June 7, 2018 • 36 mins
"Sorry dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. On the evening of March twenty sixth, twenty thirteen,
Brian Williams appeared on Late Night with David Letterman. 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.
(00:39):
Brian Williams looks like a TV anchor. He has 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. Congratulations twenty years at NBC News. Thank you
very much, twenty years starget as a young man, tell me.
(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. Stuff. Now, if I'm onto
something blinked twice, then let Himan ask the question that
(01:29):
will destroy Brian William's career. Tell me, and if I
knew this, I forgot it. And if I forgot it,
I'm ashamed. 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. My
(01:54):
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 is worth. If you haven't heard the previous episode,
(02:16):
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
(02:36):
we're all fool. 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 Schmendrick of war correspondents. I'm not terribly
(02:59):
good at it. It is not what I do full time.
I am mostly New York based. I do go cover
these two wars we've been fighting, and when I do,
I like to go out on patrol. I'd 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 groundfire, including the one
(03:22):
I was in, No. RPG and AK forty seven. As
you may remember, the helicopter Brian Williams was writing was
not in fact hit by groundfire. 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,
(03:45):
and it turned out not to be true. 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
(04:07):
and as a as a guy, as a journalist, what
do you think this is a great position to be
in our holy crap, I gotta get out of here
more toward the holy crowd. This is what we know
for certain about the case of Brian Williams and the helicopter.
(04:31):
Our colleague Brian Williams was back in Kuwait City tonight
after a close call on those skies over Iraq. Ryan,
tell us about what you got yourself into. Well in
the end, tom it. They'd give us a glimpse. Just
after the US invasion of Iraq began in the spring
of two thousand and three, William's father report for NBC
News from the field. He described how he'd been embedded
(04:52):
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. On the ground,
we learned the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown
out of the sky. That hole was made by a
(05:13):
rocket propelled grenade or RPG, 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. What we
didn't know was we were north of the invasion. We
(05:34):
were the northernmost Americans in Iraq. 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
(05:57):
post in two thousand and eight, he's more explicit. All
four of our low flying chinooks took fire. We were
forced down and stayed down. Then Letterman twenty thirteen Brian
Williams faithful appearance. 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.
(06:19):
They started distributing weapons. We heard a noise and it
was Bradley Fighting vehicles and Abram's tanks coming. They happened
to spot us. This was the invasion, the US invasion?
They saw us. 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,
(06:43):
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 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,
(07:04):
and then the skin tell me, do you know where
Brian Williams was at the moment that your helicopter was
hit by the RPG. That's Brian Stelter of CNN interviewing
Don Hellis, the pilot of the lead helicopter. Oh, we
had a lot going on, but I'm pretty sure he
was not in our flight at all. Then Stelter talks
(07:25):
to the pilot of the helicopter that Williams was on.
His name is Alan Kelly. 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.
That's correct, he was aboard my aircraft at day in March.
What was your aircraft doing and was it ever within
sight of the chinook that was shot at? As far
(07:46):
as the chinook from Big Winney that was shot down,
we were not within visual range of them. 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. Soon
every pundit under the sun is wagging a disdainful finger.
(08:08):
He's don imus, tell me where you to thank Allen.
Remember whether or not you're in a plane that gets hit.
I can not remember that. Remember getting punched in the
face in the fourth grade, Rosie O'Donnell. I think he
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. John Stewart,
(08:31):
we got us a case here of infotainment confusion syndrome.
It occurs when the celebrity cortex gets its wires crossed
with the medula anchor dollar. Even Whoopie 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.
He was more this, it was more that. And by
(08:52):
the time he was finished, he was on a helicopter.
I'm sorry, you know it's it's stolen valor. You can
get if you impersonate a soldier, say you were in combat,
you can actually get arrested and charged in jail for
doing just what he did. Oh, he's reprehensible, he's disgusting
(09:12):
and like there's a lying coward. He's been telling the
story for twelve years. This goes on from months. NBC
suspends him six months without pay, culminating with a public
penance on the Today Show. Matt Lauer in the interviewer's seat.
