Late Night News

Brian Williams Opens Up About His Unexpected Re-Invention: “Second Acts Are Possible, with a Little Spiffing Up”

Most broadcasters would have been cooked if they had undergone the sort of scandal that Williams faced in 2015. But a slow-and-steady revival—a mixture of dutiful penance, clever planning, and a dramatic change in the media—has Williams turning 11 p.m. into the new primetime.
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By Nathan Congleton/NBC News.

“I keep the pants around, mostly for funerals or church,” Brian Williams told me one recent, slightly tropical October evening. 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. 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. Now, as the host of The 11th Hour, at the decidedly un-primetime hour of 11 p.m., Williams has admittedly loosened up. 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. “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. “It’s 2017. I’m 58 years old. No one’s going to say, Hey!

It was a few hours before showtime, and Williams seemed wistful. 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. 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. He pointed to the spot where the famous Christmas tree would be set up next month. “I do love it up here,” Williams said, genuinely.

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. 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. Many journalists would have lost their jobs over such an infraction, or quickly resigned under contrived circumstances. Williams, however, embarked on a different path. 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. He stepped down from NBC Nightly News and agreed to a six-month suspension. 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. 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. Bloated and tired, Williams occasionally looked disembodied. “I said things that weren’t true,” he told Lauer. “I let down my NBC colleagues and our viewers, and I’m determined to earn back their trust.”

Williams caught hell for the mishap, which unfolded not long after he signed a five-year contract that reportedly guaranteed him $10 million per year. The crisis—or “the troubles,” as he refers to it—was, however, auspiciously timed. NBC News had been dealing with its own corporate mishegasAnn Curry’s public departure from Today; the brief tenure of Jamie Horowitz at the morning bastion; and David Gregory’s flameout at Meet the Press—ever since Comcast had purchased NBCUniversal in 2011. And this latest crisis led to a corporate shake-up that resulted in the return of Andrew Lack, the legendary news executive, as chairman of NBC News. Lack, who had run the enterprise during the 90s, had mentored Williams as a young anchor and was widely considered among the best talent-whisperers in the business. At the end of his suspension, Williams suggested to Lack that he return to MSNBC in the role of breaking-news anchor. His first broadcast coincided with Pope Francis’s inaugural official visit to the United States. “Grab your own metaphor, but it was an emotional event to return to,” Williams told me. “I was mostly very excited and hopeful to be back in the game.”

In August 2016, after months and hours on air anchoring primary election coverage alongside Rachel Maddow, Williams sat down for dinner with Lack at an uptown Italian restaurant. Lack mentioned his interest in a late-night news broadcast in order to keep apace with the cascade of election news regularly breaking after dark. Williams was intrigued. They decided that after Labor Day, in 2016, they would softly launch what Williams referred to as a “self-canceling pop-up show” that would air four nights a week for six weeks at 11 p.m., serving as the first draft of what Americans needed to know for the next day. The hour was yeoman-like, to be sure, but that was the point: the slot was open, and Williams happens to be a night owl. (“I’ve had many exchanges with him in the wee hours,” Lack told me. “With him, 11 o’clock is just getting started.”) The plan had the added benefit of being low-risk, high-reward. It also provided nice optics for a famous guy trying to make amends.

As it turned out, however, Williams and Lack launched their trial balloon into a media environment perfectly pitched for this sort of show. As the 2016 campaign played out with remarkable acceleration, the traditional news cycle was inverted upon itself: by late 2016, it was apparent that the morning news cycle officially began in the evening, as reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others were publishing their pieces after 6 p.m. and talking about them on TV hours later while audiences hyperventilated about it all on Twitter. (Disclosure: I am a CNN contributor.) All of a sudden, 11 p.m. was the new 5 a.m., and news programming was the new, hot reality show. “We were entering a whole new world order, where we could see breaking news every evening at 7, 8, 9, even 10 o’clock, and we had to advance those stories,” Lack recalled. “We had to get the best journalists we could assemble to do a 21st-century version of Nightline that could scratch that itch.”

Last month, The 11th Hour, now a full hour, five nights per week, celebrated its one-year anniversary. Meanwhile, Williams is enjoying what appears to be a rare second act in a very unforgiving business. He may not be anchoring the p.m. news, but he appears nonetheless reinvigorated. In his new life, he gets to work a few hours before the time he would have been leaving work a few years ago. He begins his day by speeding through that day’s episode of Morning Joe, which he records, before diving into e-mails and texts from his staff of around 12 news-obsessed millennials. Williams, who splits his time between homes in Connecticut and New Jersey, plus an apartment in Midtown, then works on the show until airtime, writing and re-writing his scripts himself, as he did when he anchored Nightly News. “What happened was an acute time in my life, and I had put a lot of people through a lot. I knew I needed to get back,” he said. “I am grateful for every day.”

Williams is, on some level, a man of conflicting identities. On the one hand, he is one of the most recognizable men in America, who occasionally eats sandwiches in his office with his friend Tom Hanks before his show goes live. (Hanks, in fact, officiated his daughter’s wedding ceremony two years ago, after Bruce Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa, sang them a love song. Williams sat out an evening of his own show earlier this month to attend the opening night of Springsteen’s Broadway debut, during which, Williams admitted, he repeatedly looked down the row to fellow Jersey boy Jon Stewart to see if he was crying any less. It was a wash, he said.) At the same time, he still goes to the same Jersey Shore stock-car track where his dad took him. A number of fire helmets line the walls behind the desk, including his yellow rookie helmet. (He began volunteering at 18.) His desk is adorned with a pair of brass knuckles, a gift from “a fellow high-school graduate who succeeded in life,” and binoculars, “in case we have an incident,” like when two New York Rangers players were skating outside earlier this week. “I’ve never been on skates a day in my life. Skates or skis. I never had an opportunity growing up.” Williams then reminded me that he never graduated from college.

