From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: When we first arrived, I was frankly less concerned about the grand goings-on of government than I was about the everyday business of finding a house for us to live in and schools for the kids. We were lucky on the house front, we found one quickly, but our stuff took a good while to get to Greece, so we lived in this rather cramped apartment hotel. That was a challenge. I did do one smart thing—airfreight about four boxes of toys so the kids had things to play with. In Greece, parks and playgrounds are closed during siesta and I had to keep the children quiet because people were sleeping. I kept suggesting that they might sleep, too, but they didn’t see siesta as a charming Mediterranean custom, they saw those afternoon hours in bed as nap time for babies.

  SR: But even the toys were a hassle. When I went to customs to collect them, the young guy who was checking the boxes was fascinated. Greece didn’t have anything like these fancy American toys, and he kept playing with them. Finally, I gave him a plastic helicopter and said, “Here, take it.” It was the closest I had ever come to bribing someone.

  The kids adapted very well. They never learned a lot of Greek because they both were in English-speaking schools, but they did learn one critical Greek phrase, exi biscota, parakalo, which means “six cookies, please.” There was a bakery at the corner, and they could walk there with their drachmas in hand and buy cookies. For children who had been driven everywhere they ever went, they loved being able to do things on their own like that.

  CR: That first spring, right after we arrived, we went down to Corinth and the kids were climbing around the ruins. Archaeological sites make wonderful playgrounds for kids, because they can run until they tire out. It’s not like a museum, where they have to behave and be quiet. The back of the site at Corinth had clearly been a row of shops, and the children set up imaginary stores there while we toured the site with the guidebook. When we came back to the kids, we found Becca hawking her wares. “What is your shop, Rebecca?” “It’s a statue shop.” “And what are you selling?” “I’m selling statues from Corinth, Delphi, and Santa Monica!” That was the known world of Rebecca Roberts!

  SR: One of the first friends we made in Athens was the real estate agent who helped us find the house. We didn’t know that it was across the street from where George Papadopoulos, the colonel who had run the military junta, had lived for seven years. The whole street had been closed off during his reign, but he had just been deposed in a coup, by another group of colonels, which is why the house had come on the market.

  CR: There was still a little guardhouse across the street, which was great because it was so safe.

  SR: The stories were that Papadopoulos had used our house for his family, or maybe for his mistress. We were never quite sure. The kids found in one of the drawers a set of hair curlers, and they kept waving them around saying, “We have Mrs. Papadopoulos’s curlers!”

  One of our first evenings in Athens our real estate agent invited us out to dinner at a Greek taverna. We came to love tavernas. Talk about family values. They were these wonderful, informal spots, often with gardens, even in the middle of the city. It was a perfect place to eat with young children—they could run around and not bother anybody. We usually asked for five chairs for the four of us because Becca would often conk out in the middle of the meal, stretch out across two chairs, and go to sleep. During our first taverna experience, our agent served us a goat from his home island. One of the things we learned quickly was that all Greeks were very proud of their origins. Their village or their island had the best—the best olives, the best wine, the best tomatoes, whatever. The agent was very proud of the goat, and I innocently asked him how he had managed to get it from his home island to Athens. “On a leash,” he replied. I had a mental picture of this smiling little goat, walking onto the ferry, headed for slaughter in Athens! It dimmed the pleasure of the meal a bit.

  CR: We had had a Seder with our California friends a month early, but now it really was Passover, so we celebrated with a little ceremony in our apartment hotel, just the four of us. There was a synagogue in Athens, old and very traditional. I asked Steven to go down to the synagogue and see if there were stores in the neighborhood selling matzoh. I told him to get some pita bread if he couldn’t find matzoh, because at least it’s unleavened bread and in a pinch we could substitute it for matzoh. Steven came home with a piece of cheesecake! I said, “What is this? We’re having a Seder with a piece of cheesecake?” And Steve answered, “Well, it’s Jewish.”

  SR: Hey, you have to be ready to adapt to new cultures.

  CR: After about three months things were settling down. The kids were in school, we had moved into our house, and we already had guests, a couple from New York who had been friends from Washington days. I was thinking about sending a cable to CBS saying I was ready to do some work, could they use me?

  SR: We were sitting in the house on a Monday morning, talking with our friends, and the Telex—sort of a private telegraph machine—rang upstairs. The message: “Assume you know. Coup in Cyprus. Makarios presumed dead.” I didn’t know. So I quickly called the Reuters office and learned that a group of right-wingers associated with the military government in Athens had overthrown Makarios, who was both the archbishop and the president of Cyprus. Immediately the airport in Nicosia closed down, so no reporters could get onto the island. Over the next few days dozens of reporters from all over the world gathered in Athens, eager to fly to Cyprus as soon as possible. Finally, we got a call on Thursday that the airport was opening and a flight was leaving immediately.

