by Harris, Dan
There were, however, two embarrassing things about this moment. First, a close inspection of the videotape revealed that none of the Afghans in the frame behind me ducked, or even looked particularly concerned. Second, my immediate thought as that bullet whizzed over was: I hope we’re rolling on this.
This was new. If gunshots had gone off in a situation where I was not on the job, I would have wet my pants. I had no record of courage in my personal life. No military service, not even any experience in contact sports. My only prior brush with danger was when I got hit by a cab after wandering into an intersection in Manhattan without looking. When you’re covering a news story, however, there’s a tendency to feel bulletproof. It’s as if there’s a buffer between you and the world, an exponentially more dangerous variant of the unreality you feel when taking a stroll while listening to your iPod. In the context of combat, my reflex to worry had been completely overridden by my desire to be part of the big story.
Tora Bora was a military failure—with Bin Laden most likely scurrying along a goat trail into Pakistan—but for me it was a resurrection of sorts. Having regained the trust of my bosses, I spent the next three years shuttling back and forth between New York and places such as Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Iraq. I was like a slightly less dorky Zelig, somehow materializing in the backdrop of the world’s most important historical events.
These were assignments that entailed repeated exposure to grotesquerie. In Israel, outside a seaside hotel after a suicide bombing, I watched as a gust of ocean breeze sent a bedsheet billowing off the ground, revealing a row of legs. In Iraq, a group of marines and I stared down at a bloated corpse on the side of the road as we collectively realized that what we thought were gunshot wounds in the man’s face were, in fact, drill holes. In the West Bank, I stood next to a father, watching bodies being dumped from a forklift into an impromptu mass grave in a hospital parking lot. The man let out a sustained, high-pitched wail as he spotted his own son tumbling into the pit.
While I was unable to hold it together in the face of the crying father, walking out of camera range with a lump in my throat, I was surprised by my overall reaction to the horrors of war—or, more accurately, my lack of reaction. As far as I could tell, I was not that shaken. I convinced myself this kind of psychological distance was a job requirement, like the doctors from M*A*S*H who cracked jokes over the patients on their operating table. I reckoned reportorial remove served a higher purpose, allowing me to more effectively convey urgent information. If I broke down every time I saw something disturbing, how could I function?
Back home, people would ask me whether my experiences overseas had “changed” me. My reflexive answer was: no. The old line “Wherever you go, there you are” seemed to apply. I was still the same; I just had the proverbial front-row seat at history. My parents openly worried about whether I was traumatized by what I’d seen, but I didn’t feel traumatized at all. Quite the opposite; I liked being a war correspondent. Loved it, in fact. The bodyguards, the armored cars, being driven around like I was a head of state. I also liked the way flak jackets made my diminutive frame look larger on TV. In a war zone, the rules are suspended. You ignore traffic lights, speed limits, and social niceties. It has an illicit, energizing feel not unlike being in a major city during a blackout or a blizzard. And then, of course, there’s the added romance of risk. We used to repeat to one another bastardized versions of an apt old quote from Winston Churchill: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
It wasn’t just the rush I enjoyed. I also genuinely believed in the importance of what we were doing, bearing witness to the tip of the American spear. I felt a sense of purpose—that this was a cause that merited the risk. For both of these reasons—the thrill and the principle—I freely engaged in ABC’s notorious intramural battles in order to stay in the game. An outsider might assume that we journalists spend most of our time competing with people from other networks. In actuality, we expend most of our energy competing with our own colleagues. In order to retain my spot on the front lines, I found myself vying against fellow correspondents like David Wright, another young reporter who’d recently arrived from local news. He was aggressive and smart, and I kind of resented him for it.
While I’d once been content to let the senior folks fight it out for the big stories, I was now much more assertive. This competition mostly took the form of overt lobbying—phone calls and emails to the anchors and executives who make the assignments. While the internal wrangling was, in many ways, a sign of a healthy, vibrant organization, it was also stressful and provoked me to dedicate way too many hours to measuring myself against people I worked with. For example, during a period in which David was kicking ass over in Afghanistan and I was stuck in New York, I could barely bring myself to watch the news.
