Unleashed Memoir #6 / Part II: The end of the beginning

In which the author finally, as he embarks on the fourth decade of his life, succeeds in attaining his long-sought goal: posting as a foreign correspondent. With ever so many adventures to come.

On October 6, with my beloved wife of the past quarter century—Pamela—I celebrated the 80^th anniversary of my presence on this planet among my fellow citizens of the world. As it happens, it also marks the half century (50 years) since I embarked on my life as a foreign correspondent, observer, and chronicler of more than 90 lands far from my own. To commemorate this, another moment from my own past, frozen in time, you will find here an excerpt from my memoir, "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter,” which is still being written. From time to time, Unleashed Memoir will present excerpts from this work where and when they resonate especially. And in this excerpt, I am preparing for so many adventures to come.

Now for the best part of the journey so far….in Washington as I wind up my briefings….

I began Thursday in Washington across the Potomac in Langley, Virginia at the CIA’s sprawling headquarters. It was my first return to that building since my brush with employment there that never materialized a decade earlier. This time, I was purely a visitor and was met by Angus Thuermer, who at the time described himself as “the agency’s spooksman,” spending most of his days doling out pro-forma “no comments” to nearly every inquiry.

He must have been quite adept at such obfuscation since he’d just returned from some quite adventurous times in New Delhi as station chief and would be off, a year or so after my visit, to Berlin in the same capacity, all in the depths of the Cold War.

Thuermer had been plucked from the clandestine services—the redoubtable Directorate of Operations—for his duties as spooksman, the agency clearly believing that it took someone adept at concealing secrets in far corners of the world to perform similar duties with respect to members of the American press corps. He might also have been tapped for these duties by virtue of his earlier career as an Associated Press war correspondent during World War II, watching a synagogue burn to the ground during the Kristallnacht anti-Semitic rampage in Germany before the war; interviewing P.G. Wodehouse, the British comic novelist and inventor of the character called Jeeves, in a padded cell in a German POW camp.

A Prequel !

On Sunday, as a special embed for our The World This Week #125, we are planning to offer the full version of my own 3 minute CBS Evening News profile from December 2, 1984 of Jean Marie Le Pen—the first ever on American network television….a chilling blast from the past marking the death Tuesday at age 96 of this icon of western neo-fascist extremism.

Meanwhile, Thuermer would later tell some amazing stories of his CIA days—how he smuggled Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, out of New Delhi and onward to sanctuary in the United States by hiding her in a baggage cart at Delhi airport; and how he arranged to spirit Chinese dissidents out of Nepal, over the Himalayas into India on the back of an elephant. Later, there were his countless brushes with the vaunted Stasi, the ruthless, KGB-trained, East German secret police, who kept a detailed watch on his every action. He was most surprised, he would later recount, when he managed to obtain his Stasi file after the Cold War had ended, that he found such detailed notations as the time he drove his Volkswagen bus the wrong way down a one-way street.

A young Thuermer

But I knew of none of this when I met Thuermer at the front door of the CIA headquarters, and he ushered me into a small, windowless room with bare walls, furnished with two chairs and a plain metal desk. There were two doors—the one where I entered, and a second that opened after a few moments (was I being watched, so they knew the moment I was installed?) to admit a thoroughly nondescript individual with rimless glasses, a neutral gray suit and matching tie. He never gave his name and it had been suggested that I not ask. He was simply, CIA.

He also cut straight to the chase.

“How long will you be there, in Saigon?” he began. I told him, likely two or three years. He smiled thinly.

“Sometime while you are there, it will all be over,” he said evenly. “North and South Vietnam will be united, and the North will have won.” I was stunned and lurched back as though someone had lobbed a grenade that was about to explode at my feet. My interlocutor took no notice but pressed on. “I can’t tell you when, exactly, but I can tell you what to look for, that will give you some warning, if you’d like.” Would I like? It was as though Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were all gathered before me. So, I nodded, somewhat speechless. In days of “briefings” on Capitol Hill, at the State Department and the Pentagon, no one had even suggested the end might be at all near.

The first indication, my CIA briefer said, would be a small skirmish in a village somewhere in the Central Highlands, likely between main force North Vietnamese troops and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam/South Vietnamese) forces. Then, there’ll be a brief quiet period—a few days or even a couple of weeks. That will be followed by a larger battle, likely for Buôn Ma Thuột, a major crossroads in the Central Highlands, which will quickly fall to NVA forces. At that point, a precipitous effort to flee the major Central Highlands city of Pleiku will ensue and within days, the North Vietnamese will be rolling, all but unchecked, down Highway One and a very short time later will be in Saigon. It will all be over—quite chaotically, leaving tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands dead and Hanoi in charge of the entire, united nation.

