June 7, 2018 • 36 mins
"Sorry dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft."
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. On the evening of March twenty sixth, twenty thirteen,
Brian Williams appeared on Late Night with David Letterman.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
We're very happy to have this man now with us.
He is the Emmy and the Peabody Award winning anchor
and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News. Ladies and gentlemen,
here he is our good friend, Brian Williams. Mister Williams.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Mon Brian Williams looks like a TV anchor. He is
one of those rectangular, super handsome made for television heads,
maybe two sizes larger than normal, Like he inflates it
with a bicycle pump before he goes on camera. And
he's charming, very charming.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Congratulations twenty years at NBC News, Thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Forty Wars.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Started as a young man tell me.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Williams sits down next to Letterman and the two of
them chit chat and tell jokes. There had been some
big kerfuffle about the Today Show involving Matt Lower and
let him In tries and fails to bait Williams into
saying something juicy about it.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Now, if I'm onto something, blink twice.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Then let Himan ask the question that will destroy Brian
Williams's career.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Tell me, and if I knew this, I forgot it.
And if I forgot it.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
I'm ashamed.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Something happened ten years ago in Iraq. Tell people what
that occurred. I brought a photo which arrived in my
email two mornings ago, of where I was tonight, a
decade ago, this very day, this very day.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things forgotten and misunderstood. This episode is
part two of my exploration of memory and our naive
ideas about what memory is worth. If you haven't heard
(02:15):
the previous episode, you should listen to it first. It's
the story of an early morning raid on a Nazi
hideout in Munich, a raid that involved a world class
harmonica player and a dashingly handsome undercover spy. The lesson
of that story is it only a fool, except the
evidence of his own memory is gospel. The lesson of
this story is we're all fool.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
This was me ten years ago and a young command
sergeant major. I was in Iraq. Now a couple of
caveats here, As war correspondents go I am the Herb
Schmandrick of war correspondents. I'm not terribly good at it.
It is not what I do full time. I am
mostly New York based. I do go cover these two
(03:04):
wars we've been fighting, and when I do, I like
to go out on patrol. I like to get out
in it. We were in some helicopters. We were going
to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates so the
third infantry could cross on them. Two of our four
helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I
was in, No. RPG and AK forty seven.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
As you may remember, the helicopter Brian Williams was riding
was not in fact hit by ground fire. Williams was
miles away in another aircraft entirely when the attack happened.
One of the most respected network news anchors went on
Late night TV to tell a story about his near
death experience, and it turned out not to be true.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
What happens the minute everybody realizes you've been hit, we
figure out how to land safely, and we did. We
landed very quickly and hard, and we put down and
we were stuck four birds in the middle of the
desert and we were north out ahead of the other Americans.
Oh my, and as a guy, as a journalist, what
(04:10):
do you think this is a great position to be
in our holy crap. I got to get out of
here more toward the holy crap.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
This is what we know for certain about the case
of Brian Williams and a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Our colleague Brian Williams is back in Kuwait City tonight
after a close call in the skies over a rock. Ryan,
tell us about what you got yourself into. Well in
the end, Tom, it did give us a glimpse.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Just after the US invasion of Iraq began in the
spring of two thousand and three, Williams filed a report
for NBC News from the field. He described how he'd
been embedded with a convoy of four Chinook helicopters flying
out of Kuwait City. They were carrying bridge components so
that the US Army troops could cross the Euphrates. This
is Williams reporting March twenty sixth, two thousand and three.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
On the ground, we learned the Chinook ahead of of
us was almost blown out of the sky. That hole
was made by a rocket propelled grenade or RPG.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
As Williams describes it. All four helicopters ended up on
the desert floor. There was a massive sandstorm. They were
trapped there for three harrowing days. The main invading force
was still miles away.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
What we didn't know was we were north of the invasion.
We were the northernmost Americans in Iraq.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Williams's account is included in a book published by NBC
shortly after. Four years later, he tells it again in
a blog post written after the death of a retired
general who was in the helicopter with him. Only this
time Williams uses a vague sentence there was small arms fire.
In a later blog post in two thousand and eight,
(05:59):
he's more explicit. All four of our low flying chinnooks
took fire. We were forced down and stayed down. Then
Letterman twenty thirteen Brian Williams's fateful appearance.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
So we got hit, We sat down. Everyone was okay.
Our captain took a purple heart injury to his ear
in the cockpit. But we were alone. They started distributing weapons.
We heard a noise and it was Bradley Fighting vehicles
and Abrams tanks coming. They happened to spot us this
was the invasion, the US invasion. They saw us.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Suddenly, a story that Williams has been telling in bits
and pieces gets told in the spotlight of Late night TV,
and who sees it? Lance Reynolds, the flight engineer on
the helicopter that got hit. Reynolds responds on NBC's Facebook page. Sorry, dude,
I don't remember you being on my aircraft. I do
(06:54):
remember you walking up about an hour after we had
landed to ask me what happened. One by one the
members of the flight crews involved come forward to say
the same thing, and then the skin tell.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
Me, do you know where Brian Williams was at the
moment that your helicopter was hit by the RPG.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
That's Brian Stelter of CNN interviewing Don Hellis, the pilot
of the lead helicopter.
Speaker 6 (07:18):
Oh, we had a lot going on, but I am
pretty sure he was not in our flight at all.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Then Stelter talks to the pilot of the helicopter that
Williams was on. His name is Alan Kelly.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
Is it right to say that Brian Williams was aboard
your helicopter and not aboard the helicopter that was shot
at in a rock that day.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
That's correct. He was aboard my aircraft at the day
in March.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
What was your aircraft doing and was it ever within
sight of the chinook that was shot at?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
As far as the chinook from Big Winni that was
shot down, we were not within visual range of them.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
So what sort of distance was there between your helicopter
with Brian Williams aboard and the helicopter that did take fire?
So initially we were probably a half hour behind them.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Soon every pundit under the sun is wagging a disdainful finger.
Speaker 5 (08:10):
Tell me what you think, Alancahol, not remember whether or
not you're in a plane that gets hit?
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I can you not remember that?
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Remember getting punched in the face in the fourth grade?
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Rosie O'Donnell.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
I think you would know if you were in a
helicopter that was actually hit by a missile. So I
don't think he didn't remember that. I think he fabricated
that story.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
John Stewart, we got us a.
Speaker 6 (08:31):
Case here of infotainment confusion syndrome.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
It occurs when the celebrity cortex gets its wires crossed
with the medulla anchor dolla.
Speaker 7 (08:41):
Even Whoopi Goldberg when he first told the story, He
told the story as it happened, and every time he
told it again it got more exciting.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
He was more this, it was more that.
Speaker 7 (08:52):
And by the time he was finished, he was on
a helicopter.
Speaker 8 (08:56):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
It's stolen valor.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
You can get a if you impersonate a soldier, say
you were in combat, you can actually get arrested and
charged and in jail for doing just what he did.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Oh, he's reprehensible, he's disgusting in like.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
There's a lion coward.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
He's been telling the story for twelve years.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Say repeated, Lissen.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
This goes on from months. NBC suspends him six months
without pay, culminating with a public penance on the Today Show.
