Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  Unfortunately, the Gotliebs’ and Canada’s star fell abruptly a few years later with a notorious incident on an evening in 1986, when the Gotliebs were hosting Prime Minister Mulroney and Vice-President Bush. The ambassador and his wife were under great stress to get it right at an event that could set the tone for the leaders’ future working relationship. But there was a laughable error. To accommodate so many guests, the hosts had to cover the swimming pool with temporary flooring and fill the space with dining tables. I noticed after an hour or so that my feet were getting wet; someone had neglected to shut down the pool’s running water. Then the vice-president was late in arriving, holding up the proceedings.

  Apparently the pressure was too much for Sondra. For reasons that are not clear even today, she slugged the embassy social secretary, a well-known, elegant woman named Connie Conners. It was no gentle tap: Connie was knocked off balance and broke an earring. Such an episode might have gone unreported, but it happened on the front steps of the embassy in full view of a Canadian Press reporter, Julie O’Neill. It fell to my former Ottawa colleague Bruce Phillips, recently appointed as the embassy’s communications director, to offer excuses for Sondra’s behaviour. Although O’Neill had witnessed the whole fracas, her desk would not use the story. It ran the next day in the Washington Post.

  Connie Conners could have sued for assault. A woman lawyer she and I both knew advised her to do so, but in true diplomatic style, Connie accepted an apology from Sondra and left it at that. It was rumoured that Sondra had also bowled over a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily the same night. I knew Sondra to be a charming person who could become overexcited, and well remember chatting with her one evening over a drink when she suddenly turned and ran hard, right into a wall. Colourful behaviour made for a high profile, but Sondra’s position as one of the city’s foremost hostesses was forever lost. Washington society, where servants were called “assistants,” could not tolerate bad manners and certainly not in public.

  Nonetheless Allan Gotlieb continued to be one of the best-connected and influential ambassadors on the diplomatic circuit. The relationships he forged helped smooth the negotiation of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that came into effect in 1989. He also broke new ground by conducting an active lobbying effort with the politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives. This is common practice today, but he was among the first diplomats to use his credentials for access to more than the executive mansion.

  When foreign reporters speak of covering the White House, it is understood that they are really talking about covering America, with all its magnificence, madness, and contradictions. The United States is really many nations bound together by myths, most of its citizens knowing as little about each other as they do about, say, Canada. As reporters, we dealt with an elite, a veneer on the population. Getting out of the capital and meeting Americans on their home ground was always rewarding and enlightening. The more I travelled the Union, the more my affection grew for this most complex and idiosyncratic of nations.

  One such working trip changed my life. It was 1985 and I was in Florida covering the devastation of Hurricane Gloria. My cameraman and I were travelling fast and light, transmitting our material, including stand-ups and whatever interviews and video we shot, in bits and pieces to Toronto. There, it was sewn into a single coherent news item. The message I got back was that the young woman assigned to do this assembly and editing work was producing good stories for us. She was also pleasantly unflappable during our sometimes-frantic calls. Who was she?

  I called on my friend Sandie Rinaldo for a bit of intelligence. The young woman’s name was Anne-Marie Bergeron and she was in her late twenties. Sandie reported that she was blonde and the most beautiful woman in the CTV building. Whenever she stretched across the news desk to toss or retrieve copy, every man in the room stopped in his tracks to watch. Sandie also informed me that Anne-Marie was spending a lot of time with a senior writer on the desk, although whether or not the relationship was a romantic one was unknown. All this was enough to convince me that at the very least I could invite this colleague for a business lunch next time I was in the city, as thanks for her work on our stories. I was bowled over when we met a few weeks later. She was smart, cool, and reserved, clearly not someone who would cling.

  My pattern with women was well established by this time. I had no problem with physical intimacy, but emotional commitment was a different matter. As soon as a relationship ripened into a demand for closeness, the inner voice told me to run. Childhood memory taught that love was about hurt and abandonment and it was preferable to choose companions who would not want to stick around. I was a loner who fooled the world into believing otherwise and was not yet prepared to confront the deception myself.

  Not long before the Florida assignment, though, there occurred something like a Road-to-Damascus experience. My travels in Central America had taken me away from Washington for a month. I had been back barely long enough to do laundry and check in with friends before Don Cameron sent me down to South America. Another month flew by. Home again, I did not unpack before calling a woman from the World Bank I had been seeing. She had clearly moved on. “What about the Argentinian sweater I brought for you?” I inquired.

  “Leave it at the front desk at the bank,” she said.

  I sat down before a tall stack of unopened mail and unexpectedly burst into tears. It was not that I felt sad to be dumped; the truth was, I didn’t care one way or another about her. It was the disconnectedness of my life that suddenly became clear. My glamorous, well-paid existence was an accident of circumstance, it seemed. Apart from meeting that day’s deadline, I was without goals or objectives, living a haphazard life.

  I liked who I was, but not what I was becoming. I had always believed that we create our own lives and that nothing prevents us from re-creating them at any point. Every person makes the choices that drag her into the abyss, as my mother was doing, or raises her to the heights. I saw that my determination never to put myself in a position of dependence on another person had cost me the achievement of real happiness.

