- Robyn Beck
- Just the facts, sir.
Brian Williams has got himself in a spot. The NBC news anchor admitted that his brush with death covering the war in Iraq in 2003 didn’t actually happen. The military helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade? It wasn’t the chopper Williams was riding in, despite the story he’s told for years—it was a chopper ahead of his. “Why is Williams so desperate to be considered a hero?” wondered the Tribune‘s John Kass in his Friday column.
Nine years ago I wrote an essay about the manly need to claim valor in combat at the cost of making it up. It’s pretty common. The historian Joseph Ellis made up a past that consisted of gallantry in Vietnam followed by leadership in the antiwar movement. Michael O’Brien, who’d been a circuit judge in Illinois, claimed two Medals of Honor. Wes Cooley, who’d been a Republican congressman from Oregon, said he’d fought with Special Forces in Korea.
