Bloated and tired, Williams occasionally looked disembodied. Williams’s performance in the interview may not have nailed essential questions that many observers wanted answered, but it revealed real grief-the anguish of a guy who knew he had inexplicably screwed up. Around this time, he sat for a strained interview with his colleague Matt Lauer, in which he explained that, in the lingua franca of millennial culture, he owned his failure and had let his ego get in the way of the truth. He stepped down from NBC Nightly News and agreed to a six-month suspension. The anchor, who grew up in a working-class Catholic family that oscillated between New Jersey and New York, instead performed an extended penance of sorts.
Williams, however, embarked on a different path. Many journalists would have lost their jobs over such an infraction, or quickly resigned under contrived circumstances. In early 2015, he came under fire after he embellished his account of his role in an Iraqi helicopter attack on air in his Nightly broadcast. Williams moved into the office two years ago, when he transitioned from NBC News to MSNBC in a rather public, rather excruciating crisis of his own making. “I do love it up here,” Williams said, genuinely. He pointed to the spot where the famous Christmas tree would be set up next month. A few dozen revelers were packed into the makeshift stadium seats that had been assembled upon slabs of grass, which were affixed to the plaza’s rink, circled by a Zamboni and a school of skaters.
WHO REPLACED BRIAN WILLIAMS SERIES
He occasionally stared out the wall-to-wall windows lining two sides of his office to catch a glimpse of the fourth game of the American League Championship Series between the Yankees and Astros that was being projected onto the plaza. It was a few hours before showtime, and Williams seemed wistful. “A lot of our kind in our industry have gotten away with the business-up-top, party-down-below philosophy of anchor dressing,” he said.
He still keeps a mess of ties hanging in a closet-“enough to survive if we’re in lockdown for several days,” he joked-but now prefers slim-fit AG jeans with his sport jacket.
Now, as the host of The 11th Hour, at the decidedly un-primetime hour of 11 p.m., Williams has admittedly loosened up. For a decade, as the anchor of the historic NBC Nightly News, the ever-polished broadcaster dressed formally in the tradition of Brokaw and Chancellor, in a Brioni suit and diagonal rep tie.
WHO REPLACED BRIAN WILLIAMS PROFESSIONAL
We were sitting in his second-floor office at 30 Rock, where Williams was reluctantly answering my questions about, among other things, his evolving professional sartorial tastes. “I keep the pants around, mostly for funerals or church,” Brian Williams told me one recent, slightly tropical October evening.
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