Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  Worrying about Maru and seeing her suffer exposed the feelings I had hidden behind journalism. Now when I thought about Mexico, I thought first of her. I could not just pack and leave, because it would mean leaving Maru; but if I lost her, I could not bear to stay. It took the earthquake to shake my consciousness. It made me realize that Maru had taken me into herself and into this place, deeply and forever.

  John patted me on the back, and I managed to chuckle through the tears, “Those people in the elevator must have thought I lost my whole family or something.”

  The office wondered why I hadn’t written about Monchito. He was a little boy still trapped in the rubble. I had seen the story in the Mexican media, but I didn’t pay much attention. There were people in the rubble, but I didn’t think many of them were still alive. I had just sent the desk a great story about a baby found alive. I didn’t want to go chase some story that everyone else was covering. Wrong answer.

  Monchito was a big story in the United States, and my editors were watching it all day on television. This was a relatively new problem for foreign correspondents: editing by CNN. Editors back home watched the five-year-old news network and therefore assumed they knew what was happening around the world. To the editors, there was no story bigger than this little buried boy. Monchito met the narrative needs of television and must be covered.

  I dragged myself over to where they were searching the rubble for Monchito. I pushed through the crowd to get close. Diggers—dubbed “moles”—gently pulled aside bricks and concrete, and then used a hammer or wrench to tap on a buried pipe or piece of metal. They waited for a tap in response and then dug toward the sound. They were tunneling toward a boy who had been buried since the first big quake. Someone said his nickname was Monchito. There was a vigil with candles, but the most illumination came from the television lights. TV crews from around the world camped out to be ready for the moment when little Monchito, dirty and tired but alive and grateful, would be lifted from the rubble by a weary but heroic rescuer.

  Against my better judgment, I filed a story. I tried to capture the drama of the scene. It was exciting, and unlike most of the stories I had done, it was about hope and life and the future, not about loss and death and destruction. The tapping was growing stronger, or maybe it was fainter. I was told that some rescuers had heard the little boy’s small cries for help, but I never met anyone with first-hand confirmation that he was alive. We had to get to him quickly or he would die, they said. People prayed.

  A few more days passed with no sign of Monchito. The media coverage dwindled and then moved on to other stories. When the rubble eventually was cleared, there were no bodies, no little boys. I’m not convinced there ever was a Monchito, and there were various theories about what really happened. The story felt like a collective fiction, a kind of benevolent fake news, greedily exploited and shared to make us all feel better. It worked for a day or two.

  Weeks after the earthquake, my neighborhood was not the same. All day and night, heavy trucks rumbled along, hauling rubble. A block away, workers were tearing down a damaged seven-story building that looked like something gnawed by giant wolves. Since there were plenty of laborers but only one jackhammer, they kept it pounding around the clock.

  Even before the earthquake, I was attuned to the city sounds, especially the banging, shouting, and whistling from the body shop below my window—laid over the growl of buses, honking horns, and a traffic cop’s whistle—but the jackhammer was too much. Unable to sleep, even with a pillow over my head, I imagined tiny men standing on my teeth, drilling into them with jackhammers. I got up in a fury, pulled the mattress off the spare bed, pushed it up against the window and tied it there with rope to muffle the sound. But then there was no light in my bedroom, and I still heard the thumping jackhammer.

  Maru and I fled the city for a vacation in her home state of Oaxaca. We stayed at the beach, and I was comforted by the solid feeling of walking in the sand at sea level. You don’t appreciate the stability of the planet until you’ve felt it move. There were no tall buildings, no traffic jams and no noise above the sound of the waves. We finally relaxed, chasing crabs on the beach and floating in the pool.

  I wanted to be with Maru forever, and after months of saying no, she agreed to marry me. A year later, my mom, my stepfather, my four brothers, and thirty members of my family traveled to Mexico City for the wedding. Maru’s mother had died before the ceremony, but not before giving us her blessing. Maru’s father was there along with her big family and our good friends, an amusingly oil-and-vinegar mix of reporters and dancers. The church service was performed in English and Spanish by my El Paso reporting mentor (and Catholic deacon), Ken Flynn.

