by Sally Quinn
My mouth was dry, my heart pounding, my hands perspiring. It wasn’t that I was nervous about the job interview. I really didn’t have high expectations. Besides, I had the acting job in my pocket. It was Ben.
We probably spent half an hour together; a lot of it was in the form of a dance, a sort of competitive repartee. I was giving as good as I got. Neither one of us wanted to be bested. It was pretty cheeky of me, now that I think of it. After all, he was the editor of the paper and also twenty years my senior. I don’t know where I got the courage to go at him the way I did, but he clearly enjoyed it, encouraged it even, and it felt exactly right. (It still did forty-three years later, right up until a few days before he died, when I tried to get him to do something he didn’t want to do and he gave me the finger.)
“Can you show me something you’ve written?” he asked.
“I’ve never written anything in my life,” I replied.
“Nobody’s perfect,” he said. “You’re hired.”
Phil Geyelin later claimed he said that, but it’s not how Ben and I remembered it.
I started the next day. I covered my first party, the opening of an art gallery. I didn’t have a clue what to write. Frantic, I called Warren from my desk about nine P.M. and he told me, “Just pretend you’re calling your best friend on the phone and telling her about it. That’s what you always do anyway.” So I did. I wrote it as if I were talking it through in my own voice. It worked. Everyone seemed to like it. I was on a six-month tryout, but it was clear from the beginning that I had found my métier.
Without hesitation, I called the director and told him I couldn’t take the part. Talk about the road not taken. Maybe the gods were beginning to show me the way.
Chapter 11
I am a great admirer of mystery and magic. Look at this life—all mystery and magic.
—Harry Houdini
It was 1971. The Vietnam War was raging. I was raging. Warren was raging. It was all anyone could think of. Generations were divided. The Washington Post was in the early stages of turning around its editorial support of the war, but reporters were near unanimity in being vociferously against it. Nobody could believe that after the antiwar protests of ’68 and the years just after that, we were still fighting.
Ben had come around to being against the war, persuaded by his young reporters who were covering it. He went to Vietnam and saw the horror for himself. But so many of his friends had not. His then wife, Tony, and her friends were out on the streets demonstrating against it. All of us journalists couldn’t but wanted to.
The caskets and body bags kept returning. So many of my male friends were doing everything they could to get out of going. Some moved to Canada, some got married and had babies, some signed up for graduate school, some faked medical problems. One friend of mine, whose father was in the military, had gotten a low draft number and was called in for a physical. In warm weather he got heat rashes on his feet. The day before the exam his mother wrapped his feet in warm wet towels and changed them every few hours. His feet were so red and swollen that he couldn’t walk to the exam. He told them he couldn’t be in a warm humid environment. He didn’t get drafted.
I admired these friends who did what they did to get out of fighting the war. I also admired those friends I had who went to Vietnam. It was such a wrenching struggle for all of us but particularly for the guys. Those coming back from Vietnam were not recognized as war heroes and some were even demeaned for having been stupid enough to serve. None of us had faced such a grave moral crisis in our lives.
I was as conflicted as my friends—maybe even more so because I had been brought up in the military to be a total chauvinist for our country, believing in the flag and all that it stood for. My disillusionment, however, knew no bounds, not just in my country but in my father as well, at least for a while.
Daddy was appalled at these young men who refused to fight. He was far from willing to admit that the war was a criminal hoax that was devastating America. The whole thing was sickening.
Then, on April 22, 1971, John Kerry, a young, highly decorated navy officer, just returned from Vietnam with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts, testified about the war before Congress. It was electrifying and profoundly affected everyone I knew.
His testimony was so candid, so raw, so emotional, and so patently true that nobody could deny its authenticity. He talked about the atrocities perpetrated by American soldiers on Vietnamese civilians, the millions of men “who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history,” and said, “we cannot consider ourselves America’s best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.”
He spoke of the “attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, [ . . . ] the falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts,” and the insanity of losing two platoons trying to take a hill, only “to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese.”
His most famous line was the one that galvanized a large part of an entire generation. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
His closing was poignant. “And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say ‘Vietnam’ and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.”
That did it for Warren. He desperately wanted to be assigned to cover Vietnam but the New York Post wouldn’t send him. They had no foreign correspondents, and besides, Dorothy Schiff, known as Dolly, the paper’s owner, said he was slated for greater things. I certainly had no desire to cover the war. Very few women journalists were covering it at the time. Having lived through parts of two wars with my father and seen the results up close and personal in the hospital in Tokyo, I had no stomach for it and certainly no illusions about the romance of war.
Warren and I did, however, decide to go to Vietnam—on vacation. Both of us were so crazed about the war that even though we couldn’t cover it for our papers, we were writing about it from the periphery anyway and we wanted to see it firsthand. We went in October of 1971, starting out in Paris, then on to Turkey, India, Thailand, and finally to Vietnam.