Fighting over airtime in the middle of a war was perverse, but such was the nature of the gig, it seemed to me. The great blessing of being a journalist is that you get to witness world events—to interface with the players, to experience the smells and tastes of it all. The great curse, though, is that, as I’d learned on 9/11, you come to see these events, at least in part, through the lens of self-interest. Did I get to go? Did I perform well? This psychology was not discussed much in all the autobiographies of legendary journalists that I’d read, but it was nonetheless real. Peter had epic rivalries with fellow anchors like Ted Koppel. The news division had been structured by its preceding president, Roone Arledge, as a star system with competing fiefdoms battling over scarce resources like big interviews and the best correspondents. When Wright and I were both angling to be the first into Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, Peter even called me and made approving jokes about my sharp elbows.
In an environment that was permissive of pique, I sometimes let my temper get the better of me, a tendency that dated back to my early twenties. When I was a young anchorman in Boston, I once threw my papers in the air during a commercial break to express my frustration over a technical glitch. Shortly thereafter, my boss called me into his office to warn me, “People don’t like you.” That meeting sent my heart into my throat and forced me to correct my behavior. But there continued to be room for improvement; as a network correspondent, I was still occasionally snippy with colleagues, and even, on a few occasions overseas, downright stupid. Like the time I was in the middle of a crowded, angry street demonstration in Pakistan and engaged in a supremely unwise shouting match with a protestor who’d just told me the Israelis were behind 9/11. The one situation in which my peevishness remained firmly bottled up was, of course, when dealing with Peter Jennings himself.
On a muggy July day in 2003, I got out of a taxi in front of my apartment building on the Upper West Side, having just wrapped up a five-month stay in Iraq, a posting that stretched from the months before the U.S. invasion all the way up to the beginning of the insurgency. It was strange to be back from the desert, in a world of deciduous trees, a place where I no longer required an entourage. The doormen looked at me with surprise, and I sensed that they were struggling to remember my name. I rolled my bag down the hallway of the fourteenth floor and opened the door to the “home” I’d scarcely visited in two years. The place was pathetic, decorated like a college dorm room, and with stacks of unopened mail all over the place. I’d been away so long that I’d missed the transition to DVDs—I still had one of those big, boxy televisions with a VHS player in it. I hadn’t come to the end of my overseas assignments, but the powers that be had decided that now was the time for me to focus more on domestic priorities, like covering the 2004 presidential campaign and trying my hand at the anchor desk.
Meanwhile, my personal life was a blightscape. While I had been abroad, the already limited social network I’d maintained outside of work had largely evaporated. I was in my early thirties, and my friends had all coupled up and hunkered down. People my age were maturing, nesting, and reproducing. I, by contrast, had just endured an epic breakup after a short, fiery rel
ationship with a Spanish journalist I’d met in Iraq. But I was so focused on work that romantic stability wasn’t even on my list of priorities.
Not long after I got home, I developed a mysterious illness with flulike symptoms. I felt tired and achy all the time, I was perpetually cold, and I had trouble getting out of bed. I’d always been a little bit of a hypochondriac, but this was different. It dragged on for months. I convened lengthy, medical symposia over the phone with my parents. I got tested for tropical diseases, Lyme disease, and HIV. There was even talk of chronic fatigue syndrome.
When all the tests came back negative, I latched on to the theory that my apartment had a gas leak, and I paid an exorbitant fee to get the place tested. For a few nights, I slept on the floor at the apartment of my close friend Regina, whom I’d known since college. She was a law school grad who had started a legal headhunting company. Throughout the night, her miniature pinscher would bring his kibble next to my head and chew it in my ear. Ultimately, the test results showed there was no leak. At which point I jokingly said to Regina that if I didn’t find a diagnosis soon, I might have to admit that I was crazy.