  Looking back, I believe that was the moment when I won the upper hand over the inner nuisance. He was not entirely vanquished and for some time after still insisted he knew my best interests. But I was starting to regard him as a false prophet.

  After meeting Anne-Marie Bergeron, I thought it wise to have a conversation with the colleague who was dating her. No profit for anyone if I was interfering where I was unwanted. The two suitors held what amounted to a negotiation about the way ahead. Anne-Marie would make her own choices, but I wanted to know from my colleague whether I would cause offence if I pursued my interest in her. Not in the least, he assured me, adding that I was not the kind of man who would appeal to her in any case. We parted on the friendliest of terms, as we always had.

  Anne-Marie moved to Halifax as the network producer covering the Maritimes, but we kept up a long-distance friendship. Whenever I felt the old urge to flee, she pulled me back. She was not someone who could allow herself to retreat from commitments. In 1986, and on her thirtieth birthday, we got engaged in a grass hut in Bora-Bora. By then her other swain had become so distraught and angry he’d quit the network. How different my life would have been had he been honest in his initial reaction.

  When I told Mom, she did not respond with the joy I’d hoped for. She had always preferred my first wife over any girlfriend I introduced her to, as if each were somehow responsible for the breakup of my marriage. When she came to Washington with her sister for a visit, I made sure not to raise the topic, though it would likely not have made much difference. From the time she and Aunt Mary arrived, Mom was distracted and anxious in the great city. The two of them went for a walk one evening and got caught in one of those hot summer downpours that clear the air and then pass over quickly. Mary returned to the apartment alone, telling me Mom needed help outside. I found her lying in the gutter, rolling in the gushing rainwater and laughing, serio
usly drunk. That night I asked her what the hell she was after. She answered with a single, haunting word, “Oblivion.”

  Reagan will be remembered as the president who escalated and then ended the Cold War, the ideological conflict that had held the world hostage for four decades. In the early eighties, he condemned the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and supported anti-Communist movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Alongside vastly increased military spending, he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, the infamous Star Wars project that was meant to create a defence shield for the United States against nuclear missiles.

  The Soviet Union could not keep pace with this arms race and its economy was quietly stagnating when Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the leadership in 1985. As Trudeau had done years before, Reagan at last recognized that with a fresh generation of leaders at the helm of the USSR, diplomacy might have a role after all. He decided to try for significant arms reduction agreements.

  I travelled with the White House press corps to the four historic U.S.-Soviet summit meetings between 1985 and 1988. At the first meeting, in Geneva, Switzerland, Reagan and Gorbachev broke the ice by recalling the cold in Canada. In spite of the chilly morning in the Swiss city, they agreed this was nothing compared with the frigid greetings they experienced on their first visits to Ottawa years before, when Reagan was on the speaking circuit and Gorby was the visiting Soviet agriculture minister. (I was still in the Prairies during his tour of western farms and, like everyone else, was surprised at this Communist’s easygoing manner.)

  The American intelligence agencies told Reagan, erroneously, that the Soviet economy was strong and sustainable. The foreign policy experts warned that he was being drawn into a trap. But Reagan believed Gorbachev was a departure from previous Soviet dictators, those dull and entrenched apparatchiks who kept dying every time he attempted to schedule a meeting with them. Reagan also believed that the commandstyle economy and incompetent bureaucracy were not delivering the goods to the USSR’s citizens or even maintaining its military strength. He was convinced the structure was crumbling, and he decided to test his theory.

  Star Wars was questionable, both technologically and financially, but to match it would break the bank of the Soviet economy. That drew the Soviets into negotiations about arms control with the bottom-line demand that no progress could be made unless Reagan dropped his scheme. By January 1986, in the face of Reagan’s stubborn refusal to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev was begging Reagan to soften his stance. In an open letter to Reagan, Gorbachev promised unprecedented reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal if only Reagan would shut down Star Wars. The pressure on Reagan to do so came to a head at their meeting on a miserable, wet, and cold day in Reykjavik, Iceland, in mid-October 1986.

  This was the big league and we all knew the game was down to its final innings. It was breathtaking to realize I was present and reporting on an event that could change the world—literally watching history on the run.

  Both countries brought large delegations, but the actual face-to-face meeting took place in a small government building with most of the military and diplomatic experts waiting anxiously in rooms nearby. Those of us in the White House travelling press corps were staying at neighbouring hotels and set up our recording and editing equipment in airport hangars. The Americans had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to floodlight the historic city centre just so their anchors would have an appropriate backdrop.

  I had one run-in with Icelandic culture that could have caused me great embarrassment. The local welcoming committee had invited the correspondents to discover the delights of one of their sauna clubs. Naked as the day of our birth, we sweated through the bathhouse, whipped our backs with birch boughs, and learned that the obligatory next step was a run outdoors and down a wooden boardwalk to a bracing dip in the snow-covered ocean.