What have these past five months been like for you?
It has been torture. Now maybe you don't care about
(09:43):
Brian Williams. A lot has happened since his scandal. He
currently has a nightly shown 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 understanding of memory. Brian Williams
(10:05):
remembered a traumatic event one way, then a couple of
years later, 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 assumes memory is a kind
(10:26):
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 to ask you a series
(10:49):
of questions about the morning of September eleventh, two thousand
and one. I'm talking with my friend Didie Gordon. I've
known her forever. How did you first learn about the
attack on the towers. I had just taken my dogs
out for a walk, and I had bought the New
(11:10):
York Post, the New York Times, and I remember Paris
Hilton was on the cover the New York Post, I think,
and I went and I, you know, took my walk
around the block, 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,
(11:35):
staring up in the middle of the street, and so
I poked my head out the window. I couldn't really
see what was going on. And then I turned on
the television and you know, saw what was happening. What
(11:56):
did you do next? I went up, and you know,
I either called you or I went up to your apartment.
I can't remember. It was one of these. It was
one of two things. Either I think I had called you.
I think I called you because you're upstairs. Deeedy Gordon
and I used to live in the same building in
(12:16):
the West Village, above a Budega. Whenever she came up
to see me, she would sing the theme song from
the sitcom Three's Company, Come and knock on our door. Wait,
you call me before you went on the street or
after you an on the street? I called you before? Oh?
Did I? And did? I picked up? You did? And
I was like, you need to look out your window
(12:38):
and you didn't turn on the news. Did you see
me that morning? Or did you leave before I came down?
Now we saw each other and you were like, well,
I gotta go fly someplace today. And I remember I
said to you, I go what and you 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
(12:59):
going to get on a plane Like I thought you
were crazy, And you said, Gordon, this is the safest
time to fly. That is no, I don't you know.
So First of all, your memory for this stuff is
kind of phenomenal. How certain are you about all of
(13:21):
those memories you just told me? How certain am I? Yeah,
I'm pretty certain. Now let me ask you the same
questions I was just asking DD. 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
(13:41):
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 guess that many of you can answer every one
of those questions. Maybe not with the same specificity as
DD because she has an amazing memory, but you can
tell me where you were when you heard the news.
(14:02):
I was in bed, DD called me. I went down
to Hudson Street and stood in the crowd watching a
twin towers burned. Then I went down to a little
coffee shop around the corner from my house and sat
there with a cup of tea in numb silence. Nine
eleven is what's called a flashbulb event, a big dramatic
(14:24):
incident that sears itself into our memories, and as a
whole subspecialty in psychology devoted to the study of flashbub 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
(14:46):
this over the years. One was done after the death
of Princess Die, another after the resignation of 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 eleven as well. So
nine eleven happened, and I got together a former student
(15:10):
of mine at NYU, Liz Phelps. 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. Hurst says that he and Phelps
(15:33):
realized they could do the mother of all flashbulb studies.
So the next day they reached out to colleagues around
the country Boston, New Haven, New York, wash In, DC,
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
(15:54):
were you with? How did you feel? The participants were
asked these same questions a year later, and two years later,
and finally on the tenth anniversary of the attack in
twenty eleven. So what did the researchers find. Well, first,
that everyone knows where they were when they heard the
(16:15):
towers fell, just like me. Indeedy, it's burned into memory.
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
(16:37):
the laundry room folding her clothes. Another said in two
thousand and one that she saw the attack while watching
the Today Show. A year later, she was convinced that
a girl in her dormant 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
(16:57):
variability among the subjects as to say, do we have
some who get everything wrong in retrospect and everything right? No?
