After 29 years at the network, NBC News correspondent Pete Williams will call it a career this summer, NBC News president Noah Oppenheim announced on Thursday. Williams, who made the rare move of returning to hard news reporting after serving as the Pentagon spokesperson in the George H.W. Bush administration, has been landing historic scoops for NBC since joining the network in 1993. Just this year, for instance, he broke the news that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was retiring. Beginning his career as a local news reporter in Wyoming, Williams eventually joined then-Congressman Dick Cheney’s office in 1986 before following the future veep to the Pentagon. Initially facing skepticism when he jumped back into journalism, Williams eventually proved his critics wrong. “There is no way we can ever fill Pete’s shoes, certainly not with any particular reporter,” Oppenheim told The Washington Post about Williams’ career. “If you call people at the Court or the FBI or the DOJ, in Republican and Democratic administrations, they would all say he is the most fair and the most honest and reliable and genuinely nice person,” NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell added about her colleague.