Matt Lower in the interviewer's.
Speaker 7 (09:28):
Seat, What have these past five months been like for you?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It has been torture.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Now, maybe you don't care about Brian Williams. A lot
has happened since his scandal. He currently has a nightly
show on MSNBC at eleven Eastern. He's going to be
fine in the grand scheme of things. What does it matter? Well,
it matters because of what the case exposes about our
(10:02):
understanding of memory. Brian Williams remembered a traumatic event one way,
then a couple of years later he he started remembering
that same event a different way. And the assumption of
virtually everyone who weighed in on the case was this,
if someone changes their original story, then they must be lying.
That the change must be deliberate and self aggrandizing. Everyone
(10:24):
assumes memory is a kind of time stamped video of
what happened in your life, and that if you contradict
the evidence of the video, you're up to no good.
I'm sorry, but that's insane. Free Brian Williams, I'm going
(10:48):
to ask you a series of questions about the morning
of September eleventh, two thousand and one. I'm talking with
my friend Dide Gordon. I've known her forever. How did
you first learn about the attack on the towers? Um.
Speaker 8 (11:04):
I had just taken my dogs out for a walk,
and I had bought the New York Post, the New
York Times, and I remember Paris Hilton was on the
cover of the New York Post, I think, and I
went and I, you know, took my walk around the block,
(11:24):
and I came up to my apartment and I was
like sitting at my counter reading the newspapers, and I
saw all these people standing out on Hudson Street, staring
up in the middle of the street, and so I
poked my head out the window. I couldn't really see
(11:46):
what was going on. And then I turned on the television,
and you know, saw what was happening.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
What did you do next?
Speaker 8 (11:57):
I went up and go. You know, I either called
you or I went up to your apartment. I can't remember.
It was one of the It was one of two things.
I either I think I had called you. I think
I called you because you're upstairs.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Dedy Gordon and I used to live in the same
building in the West Village, above a bodega. Whenever she
came up to see me, she would sing the theme
song from the sitcom Threees Company, Come and knock on
her door. Wait, you called me before you went out
on the street or after you went on the street.
Speaker 8 (12:30):
I called you before?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Oh did I? And did I? I picked up you did.
Speaker 8 (12:35):
And I was like, you need to look out your
window and you did at turn on the news.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Did you see me that morning or did you leave
before I came down?
Speaker 8 (12:44):
Now we saw each other and you were like, well,
I got to go fly someplace today. And I remember
I said to you, I go what and I know
the airports were closed? And You're like, oh, well, I
guess i'll leave tomorrow morning. And I said, oh, like
you're going to get on a plane like I thought
you were crazy? And you said, Gordon, this is the
(13:05):
safest time to fly.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Is that?
Speaker 6 (13:10):
No?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I don't you know?
Speaker 5 (13:12):
So?
Speaker 1 (13:13):
First of all, your memory for this stuff is kind
of phenomenal. How certain are you about all of those
memories you just told me?
Speaker 8 (13:24):
How certain am I? Yeah, I'm pretty certain.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Now let me ask you the same questions I was
just asking d D. How did you first learn about
what happened on nine to eleven? Where were you? What
were you doing? How did you feel when you first
became aware of the attack? Who was the first person
you talked to about the attack? What were you doing
immediately before you became aware of it. I'm going to
(13:50):
guess that many of you can answer every one of
those questions. Maybe not with the same specificity as Dede
because she has an amazing memory, but you can tell
me where you were when you heard the news. I
was in bed. Dedie called me. I went down to
Hudson Street and stood in the crowd watching a twin
towers burn. Then I went down to a little coffee
(14:11):
shop around the corner from my house and sat there
with a cup of tea in numb silence. Nine to
eleven is what's called a flashbulb event, a big dramatic
incident that seares itself into our memories, and as a
whole sub specialty in psychology devoted to the study of
(14:31):
flashbulb memories. You ask someone where they were right after
something dramatic or historic happened. Then you come back to
them months or years later and ask them again and
measure how accurate their memories are. There have been countless
studies like this over the years. One was done after
the death of Princess Die, another after the resignation of
(14:52):
Margaret Thatcher, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the election of Barack Obama, the O. J. Simpson verdict.
Not surprisingly, there was one done after nine to eleven
as well.
Speaker 6 (15:04):
So nine to eleven happened, and I got together with
a former student of mine at NYU, Liz Phelps.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
The nine to eleven project was headed by Bill Hurst
from the New School and Liz Phelps at New York University.
I went to Sea Hurst and he told me that
he and Phelps had come up with the idea over
dinner on September twelfth in a restaurant close enough to
the towers that you could smell the smoke. Hirst says
that he and Phelps realized they could do the mother
(15:35):
of all flashbulb studies, So the next day they reached
out to colleagues around the country Boston, New Haven, New York, Washington,
d C. Saint Louis, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz. A
total of three thousand, two hundred and forty six subjects
asked the same questions. I just asked you, where were you,
who were you with? How did you feel? The participants
(15:59):
were asked these same questions a year later, and two
years later, and finally on the tenth anniversary of the
attack in twenty eleven. Now, what did the researchers find. Well, first,
that everyone knows where they were when they heard the
towers fell, just like me. Indeedy, it's burned into memory.
(16:19):
But are those memories accurate? No, they're not. Especially in
the first year after a flashbulb event. All kinds of
discrepancies creep in. One of the respondents first said she
was in the kitchen making breakfast when she heard about
the attack. A year later, she swore she was in
the laundry room folding her clothes. Another said in two
(16:40):
thousand and one that she saw the attack while watching
the Today Show. A year later, she was convinced that
a girl in her dorm had rushed into her room
and told her so. When we look at these kinds
of inaccuracies and inconsistencies that creep into, how large is
the variability among the subjects. That is to say, do
we have some who get everything wrong in retrospect and
(17:03):
some get everything right?
Speaker 3 (17:05):
No?
Speaker 6 (17:06):
I would say that the variability is fairly small. Some
people get everything right, some people get more wrong, but
it's not a huge variability.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Hurst finds, on average, a sixty percent decline in memory consistency,
meaning sixty percent of the answers changed over time. You
would think that everything about nine to eleven would be
seared into our minds one of the most dramatic days
of our generation. But everything is not. Second thing even
(17:39):
more crucial, Are we aware that our memories of nine
to eleven are flawed. No, we're not. Our confidence in
the accuracy of our memories of that day is sky high.
They're super high. And why walk me It means of
a dumb question, but walk me through. Why are they
so high? Hurst says nine to eleven is like a
(17:59):
death in the family. We feel we have a responsibility
to remember. If you had only vague memories of where
you were when you found out your mother died, well.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Think like, what kind of person are you? How could
you not remember that? Our New Yorker's confidence levels higher,
I forget. Everybody's confident level was so high, so it's
hard to differentiate. PA two.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
We're all absolutely sure about what happened to us on
nine to eleven. My friend DETI can talk about that
morning just as if it were yesterday, and I will
swear on a stack of Bibles that she called me
on the phone and then I ran downstairs and then
eventually ended up sitting numb and alone in a coffee shop.
