- Monica Schipper/Getty Images for New York Comedy Festival
- The danger Brian Williams was most in was the danger of letting his little story run away from him.
A story in Monday’s New York Times hails the photography of Spider Martin, who in 1965 was assigned by the Birmingham News to shoot pictures of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Art historian Martin Berger is quoted by the Times observing that several scenes from the new movie Selma seem to be based on Martin’s pictures. Most photos of “bloody Sunday” at the Selma bridge show “a confusing jumble of bodies,” said Berger. But Martin’s offer “a clear narrative that seems to crystallize the stakes of the larger conflict.”
Like Brian Williams, I took a scary helicopter ride. It was on April 29, 1975, from the courtyard behind the American embassy in Saigon to a ship of the Seventh Fleet out at sea. If I’ve never incorporated that ride into a hair-raising action tale, it’s not because I wouldn’t like to. The trouble is, it’s an embarrassing memory—the evacuation continued a long time after I was gone and the tales of derring-do belong to the journalists evacuated at night from the embassy roof by the last few choppers. (Of course, those journalists must defer to the correspondents who didn’t leave at all.)
