Of Fools and Fish Tales
On the grand playing field of human intercourse, nothing gives us as much satisfaction as seeing braggarts brought low, especially if they are the cause, having dashed rather than hoisted themselves on their own petards. It’s what fools are made of, and fools have always been great entertainment.
Brian Williams, the NBC network news anchor, made one of himself with his “Nightly News” story about having been riding on a Chinook helicopter in Iraq when a rocket-propelled grenade shot it down.
As most know by now, Williams was not actually on the chopper that was shot down. His daring journalistic do turned out to be daring didn’t. He now finds himself in the stocks of public opinion getting the rotten tomato treatment from every direction. But wait, I believe Williams deserves some slack.
A lie, yes, but lies come in categories, and the celebrity anchorman’s belong within the proud category of fish tale. I remember being on Salivar’s Dock in Montauk one afternoon years ago listening to a man regaling friends with a stem-winder about catching a giant bluefin tuna.
“There we were,” he began, or something to that effect, going on to describe mountainous waves, winds so strong they would peel the paint off a building, the hook-up, the battle that went on for an hour, no, it must have been closer to two hours. He wasn’t thinking of time at the time.
The ooohs and ahhhs of the fisherman’s audience spurred him on. He said he reeled the great fish to the boat on three separate occasions only to feel it tear off again toward the horizon. The fisherman provided the “zzzzzzzzzzzzz” sound of line being stripped from the reel. Finally, he and the tuna were exhausted. With his last ounce of strength he reeled the fish to the boat. The mate gaffed it and administered the coup de grace.
There were a few problems with the story. According to the mate who did the gaffing, and who listened to the story unrecognized by the blabber, the fish in question was about half the size as it became in the telling. It was boated in about 15 minutes, and the exhausted fisherman had handed the rod to another angler who landed the fish.
The mate did not bother to correct the tale. It was a humdinger for sure, and after all, it was created on the charter boat he worked on. And what are charter boats for?
Unfortunately, Williams’s charter boat is (or was) NBC’s flagship anchor desk. To him, it must have seemed high and dry, removed from the dangerous assignments of war correspondents, from the lives of soldiers their stories are about. Columnists have accused Williams of having a Hemingway complex, looking for experiences to validate the war correspondent within.
Or, maybe it was something like the bullfight audience in Tom Lehrer’s song “Fiesta Time in Guadalajara”: “hoping that death” — or something close to it — “would brighten up an otherwise dull afternoon.”
I think this was a case of James Thurber more than Ernest Hemingway. Williams, like many of us, is Walter Mitty, a person who escapes the mundane by using the wings of his imagination.
The tale of the downed Chinook is close to a victimless crime. It made Brian Williams a fool in the eyes of real war correspondents and combat veterans. And it makes watchers of the “Nightly News” wonder if they’re getting the facts, or Walter Mitty’s version of them.
But, hey, a Chinook is a fish, a type of salmon. Williams landed it in a thick fog of war — a fish tale, taller than most, but great entertainment.