Williams spent “the troubles” doing a lot of reflection, and talking “to the kinds of people in the America I grew up in.” He drove across the country and took advantage of the opportunity to get re-certified as a firefighter. In fact, one of the only public appearances he made during his suspension was a fund-raiser for his New Jersey alma mater, Mater Dei Prep. “They’re all me and it’s home,” he told me, referring to the guys he sees changing engines at the stock-car races. “It took me 30 years to discover what’s written in thousands of books. I’m happiest when I’m home.”

Television is, in many ways, a fading medium. And yet the set of The 11th Hour is impervious to the fog of declining ratings or aging audiences that plagues 6 p.m. The pressure is lower, as is the overhead. It’s also a sweet gig for a former primetime broadcaster. (After leaving 6 p.m., Katie Couric never quite found her footing at Yahoo.) And yet Williams, at his stage of the game, appears to be building something rather than managing its decline. The show was first in the demo and in total viewers in the most recent quarter, according to NBC. Fox News announced last month that it is going to launch its own 11 p.m. show. “Having the 11 has elevated the network and upped everyone’s game,” MSNBC President Phil Griffin told me. “When Brian came back as a breaking-news anchor, we talked for a long time about if he should really be contributing in a daily way. And then he did the primaries, and by day two of this show, we knew it was exactly what that hour should have.”

In the show’s early days, producers had a harder time booking reporters who’d worked all day filing stories, many of whom would have to be up for Morning Joe. “I was doing a lot of the booking myself early on, and I was texting and calling and asking people to stay up late,” Colleen King, the program’s senior producer, who was brought over from Hardball, told me. “The sell was this is a campaign of a lifetime and B.W. wants to hear your story. They know we’re really going to highlight their reporting.” Soon enough, though, that began to change. Reporters who were regularly breaking stories well into the evening, including Ashley Parker, Jonathan Lemire, and Philip Rucker, became a rotating cast of regular characters.

In the grittier world of late-night news, Williams recruited talent the old-fashioned way—with a little fawning, and occasional avuncular sangfroid. “I tend to over-introduce my guests when they come on,” Williams admitted when I pressed him on the sentence-long biographies he lavishes upon guests. “It is one of my things. We have terrific people. I will never introduce someone only as an analyst. It’s diminishing. I try to love on them. They’re doing us a terrific favor. They not only make our broadcasts better, they make our broadcast.” Guests also knew that it wasn’t the kind of cable show where the host forces an argument between his guests, or argues with them himself. “Everything that cable TV is pilloried for, Brian is the antithesis of,” Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff at the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, who said he has been on the show 60 times so far this year, told me. “He lets us talk. He doesn’t cut us off. His questions are always of the variety of what the heck should people make of this. It gives us a chance to bottom-line. It’s a tonic for our times.”

Nicolle Wallace, who now hosts the network’s 4 p.m. hour and is a frequent guest on Williams’s show, said that she could send him 10 e-mails throughout the day with things she heard from sources, and he would manage to seamlessly work them all into the broadcast. “By the end of it, he would empty my whole notebook.” He also gave her an invaluable piece of advice before she launched her own show, telling her that the surest way to not trip over the teleprompter is to write your own copy.

NBC can bear some resemblance to high school, as Megyn Kelly is currently learning, but a half dozen co-workers in 30 Rock came up empty when I asked what the scuttle around the office was about Williams. Mostly, they told me, he seems unfailingly grateful to be there, he seems to be enjoying it, and they like his show. Williams, for his part, seems genuinely humbled by his experience. In our numerous conversations, he appeared as humbled by his good fortune as he once was vexed by his previous behavior. And he made clear that he is perfectly content to stay where he is now. Of course, cable news lineups can change on a dime; after all, the network cancelled Greta Van Susteren’s show over the summer and replaced her with Ari Melber. Right now, the rest of MSNBC’s primetime lineup seems to be working, with its more opinionated anchors locked into contracts between 8 and 10 p.m., though Williams’s name had been floated as someone to take over Lawrence O’Donnell’s slot before he re-signed his contract. Williams, though, seems to fit right where he is. “This is a different muscle group, a different skill set, and I think this is using all my cylinders, all my wiring, the way I came out of the factory. It’s the best use of the meager skills God gave me, and it may turn out to be the best job I’ve ever had,” he said. “I have put my stuff down. My wife will tell you, once I put my stuff down, I intend to stay a while.”

Williams tapes the show in the newsroom on the third floor, which just underwent a renovation. Through the demolition, the tearing down of drywall and tearing up of worn carpet, they found an original terrazzo floor that a building supervisor told Williams dates back to when the Rockefeller family built it during the height of the Great Depression. Lack, he said, had it spiffed up and shined, and now it’s the floor he walks on to get to his nightly broadcast.

By 10:40 p.m., it was almost showtime. His staff started piling into a cramped control room hidden deep within the 30 Rock maze. Technically, there was no reason for them to all be there, other than they all wanted to be part of it, to answer Williams when he asked for a Yankees score update or to drum along with the show’s opening music. About 10 minutes before the show, Williams made his way to studio 3A to tape the opening lines and greet the guests waiting for him on set, just beyond the newly buffed, uncovered terrazzo floor. “The metaphors are many and obvious,” he said. “We all stand on great things here—and second acts are possible, with a little spiffing up.”