Boston Herald: Brian Williams Snubbed Vets Conference For ‘Pressing Engagement’ - Hosting SNL
By Jack Coleman | February 9, 2015 | 10:18 AM EST
For all the revelations we’ve learned about NBC anchor Brian Williams, this one could come across as among the most unflattering.
The trouble for Williams began after a Jan. 30 report on NBC Nightly News in which he thanked an Army veteran for protecting him in Iraq after his military helicopter was purportedly brought down by enemy fire. After Williams was called out on this by soldiers involved in the incident he described, Williams issued an on-air apology that only worsened skepticism about his credibility as a journalist.
Now comes a report from the Boston Herald that Williams, who rarely misses a chance to tout his reverence for veterans, snubbed the annual convention of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in Boston in 2006. Williams’s bio on the NBC News website states that he’s a board member on the Society’s foundation.
Boston firefighter Neal Santangelo, a member of the host committee that brought the society’s convention to the city, told Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis that Williams agreed to serve as master of ceremonies six months before the convention was held in September 2006.
But when he arrived in Boston that day, Williams informed Santangelo and fellow committee member Tom Lyons that a “pressing engagement” back in New York City “prevented him from doing much more than greeting the audience of more than 1,000 guests ... and leaving,” Gelzinis wrote in his column yesterday.
“As disappointed as Lyons and Santangelo were,” Gelzinis wrote, “they still arranged for a police escort to rush Williams through the tunnel to catch his plane back to NYC.”
Several hours later, after the dinner, Santangelo’s wife phoned to tell him she knew why Williams bailed on the vets — he was guest hosting Saturday Night Live.
Neal Santangelo was so angry that he wrote a letter to Williams a week after the convention. “I ... cannot believe that you left us for this,” he wrote, according to Gelzinis. “In an act of egotistical, blatant self-promotion, you deceived the (Medal of Honor) recipients, declined to break bread with them and disrespected them. You placed comedy before courage ... Your conduct was irreverent, insulting, incomprehensible and shameful.”
Santangelo also wrote that Williams should apologize for his disrespect to the veterans — “Anything else is unacceptable.”
It shouldn’t matter if he was asked to speak to kindergarteners, a real man would honor his first commitment.