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. Hurst finds, on average a
sixty percent decline in memory consistency, meaning sixty percent of
(17:23):
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 more crucial. Are we
aware that our memories of nine eleven are flawed? No,
(17:43):
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 at means of a dumb question, but
it walk me through why are they so high? Hurst
says nine to eleven is like a death in the family.
We feel we have a responsibility to remember. If you
(18:04):
had only vague memories of where you were when you
found out your mother died, well would 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
levels so high, so it's hard to differentiate. Yeah, we're
all absolutely sure about what happened to us on nine eleven.
(18:26):
My friend Diety 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 are wrong
on at least half of those details. It did not
happen that way. Hurst says that the participants in flashbub
(18:50):
studies refused to accept this fact. They will not admit
that their memories are wrong. Take the Flashbub study done
after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in nineteen
eighty six. The psychologist in charge sat down with people
months later and showed them how differently they described things
right after the disaster. He showed them what they actually wrote.
(19:13):
He says, it's is it their 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 is overwhelming confidence that people have. Now,
(19:38):
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. It's not like memories
when you remember something, you're retrieving it and it remains
absolutely stable, and then you put it in the footlights
(19:59):
of your consciousness. It's more that when you retrieve it,
it's open up to the possibility of change. Every time
we retrieve a 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
(20:21):
time slice airs. A couple of things happen in the
same general time frame, and we get the sequence all
jumbled up. Deeedi says she and I talked in person
that morning of nine to eleven. I have no recollection
of it, but she does. I'm almost positive we spoke
inside the apartment. Yeah yeah, and then I really said
(20:42):
I was getting on a plane the next day. Oh yeah.
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 happened, really quite conscending. It
turns out it's my favorite thing about you. I decided
(21:06):
to do a little fact checking. I still have my
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 Didi's right, but according to my records,
I flew to Montreal on September nineteenth, eight days later.
(21:28):
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 Didi mete a
time slice air 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 Didy a liar? Is she working
some self promoting angle? Dedi is one of the most
honest people I've ever met. She simply did what human
beings do when it comes to traumatic events. There is
(22:11):
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 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 I interview
(22:33):
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,
didn't he just committed an incredibly normal human Yes, that
(22:58):
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 he told it. Yes, Now do you see Brian
Williams predicament. Everyone thinks he's lying in order to paint
(23:18):
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
flashbalb memories. Ded he remembers plain as day that I
was catching a flight on September twelve. People in flashbulb
studies look at their own handwriting from years earlier and say,
(23:39):
that can't be right. That's not how I remember it.
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.
When Brian Williams does his penance on the Today's Show
in mid twenty thirteen, he and Matt Lauer go around
and around in circles. I told the story correctly for
(24:02):
years before I told it incorrectly. I was not trying
to mislead people. That to me is a huge difference here.
But Matt Lower is having none of it. 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
(24:25):
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 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. He had to know, as the guy who
(24:47):
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 to see if your story is accurate. But
(25:08):
Loward doesn't say that the Today's Show interview was build
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. I understand it. This came from
(25:32):
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. This comes from clearly a
(25:57):
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. Several days after you told
the story on Nightly News, you went on the air
and you apologized, and I just said, you use terms
like I'm mistaken. I was mistaken in my recollections. Did
(26:20):
you give thought at the time to going on the
air and saying I lied? 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 co author Liz Phelps
(26:41):
is at NYU down the street from Rockefeller Center. Whether
today's show is taped, two of the world's leading experts
on memory are four subway stops away on the B
or D trains. On a nice day, Lower could have
walked it. 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,
(27:04):
do you think the outcome would have been different? Do
you think forgiveness would have come sooner? 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
(27:25):
he honestly thought he was telling the truth. The Counsel
of Cardinals could not make sense of the moral logic
of that. By the way, it's worth noting that the
whole Brian Williams saga is a case study in memory failure.
