A DAY OF LOSS
Posted: Monday, July 30, 2007 3:39 PM by Daily Nightly Editor
Filed Under:
Brian Williams
by Brian Williams, Anchor and Managing Editor
"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o'clock in the morning..."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tonight our viewers will see a still photo taken in the courtyard of a group home our NBC News team once shared in Bagdhad (during safer times -- you will note none of us is wearing body armor). It shows yours truly, NBC Nightly News producer Eric Wishnie and retired General Wayne Downing bending down to pet a dog we adopted (or rather: he adopted us) in Iraq.
Both other men in the photo are now gone from our lives.
Eric Wishnie was found critically injured on a street in Greenwich Village before dawn this morning, and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He was 44.
As he had done for years with Tom Brokaw before me, Eric and I travelled the globe. The tsunami in Indonesia, the war in Iraq ... we interviewed presidents and world leaders. He was an enormously talented producer and one of the funniest guys I've ever met. He started here as a page, then worked in our Chicago bureau before we got our hands on him here in New York. Eric produced Tom's great work at Normandy, and many of the Greatest Generation feature stories that people still remember seeing on Nightly News. He was a huge part of our post-9/11 coverage. President Bush knew him by sight and by name. We knew him as a fun and lovely man, and I knew him as a dear friend. He raised self-effacing humor to an art form, and he is responsible for easily a quarter of all the music on my iPod. I would often come into work in the morning to find a new CD on my computer keyboard, along with a note from my friend and fellow music-lover Eric -- saying that it was vital that I hear this particular new band. He left the News Division a while back, but the place still bears his mark. We will now bear the burden of his loss, along with his loved ones, and of not having Eric in our lives anymore.
We also lost Tom Snyder today. He either invented or perfected any number of genres in our line of work: a superb news anchor, a captivating television talk-show host and a colossal talent on radio. Tom was as big as all outdoors. He was a force of nature. He was a legend in every city where he honed his craft, and became a national point of conversation when he moved to this network. He invented his own late-night programming -- an interview style (through a haze of cigarette smoke) that has never been duplicated. He fit his times, and changed with them. He loved the business. He loved having an audience, and was a fellow romantic about broadcasting -- the notion of sitting in a studio and visualizing a home viewing or listening audience. I can still hear him saying, "Folks, settle back, relax, and enjoy the pictures as they fly through the air." That's how it worked before cable.
That's what it was all about for Tom, and for those of us in the audience.
Our condolences to the families of our friends.
We hope you can join us for tonight's broadcast.
Editor's note: Eric Wishnie's last blog entry for the Daily Nightly was written Aug. 28, 2006. It's a wonderful reflection of the kind and caring man that his NBC family came to know over the years. We hope you'll enjoy reading it here:
GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND FOR STRANGERS
By Eric Wishnie, NBC News Senior Producer
Someone much smarter than I once said: "You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give."
I thought about that during a recent trip I took down south to Mississippi and Louisiana. I was traveling to shoot a Campbell Brown story that will likely air Tuesday on the anniversary of Katrina slamming into the Gulf Coast.
The story is a lovely one. I think it's our job, if even occasionally, to tell a story that describes the petals of Katrina and not just the thorns. God knows the thorns are plentiful and obvious and important. We won't learn how to not repeat the inexcusable mistakes of the disaster without the thorns, but it can't hurt to be reminded of the generosity of the angels who walk among us -- the petals. In this case, the petals are a few volunteers in Erie, Pa., who wanted to know what they could do to help.
They traveled down to Mississippi and looked around. They found an errant photograph that had been lost in the storm. Probably just a picture of an old black lab or a father and son goofing around on a Saturday afternoon. Then they found another. And another. Some were covered by dirt and debris. Some were damaged. Some were partially hidden. Some had nails sticking out of them. Some probably had blood on them. Sweat and tears, too.
So the volunteers decided to do something about those lost images, and created the Picture Project. They gathered what they could. They asked around for help. They got sponsors to set up drop boxes. They went back home, far away to Pennsylvania, and slowly, thousands and thousands of photos -- literally, lost moments in people's lives -- began showing up.
The volunteers cleaned them. They organized them. And then they began the extraordinary work of trying to reunite these photos with the traumatized victims of Katrina who had lost them.
I read somewhere once that "being a man or a woman is a matter of birth. Being a man or a woman who makes a difference is a matter of choice."
Nobody made these Erie residents do what they did. And what they did was not simple. They are not independently wealthy. They are not retired. They work for the local government. Sue Weber, Dennis Heintz and Karla Anderson spent their own money, asked their bosses for time off, put the priorities of their own families, their own children, their own friends, their own important lives on hold -- for strangers.
Some of the stories Sue, Dennis and Karla came across were truly wrenching. One involved a family who not only lost their home and everything in it, but they lost their son, too.
The Rickmans had two kids with a rare ailment called Batten Disease. The trauma of the storm sped up the death of one son. And the other is, well, doing his best -- with the care of loving parents. The point is this: Imagine you've lost your home, the contents in it, you've lost your son, and on top of it, you've lost every photographic memory of that beautiful living thing? Unimaginable, really.
Then imagine you happen to be surfing the Web, and a picture of your boy with his dad next to a train -- a trip that had been a dream-come-true for father and son -- pops up on your screen. Well, if you're Carol Rickman of Biloxi, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry. So, you do both. You whoop and you holler, too.
For the Rickman family, the Picture Project literally took something that was lost, forever, and brought it back again. Carol Rickman may not have her boy's life back, but by gosh, she's got the memory of it. The very color of the shirt he was wearing. The smile on his face. The way his hair was parted just so. That was gone forever. But not anymore.
This is a dramatic example, because a life was lost. But what the Picture Project does is reunite families with much smaller moments that mean just as much to those who thought they'd lost them forever. A college graduation. A hug before going off to war. A high-five after an LSU victory. The way a mom's hand sat atop her daughter's head on a lazy afternoon -- one a long time ago, before Katrina blew away that hammock. Forever.
And why do people volunteer -- for complete strangers, no less? Its been said that volunteering is the ultimate exercise in democracy. You vote in elections every four years, but when you volunteer, you vote every day about the kind of community you want to live in. Why do we do it? I don't know. But after spending some time in Biloxi and New Orleans, and with these folks from Erie -- I now know that's the kind of community I want to grow old in.
My grandmother couldn't have said it better herself.
