E-mail a friendBrian Williams
airdate November 3, 2008
Listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World in '07, Brian Williams has covered virtually every major breaking news event around the world for the past two decades. The managing editor and anchor of NBC's flagship Nightly News is also a veteran of political campaigns and elections. He's been the net's chief White House correspondent and hosted CNBC and MSNBC news programs. Williams previously spent seven years at CBS and worked in the White House during the Carter administration.
NBC news anchor explains why his dog is the only member of his household who is not overly opinionated about the race and how humor helps when covering the campaign. (2:55)
Full interview. (13:08)
Brian Williams
Tavis: Tomorrow night I'll be in New York to take part in NBC's primetime coverage of this historic election. That coverage, of course, led by Brian Williams, anchor and managing editor of the "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams." During his stand-out career in journalism, he's received numerous awards including a Peabody, the Edward R. Murrow award, and a slew of Emmys. He joins us tonight from where else - 30 Rock in New York City. Brian, nice to have you on the program.
Brian Williams: Thank you for having me, old friend. It's good to see you, even though it's via satellite.
Tavis: Well, I'll see you in a matter of hours in New York City, on your set.
Williams: That's right.
Tavis: Let me start by asking very simply whether you're ready. Is NBC ready for tomorrow night, with all this turnout and hype on this election?
Williams: Well, as we have this conversation I'm going to head, with my briefing book under my arm, to my home tonight, and before these presidential debates, people like you and me talk about the candidates when they're over-prepped, and I'm going to try not to do that.
Look, if you don't know the basics, and if you don't know the key races around the country, you don't deserve jobs like the ones you and I have - I'm surrounded by professionals. I don't think there's ever been a team assembled like our team; I don't think there's ever been a facility.
We do have a bit of home field advantage. Have you seen 30 Rock out on the rink with the map of the nation? The American flags? To my colleagues at other networks, I say beat that. We're ready to cover this election night.
Tavis: Has this campaign, honestly and frankly, gone on just too long?
Williams: Oh, yeah. I don't even have to be honest or frank about it. (Laughter) It's just flatly gone on too long, and what's sad about it is I remember saying, naively, innocently, "Well, at least we'll have a thorough and serious and sober airing of the issues." And instead, look at what we did. Look at how our attention was able to get pulled into pigs and lipstick and plumbers.
We got a plumber who's the third member of the GOP ticket, in effect, and that's - it's all of our fault, yes, and there will be time to bloody our own backs with chains, but it's also the sorry state of our discourse as if, Tavis, we don't have enough serious issues to concentrate on.
So whoever wakes up Wednesday morning the president elect, we've got to come together and get together on these very, very serious problems.
Tavis: How does the media - I don't disagree with your assessment at all. In the Black church, we just say "amen" to what you just said, so I say amen to that. I don't disagree with your assessment at all, Brian. I guess the question is, how does the media in a contemporary sense, certainly, avoid getting caught up in a horse race when you have the kind of race that we had this year? How do you avoid that?
Williams: Well, a funny thing happened. As I always say, I answer your question with a phrase - a funny thing happened on the way to the nomination for President Giuliani and President Hillary Clinton, and that is it appears that if these polls hold and we've got it at 51-43 as of tonight, and our pollsters are very good, it looks like everybody else in this race ran smack into an American history movement.
Ran smack into a changing of those iconic symbols at the front of all the classrooms we grew up sitting in, all those oval pictures, depictions of our presidents. It's about to change, after 43 of them, if these polls hold, and people need to get out to vote. The American voter has a funny way of deciding for themselves what happens in our elections.
So I think we may find out it was a movement year, we may find out we all had to step aside and just let it happen, and we may decide we went down too many rat holes of distractions on our way there.
Tavis: You mentioned one woman a moment ago, Brian - of course, Hillary Clinton. There's another woman in this race, still in it as of this moment - Sarah Palin. Let me just ask you in a very forthright way - when you're sitting for a conversation, as you did days ago, with one Sarah Palin, and your own network, in fact, "Saturday Night Live," has made such a wonderful run of jokes about Sarah Palin, and they're not the only ones.
But clearly, she has been ridiculed - my words, not yours here - ridiculed for being, shall we say, an intellectual lightweight. When you're going into an interview and you know that that's the rub, that's what's out there, how do you prepare for that conversation so that you don't get chastised for being too soft or too hard?
Williams: Well, by then, remember the context, Tavis. By the time I got to sit down with Sarah Palin, I was, A, allowed eight minutes with her in private; B, allowed an extended period of time only if the top of the ticket, John McCain, was sitting with her. I went more than third - I went fifth or sixth, if you count some of the interviews she granted.
Charlie went first, then Katie. Here we are, to be gross about it, we're the largest evening news audience, and it was clear - I joked about it on David Letterman's show - we were paying for some of the perceived sins of our cable network, and these days, everyone knows that in prime time cable programming, there's attitude.
You know what you're getting. There's truth in labeling; nobody's being fooled. So was there a little tension? Absolutely. Can I develop a relationship, one on one, with someone? John McCain I've known for a long time, but the governor was new to me. Absolutely.
And you - I think she's a professional at her job, I try to be at mine, and we kind of quickly got over it. But a lot of - to be frank about it, a lot of the good questions had been taken, so I chose to go down different roads.
Tavis: Let me shift gears dramatically here. Obama, as you certainly know and have covered on the "NBC Nightly News," for whatever reason or reasons, has generated a certain level of enthusiasm and energy in the younger generation. You have two kids - I think 17 and 20. If my research is as good as yours, I think my facts are right. Seventeen and 20; and so they're in that age group that Obama has played so well to.
Without betraying the confidence of your children, are you one news anchor who's had your children in your ear when you're not on the anchor desk about this campaign?