And yet it is almost certainly the case that we
(18:42):
are wrong on at least half of those details. It
did not happen that way. Hers says that the participants
in flashbulb studies refused to accept this fact, they will
not admit that their memories are wrong. Take the flash
Bob study done after the explosion of the Challenger space
shuttle in nineteen eighty six. The psychologist in charge sat
(19:04):
down with people months later and showed them how differently
they described things right after after the disaster. He showed
them what they actually wrote.
Speaker 6 (19:13):
He says, is it they're handwriting? And they say yes,
But I don't know why I wrote that, because it's wrong.
You know. I agree, it's my handwriting. I agree I
must have written that, But I don't know why I
mind it because I clearly remember I was in the dorm,
even though this piece of paper says I was in
the cafeteria. So this overwhelming confidence that people have.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Now, why are we so adamant on the subject of memory.
Because we're memory fundamentalists. We think our memory is a
camera recording our life in real time with a video
timestamped and stored for later retrieval.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
It's not like memory is when you remember something, you're
retrieving it and it remains absolutely stable, and then you
put it in the footlights of your consciousness. It's more
that when you retrieve it, it's open up to the
possibility of change.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Every time we retrieve it memory. In other words, there's
a chance it can get contaminated. We hear some new
detail somewhere about the event, and without realizing it, we
just added in memory. Researchers talk a lot about what
they call time slice airs. A couple of things happen
in the same general time frame, and we get the
sequence all jumbled up. Didi says she and I talked
(20:30):
in person that morning of nine to eleven. I have
no recollection of it, but she does.
Speaker 8 (20:35):
I'm almost positively spoke inside the apartment.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah yeah, And then I really said I was getting
on a plane the next day.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 8 (20:44):
And you were like kind of cocky about it too.
You're like you kind of looked at me like, oh, Gordon,
stop being so neurotic, and you're like, don't you know
this is the safest time to get on an airplane
is when something like this happens.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
I could be really quite conscending.
Speaker 8 (21:01):
It turns out it's my favorite thing about you.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I decided to do a little fact checking. I still
have by date books from two thousand and one. I'm
pretty meticulous about keeping track of my travel, and I
did not have an airplane trip planned for September twelfth. Now,
maybe I'm mistaken, maybe DD's right, But according to my records,
I flew to Montreal on September nineteenth, eight days later.
(21:29):
I think our conversation about flights must have been right
before that trip, because why would I say it's the
safest time to fly on the morning of nine to eleven.
That's something you would only say after the airports had
reopened with much tighter security. I think DD made a
time slice era at some point she mistakenly moved that
(21:50):
memory to the morning of nine to eleven, because it
seems plausible that we would have talked about planes that morning.
Now does that make d d a liar? Is she
working some self promoting angle? Didi is one of the
most honest people I've ever met. She simply did what
human beings do when it came to traumatic events. There
(22:11):
is our memory and there is the truth, and the
two are not the same. Okay, So what if it's
not nine to eleven. What if it's a couple of
years later, at the very beginning of the Iraq War.
What if I'm in a convoy of helicopters deep in
enemy territory, scared out of my wits, and the helicopter
ahead of me gets hit. And I'm a reporter, and
(22:33):
I interview lots of people that day about what happened,
and retell the story so many times that their details
become my details, and I start to think that it
was my helicopter that got hit. When I read your paper,
the first person that came to mind is Brian Williams. Ah, Yes, Yes,
(22:53):
didn't he just committed an incredibly normal human Yes. So
that was my view, and it was a view of
most of the people in the memory field that I
know of. You're of the mind that he genuinely believed
the story as told it. Yes, Now do you see
(23:14):
Brian Williams predicament. Everyone thinks he's lying in order to
paint himself as some heroic war correspondent. But he doesn't
think he's lying. He honestly believes he was in the
lead helicopter with the same confidence we all have in
our FLASHBAULB memories. Did he remembers plain as day that
I was catching a flight on September twelfth? People in
(23:35):
FLASHBOLB studies look at their own handwriting from years earlier,
and say that can't be right. That's not how I
remember it.
Speaker 7 (23:43):
And on Thursday, NBC News announced that Brian Williams, a
twenty two year veteran of this network, would not be
returning as the anchor of NBC Nightly News. He steps down.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
When Brian Williams does his penance on The Today Show
in mid twenty thirteen, he and Matt Lower go around
and around in circles.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
I told the story correctly for years before I told
it incorrectly. I was not trying to mislead people. That
to me is a huge difference here.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
But Matt Lower is having none of it.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
I worry as you say this, Brian, that people who
are going to have listened to your apology on air
and in other areas Facebook and Stars and Stripes, who
heard you use words like conflated aircraft or made mistakes
with my memory of certain things, are now going to
hear what you're saying now, and they're going to say
he's still saying he didn't intend to mislead people, and
(24:37):
yet he didn't tell the truth. And he had to know,
as the guy who lived through those experiences, that it
wasn't the truth.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
He had to know as the guy who lived through
those experiences that it wasn't the truth. No, that's one
hundred percent wrong. What should Matt Lower have said? He
should have said, Brian, memory is fallible. You're a public figure.
For goodness sake, the next time you go on National
TV to tell a war story, go back and check
(25:05):
to see if your story is accurate. But Lower doesn't
say the Today's Show interview was built as tough minded,
uncompromising journalism. It was actually the opposite, an interrogation about
memory conducted by someone who hasn't the slightest clue how
memories work. And what is Brian Williams supposed to do?
He is no defense. All he can do is debase himself.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I understand it. This came from clearly a bad place,
a bad urge inside me. This was clearly ego driven,
the desire to better my role in a story I
was already in. That's what I've been tearing apart and unpacking.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
This comes from clearly a bad place. Once again wrong.
It comes from the most human of places, and Matt Lower,
Matt Lower, for heaven's sake, puts on the high hat.
Speaker 7 (26:09):
Days after you told the story on Nightly News. You
went on the air and you apologized, and I just
said you used terms like I'm mistaken, I was mistaken
in my recollections. Did you give thought at the time
to going on the air and.
Speaker 6 (26:23):
Saying I lied.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Matt Lower, by the way, had an entire staff whose
job it was to prepare him for interviews. This research
on memory is not a secret. Bill Hurst is at
the New School on fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Hurst's co author, Liz Phelps, is at NYU, down the
street from Rockefeller Center, where the Today Show is taped.
Two of the world's leading experts on memory are four
(26:51):
subway stops away on the B or D trains On
a nice day, Laura could have walked it.
Speaker 7 (26:56):
How hard is this not to put words in your mouth?
But had you gone on the air that night and say, folks,
I lied and I'm sorry, do you think the outcome
would have been different? Do you think forgiveness would have
come sooner?
