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Brian Williams: We were witnesses
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Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005
Every crisis has a breaking point. When Joe McCarthy was terrorizing people on Capitol Hill, there was a little lawyer from New England named Joseph Nye Welch, who one day said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Tony Zumbado was that guy in this crisis.
Tony, who’s been a cameraman with us for a long time, returned from the Convention Center and we knew he had seen something horrible, and he was asked to recount his experience on live TV.
Tony Zumbado: It was unbelievable. Dead people around the walls of the Convention Center. Laying in the middle of the street, in their dying chairs, where they died right there in their wheelchair.”
All Tony did was bring his credibility and a life’s work and his honest face and his great ability as a cameraman. And he stood there at the edge of his emotions, probably hungry and thirsty himself.
MSNBC
He was bearing witness to what he had seen and what he will take to his grave.
Sept. 1, 2005: NBC's Tony Zumbado talks to MSNBC-TV’s Alison Stewart about the desperation he witnessed outside the New Orleans Convention Center.
The government couldn’t tell us that things were OK. We were there, standing next to the things that were not OK.
Remember bodily functions, all human hygiene came to an end, babies reusing diapers. Anything you can think of that you do over the course of a day bodily, it was being done where you sat or stood. Take a moment and figure out where you’re gonna find food without refrigeration, if you don’t have a source of food.
And take a moment and think how desperate you would feel. Well, that was the backdrop. I couldn’t believe that people were starving and going without water in the United States, for lack of an air drop.
There was absolutely nothing that would lead you to believe this was the United States. It didn’t feel like we were home. People say that in this crisis, the media found their voice. People start seeing these television reporters that we’ve come to know, these docile creatures, turned into monsters. What happened was, I had the director of FEMA on live television.
I remember asking Michael Brown about the thousands stuck at the Convention Center.
NBC Nightly News -- Brian Williams reporting: “Why can’t some of the Chinook helicopters and Blackhawks that we have heard flying over for days and days and days, simply lower palettes of water, meals-ready-to-eat, medical supplies, right into downtown New Orleans? Where is the aid? It’s the question people keep asking us on camera.”
Michael Brown: “Brian, it’s an absolutely fair question, and I got to tell you from the bottom of my heart how sad I feel for those people. The federal government just learned about those people today.”
So if people saw outrage, if people saw first person reporting and anger in our eyes, we had been there.
The Today Show - Campbell Brown reporting: “Why didn’t you do anything? You’re the mayor of this city. Did you call the federal government for help, did you ask the state for help? When did you make those calls? Don’t you bear some of the responsibility for what’s happened here?”
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin: “Look, there’s going to be plenty of blame to go around. I made calls to everybody.”
People say we found our voice on this story, after some long, cold years of one Bush term and some change. Here’s the difference: We beat the first responders to Hurricane Katrina. That made us witnesses. And that gave us license to come at these government officials who were in the other side of that screen, the split-screen America we lived through for a week there, who were saying, “You know what? Everything’s fine.”
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Aug. 31, 2005: “We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government...”
And if it isn’t fine, it’s gonna be, because here’s the assets we have on the ground. Here’s the assets we have moving into the area. We became witnesses.
Fri., Sept 2, 2005
When the day dawned on Friday there were signs of a change. There were finally signs that the cavalry was arriving, that this relief -- long promised -- was starting to trickle in. And people lives were going to get better.
The early heroes of the crisis were those Coast Guard helicopter pilots. We watched so many of those pictures on TV. The young, the old people — clearly scared of heights — being told to look straight up. The roof top rescues were astounding. People are alive today because of those rescues.
The politics of all this are very simple. If we come out of all this crisis and in the next couple of years don’t have a national conversation on the following issues: race, class, petroleum, the environment, then we the news media will have failed by not keeping people’s feet to the fire. Some adults performed poorly in this case. People should know that and remember that.
I will remember all of the dead for the rest of my life. When you come around the corner and see a body facedown within sight of the Superdome on a city street with children and adults walking by it, you know something has come unraveled.
I think of the people we met inside that Superdome. I think of the wild-eyed people in that city who were scrounging to stay alive, to find anything to eat or to steal, to cash in for something they could convert into food.
I think of the faces. I think of the babies. I think of the elderly. I think of the people who, just a few days earlier, had dignity, had their lives, weren’t defecating where they stood, weren’t reusing their children’s diapers. I think of people living on interstate highways on cement. And I can’t get their faces out of my mind. But I shouldn’t, either.
They are a part of who I am. That’s pretty much the way it should be. I felt I had a privilege, an honor, of representing them. It was an honor to be with them in the Superdome. It was an honor to represent their interests, to do their pleading, on national television.
I think this is going to change our society for a good, long while. I think it should, actually, for a lot of reasons. It has changed my life. It’s changed what happens when I close my eyes, try to go to sleep.
And we have to learn that the last 100,000 faces out of every major American city are going to look a whole lot like the souls we came to know in New Orleans.
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