It was difficult to believe, but my briefer was so definite and so specific in his details that I had to ask why no one else in the government was prepared to entertain such a scenario, or at least raise it as a hypothesis even on the deepest background.

“Simple,” he concluded, rising from his chair. “They’re all in denial.” And then he was gone. I’d taken copious notes, of course, though promptly putting it all out of my mind. It just seemed so hard to believe. North and South Vietnam at that point seemed destined to assume much the same trajectory as North and South Korea—a nation divided between a communist north and a western-allied south, the north condemned to perpetual penury, the south to rapid development and healing under a benevolent proto-democracy. That Ho Chi Minh had other designs accompanied by plans, and the means, to implement them, was quite simply inconceivable in the context of that era. So, at least for the moment, I filed this whole afternoon away in a do-not-open file in my mind and headed back across the Potomac.

I began the day on Friday with Paul Chabrier, then mid-way through what would be a 38 year career as an officer of the International Monetary Fund. Though he would spend much of his time at the IMF dealing with the Middle East, at the time Chabrier was in charge of Indochina and provided some interesting perspective on the fragile state of the economy in the three all but prostrate Indochinese countries.

I wound up my Washington briefings in the afternoon with quite an extraordinary figure at the Indochina Resources Center. Perhaps the leading intellectual center of opposition to the Vietnam conflict, it was founded in 1971 to raise the level of discourse on anti-war issues from the chanting of street demonstrations to debates over the fundamentals at stake. My host was Ngo Cong Duc, a former leader of the Socialist opposition in South Vietnam’s National Assembly and editor of the Saigon daily Tin Sang.

The gist of our discussion was not much different from his remarks three years earlier at Paris’s Hotel Lutetia on fringe of the endless peace talks when he lamented to a press conference that the “political, economic and cultural life [of South Vietnam] is dominated by foreigners."

"American forces and the forces of the allies of the Americans, numbering close to 500,000 men, are engaged in round-the-clock massacres of our innocent compatriots,” Ngo observed. Of course, this was before the cease-fire and the US withdrawal. Still, he continued, “on the political level, with the Vietnamization of the war, the United States seeks only to uphold the militarists and prolong the war. The government of Mr. Nguyen Van Thieu is a dictatorial government, which persecutes all those who struggle for peace and independence and jails the innocent.” Our conversation was, of course, a total antithesis to the perspective I’d heard earlier in the week from Peter Rodman at the White House.

In the course of five days, I’d truly had a tour d’horizon of what awaited me on arrival in Southeast Asia set for just one month in the future. But the reality was impossible to convey in a series of meetings in offices and conference rooms in Washington—8,000 miles from the fields of battle—a war that seemed unlikely to end in anything but catastrophe. That much was quite clear to me, and in that I was hardly wrong. Still, I’d found myself largely detached from many of the powerful emotions that had gripped so much of our country—as polarizing an issue, then as Iraq and Afghanistan, the War on Terror, or Gaza and Ukraine would become today. My goal, if I had one, was simple—to chronicle what I would see and experience, report what I was told, separate truth from lies, shine a bit of a light on a story that I frankly believed most Americans would like to see disappear from the front pages sooner rather than later. And in that, I was far from wrong.

On Monday, I was back at my now daily Vietnamese lessons—total immersion, increasing panic setting in as the day of my departure grew ever closer. At the paper, I was beginning to make the obligatory final, farewell rounds. Assistant managing editor Seymour Topping took me to lunch on 43^rd Street at the venerable Century Club (where he would sponsor me for membership 35 years later).

He brought along his father-in-law, Chester Ronning, the distinguished Canadian diplomat and friend of China’s leaders from his days as ambassador in what was then called Peking.

Top had begun his career with the AP, then moving to The Times as a correspondent in Saigon back in 1959, just when American involvement was beginning. Our careers seemed to be a nice set of bookends. At 2:30, I took the elevator up to the quiet, wood-paneled precincts of the Editorial Board on the tenth floor of The Times building to spend a moment with John Oakes, venerable editor of the editorial pages and the publisher’s cousin. Oakes was a fascinating creature—architect of The Times determined opposition to the Vietnam War, but above all a devoted ecologist. He also understood that it was no business of the editor of the editorial pages to suggest in any fashion how a correspondent on the news staff should cover the news. So, our meeting was a brief one. By three o'clock, I was having my second plague vaccine in the medical office. And at six o’clock, following the regular page one meeting, Abe called me into his inner sanctum for a farewell drink.

One remark of his stuck with me through the rest of my career. “Your readers don’t care about you or how you got the story,” he said slowly and deliberately. “They care about the story. And if they don’t, you have to make them care.” I couldn’t agree more. The careers of all too many foreign correspondents had come a cropper over this very question of becoming the story rather than reporting it. Helas, in today’s world of celebrity journalism, that is too often observed in the breech.