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Except he didn't lie. Lying in this instance would be
Brian Williams pretending that he deliberately made up that story.
So Matt Lower is saying that he would rather Williams
had lied and confessed that he'd lied, rather than having
told the truth, that he honestly thought he was telling
the truth. The Council of Cardinals could not make sense
(27:30):
of the moral logic of that. By the way, it's
worth noting that the whole Brian Williams saga is a
case steady in memory failure. CNN's Brian Stelter interviews Don Hellis,
the pilot of the helicopter that got shot down. He
asked Hellis when he first heard Brian Williams mischaracterizing what happened,
(27:53):
and Hellis says, oh, a few weeks later, when I
got back to Kuwait, meaning in two thousand and three.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
This is crucial, mister Hellis, because according to the timeline
that we've been looking at for the past several days,
it wasn't until about two thousand and seven that Brian
Willing began to embellish this story about being actually nearby
or even on the chopper that was struck by the RPG.
So you're saying you heard it on television in two
thousand and three.
Speaker 6 (28:20):
Well, I'm saying I heard on the internet.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
That was an interview an Internet.
Speaker 5 (28:24):
Video of the television segment.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Yeah, yes, Stelter is way too nice to say it,
but hellas can't be right. His recollection is off by
four years, and does he realize how badly he's misremembered
the dates. No, he's adamant. Then another man comes forward,
the pilot of William's helicopter, and claims they did take
(28:50):
small arms fire, goes on CNN, adds some gossipy details.
Then a day later the pilot takes it all back.
Quote the information I gave you was true based on
my memories. But at this point I'm questioning my memories,
which might be the first self aware thing said anyone
during this whole sorry affair. In the Brian Williams case,
(29:16):
everyone was allowed to have a bad memory except Brian Williams.
Sorry to harp on him, but I did think it
is he was cheated, very unfair.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
He was.
Speaker 6 (29:25):
I think absolutely.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I'm waiting to see the formation of cognitive psychologists for
Brian Williams as a lobby group. I was thinking of
doing it.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
I felt so sorry for him.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
Thanks for doing this roast, Thank you for joining us, Ronan.
Speaker 9 (29:52):
And thank you everybody for coming.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
Yes.
Speaker 7 (29:54):
Hello.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Not long ago, after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, I
went to a talk in Manhattan at the ninety second
Street Why. It was a conversation between Rose McGowan, who
was the first actress to go on the record with
accusations against wine Stein, and Ronan Faroh, who wrote the definitive,
devastating account of the Weinstein case for the New Yorker magazine.
(30:16):
It was a fascinating and sometimes strange evening. McGowan speaks
in a kind of elliptical poetry. It's not always obvious
what she means. Pharaoh was a lawyer before he turned
to journalism. He's rigorous.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
So when asked me, if you were in oz, who
would you be?
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Who would you be?
Speaker 7 (30:39):
ROAs the curtain?
Speaker 4 (30:42):
I would be the curtain.
Speaker 9 (30:45):
You're not the man behind the curtain. You are the curtain.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
I am the curtain. The curtain's very pretty. The curtain
gets used kicked aside. Nobody really notices a curtain. They're
appreciative that it's there, but to just pull aside when
it's done. But it absorbs everything from both sides. From
this side presentationally, it looks so great to you, right,
this is the curtain that you see from the backside.
(31:07):
You see everything too. What he knows is the curtain.
The curtain's taking notes.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
McGowan is someone who requires an interpreter, and there was
one moment that really struck me when Pharaoh talked about
what being an interpreter meant. He was trying to get
people at NBC, where he worked at the time, to
take McGowan's accusations seriously.
Speaker 9 (31:29):
I spent a year listening to a lot of powerful
men call these women who were relating the worst experiences
of a lifetime crazy, call them unstable, call them unreliable narrators,
and a lot worse things that I won't repeat on
(31:50):
this stage. You know that was something that was lobbed
at your story countless times. I sat in rooms and
defended the fact that that on the record testimony from
you mattered and what you use so people like NBC.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
A few minutes later, the two of them start talking
about what it takes for a story like McGowan's to
break through all the skepticism and indifference.
Speaker 9 (32:12):
I think when women come forward individually and they do
a blog post or a social media post and tell
their story, that's great. The question is it's then incumbent
on reporters to do right by that and the best
way to do justice, I think to any person coming
forward with a difficult story is to interrogate it as
thoroughly as possible, and you know, lend credence farth where
(32:33):
it's due.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
One of the battle cries of the fight against sexual
predation has been believe the women. But notice that's not
what Pharaoh is saying. He did. He says the best
way to do justice to any person coming forward with
a difficult story is to interrogate it as thoroughly as
possible and lend credence where it's due. Pharaoh didn't believe
(33:02):
Rose McGowan. Pharaoh listened to Rose McGowan. He took her seriously.
That's what memory does, demands. What if Rose McGowan had
said that she'd been assaulted by Weinstein in a hotel
room in Paris and it turned out to have been
in London, and she said it had happened in March
and it turned out to be July. Can you imagine
(33:22):
her on the Today Show twisting and turning as she
tries to defend that lapse in memory. To Matt Lower,
you said you were in Paris, you were miles away
in London. You had to know, as the woman who
lived through those experiences that it wasn't the truth. But
remembering yourself in one place when you were actually in
another does not mean that you're lying. It just means
(33:45):
that uncovering the truth requires an understanding of what memory
can and cannot do. If we don't get the small
cases right, the Brian Williams cases, we're going to be
helpless at the big cases.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Looking back, it had to have been ego that made
me think I had to be sharper, funnier, quicker than
anybody else, put myself closer to the action having been
at the action in the beginning.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Oh, please stop apologizing for a crime you didn't commit.
Free Brian Williams. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The
(34:42):
senior producer is mil LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer.
Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Quiera.
Special thanks to Andy Bauers and Jake Blisberg. I'm Malcolm vladmam.
(35:13):
So what's interesting is so I'm sure you called me,
and you're sure you called me, but there's a chance.
Speaker 8 (35:20):
I'm almost one hundred percent positive I called you, and
I am too.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
But there is a chance that you didn't call me.
Speaker 8 (35:28):
There isn't a chance because I know I called.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
You, I know you called me too, But I know,
I know it's incredibly hard to deal with, but it's like,
there's a chance you didn't. I mean, there's a chance
you knocked on my door, you know.
Speaker 8 (35:40):
But then I started thinking about did I really knock
on his door? Because I respected your privacy as you
respected mine, and I would have never just went up
to knock on your door just in case that you
had like a lady up there or something, so in
respect for that, I would have probably called you first.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Just me, not even if like the twin towers are
smoking on the you know.
Speaker 8 (36:01):
I would have not walked upstairs to interrupt your your
intimate moment with a lady friend, even if the twin
towers were on fire. But please don't conclude that in
your podcast.
