I start in November 1986 on the bottom rung and my strategy is simple: now that my foot is in the door, I will not take it out. I interviewed a politician once who defined relentless as the ability to come back, time and time again, until your opponent gives up his will to resist. I am relentless. I love everything about news—the journalists in wrinkled clothes, the cigarette smoke, the energy in the newsroom before Peter Jennings goes on the air. I love the way reporters always know the inside story and the shorthand way that they talk. I love the stories they tell about getting the story—the chases, the near misses and dead ends. I love the cold dark of the editing rooms, where producers huddle with editors and create the piece frame by frame. I love the frenzied crashes, the last-minute feeds, the terrifying quiet of control rooms when stories air.
I love picking up my coffee at Elite diner two blocks from the office and eating my lunch at my desk because it seems like a New York thing to do.
I observe a few things early on: few people at ABC went to public school or Hunter College or spent summers in Kingston. I notice that the production associates’ cubicles are papered with Ivy—three Harvards, a Columbia University, and then me. I learn that Dunster House is Harvard and that people never tire of saying it, because while it might be boorish to announce you went to Harvard, you can say Cambridge repeatedly or drop the name of the house you pledged to make the same point. I notice that the Ivy Leaguers rarely have to master the videotape library.
I learn that everyone has a footnote. There is the producer related to a von Bülow, the associate producer whose father is a famous reporter at the Times, the young production associate at 20/20 of the Welch’s grape fortune. Anthony’s footnote is, of course, his family. I don’t have a footnote, or a tagline, or a phrase between two commas, but I suppose later Anthony’s is tacked onto me. She’s married to Anthony Radziwill, Jackie O’s nephew.
As an intern I start and end my days in the basement, behind the Dutch door of postproduction. The 20/20 producers bring me audio-cassettes to be transcribed and Beta tapes to be dubbed, and I fill out the work forms and send them out. I relieve the production secretaries on the phones every day, while they all have their breaks. And once a week, I stay late to clean the supply room. I spend hours sorting the paper clips, Post-it notes, and cartridges of typewriter ribbon. I label the three-ring binders and reporter’s notebooks according to size and style. I am obsessive, and it pays off. In what I consider a vote of confidence and a good omen for my career, Annette Kriener lets me order the supplies, and I approach this with a solemn intensity. I make it my business to know which producers like the razor flair markers in black and which prefer navy. I know that they all favor the small reporter’s notebooks on the road and the legal pads in the office, and I stock accordingly. I run the supply system like the Pentagon, as though our national security depends on it.
At night I waitress at the Ramapough Inn in Suffern, and on Saturdays I work for Pam Hill. Pam is a senior vice president at ABC and executive producer of the news show Closeup and was looking for someone to work for her part-time. Her assistant asked if I would be interested.
Pam and her husband, the New York Times reporter Tom Wicker, have a brownstone on Eighty-Fourth Street and two other homes, in Canada and St. Lucia. They hire me to “organize” them. I think it could be a huge break—if I am impressive enough at her house, she might hire me at Closeup. If I can keep the houses outfitted, I think, my career in news is made.
She leaves lists of errands—pick up the dry cleaning, call US Air and cancel reservations, rebook earlier flight back from New Hampshire—and stacks of catalogs littered with Post-it notes: send this to St. Lucia!, send this (black m.) to Canada, send two of these to St. Lucia and one to Canada. Every Saturday I arrive by 10 a.m., go straight to her office on the third floor, and work all day. It is fairly straightforward: order the items marked in the catalogs, charge them to either her credit card or Tom’s, ship them to the right home. I have things running smoothly until one Saturday when I order two of everything she has double-underlined in Williams-Sonoma—one set for each house, I think. Too late, I realize the mistake.
“Whose card was it on?” she asks when I tell her what I’ve done. I tell her Tom’s card, and she seems relieved, but it is my last assignment for her. It takes weeks to straighten out, and just after the card is finally credited, the fiasco all untangled, I get a paying job as a production secretary with Closeup—$225 a week.