  Maru and I moved into a beautiful little house, suddenly made affordable when real estate prices collapsed after the earthquake.

  7

  THE CAPITAL OF THE FREE WORLD

  ——— ON WHY YOU CAN’T DO IT ALONE ———

  I soon was offered an opportunity that was hard to pass up but would strain our young marriage.

  I was covering the 1988 vote in Chile about whether Gen. Augusto Pinochet should step down, fifteen years after he had taken power in a bloody coup. Some people doubted Pinochet would leave the presidency even if he lost the vote. There were protests and threats of violence, and I spent the days interviewing political leaders trying to figure out what would happen during the vote, and after.

  My El Paso buddy John Hopper was there shooting an anti-Pinochet demonstration for the Associated Press when he was knocked down and then kicked in the head by a police officer. Other photographers gathered around to protect him. Being photographers, they also took pictures of John on the ground, blood smearing his face. They wanted to take him to the hospital, but John started yelling, “Wait, wait!”

  He handed his camera to another photographer. “Take my picture!” he demanded. The photographer took a picture of John and returned the camera. John removed the film and made sure it was processed for the AP wire. That way John would not get scooped when the competing photographers transmitted photos of his bloody face. Only then did he agree to medical attention.

  When Pinochet lost the vote and announced he would allow civilian rule again, the streets filled with people cheering, crying, and hugging. I felt shivers of pleasure for them, not necessarily for the outcome of the vote—I tried not to take sides—but because their will was being respected without violence or repression. It was one of the few joyous political stories I covered during my years in Latin America.

  While I was working in my hotel room in Santiago, the phone rang. “Peter, this is Dale.”

  I worried I had done something wrong. The desk almost never called me, and most of the time they weren’t even sure where I was. Now the boss of all the editors in the Washington bureau, the managing editor Dale McFeatters, was on the line.

  “Hey, Dale,” I ventured. “What’s up?”

  “How would you like to cover the Pentagon?”

  Silence. “Uh, what do you mean?”

  “We need a Pentagon reporter.”

  “Don’t we have one?” I asked, stalling for time. I was flattered to be asked, but unsure. I knew I couldn’t cover the Pentagon from Mexico, but did that mean I would live in Washington? Was I ready to go there? What about Maru? Would I get a raise?

  “We don’t have one anymore,” he said. “Do you want to think about it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I need to talk to my wife.” But after five years in Mexico, I knew I was going to Washington, and I was pretty sure I could convince Maru.

  “¿Estás loco?” she shouted. Are you crazy? “What am I going to do there? You haven’t even taught me English!”

  “It will just be for two years,” I said. “If we don’t like it, we can come back to Mexico.”

  We talked for a couple of days and decided to give it a try.

  On a scouting trip to Washington, I had a drink with George de Lama and other members of the Chicago Tribu
ne Washington bureau. I knew some of them and recognized their bylines from growing up in Chicago. I had looked up to George when we both were reporters in the city. It was his story that had upset Mayor Byrne enough to kick the Tribune out of City Hall.

  When George was sent to cover Central America, I admired how he carried himself with a bighearted swagger. One particular weekend stuck in my memory. We were catching the sun around the pool of a hotel in Honduras. All of the sudden George went into work mode, and he whispered to ask if I knew about the plot to overthrow the government. What plot? I barely knew the name of the president, let alone the people conspiring against him. The plot failed, and thanks to George, I wasn’t scooped on something right under my nose.

  Now I was full of questions about living in Washington, covering the Pentagon, and working in the Scripps Washington bureau. George was someone I listened to.

  “Fifty,” George said. “You’ve got to make $50,000 to live here.”