On our flight into Saigon we ran into a friend, Frankie FitzGerald, who would later write Fire in the Lake, a seminal book about the war that won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. We were staying with Kevin Buckley, the Newsweek bureau chief, and Frankie joined us for dinner that first night. We went to the hangout of all the journalists, diplomats, and officers on leave, the Continental Hotel in the heart of the city. It was an old white French Colonial with a large romantic porch and ceiling fans slowly rotating above us. Slightly jet-lagged, we ate well, drank a lot of wine, and, lulled by the breeze, talked of nothing but the war. It was surreal. Only a few miles away people were fighting and dying—needlessly, it seemed to us. The three of us who had just arrived were emotional. Kevin, who had been living in the midst of the war for quite a while, was hardened and a bit cynical by then. To keep his sanity, we soon learned, he and all our journalist friends had managed to cloak themselves in some sort of defensive covering in order to do their jobs. They were supposed to be objective, which was difficult if not impossible since the war was becoming more and more morally obscene.
As it turned out, Kevin and Frankie fell in love with each other that night and ended up living together for years.
All the publications with bureaus had a researcher/driver/translator, and at Newsweek that was Cao Dao, a thin, wiry little man with a goatee who smoked incessantly. He was also whip-smart, cunning, and a seasoned operator. He was a fixer, the guy who could get you in anywhere, get you a meeting with anyone, find anything. He had street cred and nerves of steel. He was so
meone we were glad to have on our side.
After touring the city and talking to and interviewing as many people as we could, Warren and I decided we wanted to go out to the countryside where the fighting was going on. Kevin told us we were crazy, reminding us that the photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of movie star Errol Flynn, had disappeared in Cambodia with a colleague the year before and was never heard from again. This was not exactly a tourist destination, he pointed out, but Cao Dao said he would take us. I have to admit I had reservations but Warren was insistent and I figured Cao Dao wouldn’t have agreed if he thought it was truly dangerous. So off we went.
It was still humid and muggy, even in October, and we were dressed for the tropics. The drive out was relatively uneventful. We saw a few Vietnamese on their bikes and walking carrying bundles. We saw some standing huts and some that had been destroyed—the whole area looked just as it did in the newsreels. We stopped along the road, had a bite, and then headed back. Part of me was relieved, part slightly disappointed. We really hadn’t seen that much.
Then suddenly we heard a blast of gunfire, then another. Cao Dao shouted at us to get down on the floor of the car, a command we immediately followed. Before we knew it we were in the middle of some sort of firefight. Whoever was shooting didn’t seem to be aiming at us, but they were shooting at something awfully close. Cao Dao put his foot on the gas and began going what must have been a hundred miles an hour as the bullets continued to fly. He was zigzagging the car so as to avoid being the target. It seemed like hours that we lurched along the bumpy road, fully expecting to be killed at any moment. I think I was in too much shock to be scared. Neither Warren nor I said a word. Finally the noise began to subside in the distance, and Cao Dao slowed down. We were on the outskirts of the city, and at last we were safe.
Once we got back to Saigon we thanked him profusely and apologized for putting him at risk. He didn’t say anything. He just lit a cigarette, gave us a little bow, and walked away. What a cool customer. We learned later that he had been unable to get out of Saigon when the Americans left and was killed shortly afterward.
All I remember thinking about at the time were John Kerry’s words about the men who were “given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.”
We could have died as well for nothing. How stupid we were. Yet that experience was seminal for me. In a way that trip was as intense and traumatic as my stay in the hospital in Tokyo. We didn’t see anyone die. We didn’t get hurt. It was only an hour or so that we experienced the firefight. However, in Tokyo I had not really focused on the moral implications of war. I was concerned for my father, for my own health, for the welfare of the soldiers and the other patients, and missing my mother terribly. Here in Vietnam, it was so much larger than my childhood world.
The few weeks beginning in the middle of June of 1971 when the Pentagon Papers—published first by the New York Times, and a couple of days later by the Washington Post—burst onto the scene were dramatic and exciting. Of course I had been caught up in the hoopla in the newsroom. The entire place was electrified by the story—and by the threat it posed to freedom of the press. The top editors and reporters were also transfixed for a time until Kay Graham, president and publisher of the Post, with Ben’s urging, gave the go-ahead to print, defying court orders and risking the financial future of her company, which was on the verge of going public that very week. Everyone in the newsroom was in favor of publishing despite the risks. We devoured the reporting in the newspapers and all over television. It was especially interesting to think back on what we’d heard and read while we were in Vietnam on our “vacation” just a few months later. We were well aware that many people—policy-makers and journalists and private citizens alike—had come to the conclusion that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
I had not studied religion and had never heard of the Augustinian theory of a just war, though certainly Vietnam did not qualify. I didn’t pray when we were being fired upon. It didn’t occur to me. I didn’t pray for those who were being killed or wounded on either side. I was not, nor am I now, a pacifist.