Speaker 9 (36:16):
Knock been waiting for you, Waiting for you.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Three sp
Pushkin. On the evening of March twenty sixth, twenty thirteen,
Brian Williams appeared on Late Night with David Letterman.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
We're very happy to have this man now with us.
He is the Emmy and the Peabody Award winning anchor
and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News. Ladies and gentlemen,
here he is our good friend, Brian Williams. Mister Williams.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Mon Brian Williams looks like a TV anchor. He is
one of those rectangular, super handsome made for television heads,
maybe two sizes larger than normal, Like he inflates it
with a bicycle pump before he goes on camera. And
he's charming, very charming.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Congratulations twenty years at NBC News, Thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Forty Wars.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Started as a young man tell me.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Williams sits down next to Letterman and the two of
them chit chat and tell jokes. There had been some
big kerfuffle about the Today Show involving Matt Lower and
let him In tries and fails to bait Williams into
saying something juicy about it.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Now, if I'm onto something, blink twice.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Then let Himan ask the question that will destroy Brian
Williams's career.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Tell me, and if I knew this, I forgot it.
And if I forgot it.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
I'm ashamed.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Something happened ten years ago in Iraq. Tell people what
that occurred. I brought a photo which arrived in my
email two mornings ago, of where I was tonight, a
decade ago, this very day, this very day.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things forgotten and misunderstood. This episode is
part two of my exploration of memory and our naive
ideas about what memory is worth. If you haven't heard
(02:15):
the previous episode, you should listen to it first. It's
the story of an early morning raid on a Nazi
hideout in Munich, a raid that involved a world class
harmonica player and a dashingly handsome undercover spy. The lesson
of that story is it only a fool, except the
evidence of his own memory is gospel. The lesson of
this story is we're all fool.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
This was me ten years ago and a young command
sergeant major. I was in Iraq. Now a couple of
caveats here, As war correspondents go I am the Herb
Schmandrick of war correspondents. I'm not terribly good at it.
It is not what I do full time. I am
mostly New York based. I do go cover these two
(03:04):
wars we've been fighting, and when I do, I like
to go out on patrol. I like to get out
in it. We were in some helicopters. We were going
to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates so the
third infantry could cross on them. Two of our four
helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I
was in, No. RPG and AK forty seven.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
As you may remember, the helicopter Brian Williams was riding
was not in fact hit by ground fire. Williams was
miles away in another aircraft entirely when the attack happened.
One of the most respected network news anchors went on
Late night TV to tell a story about his near
death experience, and it turned out not to be true.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
What happens the minute everybody realizes you've been hit, we
figure out how to land safely, and we did. We
landed very quickly and hard, and we put down and
we were stuck four birds in the middle of the
desert and we were north out ahead of the other Americans.
Oh my, and as a guy, as a journalist, what
(04:10):
do you think this is a great position to be
in our holy crap. I got to get out of
here more toward the holy crap.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
This is what we know for certain about the case
of Brian Williams and a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Our colleague Brian Williams is back in Kuwait City tonight
after a close call in the skies over a rock. Ryan,
tell us about what you got yourself into. Well in
the end, Tom, it did give us a glimpse.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Just after the US invasion of Iraq began in the
spring of two thousand and three, Williams filed a report
for NBC News from the field. He described how he'd
been embedded with a convoy of four Chinook helicopters flying
out of Kuwait City. They were carrying bridge components so
that the US Army troops could cross the Euphrates. This
is Williams reporting March twenty sixth, two thousand and three.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
On the ground, we learned the Chinook ahead of of
us was almost blown out of the sky. That hole
was made by a rocket propelled grenade or RPG.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
As Williams describes it. All four helicopters ended up on
the desert floor. There was a massive sandstorm. They were
trapped there for three harrowing days. The main invading force
was still miles away.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
What we didn't know was we were north of the invasion.
We were the northernmost Americans in Iraq.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Williams's account is included in a book published by NBC
shortly after. Four years later, he tells it again in
a blog post written after the death of a retired
general who was in the helicopter with him. Only this
time Williams uses a vague sentence there was small arms fire.
In a later blog post in two thousand and eight,
(05:59):
he's more explicit. All four of our low flying chinnooks
took fire. We were forced down and stayed down. Then
Letterman twenty thirteen Brian Williams's fateful appearance.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
So we got hit, We sat down. Everyone was okay.
Our captain took a purple heart injury to his ear
in the cockpit. But we were alone. They started distributing weapons.
We heard a noise and it was Bradley Fighting vehicles
and Abrams tanks coming. They happened to spot us this
was the invasion, the US invasion. They saw us.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Suddenly, a story that Williams has been telling in bits
and pieces gets told in the spotlight of Late night TV,
and who sees it? Lance Reynolds, the flight engineer on
the helicopter that got hit. Reynolds responds on NBC's Facebook page. Sorry, dude,
I don't remember you being on my aircraft. I do
(06:54):
remember you walking up about an hour after we had
landed to ask me what happened. One by one the
members of the flight crews involved come forward to say
the same thing, and then the skin tell.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
Me, do you know where Brian Williams was at the
moment that your helicopter was hit by the RPG.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
That's Brian Stelter of CNN interviewing Don Hellis, the pilot
of the lead helicopter.
Speaker 6 (07:18):
Oh, we had a lot going on, but I am
pretty sure he was not in our flight at all.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Then Stelter talks to the pilot of the helicopter that
Williams was on. His name is Alan Kelly.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
Is it right to say that Brian Williams was aboard
your helicopter and not aboard the helicopter that was shot
at in a rock that day.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
That's correct. He was aboard my aircraft at the day
in March.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
What was your aircraft doing and was it ever within
sight of the chinook that was shot at?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
As far as the chinook from Big Winni that was
shot down, we were not within visual range of them.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
So what sort of distance was there between your helicopter
with Brian Williams aboard and the helicopter that did take fire?
So initially we were probably a half hour behind them.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Soon every pundit under the sun is wagging a disdainful finger.
Speaker 5 (08:10):
Tell me what you think, Alancahol, not remember whether or
not you're in a plane that gets hit?
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I can you not remember that?
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Remember getting punched in the face in the fourth grade?
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Rosie O'Donnell.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
I think you would know if you were in a
helicopter that was actually hit by a missile. So I
don't think he didn't remember that. I think he fabricated
that story.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
John Stewart, we got us a.
Speaker 6 (08:31):
Case here of infotainment confusion syndrome.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
It occurs when the celebrity cortex gets its wires crossed
with the medulla anchor dolla.
Speaker 7 (08:41):
Even Whoopi Goldberg when he first told the story, He
told the story as it happened, and every time he
told it again it got more exciting.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
He was more this, it was more that.
Speaker 7 (08:52):
And by the time he was finished, he was on
a helicopter.
Speaker 8 (08:56):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
It's stolen valor.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
You can get a if you impersonate a soldier, say
you were in combat, you can actually get arrested and
charged and in jail for doing just what he did.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Oh, he's reprehensible, he's disgusting in like.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
There's a lion coward.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
He's been telling the story for twelve years.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Say repeated, Lissen.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
This goes on from months. NBC suspends him six months
without pay, culminating with a public penance on the Today Show.