CNN's Brian Stelter interviews Don Hellis, the pilot of the
(27:46):
helicopter that got shot down. He asked Hellis when he
first heard Brian Williams mischaracterizing what happened, and Hellas says, oh,
a few weeks later, when I got back to Kuwait,
meaning in two thousand and three. This is 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
(28:07):
about two thousand and seven that Brian Way 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, Well,
I'm saying I heard on the internet. That was an
interview an Internet video of the television segment. Yeah. Yes,
(28:28):
Stelter is way too nice to say it. But Hellis
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 small arms fire,
(28:51):
goes on CNN add 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 things said by anyone doing this
whole sorry affair. In the Brian Williams case, everyone was
(29:16):
allowed to have a bad memory except Brian Williams. Sorry
s harp on him, But I did think it is
he was cheated, very unfair he was. I think absolutely,
I'm willing to see the formation of cognitive psychologists for
Brian Williams as a lobby group. I was thinking of
doing it. I felt so sorry for him. Thanks for
(29:49):
doing this, Rose, thank you for joining us, Ronan, thank
you everybody for coming. Yes. Hello. Not long ago, after
the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, I went to a talk
in Manhattan at the ninety Street Why. It was a
conversation between Rose McGowan, who was the first actress to
go on the record with accusations against why and ronand Pharaoh,
(30:11):
who wrote the definitive, devastating account of the Weinstein case
for the New Yorker magazine. 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 in a
Someone asked me, if you were in oz, who would
(30:37):
you be. Who would you be? Rose the curtain. I
would be the curtain. You're not the man behind the curtain.
You are the curtain. I am the curtain. The curtain's
very pretty. The curtain gets used, kicked aside. Nobody really
notices the curtain. They're appreciative that it's there, but to
pull it aside when it's done. But it absorbs everything
(30:59):
from both sides. From this side presentationally, it looks so
great to you, right, this is the curtain that you
see from the backside. You see everything too, but nobody
knows as the curtain the curtains. Taking notes, McGowan is
someone who requires an interpreter, and there was one moment
that really struck me when Farrow talked about what being
(31:20):
an interpreter meant. He was trying to get people at NBC,
where he worked at the time, to take McGowan's accusations seriously.
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,
(31:48):
and a lot worse things that I won't repeat on
this stage. You know that was something that was lobbed
at your story countless times. I sat in rooms and
defended the fact that got on the record testimony from
you matter and what you two people like NBC. A
few minutes later, the two of them start talking about
what it takes for a story like McGowan's to break
(32:09):
through all the skepticism and indifference. Well, 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.
If 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
(32:31):
you know, lend credence, of course, where it's due. 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
(32:51):
difficult story is to interrogate it as thoroughly as possible
and lend credence where it's due. Pharaoh didn't believe Rose McGowan.
Pharaoh listened to Rose McGowan. He took her seriously. That's
what memory demands. What if Rose McGowan had said that
she'd been assaulted by Weinstein in a hotel room in
(33:14):
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 her on
today's 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,
(33:35):
that it wasn't the truth. But remembering yourself in one
place when you are actually in another does not mean
that you're lying. It just means 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.
(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. Oh, please stop apologizing
(34:24):
for a crime you didn't commit. Free Brian Williams. Revisionist
History is a panoply production. The senior producer is Mela Belle,
(34:44):
with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson.
Original music by Luis Guerra, Special thanks to Andy Bowers
and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glad. So what's interesting is
(35:14):
so I'm sure you called me, and you're sure you
called me, but there's a chance. I'm almost one hundred
percent positive I called you, and I am I am too,
but there is a chance that you didn't call me.
There isn't a chance because I know I called you.
I know you called me too, but I know, I
know it's incredibly hard to deal with. But it's like,
(35:35):
there's a chance you didn't. I mean, there's a chance
you knocked at my door, you know. 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, just not even
(35:56):
if not even if like the twin towers are smoking
on the you know, 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. Um knock on, do
(36:19):
be waiting for you? Waiting for you? This is a
three st
Pushkin. On the evening of March twenty sixth, twenty thirteen,
Brian Williams appeared on Late Night with David Letterman. 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.