Williams: Oh, you've just landed on the recurring theme in my house. My family knows that I am such a political agnostic, I've never told my wife of 22 years or either child who I voted for for president. I've only said publicly that I think my politics might surprise some folks, that I've voted for members of both parties for president.
But it drives them crazy, and it's been driving me crazy that I have to put ear plugs and blinders on when I come in the house. I can't hear it. I can't hear it, I don't want to hear it, I don't have a dog in this. I go up to my easy chair on the second floor of the house.
My dog comes with me. She sits with me and keeps me company. She has expressed no view in this election, and so far she's the only member of my household (laughter) to express no view in this election.
Tavis: There goes that sense of humor again. Let me just talk about that for a moment. You are - I've known you for some years, and as we just saw now, another example of that wit and humor. And I'm thinking about the "Saturday Night Live" episode that you hosted, which was a wonderful episode - you did a great job.
How does, seriously, though, a sense of humor come in handy when you're anchoring the news, Brian Williams?
Williams: Well, it comes in handy this way - when I saw John McCain and Sarah Palin in a theater in a high school in Ohio, I began by saying, "Perhaps we should put on a musical." And when Barack Obama saw me last week on Thursday - where were we? - in Florida, he walked up to me and said, "I hadn't realized how gray you've gotten lately."
And I said, "Are you sure you want to be calling me out on gray hair?" And it's just you pick up these relationships where you left off, and it helps, frankly, to have a sense of humor. Yes, we're electing the leader of the next free world. Yes, this is the most important election certainly in our lifetime. Yes, this will rewrite both the covenant and your yearly gathering, the State of the Black Union. It'll rewrite it.
Think of all the ongoing assumptions if these polls are right, Tavis, that'll just go out the window and force a new conversation to replace them. So this is weighty stuff. It couldn't get more serious. But the only way these candidates get through the night and wake up for the next day is kind of keeping calm and remembering that a good sense of humor will get you through the night, and you can survive just about anything.
Tavis: Let me ask you a question now, Brian Williams - I'm sure that you will ask me a version of this at some point tomorrow night, as you will ask others on your program tomorrow night, and for that matter, over the coming days, should Obama win tomorrow night. Assess for me how you think the media in general, and in particular how NBC has covered the race angle in this race.
Williams: Well, it's interesting. I think - as you know, you and I first met at the White House, actually, and I covered the middle slice of the Clinton White House years. I always thought we'd have that national conversation we've been promising to have on race. I always thought that might be President Clinton's second term. We saw what ended up happening to his second term.
I've always said this about race: Every day, millions of Americans get up and see this elephant in the room, and choose to put it back under the bed, close the door, go to work, come home, it's still there. We see it every day, and we suppress it. We don't talk about it. We talk about the fringe, it flares up every once in a while, but we don't talk about it.
If Obama wins this election, if these polls hold true, I think the national conversation about race - game on. It's underway starting Wednesday morning if this happens, and the world is different. Someone said in a meeting I attended the other day, how, only 150 years after the abolition of slavery, how do you elect an African American president? You need three-quarters of a billion dollars and the perfect campaign and the perfect candidate.
And think of this, Tavis - you'll hear this again tomorrow night - in the time of John F. Kennedy, we still had Americans alive with us who were alive during the time when slavery was allowed in the United States. It has been an eyelash in the scope of world history. So that's what we'll be watching for tomorrow night.
Tavis: You mentioned world history, Brian, and obviously, with your program, you cover the world. Indeed, as anchor, you've traveled around the world. What's your sense, if Obama wins, of how this story is going to be covered around the world?
Williams: Well, I've traveled so much just this year, I think this year I've hit the big three of Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I was over in Berlin with Senator Obama; I was in Beijing for the Olympic Games. I have seen Obama posters hanging in an open-air market in Amman, Jordan; in some unlikely places.
And there's been media criticism for talking about this because there's not that same movement feeling regarding the GOP nominee, John McCain - there just hasn't been because it's not the game-changer it would be on the other side. I think some of that would happen if Obama is successful, without lifting a finger. Wednesday morning, the message would go forth, to quote another president, and a lot of that would just be.
And we would cover it. We've got correspondents from Kenya to London who are going to track reaction for us tomorrow night, depending on what happens. It'll certainly be an interesting sidebar to this story that'll mainly be about us and the United States.
Tavis: You expect that we're going to have a long night tomorrow night, given the long - we've seen these long lines in early voting, to be sure. We expect massive turnout tomorrow. Is that going to impact how long we're on the air tomorrow night, you think?
Williams: Yeah, it could. You could, Tavis, have some judges saying, "I declare polls are going to be hung open," and we will obviously not release the final count. We will make no judgments until the polls are closed. And something else - these six and eight-hour lines to vote? My friend Rachel Maddow said on MS-NBC last night, "When does this become just a de-facto poll tax?"
Who can afford six or eight hours? Who can afford - where are these jobs with willing employers? When does this become so arduous and costly - time is money in this country, increasingly. Can't we use this as a jumping-off point to maybe fix the way we elect our presidents?
Tavis: In 45 seconds, if after all that has been said and done John McCain were to pull off the upset tomorrow night, the look on your face would represent what?
Williams: A look on my face would represent it has happened again. How did it happen and what does John McCain do first thing Wednesday morning? I'd try to cover it the way I expect to cover whatever the story is, like a cork bobbing along on the sea. At least call them as we see them.
Tavis: Brian Williams, of course, the anchor the "NBC Nightly News." I have the honor of being a part of his team tomorrow night in New York alongside him to cover this historic election. Brian, always an honor to have you on the program. Thanks for your time - I appreciate it.
Williams: Thank you for having me, Tavis.
Tavis: It's my pleasure.
Back to November 3, 2008