Matt Lower in the interviewer's.
Speaker 7 (09:28):
Seat, What have these past five months been like for you?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
It has been torture.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Now, maybe you don't care about Brian Williams. A lot
has happened since his scandal. He currently has a nightly
show on MSNBC at eleven Eastern. He's going to be
fine in the grand scheme of things. What does it matter? Well,
it matters because of what the case exposes about our
(10:02):
understanding of memory. Brian Williams remembered a traumatic event one way,
then a couple of years later he he started remembering
that same event a different way. And the assumption of
virtually everyone who weighed in on the case was this,
if someone changes their original story, then they must be lying.
That the change must be deliberate and self aggrandizing. Everyone
(10:24):
assumes memory is a kind of time stamped video of
what happened in your life, and that if you contradict
the evidence of the video, you're up to no good.
I'm sorry, but that's insane. Free Brian Williams, I'm going
(10:48):
to ask you a series of questions about the morning
of September eleventh, two thousand and one. I'm talking with
my friend Dide Gordon. I've known her forever. How did
you first learn about the attack on the towers? Um.
Speaker 8 (11:04):
I had just taken my dogs out for a walk,
and I had bought the New York Post, the New
York Times, and I remember Paris Hilton was on the
cover of the New York Post, I think, and I
went and I, you know, took my walk around the block,
(11:24):
and I came up to my apartment and I was
like sitting at my counter reading the newspapers, and I
saw all these people standing out on Hudson Street, staring
up in the middle of the street, and so I
poked my head out the window. I couldn't really see
(11:46):
what was going on. And then I turned on the television,
and you know, saw what was happening.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
What did you do next?
Speaker 8 (11:57):
I went up and go. You know, I either called
you or I went up to your apartment. I can't remember.
It was one of the It was one of two things.
I either I think I had called you. I think
I called you because you're upstairs.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Dedy Gordon and I used to live in the same
building in the West Village, above a bodega. Whenever she
came up to see me, she would sing the theme
song from the sitcom Threees Company, Come and knock on
her door. Wait, you called me before you went out
on the street or after you went on the street.
Speaker 8 (12:30):
I called you before?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Oh did I? And did I? I picked up you did.
Speaker 8 (12:35):
And I was like, you need to look out your
window and you did at turn on the news.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Did you see me that morning or did you leave
before I came down?
Speaker 8 (12:44):
Now we saw each other and you were like, well,
I got to go fly someplace today. And I remember
I said to you, I go what and I know
the airports were closed? And You're like, oh, well, I
guess i'll leave tomorrow morning. And I said, oh, like
you're going to get on a plane like I thought
you were crazy? And you said, Gordon, this is the
(13:05):
safest time to fly.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Is that?
Speaker 6 (13:10):
No?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I don't you know?
Speaker 5 (13:12):
So?
Speaker 1 (13:13):
First of all, your memory for this stuff is kind
of phenomenal. How certain are you about all of those
memories you just told me?
Speaker 8 (13:24):
How certain am I? Yeah, I'm pretty certain.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Now let me ask you the same questions I was
just asking d D. How did you first learn about
what happened on nine to eleven? Where were you? What
were you doing? How did you feel when you first
became aware of the attack? Who was the first person
you talked to about the attack? What were you doing
immediately before you became aware of it. I'm going to
(13:50):
guess that many of you can answer every one of
those questions. Maybe not with the same specificity as Dede
because she has an amazing memory, but you can tell
me where you were when you heard the news. I
was in bed. Dedie called me. I went down to
Hudson Street and stood in the crowd watching a twin
towers burn. Then I went down to a little coffee
(14:11):
shop around the corner from my house and sat there
with a cup of tea in numb silence. Nine to
eleven is what's called a flashbulb event, a big dramatic
incident that seares itself into our memories, and as a
whole sub specialty in psychology devoted to the study of
(14:31):
flashbulb memories. You ask someone where they were right after
something dramatic or historic happened. Then you come back to
them months or years later and ask them again and
measure how accurate their memories are. There have been countless
studies like this over the years. One was done after
the death of Princess Die, another after the resignation of
(14:52):
Margaret Thatcher, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the election of Barack Obama, the O. J. Simpson verdict.
Not surprisingly, there was one done after nine to eleven
as well.
Speaker 6 (15:04):
So nine to eleven happened, and I got together with
a former student of mine at NYU, Liz Phelps.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
The nine to eleven project was headed by Bill Hurst
from the New School and Liz Phelps at New York University.
I went to Sea Hurst and he told me that
he and Phelps had come up with the idea over
dinner on September twelfth in a restaurant close enough to
the towers that you could smell the smoke. Hirst says
that he and Phelps realized they could do the mother
(15:35):
of all flashbulb studies, So the next day they reached
out to colleagues around the country Boston, New Haven, New York, Washington,
d C. Saint Louis, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz. A
total of three thousand, two hundred and forty six subjects
asked the same questions. I just asked you, where were you,
who were you with? How did you feel? The participants
(15:59):
were asked these same questions a year later, and two
years later, and finally on the tenth anniversary of the
attack in twenty eleven. Now, what did the researchers find. Well, first,
that everyone knows where they were when they heard the
towers fell, just like me. Indeedy, it's burned into memory.
(16:19):
But are those memories accurate? No, they're not. Especially in
the first year after a flashbulb event. All kinds of
discrepancies creep in. One of the respondents first said she
was in the kitchen making breakfast when she heard about
the attack. A year later, she swore she was in
the laundry room folding her clothes. Another said in two
(16:40):
thousand and one that she saw the attack while watching
the Today Show. A year later, she was convinced that
a girl in her dorm had rushed into her room
and told her so. When we look at these kinds
of inaccuracies and inconsistencies that creep into, how large is
the variability among the subjects. That is to say, do
we have some who get everything wrong in retrospect and
(17:03):
some get everything right?
Speaker 3 (17:05):
No?
Speaker 6 (17:06):
I would say that the variability is fairly small. Some
people get everything right, some people get more wrong, but
it's not a huge variability.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Hurst finds, on average, a sixty percent decline in memory consistency,
meaning sixty percent of the answers changed over time. You
would think that everything about nine to eleven would be
seared into our minds one of the most dramatic days
of our generation. But everything is not. Second thing even
(17:39):
more crucial, Are we aware that our memories of nine
to eleven are flawed. No, we're not. Our confidence in
the accuracy of our memories of that day is sky high.
They're super high. And why walk me It means of
a dumb question, but walk me through. Why are they
so high? Hurst says nine to eleven is like a
(17:59):
death in the family. We feel we have a responsibility
to remember. If you had only vague memories of where
you were when you found out your mother died, well.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Think like, what kind of person are you? How could
you not remember that? Our New Yorker's confidence levels higher,
I forget. Everybody's confident level was so high, so it's
hard to differentiate. PA two.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
We're all absolutely sure about what happened to us on
nine to eleven. My friend DETI can talk about that
morning just as if it were yesterday, and I will
swear on a stack of Bibles that she called me
on the phone and then I ran downstairs and then
eventually ended up sitting numb and alone in a coffee shop.
