respect for life every time I come here. Beyond your journalism you are also an author. Do you get a lot of writing time on the ranch? I do. I've got a log cabin office and a commercial satellite for broadband. Who are your writing influences, Tom? Mostly historians and nonfiction, although I am a big fan of the classics in nonfiction. I had a long talk with Douglas Brinkley yesterday. He is doing a different book on Walter Cronkite and I keep at my bedside his book on Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Warrior. [The Wilder- ness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2009)]. But also he did a wonderful book on Reagan and his diaries and what he was thinking—he kept very me- ticulous diaries. In my world those are the kind of people I stay in touch with, that we have shared interests. Rick Atkinson, the military historian. Tom Friedman and I talk a lot—we are very close friends. I am always in awe of the 76 great contemporary historians. Ron Chernow [Washington: A Life (2010)] has a book out on George Washington that I've been reading, and it's both enlightening and awe-in- spiring in terms of the enormous detail, the richness of the way he brought that time back to life. George Washington has always ben an enigmatic figure for a lot of contempo- rary people. In a speech you gave at Montana State University you said that "informa- tion is the oxygen of a democracy." But are we getting dizzy with so much information right now? What I do think is that there was a time when you could be a couch potato as a citizen. You could get up in the morning and take the paper off the front stoop, watch "The Today Show" for a while, get home in the evening, watch either Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley and Da- vid Brinkley or later Dan, Peter, or Tom—and you'd have a pretty good fix on what was going on. Now there is a tsunami of information all day long. And a lot of it comes from unknown sources. So you have to have a much more proactive attitude as a news consumer about where you are getting your information, how does it hold up, does it have credibility, does it have a separate agenda, and you have to bring the same active intelligence to information as you do to buying a new car. Or even a shirt for that matter. Or maybe making a decision about what doctor you're going to go see. A lot of people come to me wide- eyed and say, "You're not going to believe what I read on the Internet this morning," and I say, "you're right, I'm not going to believe it." DISTINCTLY MONTANA • SUMMER 2012 GERI JANSEN

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