The next week was my last in New York, kicked off by 15 minutes with the publisher—Arthur Ochs Sulzberger—the man who signed my paychecks and made it all possible. That was followed by Lew Jordan, the venerable desk editor who oversaw what was called the bullpen. The bullpen was officially the News Desk, and it ran the whole newspaper—or at least the news and feature pages, indeed everything but editorial and op-ed. It was, effectively, the means by which the senior editors, especially the executive editor, executed any actions.

In the bullpen, the phones are more modern, but not much else

At the same time, the bullpen was the keeper of the flame—writing and updating the Stylebook, which decreed what every nation in the world was called, how to spell the most arcane word or most obscure public figure. Would it be Khaddafi or Gadafi or Qaddafi; Al-Qaida or al-Qaeda? It was also the news desk that made up the front page, doled out the column inches to the various desks (the news budget) and made sure every deadline was met. And from all these moves it would set the tone, the text and the texture, indeed establish the very agenda across America and for much of the world. The Times “budget” or the placement of stories, which went out to subscriber newspapers on the Times News Service, would in turn affect editorial priorities and news judgment in subscriber papers around the globe.

And each day, every Times correspondent, no matter how remote his or her posting, would receive the “frontings.” We lived and breathed for that message from the news desk. It told us that our story had been received (often the only indication we’d have), where it was placed in the paper or whether it had been held, shorted (trimmed to a couple of brief paragraphs absent a byline) or fronted (made the front page). It would also tell us what happened to each of our foreign colleagues’ stories, often the first clue of what they’d been working on, and also what stories made the front page from every desk. It was our lifeline to the world, and our small, thin tether to New York, often thousands of miles and many time zones distant. In those days, the bullpen was run by Theodore Bernstein and his deputy, Lewis Jordan, who moved up to the top spot after Ted’s retirement. Ted and Lew pioneered The New York Times Stylebook, which Lew eventually handed off to Allan Siegal, along with management of the bullpen. So, I made especially nice to Lew, hoping that it might tilt the balance just a hair if my story was being considered for page one, or the lead or off-lead of the paper, and then had lunch with Al Siegel, at that time deputy foreign editor and destined for the bullpen eventually. Business editor John Lee spent a half hour with me on Wednesday, followed by lunch with Jimmy Greenfield whose shared cab in the rain had started me months before on this odyssey that would climax in Indochina in ten days. Dessert was a gamma globulin shot—my final jab before takeoff.

In evening, I had drinks with Francis Fitzgerald, one of the great chroniclers of our Vietnam experience. In 1972, Frankie had published a book Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, tracing the entire American trajectory in Vietnam. It won her both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She was an extraordinary reporter and writer, and certainly a model for any war correspondent off to cover a conflict as complex and dangerous as Vietnam.

Of equal interest to me, however, was her lineage—daughter of Desmond Fitzgerald and Marietta Tree. Fitzgerald had been deputy director of the CIA for operations, renowned for trying three times to engineer the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro—all unsuccessful.

Desmond and another wife, Loulou de la Falaise

Her mother, who split with Desmond later on, had a torrid love affair with the film director John Huston, then divorced Fitzgerald to marry British billionaire Ronald Tree, a close friend of Winston Churchill. They moved into Tree’s home, Ditchley Park outside of Oxford where, as it happened, I would much later spend quite an idyllic weekend.

Marietta & parasol

Frankie, a magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe the year before I arrived there, would eventually go off to Vietnam, spend time with the Viet Cong, much to the horror of her father and mother, then write her quite definitive book. She was an unabashed apologist for the Viet Cong, who had clearly won over her sympathies during her trips into the countryside. Marxism, even the Vietnamese brand, was not at odds with any local values, she contended, but really quite compatible with Confucianism and Buddhism, both central to the Vietnamese way of life. The Communist Party and National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), which she admired, were replacements for Buddha or the emperor as the source of wisdom and leadership. She acknowledged the atrocities that were committed but suggested that this was eclipsed by the behavior of the American-backed Saigon government. At any rate, our conversation was a window into what I was in for as the latest interpreter of events in that far-off land where America had such a deep stake. Some years later, Frankie would marry her one great love, Jim Sterba, my New York Times colleague.

It’s for one line that I will forever remember Sterba. One of my predecessors (and hero) in Southeast Asia, he was on a reporting trip deep in Central Java, the main island of Indonesia. He was driving along a dirt track between rice paddies. It was a stunning sunrise, so he asked his driver to stop the car, got out and looked out across this quiet, pristine vista, with the sky brightening to an astounding hue in the east. “Imagine,” he said to himself. “They’re paying me to do this.” Which about sums up the life I was about to embark on.

Two days later, at eight o’clock on Saturday evening February 16, 1975, I boarded a TWA airliner, headed to London, then Paris and beyond as a foreign correspondent.

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