Thoughts from Brian Williams and Keith Olbermann

Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News
Let's begin with all things media-related. On this November 22nd, a date that has deep, lasting and age-specific meaning in this country, we are mourning the loss of a giant in the business of writing about Presidents. Not long after we got off the air last night I received a blackberry message that Hugh Sidey had died. Because TIME magazine (along with the other giants of the era, LOOK and LIFE) was always prominent on the living room table in the house I grew up in, I knew of Sidey's work at a very young age. His "Presidency" dispatches (I was four years old when he wrote his first) always made me feel like a White House insider, even from my vantage point of a ranch house in upstate New York. Hugh was a marvelous and sparkling guy, always interested and interesting. While he weathered (with good humor) charges for much of his professional life that he was enamored with one or two of the subjects he wrote about, the truth is he was guilty only of a great love of his country, its system of government and centers of power. Hugh was a detail guy...who mined each audience with each President he covered for the rich details it offered. My favorite example is the story of Johnson's brown shoes. Sidey noticed that the usually sartorially-fastidious Lyndon Baines Johnson wore cordovan shoes with a gray suit. Sidey knew the man and his tastes enough to know that something was up. Sure enough, the shoes were meant to go with the khaki-colored safari outfit Johnson wore when he knew he was going to be mingling with soldiers. Johnson was planning a secret trip to Vietnam that day, and Sidey had the story. That's the short version. There are other tellings that have taken on much more texture with rich embellishments over the years. Hugh covered every President from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. He was in Dallas on this day in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He famously called Kennedy's Vice President, LBJ, the most fascinating person he ever met. In later years, Hugh put his love of all things Presidential to work as Chairman of the White House Historical Society...a job that would have to have been invented for him if it didn't already exist. I was very fortunate to have come to know Hugh Sidey...who never forgot how fortunate he was to know the small club of men who have occupied the Oval Office in modern times.
In a much different way, we say goodbye tonight to a giant in our profession: tonight's NIGHTLINE will mark Ted Koppel's farewell as anchor, and the start of a new chapter for him. While I will transmit more personal thoughts privately, allow me to say here that Ted has always done it right, and on his own terms. I will always remember the sight of him standing over me in the "executive aviation" wing of Saddam International Airport in the early days of the current war. I hadn't been asleep for long (we got in late, and what with the sounds of artillery and all...) and for a time I thought I was having a very vivid dream about Ted Koppel. Until I realized that WAS Ted Koppel, ribbing me for sleeping on a cement tile floor in my dirty clothes...and for having joined up with his unit of the 3rd Infantry AFTER the initial slog through the desert that Ted weathered so seemingly easily. I thought Ted's coverage of the war was the essence of clarity, bravery and just solid journalism. Going back to Vietnam, that pretty much sums up his entire career.


Keith Olbermann, Countdown
NEW YORK - Jean Schmidt of Ohio, the least grammatically-inclined member of the United States Congress, was happily calling Jack Murtha a “coward,” before the chair gaveled her into silence and the House mics were shut off.
Hours earlier, Colonel James Brown, head of the 56th Brigade Combat Team, was talking to the media from a base north of Baghdad, talking about the “beautiful day in the free nation of Iraq” (90 dead in bombings), and refuting Murtha’s call by saying “here on the ground, our job is not done” - kind of strange given that his is - it was two days before he was due to be rotated back to Texas.
Where was Bill O’Reilly during all this? Spending the night with me!
It was the annual fundraiser at New York’s Hotel Pierre for Joe Torre’s Safe At Home Foundation, combating domestic violence, filled with athletes and broadcasters of every imaginable stripe. No barbs or punches were thrown (instincts of some sort are shared here - we never got closer to each other than ten feet), John Mellencamp performed an extraordinary acoustical set, and just to round-out the small-world department, one of the dozens of other table hosts was our old MSNBC pal Deborah Norville, another was an eminent Yankees fan named Ari Fleischer, and the emcee was Bob Costas, whom I believe is now dabbling in cable news his ownself.
To my knowledge, not a word of politics was spoken among the principals. There is a time and a place for this stuff (evidently, any time on the floor of the House, at the top of your lungs, making sure you debate not the issue but the assumption that criticism at home is somehow more dangerous to our soldiers than the bullets and bombs of Iraqi insurgents).
And by the time of my return from one of the truly consciousness-raising events on the charity gala circuit, I had a stack of inquiries about the “big announcement” Dan Patrick and I teased on our ESPN radio hour Friday afternoon. I should give you a quick warning: Dan and I hype everything. This one, which will be made in the 2 PM ET hour of Dan’s show Monday, we described as something that “will change your world.” If I’m using a different set of headphones than usual, we’ll call that a “major development.”
I’m not going to steal my own thunder here - we’re going to announce this Monday and that’s that. But I just wanted to clarify the relevant part: contrary to a lot of guesswork, this announcement won’t impact MSNBC or Countdown.
Comments? E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com