When I finally broke down and went to see a psychiatrist, he took about five minutes to deliver his verdict: depression. As I sat on the couch in this cozy Upper East Side office, I insisted to the kindly, sweater-wearing shrink that I didn’t feel blue at all. He explained that it is entirely possible to be depressed without being conscious of it. When you’re cut off from your emotions, he said, they often manifest in your body.
This was humbling. I had always fancied myself to be reasonably self-aware. My mind, a perpetual motion machine of plotting, planning, and evaluating, had apparently missed something essential. The doctor had a couple of theories. It was possible, he said, that the horror of what I had witnessed overseas was too much for my conscious mind to handle. It was also possible that I was subconsciously pining for the adrenaline of war zones—that I was essentially in withdrawal from journalistic heroin. Or perhaps it was a combination of both. He recommended antidepressants. Unfortunately, I had already started self-medicating.
Although many of my friends partook, I had made it through high school, college, and my twenties without experimenting with hard drugs. Alcohol and a little weed, yes, but nothing more. I was never even tempted—or to be more honest, I was scared. On a few occasions, pot had made me so intensely paranoid that I felt like I was incarcerated in an inner Mordor. I figured harder drugs had the potential to be even worse.
However, my psychosomatic illness had left me feeling weak and adrift. One night, I agreed to go to a party with a guy from the office. We were at his apartment, having a quick drink before going to meet his friends, and he shot me an impish look and said, “Want some cocaine?” He had offered before and I had always demurred, but this time, on an impulse, I caved. Here I was crossing what had always been a distinct, bright line, in an utterly haphazard fashion. I was thirty-two years old.
The drug took about fifteen seconds to kick in. At first, it was just a pleasant electric sizzle coursing through my limbs. Then I noticed a disgusting ammonia-flavored postnasal drip. It didn’t bother me, though, because it was accompanied by a triumphant horn flourish of euphoric energy. After months of feeling run-down and ragged, I felt normal again. Better than normal. Rejuvenated. Restored. Logorrhea ensued. I said many, many things over the course of the evening, one of which was: “Where has this drug been all my life?”
Thus began what my friend Regina sardonically called my Bright Lights, Big City phase. That night, at the party I went to with the guy from work, I made a bunch of new friends. And those people also did cocaine.
With coke, you never reach satiety. It hits, it peaks, it fades—and before you know it, every cell in your body is screaming for more. It’s like that line from the poet Rilke, who referred to the “quick gain of an approaching loss.” I chased this dragon with the zeal of the convert. Late one night, I was partying with another new friend, Simon—a man who had, to put it mildly, a great deal of experience with drugs—and when he was ready to go to bed, I insisted we stay up and keep going. He looked over at me wearily and said, “You have the soul of a junkie.”
Then I discovered ecstasy. I was with some friends in New Orleans when someone started handing out little blue pills. They said it would take a half hour or more before I felt anything, and as I waited, I strolled through the city’s French Quarter. I knew I was high when we passed a piano bar where they were playing Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and it sounded transcendent.
I couldn’t believe one pill could make me so happy. I felt as if my torso was swaddled in heated cotton balls. The very act of talking, the mere vibration of my vocal cords, was blissful. Walking was a symphony of sensual pleasure, with waves of euphoria melting all the calcified barriers of self-consciousness. I could even get out of my own way to dance.
Sadly, the pain of the comedown was proportional to the power of the high. Reality reentered the scene with a pickax. The lesson for the neophyte drug taker was that there is no free lunch, neurologically speaking. On the day after ecstasy, my serotonin stores would be utterly depleted. I often found myself overwhelmed by a soul-sucking sense of emptiness, a hollowed-out husk of a man.