  Fifty grand? I was making about $37,000, and that was double what I made in El Paso and just about double again what I had made in Chicago. There was no way they would give me that big a bump. Still, the cost of living was high in Washington, and I didn’t want to take a big hit on how we lived, especially if I was going to convince Maru to stay with me. I knew we weren’t likely to have the same standard of living we had in Mexico (where I earned dollars and spent pesos), but I wanted things to be nice for Maru.

  When the real estate agent learned my salary, she told me to jump into the car. We drove for about forty-five minutes. This is Rockville, Maryland, she explained, as I frowned at grim strip malls and empty fields. She showed me a couple of townhouses, not even single-family homes, and a few condos.

  This was not what I had imagined. On an earlier trip, the managing editor, Dale, and his wife, Ann, the White House reporter in the bureau, had invited me to dinner at their huge, old wooden house painted bright yellow and bordered by a comfy porch. There were tall leafy trees on the quiet street, and it was not far from the office. That was the kind of place I wanted, but apparently it was way out of our price range.

  I went to see Dan, the bureau chief. I told him other reporters in town said I couldn’t get by on less than $50,000.

  Dan laughed and said, “Welcome to the real world, kid.” Conversation finished.

  Maru and I stayed in a downtown Washington hotel during early January of 1989, while we looked for a house. I had to start work right away, which was consuming for me and frightening for Maru.

  In Mexico, I had worked from home, and we often had lunch together or interrupted the workday with a “beso break” (beso meaning kiss). After Maru left the dance company, she was modeling and dancing every night on a popular TV show. Still, we managed to make time for each other. Now she was going to be alone in a strange city while I went to an office, sometimes from early morning until after dark. She didn’t have a job in Washington, or even a plan. She didn’t have a high school degree or speak the language. Then it snowed.

  Maru had not seen much snow before, so I thought it would be fun for her, despite the cold. The city, however, was not prepared, and the streets were blocked with drifts and stuck cars. I worried about getting to the office on time for my first day, what to wear, where I was going to sit, whether I would like my new colleagues.

  Maru was still under the covers. I put on my winter coat and sat on the bed next to her. She was tan and gorgeous against the white sheets, her hair black and shiny, her eyes dark, dark, and moist with tears. She reached up and grabbed me. “Don’t go, Pito! Don’t leave me!”

  “I’ve got to go to work,” I said. “I’ll be back tonight.”

  “What am I going to do? Don’t leave me!”

  I hugged her, buttoned my coat, took the elevator down, and walked out into the snowy cold.

  That night after work I walked back in darkness through the snow to the hotel, worried she was still in bed, depressed and angry with me. Or what if she had just packed up and returned to Mexico? What if this didn’t work? What if she couldn’t adjust? She wasn’t at all prepared, and I had not helped her. Had I just made a terrible mistake? She was more important than any job, but I had been distracted by my ambition. I rode up the elevator trying not to panic.

  I opened the door to our room and found her bursting with energy, cheeks red and windblown. “I had a fabulous day!” she said, restlessly pacing the carpet. She moved like a panther and appeared larger than her actual size. “I met the most wonderful cab driver. He’s from Ethiopia. He is this giant, huge, guy. I mean huge! We spent the day together, and he took me to lunch at this restaurant, the ‘Sun’ something, and he knew everybody and he introduced me to all of his friends. We are going out tomorrow, too. He showed me the sights and I got to know the city. It’s really quite beautiful, you know . . .”

  I think my face registered both shock and fascination, barely hidden by the mask of a smile I strained to hold. “Interesting,” I managed to say. “Wow.”

  She also surprised me on our first day of house hunting, but only because I was dense. That morning we jumped into my trusty Datsun, which had carried me from Chicago to El Paso, and then to Mexico City and now to Washington. I cheerfully drove Maru out to suburban Rockville, enthusing about the extensive shopping and easy access to the train.

  I lost her when we crossed the Beltway ringing Washington. She looked horrified at the suburban sprawl and declared, “I’m a flor de asfalto,” an asphalt flower. “I’m not living in the sticks.”

