"Go-To-The-Graves"
"I know, I know," Brian Williams says into his low-end Motorola. "What if that ever got out?""We're all for keeping things off the record, writes ETP, "but this strikes us as rather scary and cabal-like." Of course, we can't know how scary or cabal-like this situation actually is unless we find out what Russert and Williams were actually talking about (unlikely, given the "go-to-the-graves" remark and everything.)He's talking at a rapid clip to his NBC colleague Tim Russert, the host of Meet the Press, about the exclusive Roosevelt Room meeting they just had with President George W. Bush. This was the plan: Williams and Russert and their network peers (Gibson, Couric, Schieffer, Stephanopoulos, and others) would get the president's perspective on the troop surge he was scheduled to announce in a few hours, and no quotes would be allowed to emerge without approval. But some doozies, like the one Williams and Russert are kibitzing about, slipped out of the president's mouth. When this happened, Williams recalls, he looked around at the ashen faces of White House aides, who quickly imposed a retroactive lockdown on that tidbit, whatever it was.
And so Williams keeps the secret, despite my needling across a two-foot-long folding table that separates me from the anchor of the NBC Nightly News--he of starchy wardrobe, stiff hair, and Dudley Do-Right air--on a northbound Amtrak about an hour later. He can talk about it with Russert and anyone else who was in the room, but no one on the outside, not even his wife, Jane, herself a savvy onetime TV news producer. "I call them 'go-to-the-graves,'" Williams says, tallying about a half-dozen he maintains for Bush alone. Williams hastens to add that today's just-between-us moment was not meant to shield the president from a trifling embarrassment, but instead to preserve the United States' options for multi-front warfare.
Nonetheless, the debate is worth thinking about. Is it better for anchors to get briefed on information that they've agreed never to reveal than for them never to hear it at all?