(00:39):
Brian Williams looks like a TV anchor. He has 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. Congratulations twenty years at NBC News. Thank you
very much, twenty years starget as a young man, tell me.
(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. Stuff. Now, if I'm onto
something blinked twice, then let Himan ask the question that
(01:29):
will destroy Brian William's career. Tell me, and if I
knew this, I forgot it. And if I forgot it,
I'm ashamed. 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. My
(01:54):
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 is worth. If you haven't heard the previous episode,
(02:16):
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
(02:36):
we're all fool. 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 Schmendrick of war correspondents. I'm not terribly
(02:59):
good at it. It is not what I do full time.
I am mostly New York based. I do go cover
these two wars we've been fighting, and when I do,
I like to go out on patrol. I'd 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 groundfire, including the one
(03:22):
I was in, No. RPG and AK forty seven. As
you may remember, the helicopter Brian Williams was writing was
not in fact hit by groundfire. 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,
(03:45):
and it turned out not to be true. 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
(04:07):
and as a as a guy, as a journalist, what
do you think this is a great position to be
in our holy crap, I gotta get out of here
more toward the holy crowd. This is what we know
for certain about the case of Brian Williams and the helicopter.
(04:31):
Our colleague Brian Williams was back in Kuwait City tonight
after a close call on those skies over Iraq. Ryan,
tell us about what you got yourself into. Well in
the end, tom it. They'd give us a glimpse. Just
after the US invasion of Iraq began in the spring
of two thousand and three, William's father report for NBC
News from the field. He described how he'd been embedded
(04:52):
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. On the ground,
we learned the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown
out of the sky. That hole was made by a
(05:13):
rocket propelled grenade or RPG, 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. What we
didn't know was we were north of the invasion. We
(05:34):
were the northernmost Americans in Iraq. 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
(05:57):
post in two thousand and eight, he's more explicit. All
four of our low flying chinooks took fire. We were
forced down and stayed down. Then Letterman twenty thirteen Brian
Williams faithful appearance. 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.
(06:19):
They started distributing weapons. We heard a noise and it
was Bradley Fighting vehicles and Abram's tanks coming. They happened
to spot us. This was the invasion, the US invasion?
They saw us. 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,
(06:43):
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 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,
(07:04):
and then the skin tell me, do you know where
Brian Williams was at the moment that your helicopter was
hit by the RPG. That's Brian Stelter of CNN interviewing
Don Hellis, the pilot of the lead helicopter. Oh, we
had a lot going on, but I'm pretty sure he
was not in our flight at all. Then Stelter talks
(07:25):
to the pilot of the helicopter that Williams was on.
His name is Alan Kelly. 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.
That's correct, he was aboard my aircraft at day in March.
What was your aircraft doing and was it ever within
sight of the chinook that was shot at? As far
(07:46):
as the chinook from Big Winney that was shot down,
we were not within visual range of them. 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. Soon
every pundit under the sun is wagging a disdainful finger.
(08:08):
He's don imus, tell me where you to thank Allen.
Remember whether or not you're in a plane that gets hit.
I can not remember that. Remember getting punched in the
face in the fourth grade, Rosie O'Donnell. I think he
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. John Stewart,
(08:31):
we got us a case here of infotainment confusion syndrome.
It occurs when the celebrity cortex gets its wires crossed
with the medula anchor dollar. Even Whoopie 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.
He was more this, it was more that. And by
(08:52):
the time he was finished, he was on a helicopter.
I'm sorry, you know it's it's stolen valor. You can
get if you impersonate a soldier, say you were in combat,
you can actually get arrested and charged in jail for
doing just what he did. Oh, he's reprehensible, he's disgusting
(09:12):
and like there's a lying coward. He's been telling the
story for twelve years. This goes on from months. NBC
suspends him six months without pay, culminating with a public
penance on the Today Show. Matt Lauer in the interviewer's seat.