And yet it is almost certainly the case that we
(18:42):
are wrong on at least half of those details. It
did not happen that way. Hers says that the participants
in flashbulb studies refused to accept this fact, they will
not admit that their memories are wrong. Take the flash
Bob study done after the explosion of the Challenger space
shuttle in nineteen eighty six. The psychologist in charge sat
(19:04):
down with people months later and showed them how differently
they described things right after after the disaster. He showed
them what they actually wrote.
Speaker 6 (19:13):
He says, is it they're handwriting? And they say yes,
But I don't know why I wrote that, because it's wrong.
You know. I agree, it's my handwriting. I agree I
must have written that, But I don't know why I
mind it because I clearly remember I was in the dorm,
even though this piece of paper says I was in
the cafeteria. So this overwhelming confidence that people have.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Now, why are we so adamant on the subject of memory.
Because we're memory fundamentalists. We think our memory is a
camera recording our life in real time with a video
timestamped and stored for later retrieval.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
It's not like memory is when you remember something, you're
retrieving it and it remains absolutely stable, and then you
put it in the footlights of your consciousness. It's more
that when you retrieve it, it's open up to the
possibility of change.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Every time we retrieve it memory. In other words, there's
a chance it can get contaminated. We hear some new
detail somewhere about the event, and without realizing it, we
just added in memory. Researchers talk a lot about what
they call time slice airs. A couple of things happen
in the same general time frame, and we get the
sequence all jumbled up. Didi says she and I talked
(20:30):
in person that morning of nine to eleven. I have
no recollection of it, but she does.
Speaker 8 (20:35):
I'm almost positively spoke inside the apartment.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah yeah, And then I really said I was getting
on a plane the next day.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 8 (20:44):
And you were like kind of cocky about it too.
You're like you kind of looked at me like, oh, Gordon,
stop being so neurotic, and you're like, don't you know
this is the safest time to get on an airplane
is when something like this happens.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
I could be really quite conscending.
Speaker 8 (21:01):
It turns out it's my favorite thing about you.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I decided to do a little fact checking. I still
have by date books from two thousand and one. I'm
pretty meticulous about keeping track of my travel, and I
did not have an airplane trip planned for September twelfth. Now,
maybe I'm mistaken, maybe DD's right, But according to my records,
I flew to Montreal on September nineteenth, eight days later.
(21:29):
I think our conversation about flights must have been right
before that trip, because why would I say it's the
safest time to fly on the morning of nine to eleven.
That's something you would only say after the airports had
reopened with much tighter security. I think DD made a
time slice era at some point she mistakenly moved that
(21:50):
memory to the morning of nine to eleven, because it
seems plausible that we would have talked about planes that morning.
Now does that make d d a liar? Is she
working some self promoting angle? Didi is one of the
most honest people I've ever met. She simply did what
human beings do when it came to traumatic events. There
(22:11):
is our memory and there is the truth, and the
two are not the same. Okay, So what if it's
not nine to eleven. What if it's a couple of
years later, at the very beginning of the Iraq War.
What if I'm in a convoy of helicopters deep in
enemy territory, scared out of my wits, and the helicopter
ahead of me gets hit. And I'm a reporter, and
(22:33):
I interview lots of people that day about what happened,
and retell the story so many times that their details
become my details, and I start to think that it
was my helicopter that got hit. When I read your paper,
the first person that came to mind is Brian Williams. Ah, Yes, Yes,
(22:53):
didn't he just committed an incredibly normal human Yes. So
that was my view, and it was a view of
most of the people in the memory field that I
know of. You're of the mind that he genuinely believed
the story as told it. Yes, Now do you see
(23:14):
Brian Williams predicament. Everyone thinks he's lying in order to
paint himself as some heroic war correspondent. But he doesn't
think he's lying. He honestly believes he was in the
lead helicopter with the same confidence we all have in
our FLASHBAULB memories. Did he remembers plain as day that
I was catching a flight on September twelfth? People in
(23:35):
FLASHBOLB studies look at their own handwriting from years earlier,
and say that can't be right. That's not how I
remember it.
Speaker 7 (23:43):
And on Thursday, NBC News announced that Brian Williams, a
twenty two year veteran of this network, would not be
returning as the anchor of NBC Nightly News. He steps down.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
When Brian Williams does his penance on The Today Show
in mid twenty thirteen, he and Matt Lower go around
and around in circles.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
I told the story correctly for years before I told
it incorrectly. I was not trying to mislead people. That
to me is a huge difference here.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
But Matt Lower is having none of it.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
I worry as you say this, Brian, that people who
are going to have listened to your apology on air
and in other areas Facebook and Stars and Stripes, who
heard you use words like conflated aircraft or made mistakes
with my memory of certain things, are now going to
hear what you're saying now, and they're going to say
he's still saying he didn't intend to mislead people, and
(24:37):
yet he didn't tell the truth. And he had to know,
as the guy who lived through those experiences, that it
wasn't the truth.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
He had to know as the guy who lived through
those experiences that it wasn't the truth. No, that's one
hundred percent wrong. What should Matt Lower have said? He
should have said, Brian, memory is fallible. You're a public figure.
For goodness sake, the next time you go on National
TV to tell a war story, go back and check
(25:05):
to see if your story is accurate. But Lower doesn't
say the Today's Show interview was built as tough minded,
uncompromising journalism. It was actually the opposite, an interrogation about
memory conducted by someone who hasn't the slightest clue how
memories work. And what is Brian Williams supposed to do?
He is no defense. All he can do is debase himself.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I understand it. This came from clearly a bad place,
a bad urge inside me. This was clearly ego driven,
the desire to better my role in a story I
was already in. That's what I've been tearing apart and unpacking.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
This comes from clearly a bad place. Once again wrong.
It comes from the most human of places, and Matt Lower,
Matt Lower, for heaven's sake, puts on the high hat.
Speaker 7 (26:09):
Days after you told the story on Nightly News. You
went on the air and you apologized, and I just
said you used terms like I'm mistaken, I was mistaken
in my recollections. Did you give thought at the time
to going on the air and.
Speaker 6 (26:23):
Saying I lied.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Matt Lower, by the way, had an entire staff whose
job it was to prepare him for interviews. This research
on memory is not a secret. Bill Hurst is at
the New School on fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Hurst's co author, Liz Phelps, is at NYU, down the
street from Rockefeller Center, where the Today Show is taped.
Two of the world's leading experts on memory are four
(26:51):
subway stops away on the B or D trains On
a nice day, Laura could have walked it.
Speaker 7 (26:56):
How hard is this not to put words in your mouth?
But had you gone on the air that night and say, folks,
I lied and I'm sorry, do you think the outcome
would have been different? Do you think forgiveness would have
come sooner?