As a production secretary, my job is to assist the producers and associate producers. I man the phones, sort the mail, stack the morning newspapers for them to pick up. I book their travel and keep compulsive track of their profiles. One producer goes to Washington often, and I know always to book him a room at the Ritz, never the Mayflower across the street from the bureau. Another prefers American Airlines, so I learn ways around the company policy requiring travel on Continental. I memorize their employee ID numbers, sign their travel vouchers, collect their cash advances from the credit union, and babysit their children when they are out of town. One producer always takes calls from B—, a detail I learn the first time I refuse to connect her when he is in a screening. He calls me into his office later that day to tell me, “You are always to put her through. Oh, and if my wife calls, tell her you moved my car for alternate-street parking and dropped your barrette in the backseat.” There is nothing I am unwilling to take care of.
But the action is on the phones. I have a chunky, flesh-colored phone on my desk with the extensions of all the producers. The telephone, or, more specifically, the person answering it, is critical. This is a time before cell phones, voice mail, or e-mail. A time, still, of While You Were Out, the pink slips on which you check a box to indicate whether the caller was returning a call, expected to be called back, or left a message, in which case you wrote it down on the black lines at the bottom. The phones are a lifeline. I’ll transfer you is a solemn promise, a contract. There are producers calling from the lobby of the Commodore Hotel in West Beirut, from satellite phones in Moscow, and in my mind, a disconnected call might be the difference between life and death, or worse, might cost us a story. The phone connects me to places I read about in the papers and hear the veteran producers discuss in the halls. On the other end of the phone are the places in my dreams, where I imagine I will go one day to cover a story. I want to stay at the Commodore, with its well-stocked bar and talking parrot in the corner. I want to be asked at the front desk, “Do you want a room on the car-bomb side or the artillery-shell side?” I want to have stringers and drivers and sources and call from the bombed-out Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, where electricity is unpredictable but there is an espresso machine in the lobby. I want to be reached at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, conducting off-the-record interviews with members of the PLO. This is where I have set my sights.
In the meantime I am happy logging stock footage and running tapes to the editing rooms behind the newsroom. We call it slant track—a group of cold, dark, windowless rooms named after the angle that video ran through the old-style tape machines. They have a bank of monitors and two chairs, one for the producer and one for the editor. This is where it happens—the flotsam becomes a three-minute news spot. I sometimes sneak in and stand quietly in the back and watch them. The producer next to the editor, sitting in the dark, pointing, rewinding, forwarding frame by frame, sometimes screaming. Cut—no, dissolve fifteen frames, play that sound bite. Weaving together sound bites and b-roll and file footage and rushing to feed the piece to the control room, where it will be dropped into the show.
I am eventually assigned small research projects: collecting articles on the drug war, compiling crime statistics, tracking down archival footage. Call the Washington desk—find out what gun control legislation is pending on the Hill. The best way I see to be promoted to PA is to be a PA, so I squeeze research in between phones, travel itineraries, and tape searches.
Pam Hill’s Closeup is canceled in the spring of ’88, an
d the staff is folded into what we call the long-form programming unit—that is, anything that isn’t the evening news or a weekly magazine show. By now I am doing more research than travel or phones. I make research books for a series of one-hour specials ABC airs called Burning Questions, each on a different subject: education, drugs, the environment. I do time-consuming and expensive LexisNexis searches, pull every relevant article on each subject, and then make up binders with ABC News labels and mark them with a thick black Sharpie by producer name and story number.
I am essentially a production associate with a production secretary title, but I don’t mind. The production secretaries are paid hourly, so I get overtime, and I am working enough to get my own apartment—a small studio, a fourth-floor walk-up, over the Raccoon Lodge Bar on York Avenue, that I share with a family of insomniac mice.