What have these past five months been like for you?
It has been torture. Now maybe you don't care about
(09:43):
Brian Williams. A lot has happened since his scandal. He
currently has a nightly shown 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 understanding of memory. Brian Williams
(10:05):
remembered a traumatic event one way, then a couple of
years later, 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 assumes memory is a kind
(10:26):
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 to ask you a series
(10:49):
of questions about the morning of September eleventh, two thousand
and one. I'm talking with my friend Didie Gordon. I've
known her forever. How did you first learn about the
attack on the towers. I had just taken my dogs
out for a walk, and I had bought the New
(11:10):
York Post, the New York Times, and I remember Paris
Hilton was on the cover the New York Post, I think,
and I went and I, you know, took my walk
around the block, 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,
(11:35):
staring up in the middle of the street, and so
I poked my head out the window. I couldn't really
see what was going on. And then I turned on
the television and you know, saw what was happening. What
(11:56):
did you do next? I went up, and you know,
I either called you or I went up to your apartment.
I can't remember. It was one of these. It was
one of two things. Either I think I had called you.
I think I called you because you're upstairs. Deeedy Gordon
and I used to live in the same building in
(12:16):
the West Village, above a Budega. Whenever she came up
to see me, she would sing the theme song from
the sitcom Three's Company, Come and knock on our door. Wait,
you call me before you went on the street or
after you an on the street? I called you before? Oh?
Did I? And did? I picked up? You did? And
I was like, you need to look out your window
(12:38):
and you didn't turn on the news. Did you see
me that morning? Or did you leave before I came down?
Now we saw each other and you were like, well,
I gotta go fly someplace today. And I remember I
said to you, I go what and you 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
(12:59):
going to get on a plane Like I thought you
were crazy, And you said, Gordon, this is the safest
time to fly. That is no, I don't you know.
So First of all, your memory for this stuff is
kind of phenomenal. How certain are you about all of
(13:21):
those memories you just told me? How certain am I? Yeah,
I'm pretty certain. Now let me ask you the same
questions I was just asking DD. 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
(13:41):
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 guess that many of you can answer every one
of those questions. Maybe not with the same specificity as
DD because she has an amazing memory, but you can
tell me where you were when you heard the news.
(14:02):
I was in bed, DD called me. I went down
to Hudson Street and stood in the crowd watching a
twin towers burned. Then I went down to a little
coffee shop around the corner from my house and sat
there with a cup of tea in numb silence. Nine
eleven is what's called a flashbulb event, a big dramatic
(14:24):
incident that sears itself into our memories, and as a
whole subspecialty in psychology devoted to the study of flashbub 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
(14:46):
this over the years. One was done after the death
of Princess Die, another after the resignation of 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 eleven as well. So
nine eleven happened, and I got together a former student
(15:10):
of mine at NYU, Liz Phelps. 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. Hurst says that he and Phelps
(15:33):
realized they could do the mother of all flashbulb studies.
So the next day they reached out to colleagues around
the country Boston, New Haven, New York, wash In, DC,
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
(15:54):
were you with? How did you feel? The participants were
asked these same questions a year later, and two years later,
and finally on the tenth anniversary of the attack in
twenty eleven. So what did the researchers find. Well, first,
that everyone knows where they were when they heard the
(16:15):
towers fell, just like me. Indeedy, it's burned into memory.
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
(16:37):
the laundry room folding her clothes. Another said in two
thousand and one that she saw the attack while watching
the Today Show. A year later, she was convinced that
a girl in her dormant 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
(16:57):
variability among the subjects as to say, do we have
some who get everything wrong in retrospect and everything right? No?
