After the storm

THERE’S a needlepoint pillow on the couch in Brian Williams’ corner office in Rockefeller Center, a recent gift from a friend who embroidered across the front in careful stitching: “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”

The sardonic memento -- a reference to a comment President Bush made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina -- sits in view of the NBC anchor’s desk, a quiet reminder of a story that enveloped him early into his tenure on the evening newscast and has preoccupied him ever since.

A year ago, Williams was hunkered down inside New Orleans’ Superdome to wait out the storm with thousands of local residents. After howling winds wrenched panels off the stadium’s roof, he shot pictures with his cellphone camera of daylight streaming through the ragged holes.

By the end of the week, he had watched the city unravel, supplies dwindle, bodies float down the flooded streets. His disgust spilled out on air.

“I saw fear, I saw death, I saw depravity, I saw firearms being brandished, I saw looting -- and this in one of the great cities in the United States,” the 47-year-old anchor said in a recent interview. “It’s always going to be a part of me. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry about a subject that intersected with my work.”

Katrina was also, in many ways, the story in which Williams shook off the mantle of simply being Tom Brokaw’s successor. When the hurricane hit, he had been in the anchor chair for less than nine months. His often-impassioned reports on the aftermath -- first from inside the Superdome and then delivered amid knee-deep water in the streets -- earned NBC a George Foster Peabody Award and helped him move beyond an image of just a smooth-talking broadcaster.

“People said we saw the reawakening of the post-Clinton media,” he said. “I just think you saw reporters who were eyewitnesses saying, ‘We’re not going to have it. We’re not going to accept what we hear being said by the government.’ ”

In the last year, he’s gone back to the Gulf Coast nine times and spearheaded a series of stories on related topics such as infrastructure, oil and race.

He returned to New Orleans on Monday night for an hourlong prime-time special about the storm and its aftermath and is scheduled to interview President Bush from there on tonight’s evening newscast.

“It deeply affected him to his core,” said NBC News President Steve Capus. “Brian has made this a personal mission to continue to tell the stories of Katrina.”

But if witnessing the storm’s devastation helped Williams find his voice, it came during a year when the spotlight largely moved off the NBC anchor. Peter Jennings’ death just weeks before the hurricane triggered months of high-profile anchor upheavals at ABC, while Katie Couric’s subsequent jump to CBS dominated much of the chatter about television news.

“I’ve been fine with the attention elsewhere,” Williams insisted mildly, adding that his focus has been on putting out the best newscast he can.

Since he took over the “NBC Nightly News,” the program has held on to its top-rated spot. But its viewership has declined as the overall audience tuning in to the three network evening newscasts has continued to wane -- down to an average of fewer than 25 million viewers a night so far this season, a drop of more than 20% in the last decade. NBC alone has lost about 500,000 viewers since last season.

Still, Williams argues that the appetite for a 6:30 p.m. newscast remains robust. “With the number of distractions expanding exponentially, I say we’ve never been healthier,” he said. “All the talk has been of, ‘Oh, podcasting is clearly how we’re going to communicate in the future.’ Or, ‘Blogs -- we’ll have all 285 million of us writing at the same time.’ And never mind the fact that no one will have a chance to read a whit of it. That we are still hitting this enormous swath, that there is no other medium close to the audience we have, I think is cause for great celebration.”

For the NBC anchor, covering Katrina reinforced the newscast’s potency.

A year later, he is still approached by strangers in airports who thank him for sticking with the story -- some of whom burst into tears as they recall their experiences, he said.

“With all the talk about how irrelevant network evening newscasts are, I’ve got news for you: We had a chance and took it to really make a difference and stand for something in people’s lives, and focus our enormous candlepower,” he said. “This story was a television story. No other medium could have done what we did.”

Williams, who contracted dysentery after several days in the flooded city, said watching the sluggish response to the disaster firsthand “has shaken my confidence in my government.”

“It’s because of what I’ve witnessed in places like Iraq, where a colonel can pick up a telephone and have water and food delivered by Black Hawk or Chinook dual-rotor helicopter in minutes to a place the size of a dime in the middle of the desert,” he said. “That’s what kept getting me in this. No one had any information.

“It’s not my Vietnam. But it doesn’t take much after I close my eyes to summon what I saw in New Orleans. Why? Maybe that they are Americans, maybe that these folks are so identifiable to me. I’ve been accused of crusading, and I reject that. I just can’t understand why it isn’t top of mind with more Americans.”

Indeed, not everyone has cheered his coverage.

Every time he has visited New Orleans anew and filed postings about the coverage on his Internet blog, the Daily Nightly, Williams has been peppered with e-mail complaints from viewers who say they want him to move on.

“I am tired as hell of hearing about New Orleans every time I hear the NBC News,” read one typical message from a Georgia man posted in June. “Get on with life.”

Williams blames such an attitude on a culture that has become increasingly coarse and self-centered.

“These are people who have theirs and would like us to move on, thank you very much,” he said. “And I can’t. I can only say to them, ‘If this was your crisis, I would be a bird dog about it.’ ”

That said, he admits that the remaining challenges to rebuilding the region have largely fallen out of the headlines.

“I think if we’ve dropped a stitch, it is that we the media -- and this is a wide swath of responsibility -- have not kept the issues in the forefront,” he said. “And I should quickly add: We have American soldiers on two battlefields. We now are covering a third front. We have had a lot to talk about. It is not as if we’ve been preoccupied by the superfluous.”

For his part, Williams said he plans to try to return to New Orleans as much as possible.

“I think I’m going to be an honorary part-time citizen,” he said. “You know, you can still find a nook, a little place that gives you your fix, where if you’re in need of reassurance on one of these trips, you can say, ‘Yeah, there’s New Orleans.’ You walk past someone on the sidewalk and you’ll hear them speaking French. It’s like an aroma that’s comforting. You say, ‘That’s it; that’s why this is so worth saving.’ ”