  A brave reporter headed out the door so I followed but was too far along when I noticed that local news photographers were snapping pictures of the scene. There was no intention to cause us discomfort; they simply wanted to capture their Washington guests enjoying a bit of Icelandic hospitality. Clearly, these Nordic nature lovers did not share our North American horror of public nudity. Next morning the front page of the local daily paper carried a picture of the naked behinds of two reporters dashing from bathhouse to ocean. One of them was mine, and I was thankful the paper had spared readers a frontal view.

  Whatever merriment this brought to the delegations, there was serious business going on and anticipation of a historic breakthrough, possibly a pledge to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But the talks foundered on Reagan’s insistence that Star Wars testing be allowed to continue. The summit broke up in anger and accusations of bad faith.

  For some reason of logistics I flew back to Washington on Air Force Two, normally used by the official delegation of negotiators, senior White House officials, and the American journalists. The mood was grim. It was easy to believe that a singular opportunity had slipped from our grasp and that the world was heading back into the darkest days of the Cold War. One adviser muttered that they had warned the president all along that this was a Soviet set-up. Another described how Reagan was visibly angry when he threw Gorbachev’s ultimatum back in his face. The recriminations included one presidential aide complaining bitterly that Star Wars was a nutty idea that his government should be able to jettison. They could not do so because “the old man” could not face the humiliation of killing it in exchange for Gorbachev’s stunning arms reduction offer.

  But the voice of one experienced Cold Warrior stood out for me. The Soviet offer had not gone down a black hole, he insisted. Informal talks with his Soviet counterparts had convinced him the country’s economy was in dire trouble. It was in their interest to return to the bargaining table.

  Just over a year passed before Gorbachev returned. There was no mention of Star Wars in his request for another summit, this one held in early December 1987. Gorby dropped the demand that had been the stopper. Reagan’s stubbornness had paid off. Under the terms of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) signed at this meeting, Star Wars was sidestepped and the two men agreed on massive reductions in nuclear weapons. For those who have not lived under the threat of nuclear war, the significance of that deal may be difficult to grasp. The warmth of the personal relationship between the two leaders, with its promise of broader conversations to come, shone rare a light of hope on the world. It led straight to the fall of the Berlin Wall, another unwelcome Cold War relic, and—to Reagan’s considerable satisfaction—to the breakup of the Soviet Union once headed by his friend Gorbachev.

  In the economic realm, Reagan’s record is more controversial. His spending resulted in the largest budgetary deficits in American history up to that time. He cut taxes by an astonishing 30 percent on the promise that the wealth would “trickle down,” a theory that has been largely discredited. The economic policy was essentially unfair, rewarding the rich at the expense of low-income and particularly black citizens. Strangely, Reagan seemed insensitive to this.

  Despite fears he would be a dangerous right-wing zealot, Reagan governed as a moderate conservative. After five disappointing presidencies in a row, he restored the prestige and authority of that enormously important office. He also gave back to Americans their pride and self-respect. Reagan refused to accept the concept of an America in decline, a view widely held by the intellectual class at the time. If he was ever pessimistic, he never showed it through that endlessly cheerful demeanour.

  I went to the White House press room to watch Reagan’s goodbye speech to the nation in January 1989. The “great communicator” was never better. He told Americans he had only provided the voice for the ideas of a great nation. He stole that line from Winston Churchill, but who knew or cared. His closing lines were perfect. “We made a difference … All in all, not bad, not bad at all.” It was corny, certainly, but then so was he.

  6

  THE VULTURE BRIGADES<
br />
  The life of the war correspondent is a disorienting, gypsy existence. A strange exhilaration takes hold, a fascination with the morbid. Life on the road seems more real than life back home. Situations that should be frightening become routine, leading to the easy embrace of ever-greater risks. Confusion and chaos are eagerly anticipated aspects of the job. Then one morning, if you are lucky, you wake up with the certain, sickly knowledge that if you keep pursuing death, it will catch you.

  My foreign adventures were the dirty conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the tidy and relatively uneventful U.S. invasion of Panama, and a generally benign tour of duty in Argentina, where the greatest threat most of us faced was a bad bottle of Chilean wine. To report from Washington in those years was to report from these Central and South American hot spots, all targets of the Reagan administration’s aggressive attention. I became a part-time member of the international vulture brigades, that club of broadcast and newspaper correspondents who specialize in wars and revolutions.

  These men and women are a breed apart. Many have been killed or seriously injured, and among those who do survive, marriages seldom last. It is a business for the young, kids fresh out of journalism school who pick up a videocam and set out to make their reputations. But so too are there greybeards, reporters and cameramen who have become hooked on the action. I have seen war photographers, in particular, perform courageous acts to get their footage, and then drink the night away. The fearless BBC correspondent Martin Bell was proud of telling me he had covered twelve wars without a scratch. Eventually he too was wounded—in Bosnia.

  The brush wars in Central America were particularly risky for reporters because we operated on our own. We did not travel under the protection of large armies. There were no medics or field hospitals to minister to our occasional wounded. Nor were there any “friendlies.” Government troops and rebel fighters alike abhorred reporters for separate but equally malicious reasons.