After work the PAs go to Peter’s on Columbus, between Sixty-Eighth and Sixty-Ninth. The beer is cheap, and the hard-boiled eggs they keep lined along the counter are free. When we tire of the bar, we play pinball in the back room. We like Peter’s until someone spots a cockroach, and then we start going to Santa Fe around the corner. We are the young crowd. The old guard goes to the Ginger Man, on Sixty-Fourth Street. Like the Pentagon Bar for Edward R. Murrow and his boys swapping stories of McCarthy, the Ginger Man is for the producers who’ve been shot at and know which side of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem has the better rooms. It is for Charlie Glass, the Middle East bureau chief who was kidnapped in Lebanon. It is for David Lewis, Tom Lennon, Steve Singer, Chris Isham, Pat Cook, John Fielding, Richard Gerdau—the inner circle. The crowd who, if I peeked through the window at almost any time of the day, would epitomize what I think journalists should be. Smoking filterless Camels, drinking Scotch and soda, trading stories of evacuations and military checkpoints, comparing restaurants in Managua. I am enchanted with the world of the Ginger Man in the same way I was captivated peering down from the loft in Kingston at the grown-ups around the table in the Knotty Pine room.
One morning my phone rings. Tom Yellin, the executive producer of PJR, is on the other end. “We’re interested in Cambodia. Can you come to my office?” Peter Jennings has just created his own documentary unit, Peter Jennings Reporting, and a small group is assigned to work in it.
This is an opportunity, and I don’t grab for it so much as lunge.
I imagine villages and jungles. I imagine refugees and guerrilla soldiers. I imagine that someone has just handed me the phone, Cambodia on the line, and given me permission to step through. I have misty visions of bombs and sources and intrigue in my head, of suspicious men in trench coats slipping me microcassettes. I imagine deals brokered, negotiations, shady characters ringing at three in the morning.
“You’ll be working with Leslie Cockburn. I’ll have her call you, but expect to be there by the beginning of the year.” And then as an afterthought, “You’re familiar with the situation there, right?”
I say yes, of course I know Cambodia, though I’m not even sure, at this point, that I can place it on a map.
I have three months to become familiar. I spend nights after work in the news library reading back issues of the Far Eastern Economic Review. I comb through Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross, all 544 pages. My twenty-five-year-old eyes grow wider. I make up research books full of every policy article I can find. I buy a safari vest at Banana Republic.
Leslie Cockburn is producing, and I’m assigned as her PA. Leslie is notorious—a one-word name in the news business, like Madonna. The daughter of a tycoon, she is on a first-name basis with Third World leaders, spies, and rock stars. She carries an Hermès address book full of the private numbers of arms merchants and drug cartel bosses. She has the source no one else can get, the impossible interview. She is famous for it.
She gives me a long list of things to do to prepare for the trip. I have to get visas for the crew to Cambodia and Vietnam and set up meetings with officials at the embassy in Thailand. I make an appointment with Dr. Kevin Cahill, the infectious-disease specialist, for my shots: tetanus, yellow fever, gamma globulin. I fill my prescription for malaria medication. “And call Sathern.” Leslie gives me his number. “He’s our stringer and will take care of everything.” Then she sends me ahead to line up interviews and smooth itineraries, with ten thousand dollars cash and a box of ABC News baseball caps.
On New Year’s Eve 1989 I take an overnight flight to Thailand. Sathern picks me up at the airport and takes me to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. It’s not the Commodore. There are plush white robes and warm slippers, and the laundry is returned wrapped in tissue paper—no artillery fire, but still. It’s where the journalists stay.
The documentary is to be called Peter Jennings Reporting: From the Killing Fields and will focus on American foreign policy. It will have good guys, bad guys, innocent victims, a culpable government. There will be refugees and insurgents, a front line and coalition forces; guns and money and one of the most murderous groups in history, the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia and Thailand and Vietnam, places where it seems there is no end to war.
The United States has a long history in Cambodia, most of it duplicitous. In the early seventies, as part of its Vietnam strategy, the Nixon administration secretly dropped close to a quarter million tons of bombs in northern Cambodia, along the Mekong River. And by 1974, Cambodia was simply another casualty of the Vietnam War. When the United States pulled out, it was left shattered. The next year Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge marched to the capital city of Phnom Penh and emptied it. They tortured and killed close to two million people. The worst act of genocide since World War II.