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. Hurst finds, on average a
sixty percent decline in memory consistency, meaning sixty percent of
(17:23):
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 more crucial. Are we
aware that our memories of nine eleven are flawed? No,
(17:43):
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 at means of a dumb question, but
it walk me through why are they so high? Hurst
says nine to eleven is like a death in the family.
We feel we have a responsibility to remember. If you
(18:04):
had only vague memories of where you were when you
found out your mother died, well would 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
levels so high, so it's hard to differentiate. Yeah, we're
all absolutely sure about what happened to us on nine eleven.
(18:26):
My friend Diety 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 are wrong
on at least half of those details. It did not
happen that way. Hurst says that the participants in flashbub
(18:50):
studies refused to accept this fact. They will not admit
that their memories are wrong. Take the Flashbub study done
after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in nineteen
eighty six. The psychologist in charge sat down with people
months later and showed them how differently they described things
right after the disaster. He showed them what they actually wrote.
(19:13):
He says, it's is it their 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 is overwhelming confidence that people have. Now,
(19:38):
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. It's not like memories
when you remember something, you're retrieving it and it remains
absolutely stable, and then you put it in the footlights
(19:59):
of your consciousness. It's more that when you retrieve it,
it's open up to the possibility of change. Every time
we retrieve a 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
(20:21):
time slice airs. A couple of things happen in the
same general time frame, and we get the sequence all
jumbled up. Deeedi says she and I talked in person
that morning of nine to eleven. I have no recollection
of it, but she does. I'm almost positive we spoke
inside the apartment. Yeah yeah, and then I really said
(20:42):
I was getting on a plane the next day. Oh yeah.
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 happened, really quite conscending. It
turns out it's my favorite thing about you. I decided
(21:06):
to do a little fact checking. I still have my
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 Didi's right, but according to my records,
I flew to Montreal on September nineteenth, eight days later.
(21:28):
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 Didi mete a
time slice air 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 Didy a liar? Is she working
some self promoting angle? Dedi is one of the most
honest people I've ever met. She simply did what human
beings do when it comes to traumatic events. There is
(22:11):
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 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 I interview
(22:33):
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,
didn't he just committed an incredibly normal human Yes, that
(22:58):
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 he told it. Yes, Now do you see Brian
Williams predicament. Everyone thinks he's lying in order to paint
(23:18):
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
flashbalb memories. Ded he remembers plain as day that I
was catching a flight on September twelve. People in flashbulb
studies look at their own handwriting from years earlier and say,
(23:39):
that can't be right. That's not how I remember it.
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.
When Brian Williams does his penance on the Today's Show
in mid twenty thirteen, he and Matt Lauer go around
and around in circles. I told the story correctly for
(24:02):
years before I told it incorrectly. I was not trying
to mislead people. That to me is a huge difference here.
But Matt Lower is having none of it. 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
(24:25):
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 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. He had to know, as the guy who
(24:47):
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 to see if your story is accurate. But
(25:08):
Loward doesn't say that the Today's Show interview was build
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. I understand it. This came from
(25:32):
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. This comes from clearly a
(25:57):
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. Several days after you told
the story on Nightly News, you went on the air
and you apologized, and I just said, you use terms
like I'm mistaken. I was mistaken in my recollections. Did
(26:20):
you give thought at the time to going on the
air and saying I lied? 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 co author Liz Phelps
(26:41):
is at NYU down the street from Rockefeller Center. Whether
today's show is taped, two of the world's leading experts
on memory are four subway stops away on the B
or D trains. On a nice day, Lower could have
walked it. 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,
(27:04):
do you think the outcome would have been different? Do
you think forgiveness would have come sooner? 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
(27:25):
he honestly thought he was telling the truth. The Counsel
of Cardinals could not make sense of the moral logic
of that. By the way, it's worth noting that the
whole Brian Williams saga is a case study in memory failure.