  Maru fell in love with Dupont Circle, a city neighborhood with good restaurants, stately row houses, trendy shops, and bookstores. We bought a small condo we could not afford. There were big trees on the street, but it was urban enough that—as Maru required—it was “walk to sushi.”

  I decided to cover my new Pentagon beat the way I would a strange country with its own language, beliefs, and local costumes. I had not thought much about the Pentagon before being assigned to cover it. I was too young for Vietnam, and few of my friends chose a career in uniform. I never was opposed to the military, even in college when I protested US foreign interventions, but mostly I was ignorant of what they did. Similar to when I first was assigned to cover transportation in Chicago, I had to become an expert in an arcane field (now tanks and warships instead of buses and trains), and it was a similar challenge.

  Part of the reason the Pentagon reminded me of a big transportation bureaucracy was that the country was at peace. The Cold War was winding down, so the military leadership’s biggest concern was protecting the Pentagon budget from members of Congress hoping to use the “peace dividend” for social programs. This was to be the era of “small wars” and low-intensity conflicts, the experts said. People ridiculed the brass for trying to maintain the capability to fight massive wars using aircraft carriers, jets, and tanks.

  I knew nothing about the policy debates or global threats (outside of Latin America). I didn’t know how the secretary of defense worked with the president, the armed forces, or the Congress. I wasn’t positive about the difference between the Marines and the army.

  This was normal for a beat reporter. Ideally, you covered a topic until you mastered it, and then moved on to another beat before you became too bored. In a way, each story was like that, too. For every story, I had to find sources and write what I learned. Then I moved on to the next shiny thing, often forgetting completely about what I had written just days before. My plan for the new military beat was to read a couple of books, talk to some experts, and give myself a graduate course in military affairs before I even visited the Pentagon.

  During my first week in the Washington office, I walked over to Dale’s desk to check in. “You’re in luck,” he said. “You’ve got a war on your hands. Get over to the Pentagon, now.”

  I wasn’t sure how to get to the Pentagon by myself. And then what? I knew from my reading that the building had seventeen miles of corridors, and I had no idea where I was supposed to go. I just nodded to D
ale and grabbed my coat. I studied the Metro map and noticed a “Pentagon” stop, so that looked promising.

  Just by luck, I boarded the train with a camera crew, and I guessed they were covering the same story. When we arrived at the Pentagon station, they walked off ahead of me and seemed to know what they were doing. I was too shy to say anything, but I followed, close enough to watch them but not so close as to be stalking.

  We rode up a long escalator into a windowless mall where military personnel were shopping in the pharmacy, the bookstore, getting something to eat, just like normal people. I followed the camera crew—a big guy with a bulky camera, a sound guy, a well-dressed guy who must have been the reporter, and a woman carrying more gear. They were slow and obvious, and easy to follow. A young man in uniform greeted them and pointed them down a hallway. I jumped in, said I was from Scripps Howard, and tagged along. So far so good.

  I should have left a trail of crumbs, because after the first couple of turns I had no idea where we were. The hallways looked the same, and I was a little disappointed. I had expected something flashier, maybe more martial; this looked like a large hospital or an aging elementary school. There were subtle grooves worn in the stone steps where rivers of people in shiny black shoes had coursed through the halls. The occupants were mostly men, and they looked clean in their pressed uniforms, but preoccupied and harried, carrying file folders and coffee cups, briskly marching into windowless offices.

  Then I saw it: a sign above a hallway read “Correspondents Corridor.” This was where the pressroom was located, and on the wall was a gallery of headshots of the beat reporters who covered the Pentagon. There was a small room called the Ernie Pyle Alcove. I recognized the name Ernie Pyle because he was a Scripps Howard reporter killed during World War II. I didn’t know much about him, but I felt a twinge of pride because we worked for the same outfit. There was a portrait of Pyle, in uniform and with a manual typewriter, but the style of painting was from olden times and not relevant to a modern reporter like me. I followed the camera crew into a briefing room with a lectern adorned with the seal of the Department of Defense.