Brian Williams is how fragile it all is in American life, no matter who you are, how famous you are, how close you’ve come to touching the sun. This is how fast it can all go away from you.  It doesn’t mean you are a criminal or a bad guy. It happens this way, even when you do it to yourself, when you’re caught for not being what people thought you were; when they decide they can’t trust you as much as they thought they could. You take this kind of fall, this fast, and the rest of us get dizzy watching it happen.  Think about it: Last Tuesday night, because people hadn’t listened to those who knew that the war story he had been telling for years wasn’t true, he was still Brian Williams, on top of his world, bringing in the kind of money he was bringing in for NBC. Now he is suspended, but not fired, because NBC, even making a hard choice, did not take the easy way out here.  Think about something else: What if somebody had told you, just six years ago, or seven, that Alex Rodriguez would be going to the Yankees before spring training 2015, seeking redemption the way Brian Williams may seek the same kind of redemption in six months. What if somebody had told you that Tiger Woods would have this kind of fall from grace? A-Rod was on his way to being the all-time home run king of baseball. Tiger was the most famous athlete in America, on his way to breaking Jack Nicklaus’ record for major championships.  And back in those days Brian Williams had already become a different kind of star, in a different arena, after taking over for Tom Brokaw.  Will the American people forgive Williams when — and if — he comes back? Sure they will. And why not? But the part of the story that nobody knows right now is whether or not the people in Williams’ own business will forgive him, because you know they will never forget.  I have known him a long time. I like him. I coached his son in Little League baseball. Our sons later played on the same high school soccer team. He has always been what the American people found him to be on the “NBC Nightly News”: Good company. Now he goes away.  Williams is going to have to take a page out of Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods' stories — launch a comeback after losing the support of the people.  We all know how much America loves a comeback story. But you wonder what it will be like for Williams six months from now, after the terrible week he’s just had in February of 2015, because even in six months, the facts of what brought on this fall, in the mythical place that Looie Carnesecca used to describe as Macy’s window, will have not changed.  It will still be somebody else’s Chinook helicopter that took the fire that day, which happens to be the way Williams told it in the first place, before it became the kind of inflated war story — or conflated story — that soldiers rarely tell.  Others before Brian Williams have found out how terrible and sudden these falls are, whether they committed lesser or greater sins in the eyes of the public. You saw this one play out the way it has. First Williams tried to explain the thing away, badly. Then he said he was taking himself off the air. Now he leaves the stage for six months, because of self-inflicted wounds.  Jon Stewart, who is leaving his own hit show, “The Daily Show,” for completely different reasons, joked the other night, in a segment he did on Brian Williams, that at last somebody is being held accountable for things that happened in Iraq. It was a joke, because of all the lies we know politicians told about that war, lies that the media bought wholesale at the time, and never apologized much for not challenging. But none of this seems very funny right now, whether you know Brian Williams from television, or just know him.  For now, he doesn’t get the media death penalty that others have gotten before him. Good. You cannot simply ignore the good work he has done, and that includes out in the field, during the time when he did become the kind of star he did in reading the news and covering it. It doesn’t forgive what he did, or explain it away. But he was in one of those helicopters. He’s gone to these places. That doesn’t help him right now, either.  He told this story about that helicopter for a long time. Nobody stopped him, though so many knew the facts of what happened that day. This particular war story was more than 10 years in the telling. The stunning fall caused by it came faster. A fish tale and a cautionary tale, for everybody.
The story of Brian Williams shows just how fragile American life, and fame, may be, and how fast you can lose it all.