CNN's Brian Stelter interviews Don Hellis, the pilot of the
(27:46):
helicopter that got shot down. He asked Hellis when he
first heard Brian Williams mischaracterizing what happened, and Hellas says, oh,
a few weeks later, when I got back to Kuwait,
meaning in two thousand and three. This is 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
(28:07):
about two thousand and seven that Brian Way 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, Well,
I'm saying I heard on the internet. That was an
interview an Internet video of the television segment. Yeah. Yes,
(28:28):
Stelter is way too nice to say it. But Hellis
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 small arms fire,
(28:51):
goes on CNN add 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 things said by anyone doing this
whole sorry affair. In the Brian Williams case, everyone was
(29:16):
allowed to have a bad memory except Brian Williams. Sorry
s harp on him, But I did think it is
he was cheated, very unfair he was. I think absolutely,
I'm willing to see the formation of cognitive psychologists for
Brian Williams as a lobby group. I was thinking of
doing it. I felt so sorry for him. Thanks for
(29:49):
doing this, Rose, thank you for joining us, Ronan, thank
you everybody for coming. Yes. Hello. Not long ago, after
the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, I went to a talk
in Manhattan at the ninety Street Why. It was a
conversation between Rose McGowan, who was the first actress to
go on the record with accusations against why and ronand Pharaoh,
(30:11):
who wrote the definitive, devastating account of the Weinstein case
for the New Yorker magazine. 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 in a
Someone asked me, if you were in oz, who would
(30:37):
you be. Who would you be? Rose the curtain. I
would be the curtain. You're not the man behind the curtain.
You are the curtain. I am the curtain. The curtain's
very pretty. The curtain gets used, kicked aside. Nobody really
notices the curtain. They're appreciative that it's there, but to
pull it aside when it's done. But it absorbs everything
(30:59):
from both sides. From this side presentationally, it looks so
great to you, right, this is the curtain that you
see from the backside. You see everything too, but nobody
knows as the curtain the curtains. Taking notes, McGowan is
someone who requires an interpreter, and there was one moment
that really struck me when Farrow talked about what being
(31:20):
an interpreter meant. He was trying to get people at NBC,
where he worked at the time, to take McGowan's accusations seriously.
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,
(31:48):
and a lot worse things that I won't repeat on
this stage. You know that was something that was lobbed
at your story countless times. I sat in rooms and
defended the fact that got on the record testimony from
you matter and what you two people like NBC. A
few minutes later, the two of them start talking about
what it takes for a story like McGowan's to break
(32:09):
through all the skepticism and indifference. Well, 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.
If 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
(32:31):
you know, lend credence, of course, where it's due. 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
(32:51):
difficult story is to interrogate it as thoroughly as possible
and lend credence where it's due. Pharaoh didn't believe Rose McGowan.
Pharaoh listened to Rose McGowan. He took her seriously. That's
what memory demands. What if Rose McGowan had said that
she'd been assaulted by Weinstein in a hotel room in
(33:14):
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 her on
today's 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,
(33:35):
that it wasn't the truth. But remembering yourself in one
place when you are actually in another does not mean
that you're lying. It just means 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.
(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. Oh, please stop apologizing
(34:24):
for a crime you didn't commit. Free Brian Williams. Revisionist
History is a panoply production. The senior producer is Mela Belle,
(34:44):
with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson.
Original music by Luis Guerra, Special thanks to Andy Bowers
and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glad. So what's interesting is
(35:14):
so I'm sure you called me, and you're sure you
called me, but there's a chance. I'm almost one hundred
percent positive I called you, and I am I am too,
but there is a chance that you didn't call me.
There isn't a chance because I know I called you.
I know you called me too, but I know, I
know it's incredibly hard to deal with. But it's like,
(35:35):
there's a chance you didn't. I mean, there's a chance
you knocked at my door, you know. 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, just not even
(35:56):
if not even if like the twin towers are smoking
on the you know, 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. Um knock on, do
(36:19):
be waiting for you? Waiting for you? This is a
three st
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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