When I interviewed Harry Smith in October on the Central College campus in Pella, the focus was his class on curiosity he was teaching at his alma mater. But naturally, the conversation turned to story upon story of his 40-year career in journalism including his time as an anchor and reporter for NBC News and CBS News.

We spent a few minutes trading anecdotes on covering the Iowa caucuses and Smith’s curiosity about then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s run and rise to the top of the Republican caucus field in 2008.

Smith said his story on Huckabee at CBS News early in the 2007-08 caucus cycle was the Arkansas governor’s first bit of national election coverage. He said it took some convincing to get the green light from his executive producer in 2007 to do the piece, but Smith knew his intuition into Huckabee’s potential as a national political figure would “pay dividends” in the final days of the race in Iowa. Huckabee went on to win the Iowa caucuses in January 2008 before ending his campaign three months later.

Here is an excerpt from the interview with Smith.

Smith: I love the field. And the whole time I was an anchor, I was always jumping on planes, always trying to get in the field, and especially when there’s breaking news. We used to come here and do the Iowa caucus like nobody’s business. Just as an aside, I’ll tell you a brief story. I had done a story on Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas because he lost a lot of weight, and he was pre-diabetic and all this other stuff. And all of a sudden his health was so much better. Because I studied theology and I’m interested in theology, I’m very interested in evangelicals. And so he’s that guy. He starts running [for the Republican presidential nomination] out here, and I said, “We have to go shoot a story with him.”

I’m pretty sure he didn’t have money to put gas in the bus. We met him in Indianola and there were nine people standing there listening to him, and I think probably four of them were part of his staff. It was very sparse. We shoot the story with him. We have a great conversation. I bring it back to New York, and whoever was the executive producer at the time said, “I just, I don’t … I’m not feeling this story, this Huckabee story.” And I said, “Trust me. He’s zero in the polls now; it will not stay that way. And I promise you that if we run this story, it would be the first national television story, it will pay dividends.”

So a month before the caucuses, who’s No. 1 in the polls? And guess what? We called him up and said, “We’re going to do the show, the CBS Morning News, live from Pella, Iowa, with an audience, and we want you to be there to interview you.” And he said, “Well, I’m supposed to be in New Hampshire, but I’ll be there.”

It’s homework. Homework and intuition are very much entwined, right? It’s just who lives here, who really shows up, right? That’s who shows up. That was proof of that.