It was partly because of the severity of the hangover—cocaine, too, left me cracked-out and colicky for at least twenty-four hours—that I was meticulous about never doing drugs when I had to work the next day. Not only did I largely quarantine my substance abuse to weekends, but there were also long stretches of time when I was traveling for work and completely abstinent—covering the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, for example. The pull of drugs was powerful, but the tug of airtime was even more so. In fact, during one of the years when I was using drugs, I was ranked as the most prolific network television news correspondent. This only served to compound my master of the universe complex, convincing me I could fool everyone and pull it all off.
On some level, of course, I knew I was taking a massive professional risk. If my partying leaked out I could have been fired. And yet I carried on, impelled forward blindly, my common sense hijacked by the pleasure centers of my brain. I kept using drugs well past the point where I had been diagnosed with depression. I failed—or refused—to connect the dots.
I had always had an addictive personality. It’s a lucky thing that the first time I tried cigarettes, at age fourteen, I puked. Otherwise, I might have picked up a lifelong habit. One of my most vivid childhood memories was playing ball one afternoon with my mom and brother on top of a hill near our house. I kept telling them I needed to use the bathroom, and would then sneak back to the kitchen to take slices of cake from the fridge. On the fourth or fifth trip, after realizing I had eaten nearly the whole thing, I came back and tearfully confessed. Not long afterward, I found out where my parents—who were very strict about candy—had hidden a bag of lollipops on a very high shelf in the kitchen. Over the course of several days, I repeatedly weaseled up there and ate them all. The power of craving, the momentum of wanting was always difficult for me to resist.
Now, as a budding drug abuser, it wasn’t just the professional risks I shrugged off. I developed persistent chest pains that got so bad that one night I went into the ER to get checked out. A young medical resident told me that the trouble was very likely caused by cocaine, which I had reluctantly admitted to using. Despite her pleading, I left the hospital and pretended the encounter had never happened.
Every drug recovery narrative has to have its bottom, and mine—or at least my first one—came on that warm June morning on the set of GMA when I melted down on live TV. Ever since my return from Iraq, I’d been occasionally filling in for Robin Roberts as the News Reader. It was a huge opportunity, one I valued immensely and hoped would turn into something larger. I was used to the routine—I’d been appearing semi-regularly for a few months now—so I had no reason to think this morning would be any different. Which is why I was shaken to my core when th
at irresistible bolt of terror radiated out from the reptilian folds of my brain.
My mind was in outright rebellion. My lungs seized up in what pulmonary doctors call “air hunger.” I could see the words scrolling up in front of me on the teleprompter, but I just could not get myself to say them. Every time I stumbled, the prompter would slow down. I could picture the woman who operated the machine, tucked away in a corner of the studio, and I knew she must be wondering what the hell was going on. For a nanosecond, amid my inner hurricane of thoughts, I really cared what she, in particular, was thinking.
I tried to soldier on, but it wasn’t working. I was helpless. Marooned, in front of millions of people. So, at the end of the voice-over about cholesterol-lowering drugs and their impact on “cancer production,” I decided to resort to a gambit I’d never used before on TV. I bailed—punted. I cut the newscast short, several full minutes before I was supposed to be done, managing to squeak out, “Uh, that does it for news. We’re gonna go back now to Robin and Charlie.” Of course, I was supposed to have said “Diane and Charlie.”
You could hear the surprise in Charlie’s voice as he picked up the verbal baton and started to introduce the weather guy, Tony Perkins. Diane, meanwhile, looked genuinely worried for me, making a series of quick, anxious glances in my direction.
As soon as the weathercast began, Charlie shot out of his seat and ran over to see if I was okay. The producers were buzzing in my earpiece. Stagehands and camera operators were crowding around. No one seemed to know what had happened. They probably thought I’d had a stroke or something. I insisted I had no idea what went wrong. But as the panic subsided, humiliation rushed in; I knew with rock-solid certitude that, after having spent the previous decade of my professional life trying to cultivate a commanding on-air persona, I had just lost it in front of a national audience.