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Something that struck me while reading and researching Lehrer's fiction is how themes and characters can travel from work to work. One of my favorite minor characters in Eureka is "Church Key Charlie Blue," who is a washed-up former pro football player who expectedly drinks beer and watches football a lot, but rather more quirkily makes and sells fresh fudge (his grandmother's recipe) for a living. I discovered (gotta love Wikipedia) that one of Lehrer's three plays is Church Key Charlie Blue, which explored more of, and a darker side to, this character's life. "You're one of the only people who realizes that this character is the same one as in the play," Lehrer told me. I readily confessed that I had "tried to do my homework" before meeting with him.

Another example is not a character per se, but is an icon that shows up in at least two books. In the town of Eureka's "world-famous" psychiatric clinic, "Silver Star" is a nickname given to a person who makes up false memories of past bravery in order to boost his current social standing. As it turns out, in Lehrer's last novel, the main character purchases a military medal at auction—yes, a Silver Star—and proceeds to concoct an imaginary personal history of how he came to win the honor. I asked the author how he goes about carrying these characters and themes over the bridges between books.

"Well, you know, there's no one way; it simply happens," he said, as he gently reminded his stammering interrogator of his sixteenth novel's title. "In the Phony Marine experience, I was giving a speech to a small National Park Service crowd on my book about the Battle of Antietam. And the guy who introduced me is a Vietnam veteran…he picked me up to take me to where the speech was [to take place], and in the car, he says, 'I didn't realize, Jim, that you were an infantry officer in the Marine Corps.' And he just finished saying 'during the Korean War' when we got there and had to get out of the car. So he's introducing me and he says 'you may know Jim Lehrer from television, and you may know him from his novels, but what you probably do not know is that he was a U.S. Marine infantry officer, in combat, during the Korean War.'"

"Now that was not true," Lehrer continued. "It was between the Korean War and the Vietnam War—and I didn't want to correct him. I did; but the instinct was there, and that stuck in my head. There's an understandable thing, you know, in that you want people to think the best of you." Later, actual news stories would surface about someone posing as a former Marine that provided more material for the novel, but the seed was planted during that event in his own life. "The looks on the faces of those people when he said that, I'll never forget. They looked at me like, 'oh my God!'"

I had to ask about another character in Eureka, named Roger Atchison, aka "The Cushman King." This is the man who sells Otis Halstead, the main character, his long sought-after motor scooter, and who, according to one of my favorite narrative lines from the book, "could have passed for a retired Coca-Cola bottler or mayor of Marion, Nebraska, both of which he was." I was curious if Lehrer had any plans to bring back this eccentric owner of one hundred thirty-four ("and still counting") antique Cushman scooters anytime in the future. "Who knows?" came the bemused reply.

But that got us talking about Church Key Charlie again, and the difficulties, given the schedule of a national daily television news anchor, of writing plays as opposed to novels. "Someday, if I leave daily journalism, I might start writing plays again," Lehrer informed. "Because when you do a play, you have to workshop, you have to spend a lot of time with actors. You don't know if it works until you hear it read. Now this [holds up the book], this is done; I can hold it in my hand. But a play doesn't live unless it's on the stage. So, anyway…I borrowed my own character."

I could feel the stopwatch ticking, so I segued as best I could into some of the other topics on which I had planned to inquire. I referenced a scene in Eureka where Otis is resting in a motel room, watching television, and is frustrated by the sense that the news has become inundated with entertainment. Otis thinks to himself, "[in earlier years], the reporting had seemed calm, straight, newsy, relevant, necessary to watch. Now it wasn't any of those things." I pointed out that it seemed to really be Jim Lehrer talking in the passage.

He laughed and exclaimed, "you really have done your homework!" I asked him if the fact that news has become more or less entertainment helps explain why newspaper readership is down, as are the ratings of nightly network newscasts. "There are still 30 million people who watch the nightly news programs," he countered, but then added, "I think the pendulum is swinging back…with the blogs, the talk shows, which I think are terrific. The more vehicles, the more voices that are heard, terrific. But in the beginning there has to be a news story. When Jon Stewart or David Letterman tells a joke, and everybody laughs—they're not going to get it if they don't know the original story."

"And I'm in the first stage of that, I'm in the 'story' part of that," he continued. "And we need to stay in that. There's a crying out for that, I notice. And it doesn't have anything to do with anybody wanting to return to the 'days of glory' of the 'old white man' anchormen; I don't mean that. It's just that they want people they can trust to tell them—I don't give a damn whether it's on a pink iPod, or wherever in hell, it doesn't matter where it comes from—just tell me what happened, please. And then you can blog me and you can shout at me and, you know, do whatever you want to do," he laughed.

"But in the beginning, what exactly did Musharraf do? Don't start with the screaming about this awful thing that he's done. And so I think the future—well, there are a lot of futures—one possible future, if I [were] the god of journalism"—here I resisted the urge to turn total sycophant and mutter something about his being in the pantheon, at least—"I would put this together: I would take a story like Pakistan, and I would do all the reporting I could possibly do on it. And then I would come right after that and say 'here's what the AP said about this story, here's what Reuters said about it, here's what the three networks have said, and the cable networks….'"

Lehrer's eyes flashed as he further relayed his vision of providing news consumers with expertly selected content: "Here's the initial talk show stuff that's happened, and, say, pick a sampling of the bloggers; in other words, do the whole thing, because folks don't have time to do all this crap all by themselves. It's the reason nobody watches cable television [news]." He was on a mission now. "Cable has minuscule audiences, especially during the day, and even some of the 'shout shows' don't have good audiences anymore, because people are weary of it."

His dream delivery method sounded to me like the perfect blend of good 24-hour television news (a theoretical concept only, these days) and a well-designed website, "with links everywhere," so that one could stop the broadcast at will and read the original content, such as, in his example, the whole statement by Musharraf; but that the same consumer could just as easily skip the corresponding statement by opposition leader Bhutto. In Lehrer's ideal news medium, the audience just needs someone to sort through it all, and present it on a menu, and keep that content continually updated.

Had there been time, I would have pulled up articles that describe the very system he outlined, and that furthermore declare in no uncertain terms that if traditional news outlets wish to stay relevant, they will adopt similar models; but I instead encouraged him to pursue it by asking if we'd see these transformations coming to the NewsHour in the near future. He wouldn't commit to it, but maybe a seed was planted; who knows?

I had watched a recent interview of Jim Lehrer by fellow PBS man Charlie Rose, and thus knew it was futile to try to get him to prognosticate on the upcoming presidential race, so I took a shot at another political story, and asked if he thought he would be covering any impeachment hearings in the next year or so. (Among Lehrer's big early stories at PBS was the Nixon impeachment.) He shook his head, and said that he didn't think that the current effort to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney is serious. "I know a little bit about impeachment. You can't get impeached for making the wrong decision."

And then, just as abruptly as they began, the ten minutes were over. I stopped being a novice journalist and fell into full-on fan mode. "If you wouldn't mind, just one more," I said, holding out my copy of Eureka. Lehrer obliged and, after getting my name again, signed the page. Then he did something I hadn't seen him do with any other autograph-seeker: he read his inscription to me. "You're gonna know what this means, Joe. It says, 'To Joe: Welcome.' Okay?"

I thanked him, and he was gone. The bookstore's audio system was playing Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." As I climbed aboard the bus back home (read: drove the VW Jetta), my thoughts tumbled over Archimedes, revolutionary news products, Eureka moments, war stories, blogging—and that one word, "Welcome."