I have a list of things to do, and it starts in the border town of Aranyaprathet, where Sathern and I head first on a dusty road out of town, at night to avoid the Bangkok traffic and heat. Cambodia is just over the mountain, a few hours’ hike. Border towns are where everything happens, in the lawless haze between one country and another. They are hideouts for illegal gunrunners, jewel traders, and military intelligence officers. Sathern has a list of names and numbers for everything I’ll need. He knows everyone, or if he doesn’t, he knows what they cost. As stringers go, he’s the best.
He has set up a meeting with the Thai generals so I can get permission to film in the refugee camps. The camps are run by the United Nations, but nothing happens without a nod from the Thai military. The meeting with the generals is a formality. I sit in a tent across a metal folding table from three men. They regard me suspiciously. Americans, they must think, sending a woman to do a man’s job. They examine the business card I hand them and seem reassured by the logo. The cards are not even real. PAs don’t get business cards, but someone told me to bring a box of them. So I cut out an ABC logo from letterhead before I left and took it to a print shop by my apartment. I ordered three hundred cards, and except for the cheap paper they look as good as the official ones. I am winging this, all of it.
I ask their permission to film, I ask for access to the people inside the camps. I get our names on the list, and then money trades hands, paperwork is filled out, ABC News caps are passed around.
We stop at Site 8 because it is famous—the refugee camp under control of Khmer Rouge soldiers. This is understood more than stated, and affirmed by their telltale green caps. There are nearly thirty-five thousand refugees in Site 8, many of them used as mules to carry food and ammunition to the secret military camps over the border.
I go back to Aranyaprathet a few weeks later, alone, to get footage of these camps. I have the name of a local cameraman who freelances for WTN, World Television Network, and, according to rumor, runs guns in and out of the camps on the side. I have no trouble finding him. Aranyaprathet is straight out of the Wild West—you walk into the saloon and ask for the WTN guy, and they all point across the street. “He’s over there.” He speaks just enough English to understand where I want to go, and he has legitimate equipment, a Sony Beta camera. I hire him for two days, and
we drive, then hike, to the KR military camps across the Thai border. The soldiers are young boys with smooth cheeks, thin arms, and expressionless faces. We ask them to march through the trees. We film them riding in trucks. We film them in the camps, bored and smoking cigarettes. Such a fierce reputation, and they look so harmless. My requests do not surprise or startle them; they seem accustomed to this.
To get Peter Jennings to Phnom Penh I have to fly to Hanoi, Vietnam, to negotiate a charter with the president of the state-run Vietnamese airline. I am met at the Hanoi airport by Nuygen, a government minder, who has been assigned to translate and keep his eye on me. To take me to the shops where he gets kickbacks on what I spend. He takes my passport and tells me in perfect English, with a French accent, that I can have it back in four days.
I am booked in the VIP hotel, the one for diplomats, though when I arrive it is filled mostly with French and Australian businessmen. I check into my room and make phone calls, report back to the foreign desk, and two hours later Nuygen is still waiting in the lobby. “Would you like to see where your Senator McCain was shot down, Miss Carole?”
I meet with the president of the airline the next day, and through Nuygen we agree on a price for a charter flight and make a plan for me to deliver the cash. We don’t discuss currency, we make assumptions, and I make the wrong one. The next morning I have six thousand dollars in my shoulder bag, and I stop at a bank to convert it to Vietnamese dong. The president, when he sees this, is enraged. “No, I understand,” I tell Nuygen, who looks worried, trying to keep up with the translation. “Tell him, please, I’ll convert it back.” There is another fee for the transaction at the bank, but I return within the hour. Everyone is happy.
Carolyn will make me tell these stories again and again.
I’m learning the ropes: how to talk to guerrilla fighters and negotiate with presidents of airlines, and where to find the best exchange rate on the black market. I know now to always to carry cigarettes, and lighters with the ABC News logo. Bartering tools are almost as good as cash in third world countries.
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