  So I raced to the airport and found myself in the departure lounge surrounded by all these war correspondents wearing fancy bush jackets and safari suits. They all seemed to know each other, and they kept saying things like, “Hey, remember that day in the Golan Heights?” I was sitting there in a drip-dry sports shirt, watching these guys and saying to myself, “I can’t cover this war. I can’t even dress right for this war.” But I had actually been to Cyprus once, a few weeks before. During that period when the airport was closed, I’d written a long background piece on the politics of Cyprus, which ran that morning on the front page of the International Herald Tribune. I got on the plane still feeling very shaky about my role when I noticed that all these self-important war correspondent types were tearing my story out of the Tribune and stuffing it into one of the many pockets of their bush jackets. Then I realized: “I may not have the right clothes, but at least I know where this island is, and most of you don’t!”

  The first two days were very calm. I went over to the Turkish sector for dinner with two other New York Times correspondents who had flown in from Israel and Lebanon. But at five o’clock Saturday morning I was rudely rousted out of bed by machine-gun fire. I dashed to the window of the hotel, which was right on the border between the Greek and Turkish sectors, and Turkish paratroopers were dropping out of the sky. The Greeks had machine guns on the roof and were firing down into the Turkish sector. Shortly after I was woken up by gunfire in Cyprus, Cokie was woken up by a phone call in Athens.

  CR: It was CBS telling me the Turks had invaded Cyprus. I cried, “Oh, my God. Steve’s there.” The person on the phone said huffily, “Well, we have correspondents there as well.” He thought I was being competitive on Steve’s behalf, not that I was worried about my husband. Then he asked me to file a radio spot.

  SR: The main CBS stringer in Athens was in Cyprus with me. They didn’t have anybody but Cokie.

  CR: I had not heard from CBS since my visit in New York, but now they wanted Greek reaction to the invasion and they had my phone number, so the folks there thought it was worth trying me. I had never filed a radio spot in my life. It was very early in the morning, so there wasn’t anything going on, what was I going to do? I didn’t know anybody. I woke up the live-in baby-sitter, a young Canadian woman who was in Greece for the summer, and told her I was leaving to do a radio report. I drove by the Greek Pentagon—which was right near our house—no action there. Then I went to the Reuters offi
ce, where the bureau chief, Neocosmos Tzallas, a good friend of ours, was already working. Fortunately, Neo had an old friend, an opposition politician named Averoff—he later became defense minister—and Averoff was able to find out what was happening and fill us in, so I was able to file a spot. From there on out I was filing every hour, but at times the whole country’s communication system broke down and I couldn’t get a phone line out of Athens. The father of one of Lee’s friends was duty officer at the American embassy one night and tipped me off that they had agreed on a cease-fire in Cyprus. I had a world beat but I couldn’t get the story out. Our borders were closed. Banks were closed. It was chaos. And I didn’t know where Steven was. For a little while I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, until the Times got word to me that he was safe. Meanwhile I was filing constantly. The events in Cyprus triggered a reaction in Greece, and the civilian politicians started moving against the military junta. I’d been working twenty hours straight for days, which was fine because I was so scared about Steve, and it was all very exhilarating. But the baby-sitter was getting pretty tired. On her birthday, I promised I’d be home for dinner and we’d cook some steaks and have a nice party. I got in the cab to go back home from the Reuters office and all of a sudden it was like Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve all at once. In all the cars, people honked their horns, and on the street everyone was shouting and jumping up and down. Just then the radio in the cab announced that the junta had fallen! I hopped out right at the Presidential Palace, where the civilian leaders were meeting, and turned on my tape recorder to capture all the sound. Flower stalls line one whole side of the building. I ran into one stall and commandeered the guy’s telephone. Without so much as a by-your-leave, I took the phone apart and stuck these little alligator clips into the receiver, which is the way you filed from a tape recorder in those years, and produced a spot. The flower-stall owner was screaming at me, convinced I was with the CIA, taking his phone apart. I calmed him down and bought some flowers. It was an incredibly exciting moment.

  SR: That night CBS called Cokie’s mother and asked, “Do you have a picture of your daughter?” Lindy was alarmed. “Why? Is something wrong?” And CBS said, no, but her radio report is the only news we have out of Greece; we want to play it as the lead of the TV news and we want to run her picture along with it. So just days after Cokie started working for CBS, she led the Walter Cronkite show. Not a bad beginning.

  CR: All of this time, which seemed forever but was in fact about a week, Steven and I hadn’t been able to talk to each other, and usually, no matter where we are, we talk at least once a day. It was the longest period of our lives that we were out of touch—even now, twenty-five years later, it’s still the record. It was just terrifying. I didn’t know what his situation was. My own situation was pretty scary. It was hard for me to get money to buy food. The banks were closed and credit cards didn’t exist. Fortunately, the kids thought it was pretty neat, with all these tanks in the street.

  SR: I wasn’t able to talk to Cokie because I went to the British base in the south of the island, hoping for better communications. But there were about twenty or thirty reporters and only one phone line we could use, so whenever it was my turn, I’d call my office in London to try to dictate a story.

  CR: At one point the Times called your father to tell him you were okay, and he said, “I didn’t raise my son to be a war correspondent!”

