As War Dragged On, Coverage Tone Weighed Heavily on Anchors

It seemed a self-conscious attempt to replicate the moment in 1968 when Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam and pronounced the war a stalemate. But that verdict from America's most trusted man, in an era when a television anchor could hold that designation, was based on firsthand reporting, while NBC's maneuver was simply a linguistic confirmation of what most Americans already believed to be the case.

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Williams felt that the news division should not have treated it as a major policy pronouncement. They often made changes to the network stylebook -- and had long ago stopped using phrases like "homosexual lifestyle" and "pro-life" -- without any fanfare. By trumpeting the move, Williams believed, they had made themselves the center of attention and invited the criticism that followed.

Fateful Decision

Williams spent the next few months wrestling with a personal question: Should he return to Iraq for the first time since the invasion, when a sandstorm had grounded his helicopter for three days? He was acutely conscious of the risks involved, and yet felt guilty about staying away. Iraq was the story of our time, it led the newscast night after night, and Williams felt a responsibility to touch it and feel it and not just observe from a safe distance.

There had been long conversations with his wife, Jane, in the den of their Connecticut home. For one year after their friend Bob Woodruff, the ABC anchor, had been injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Jane Williams could not imagine her husband returning there. Yes, the story was crucial to the national dialogue, but was any job, any assignment worth the destruction of a human life?

Jane reacted, on one level, like the television producer she had once been. She could not live her life paralyzed by fear. "I think you need to go to Iraq sooner rather than later," she said. But Jane also leveled with her husband about her emotional reaction. This is insane, she said; look at what happened to Bob Woodruff.

"I reserve the right to be sad that you're walking out the door," Jane said.

The anchor's toughest sales job was with his two teenagers. "I'm going to be heavily guarded, I'm not going to do anything stupid, and I will be back," he assured them.

When Williams was in Iraq, the picture he got was as muddled as ever. Williams told friends that if they wanted to find good news in Iraq, he could show them plenty of examples. And if they wanted proof that Iraq was a lost cause, he could provide considerable evidence of that as well. Still, when he looked at the big picture, he wondered how the war effort was ever going to succeed.

Katie Couric, too, came back with a mixed verdict. As the single mother of two daughters, she had thought long and hard about whether it was responsible for her to make the trip. She talked it over with her teenagers and with her parents, but decided that she felt comfortable with CBS's security arrangements. Couric saw many signs of the frustrating stalemate in a war in which she felt the administration had made so many mistakes, but also concluded that, in some areas of Iraq, the situation was improving.

Charlie Gibson had not been to Iraq in three years and felt that he should go back, to get a better feel for the situation. Some generals had invited him to make the trip and promised that the military would keep him safe. He brought it up at a lunch with ABC News President David Westin.

"Not on my life are you going," Westin said. "Not with my track record." After what happened to Woodruff, Westin felt that he couldn't take the risk of losing another anchor.

Gibson wished that he could just sneak off to Iraq on his own. The problem, even if Westin were to acquiesce, was that the press would make the mere fact of his trip a bigger story than any reporting he was able to carry out. And Gibson had no desire to go to Baghdad as a PR stunt, not to wander into a dangerous a war whose mission, at least to him, was still not clear.

This article is adapted from "Reality Show," which is based on two years of research that included extensive interviews with journalists and executives at all levels of ABC, NBC and CBS. The interviews were conducted on condition that they be used for the book.