Vanity Fair pays tribute to the late Marjorie Williams, whom they call "our own Jane Austen on the Potomac," by reprinting three of her profiles on the magazine's website. Williams has also been dubbed "Washington's most dangerous profiler," but this snippet of her 1999 piece on Brian Williams, Man of the Hour shows more affection than danger:

If he is, in his words, "an anachronism" and "a young fogy," the origins of that stance are easy to find. He was the "menopausal surprise" of 42- and 43-year-old parents, whose three other children were a good deal older. "I was raised kind of like an only child," Williams says and the only child of older parents, at that. "My parents were as grown-up as grown-ups get." Once, in elementary school, he told his classmates that his visiting parents were in fact his grandparents. "My sister," he says, "jokes that I wasn't allowed to perspire until I was about 15."

But, for all his throwback qualities, he is in other ways a true child of his generation, steeped in pop culture his conversation is larded with Led Zeppelin and Batman and the Brady Bunch and possessed of a sharp, even mordant sense of humor. Brian Williams, Golden Boy, has the class screwup's observing eye.


Vanity Fair also reprints Williams' profile of Barbara Bush and her examination of Clinton and Women.
Marjorie Williams, 1958 2005 a Tribute [VF]