Instead, what I came away with was a revulsion for the Washington power center, for those who had gotten us into what I concluded was this hateful war and then were too cowardly to admit they were wrong and got us in even deeper to protect their own reputations. They lied to the American people, and they lied—in the most cynical way—to those who were fighting. They seemed not to care and tried to make us all believe that we were fighting for freedom and for the good of our country. It’s not that I hadn’t known this already. Somehow I hadn’t wanted to admit it. The reality of it was too painful to accept. After all, I had met quite a few of the people who were responsible. I didn’t view them (or at least all of them) as evil, but I was convinced that what they did was evil. That experience changed me as a reporter and as a person. As a reporter, it expanded my world, enhancing my perceptions and observations and adding to my questions. As a person, it focused my attention on the importance of morality in politics and in my life. How to live became much more of a factor in my thinking, more than it ever had before.
Chapter 12
Do not become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.
—Ivan Pavlov
From Vietnam, Warren went back to the States and I went to Iran where I had been assigned to cover the shah of Iran’s two-thousand-five-hundredth anniversary celebration of the Persian Empire in the desert surrounding the city of Shiraz. This was my first foreign assignment and I was terribly excited. I arrived in Tehran for a few days of reporting on my way to Shiraz. It was a whirlwind of intrigue, fascination, and fear. I had done enough research to know that the people of Iran were not all that thrilled about the biggest party ever held.
The shah, in an attempt to put himself on the power map, had invited every head of state, king, queen, emperor and empress, prince and princess on the planet. He had built an enormous tent city on the sands outside of Shiraz and imported everything from France—and I mean everything, down to the eggs, the butter, and the false eyelashes for the female guests. It was costing a fortune while people were starving and the shah and his wife were living like, well, kings and queens, which they were. There was a lot of underground dissent. Nobody dared complain openly for fear of being tortured by the dreaded Savak, the shah’s secret service.
My friend Ardeshir Zahedi, who had been the Iranian ambassador to the United States and foreign minister—he was divorced from the shah’s daughter but was still on the best of terms with him—had set me up with an interview with the empress, or shahbanou, Farah Diba Pahlavi, which was a major coup. He had also introduced me to a government official who had invited me to his house for dinner with his family.
Meanwhile I had met a number of journalists, both American and Iranian. I had learned early on that no matter where you go, you want to hook up with the journalists first because they are always in the know. That’s still true to this day. My first big shock was trying to take a male photographer friend, also covering the celebration, to my room at the hotel so we could have a drink. There was no bar. The all-male desk staff went crazy, and there was a terrible screaming match in the lobby as they at first refused to allow him to accompany me because I was a woman. When I prevailed—I simply refused to stand down—they began yelling at me, calling me a whore and other things I didn’t understand but had a pretty good idea of.
The following night I had been invited by a group of Iranian journalists to a secret meeting. If I really wanted to know what was going on in Iran, I was told, I should go, but I had to agree to be blindfolded. It was risky, but I was too curious to refuse.
Once at the meeting I was shocked at what I heard. These people were not just dissidents, they were revolutionaries, and they wanted to overthrow the shah. The celebration, they said, was what had pushed them over the edge. Aside from the shah, one of the things they were most afraid of was the surge in militant Islam. The Islamists
were outraged at the shah’s flaunting of his secular views and his rejection of their fundamentalist Islamic faith. These dissidents or revolutionaries were terrified that if they didn’t try to oust the shah, the Islamists would and they would have an even more repressive state than they already did. This could become a religious war, they said, and Iran could become a theocracy. I was shaken by this information.
The next day one of our foreign correspondents from the Post, a friend, showed up in Tehran. I breathlessly told him what had happened. He suggested, somewhat patronizingly I felt, that I stick to party coverage and he would take care of the foreign coverage. However, I remained haunted for a long time by that conversation at the secret meeting.
The following evening I was picked up by the personal driver of the government official whom Ardeshir had introduced me to and I was taken to an expansive and wildly overdecorated house in the suburbs of Tehran overlooking the mountains. When I arrived, I found that the man was there without his family. He explained that his wife had taken the children to the Black Sea for the weekend. I began to feel very uncomfortable.
He offered me a glass of champagne, which I accepted as I talked a lot about “my dear friend Ardeshir,” as a way to ward him off. I refused a second glass and we went to the table. One lone servant, very discreet, was there to see to us. It was clear this person knew the drill. The man was beginning to leer and make suggestive remarks. I tried to bring up the subject of a revolution, but he dismissed it out of hand. It was clear he had no interest in discussing politics with me. I was beginning to think that maybe I should leave.