http://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/10/katrina-hotel-manager-maybe-williams-misremembered-that-too/?utm_source=hafbp&utm_medium=fbpage&utm_campaign=haupdateKatrina hotel manager: Maybe Williams “misremembered” that too
POSTED AT 2:01 PM ON FEBRUARY 10, 2015 BY ED MORRISSEY
Another of Brian Williams’ courage-under-fire stories continues to unravel. After Williams admitted that the story he’d told for more than a decade about coming under fire in Iraq was untrue, people began questioning his recollections from reporting during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Williams holed up in the Ritz Carlton, which he later claimed became overrun with criminal gangs and medical emergencies. Williams himself claimed to have contracted dysentery while in the hotel, with it being so bad that he could hardly move while off-camera. The Washington Post puts together some of his claims in this video mash-up:
“That was just the start,” Williams says at one point in his 2014 conversation, recounting his Peabody Award-winning coverage while being the new anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News. It might be the start of the end of that career, however, as one key witness refutes almost all of what Williams has stated over the years. Myra DeGersdorff won the President’s Award from Ritz-Carlton that year for preventing the kind of lawlessness that Williams now claimed dominated the hotel:
The storm was worse than anyone expected. But DeGersdorff was ready. She enlisted a number of local cops to stay in a half-dozen of the hotel’s 452 rooms, and at any given moment there were at least “six or seven” officers on hand. She dispatched a team of “strong, tall” employees to barricade the exits with king-sized mattresses, and to “make sure those doors stayed locked,” she recalled in a telephone interview with The Washington Post. And she had set up an impromptu “MASH unit,” stocked with medicine from a nearby Walgreens and manned by more than a dozen doctors.
The preparation paid off. Though the hotel was packed, everyone there made it through one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history in one piece. And the very next year, in 2006, the company’s corporate office gave DeGersdorff the Ritz-Carlton President’s Award. …
That’s why DeGersdorff was surprised to flip on the news this week and see a perplexing story about NBC News anchor Brian Williams and the hotel she once managed. His recollection of what happened there didn’t match hers. In interviews that surfaced over the past week that she had never seen, Williams said the hotel was anything but secure. In fact, he told Tom Brokaw last summer, gangs had “overrun” the place. He spoke of seeing a dead body floating past the hotel. Williams also once told a book author that he got dysentery during Katrina. During his stay at the hotel, he said he declined an IV and then “had no medicine, nothing.”
DeGersdorff, now a resident of Scottsdale, Ariz., was confused. She said there was more than enough medicine and doctors in the MASH unit.
“Maybe he misremembered,” she told The Post of Williams’s claims. “I’m not going to judge him, because it was such an unpleasant week and there were times to be concerned. … And when there is that kind of concern, you can misremember. And maybe he was out there, and it wasn’t impossible he could have encountered a body, but I don’t think it was in the French Quarter. The French Quarter only got inches” of flooding.
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