For all the revelations we've learned about NBC news anchor Brian Williams, this one could come across as among the most unflattering.
The trouble for Williams began after a Jan. 30 report on NBC Nightly News in which he thanked an Army veteran for protecting him in Iraq after his military helicopter was purportedly brought down by enemy fire. After Williams was called out on this by soldiers involved in the incident he described, Williams issued an on-air apology that only worsened skepticism about his credibility as a journalist.
Now comes a report from the Boston Herald that Williams, who rarely misses a chance to tout his reverence for veterans, snubbed the annual convention of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in Boston in 2006. Williams's bio on the NBC News website states that he's a board member on the Society's foundation.
Boston firefighter Neal Santangelo, a member of the host committee that brought the society's convention to the city, told Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis that Williams agreed to serve as master of ceremonies six months before the convention was held in September 2006.
But when he arrived in Boston that day, Williams informed Santangelo and fellow committee member Tom Lyons that a "pressing engagement" back in New York City "prevented him from doing much more than greeting the audience of more than 1,000 guests ... and leaving," Gelzinis wrote in his column yesterday.
"As disappointed as Lyons and Santangelo were," Gelzinis wrote, "they still arranged for a police escort to rush Williams through the tunnel to catch his plane back to NYC."
Several hours later, after the dinner, Santangelo's wife phoned to tell him she knew why Williams bailed on the vets -- he was yukking it up on Saturday Night Live, in its "Weekend Update" mock news segment.
Neal Santangelo was so angry that he wrote a letter to Williams a week after the convention. "I ... cannot believe that you left us for this," he wrote, according to Gelzinis. "In an act of egotistical, blatant self-promotion, you deceived the (Medal of Honor) recipients, declined to break bread with them and disrespected them. You placed comedy before courage ... Your conduct was irreverent, insulting, incomprehensible and shameful."
Santangelo also wrote that Williams should apologize for his disrespect to the veterans -- "Anything else is unacceptable."
Santangelo said he declined to send the letter after other members of the host committee said that while they agreed with him, they did not want to risk antagonizing Williams.
Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, not incidentally, must consider himself among the luckiest people in media for dodging the Williams scandal so far. SNL did not air this past weekend, most likely because the show is preparing for a 40th anniversary broadcast on Sunday, Feb. 15. It is due to run again its first episode, from Oct. 11, 1975 with late comedian George Carlin as guest host, this coming Saturday.
Also worth noting is that Saturday Night Live and NBC Nightly News are broadcast from the same building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Williams was apparently so desperate to appear on SNL that he was willing to renege on a commitment to honor our most esteemed soldiers, choosing instead to hang with a comedic troupe only a few floors from where he works.
Correction: This post initially reported that Williams guest hosted Saturday Night Live in September 2006. Williams appeared in the show's Weekend Update segment on Sept. 30, 2006, but he did not host the show until Nov. 3, 2007.