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Except he didn't lie. Lying in this instance would be
Brian Williams pretending that he deliberately made up that story.
So Matt Lower is saying that he would rather Williams
had lied and confessed that he'd lied, rather than having
told the truth, that he honestly thought he was telling
the truth. The Council of Cardinals could not make sense
(27:30):
of the moral logic of that. By the way, it's
worth noting that the whole Brian Williams saga is a
case steady in memory failure. CNN's Brian Stelter interviews Don Hellis,
the pilot of the helicopter that got shot down. He
asked Hellis when he first heard Brian Williams mischaracterizing what happened,
(27:53):
and Hellis says, oh, a few weeks later, when I
got back to Kuwait, meaning in two thousand and three.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
This is crucial, mister Hellis, because according to the timeline
that we've been looking at for the past several days,
it wasn't until about two thousand and seven that Brian
Willing began to embellish this story about being actually nearby
or even on the chopper that was struck by the RPG.
So you're saying you heard it on television in two
thousand and three.
Speaker 6 (28:20):
Well, I'm saying I heard on the internet.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
That was an interview an Internet.
Speaker 5 (28:24):
Video of the television segment.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Yeah, yes, Stelter is way too nice to say it,
but hellas can't be right. His recollection is off by
four years, and does he realize how badly he's misremembered
the dates. No, he's adamant. Then another man comes forward,
the pilot of William's helicopter, and claims they did take
(28:50):
small arms fire, goes on CNN, adds some gossipy details.
Then a day later the pilot takes it all back.
Quote the information I gave you was true based on
my memories. But at this point I'm questioning my memories,
which might be the first self aware thing said anyone
during this whole sorry affair. In the Brian Williams case,
(29:16):
everyone was allowed to have a bad memory except Brian Williams.
Sorry to harp on him, but I did think it
is he was cheated, very unfair.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
He was.
Speaker 6 (29:25):
I think absolutely.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I'm waiting to see the formation of cognitive psychologists for
Brian Williams as a lobby group. I was thinking of
doing it.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
I felt so sorry for him.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
Thanks for doing this roast, Thank you for joining us, Ronan.
Speaker 9 (29:52):
And thank you everybody for coming.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
Yes.
Speaker 7 (29:54):
Hello.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Not long ago, after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, I
went to a talk in Manhattan at the ninety second
Street Why. It was a conversation between Rose McGowan, who
was the first actress to go on the record with
accusations against wine Stein, and Ronan Faroh, who wrote the definitive,
devastating account of the Weinstein case for the New Yorker magazine.
(30:16):
It was a fascinating and sometimes strange evening. McGowan speaks
in a kind of elliptical poetry. It's not always obvious
what she means. Pharaoh was a lawyer before he turned
to journalism. He's rigorous.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
So when asked me, if you were in oz, who
would you be?
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Who would you be?
Speaker 7 (30:39):
ROAs the curtain?
Speaker 4 (30:42):
I would be the curtain.
Speaker 9 (30:45):
You're not the man behind the curtain. You are the curtain.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
I am the curtain. The curtain's very pretty. The curtain
gets used kicked aside. Nobody really notices a curtain. They're
appreciative that it's there, but to just pull aside when
it's done. But it absorbs everything from both sides. From
this side presentationally, it looks so great to you, right,
this is the curtain that you see from the backside.
(31:07):
You see everything too. What he knows is the curtain.
The curtain's taking notes.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
McGowan is someone who requires an interpreter, and there was
one moment that really struck me when Pharaoh talked about
what being an interpreter meant. He was trying to get
people at NBC, where he worked at the time, to
take McGowan's accusations seriously.
Speaker 9 (31:29):
I spent a year listening to a lot of powerful
men call these women who were relating the worst experiences
of a lifetime crazy, call them unstable, call them unreliable narrators,
and a lot worse things that I won't repeat on
(31:50):
this stage. You know that was something that was lobbed
at your story countless times. I sat in rooms and
defended the fact that that on the record testimony from
you mattered and what you use so people like NBC.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
A few minutes later, the two of them start talking
about what it takes for a story like McGowan's to
break through all the skepticism and indifference.
Speaker 9 (32:12):
I think when women come forward individually and they do
a blog post or a social media post and tell
their story, that's great. The question is it's then incumbent
on reporters to do right by that and the best
way to do justice, I think to any person coming
forward with a difficult story is to interrogate it as
thoroughly as possible, and you know, lend credence farth where
(32:33):
it's due.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
One of the battle cries of the fight against sexual
predation has been believe the women. But notice that's not
what Pharaoh is saying. He did. He says the best
way to do justice to any person coming forward with
a difficult story is to interrogate it as thoroughly as
possible and lend credence where it's due. Pharaoh didn't believe
(33:02):
Rose McGowan. Pharaoh listened to Rose McGowan. He took her seriously.
That's what memory does, demands. What if Rose McGowan had
said that she'd been assaulted by Weinstein in a hotel
room in Paris and it turned out to have been
in London, and she said it had happened in March
and it turned out to be July. Can you imagine
(33:22):
her on the Today Show twisting and turning as she
tries to defend that lapse in memory. To Matt Lower,
you said you were in Paris, you were miles away
in London. You had to know, as the woman who
lived through those experiences that it wasn't the truth. But
remembering yourself in one place when you were actually in
another does not mean that you're lying. It just means
(33:45):
that uncovering the truth requires an understanding of what memory
can and cannot do. If we don't get the small
cases right, the Brian Williams cases, we're going to be
helpless at the big cases.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Looking back, it had to have been ego that made
me think I had to be sharper, funnier, quicker than
anybody else, put myself closer to the action having been
at the action in the beginning.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Oh, please stop apologizing for a crime you didn't commit.
Free Brian Williams. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The
(34:42):
senior producer is mil LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer.
Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Quiera.
Special thanks to Andy Bauers and Jake Blisberg. I'm Malcolm vladmam.
(35:13):
So what's interesting is so I'm sure you called me,
and you're sure you called me, but there's a chance.
Speaker 8 (35:20):
I'm almost one hundred percent positive I called you, and
I am too.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
But there is a chance that you didn't call me.
Speaker 8 (35:28):
There isn't a chance because I know I called.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
You, I know you called me too, But I know,
I know it's incredibly hard to deal with, but it's like,
there's a chance you didn't. I mean, there's a chance
you knocked on my door, you know.
Speaker 8 (35:40):
But then I started thinking about did I really knock
on his door? Because I respected your privacy as you
respected mine, and I would have never just went up
to knock on your door just in case that you
had like a lady up there or something, so in
respect for that, I would have probably called you first.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Just me, not even if like the twin towers are
smoking on the you know.
Speaker 8 (36:01):
I would have not walked upstairs to interrupt your your
intimate moment with a lady friend, even if the twin
towers were on fire. But please don't conclude that in
your podcast.
Speaker 9 (36:16):
Knock been waiting for you, Waiting for you.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Three sp
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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