About a year or so ago, my husband and his boss were in a car with Brian Williams for about 15 minutes in Manhattan, going from 34th Street to 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In the course of that quarter hour, they all chatted, and Williams shared his now-infamous story about being in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003 when its tail section was hit with an RPG that fortunately did not go off. My husband told me about this at the time, saying, basically, “I don’t agree with his politics, but he was really charming, and you’ve got to admit he’s got grit. He was a celebrity anchor in a real war zone.”
So Williams shoehorned this story into 15 minutes of casual conversation with two men he would never see again and whom he had no need to impress.