  SR: I agreed with him. And anyway, the new civilian government in Greece was an even bigger story, so after about a week I was able to hop a British air force flight to London, and get back to Athens the next day. I had left behind a wife who was obviously a very accomplished woman but didn’t know squat about being a radio reporter. I returned home to find out that she had been filing constantly for a week and was now a veteran foreign correspondent. It was one of the more bizarre moments in our marriage. Friends in California tell tales of driving along, listening to the CBS all-news station, hearing Cokie’s voice from the radio and practically driving off of the freeway. I wasn’t the only one surprised.

  CR: That week established me with CBS, and later that year the foreign editor came to Greece and said that they were interested in hiring me as their woman in Europe. There was just no way on earth I could do that. Steve was away all the time, I’d be away all the time. Talk about unfair to your children! But it was fine to say no to that. It was flattering, but it would have been wrong. We were able to spend a lot of time traveling together, often with the kids. And The New York Times was beginning to understand that the spouses of their correspondents were important to the whole operation. So they agreed to pay my way occasionally when I traveled with Steven, and that helped a lot.

  SR: When Cokie traveled with me, she’d often call CBS and offer to work. At one point we went to Italy during an election campaign, and when she called New York they said, “Thank God you’re there. Our radio correspondent has just been taken to the hospital.” Cokie wound up covering the whole Italian election for CBS radio. It posed a bit of a problem for me because my editor used to drive into New York listening to CBS and I would propose all these stories and more than once he’d say, “I already heard that story on CBS from Cokie.” What he probably didn’t realize was that he was also paying for her to scoop me.

  Even though Cokie wasn’t working anywhere near full-time, having her own press card, her own identity, was very important in those years. She had legitimacy in the international press corps and with government ministers, and had access to press conferences and briefings. She had an independent role beyond foreign correspondent’s wife. Secondly, I think it meant that she could absorb and process the experience in a very different way. Everything became grist for a possible story.

  CR: I started doing freelance pieces for little magazines, and then we wrote some travel pieces together for The New York Times and a big Sunday magazine piece. Like Steven, I was able to write on a variety of topics and I enjoyed putting together different stories for different publications, plus the radio and occasional TV work when news broke.

  SR: We had both become interested in how modern archaeologists were proving that many of the ancient myths had a basis in fact. The magazine article focused on an excavation on the island of Santorini, in the middle of the Aegean. A village had been sealed in by a volcanic explosion, just like Pompeii, except this was from the Bronze Age, 1200 B.C., more than a thousand years before Pompeii. The site had been discovered accidentally by a shepherd and it was in the early stages of excavation. So we went to the island with the kids and the baby-sitter and left them together one morning at the little villa we had rented. Cokie and I spent this absolutely fascinating morning going through the dig with the caretaker explaining it all to us, and I became convinced the explosion on Santorini had led to the myth of Atlantis.

  CR: The caretaker’s grandfather was the shepherd who had first stumbled on the find and this was the family property.

  SR: Normally, in any ancient site the walls are at most three feet high, but here was a Bronze Age city with ruins preserved to the second story. In fact, they had discovered a bench on the second floor with a hole in it. The archaeologists had originally proclaimed that this must be a shrine; that’s what they always said when they couldn’t explain something. Then they discovered the network of pipes leading from the hole and realized it was indoor second-floor plumbing more than three thousand years old. Some of the houses in the surrounding village didn’t have such luxuries. Then we went to a late lunch, Greek style.

  CR: We went to this little teeny beach which had maybe three buildings on it. We had hired a cab for the day, and we asked the driver to recommend a taverna. He said, “That one on the end, the guy who runs it is also the fisherman.” The place had at most two tables, and a little lettuce garden out back. Santorini is famous for its wine because the volcanic soil produces delicious grapes; tomatoes, too. The fisherman showed us his fresh-from-the-sea catch and we picked out a couple of fish. Then he and his wife brought
our rickety little table right out to the water. While we were waiting for the fish to cook we ate the fresh-picked lettuce, with some cheese and wine. Then on came this unbelievably fresh fish, grilled perfectly, and Steve looked at me and exulted: “We’re on assignment for The New York Times! We’re getting paid to do this!” That was maybe the single best moment of our entire stay in Greece. It doesn’t get any better than that.

  As Steve says, working was important for my identity and sanity, but it also helped to keep my hand in professionally so that when I did come home, I had clips to show, and broadcasts to bolster my résumé. But I also wanted time to be a mother and volunteer in the community. I was PTA president one year and very involved with the school. I remember setting up a spook house for the elementary school at Halloween, and it wasn’t easy. This wasn’t a country where I could run down to the local hardware store and buy fluorescent paint. After I finally found the paint through some theater group, I prevailed upon an appliance store to give me a huge refrigerator box. I got inside the box and painted all these spiders and eyes. I am the world’s worst artist, but I was the only one willing to do it. Turns out the rest of the mothers were wise to steer clear because that fluorescent paint is poison!