New York — THERE'S a needlepoint pillow on the couch in Brian Williams' corner office in Rockefeller Center, a recent gift from a friend who embroidered across the front in careful stitching: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
The sardonic memento -- a reference to a comment President Bush made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina -- sits in view of the NBC anchor's desk, a quiet reminder of a story that enveloped him early into his tenure on the evening newscast and has preoccupied him ever since.
A year ago, Williams was hunkered down inside New Orleans' Superdome to wait out the storm with thousands of local residents. After howling winds wrenched panels off the stadium's roof, he shot pictures with his cellphone camera of daylight streaming through the ragged holes.
By the end of the week, he had watched the city unravel, supplies dwindle, bodies float down the flooded streets. His disgust spilled out on air.
"I saw fear, I saw death, I saw depravity, I saw firearms being brandished, I saw looting -- and this in one of the great cities in the United States," the 47-year-old anchor said in a recent interview. "It's always going to be a part of me. I don't think I've ever been so angry about a subject that intersected with my work."
Katrina was also, in many ways, the story in which Williams shook off the mantle of simply being Tom Brokaw's successor. When the hurricane hit, he had been in the anchor chair for less than nine months. His often-impassioned reports on the aftermath -- first from inside the Superdome and then delivered amid knee-deep water in the streets -- earned NBC a George Foster Peabody Award and helped him move beyond an image of just a smooth-talking broadcaster.
"People said we saw the reawakening of the post-Clinton media," he said. "I just think you saw reporters who were eyewitnesses saying, 'We're not going to have it. We're not going to accept what we hear being said by the government.' "
In the last year, he's gone back to the Gulf Coast nine times and spearheaded a series of stories on related topics such as infrastructure, oil and race.
He returned to New Orleans on Monday night for an hourlong prime-time special about the storm and its aftermath and is scheduled to interview President Bush from there on tonight's evening newscast.
"It deeply affected him to his core," said NBC News President Steve Capus. "Brian has made this a personal mission to continue to tell the stories of Katrina."
