I took a seat in the back, and almost immediately a flourish of uniforms with shining medals charged into the room and deployed around the lectern. This was a big story, so the briefer was Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. He launched into a detailed recounting of how on January 4, 1989, two US jets had fired on two Libyan jets over the Mediterranean Sea.
I took furious notes, afraid to look up and miss something. “Jinked the bogeys.” Or was it “bogies?” Fox One. Then, “the sparrows left the rails.” Some other military-sounding stuff. Engagement. RIO (which seemed to be an acronym). F-14s. Floggers. Kennedy battle group. CAP?
Then Carlucci asked for questions. I kept taking notes. The secretary thanked us and left. I looked at my notebook. I had a lot of notes. I had no clue what had happened over Libya, or wherever it was.
The wire reporters raced out to file stories. A few reporters who were not on deadline lingered to talk. I moseyed along behind them into the pressroom. This was a new pack of reporters, and I was an outsider. I stood back a little and watched from a respectful distance. Just as at City News, and then El Paso, and then Mexico City and Central America, I was the new guy and knew my place. There was one man, maybe twice my age, who seemed to be the big dog. I noticed how the other reporters gathered around him to listen. I waited until he was alone.
“Excuse me,” I said, offering my hand. “I’m Peter Copeland. I’m the new Pentagon guy for Scripps Howard. I don’t understand a thing of what just happened.”
“I’m George Wilson,” he said, shaking my hand. “Sit down.”
George Wilson, I found out later, was a Washington Post reporter and dean of the Pentagon press corps. He flipped his notebook to a clean sheet and drew little airplanes facing each other. These are the “bogeys,” he said, pointing to the Libyan planes. The “Sparrows” are the missiles. “Jink” is a move a pilot makes in a dogfight.
A light went on in my head: dogfight. I didn’t remember that phrase from the briefing, but that was something that sped up my heart. A dogfight was dramatic, dangerous, a story with winners and losers. I could write about that.
Once I had the big picture, Wilson walked me through the details, even marking his diagram with the times (by the second) when everything had happened. The way he told the story, I could imagine his little drawings as real jets in the air, jerking back and forth, the US pilots trying to decide whether to shoot or evade. Were they going to be shot down first? Were the Libyans playing or was this for real? Why were they doing this?
“You got it?” Wilson asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Thank you.”
I followed some reporters back to the Metro station and took the train to the office. I typed up the story on the central computer system we shared and saved it in a folder used by editors on the desk. Then I walked over and told Dale the story was ready for a first read. After Dale edited and christened it with a headline, the story would get a second read by a copy editor, checking the details such as spelling and grammar, before being sent on the wire. I was told to stick around in case they had questions. I stood over Dale’s shoulder, watched him edit, and nervously awaited his verdict.
I appreciated a good edit. A good editor kept you from making mistakes and helped put your narrow focus into a bigger context. The good ones knew their history and could see ahead, even around corners. You could edit yourself, but it was like giving yourself a massage: it was not very effective or satisfying. I did prefer certain editors, the ones with a lighter touch, and sometimes waited to file a story until the clumsier editors had gone to lunch.
Dale, one of the good editors, read through my Libya story (courtesy of George Wilson, but I did not mention that), made a few changes, and looked up at me. “Pretty good story,” he said. Then he asked the question I heard every day of my career: “What have you got for tomorrow?”
The next day I found a military history book in the bureau library and photocopied a chart of the ranks and insignia. I cut the chart small enough for the inside pocket of my suit jacket. Then when a person in an army uniform would speak to me, I would look at the shoulder—silver bird—and then glance at my cheat sheet. “Hello, colonel.”
I realized they took their appearance—a uniform appearance—seriously. I visited the Pentagon barbershop for a haircut (they pretty much had just one style), and more importantly, I had my shoes buffed to a deep black. This was just like in Mexico City where I had stopped wearing shorts (no grown Mexican man wore shorts in the city) and polished my shoes. Better to fit in than stand out.
I read all I could on aerial combat, thoroughly preparing to cover the last battle. If they got into another dogfight, I would be ready. I also started to understand how the military was organized, what they worried about and how they trained to fight. I learned about the rivalries between the army and the Marines, how they both thought the air force had it easy, and how sailors referred to ground troops as knuckle draggers or human sandbags. Special operations guys were elite warriors or dangerous hot dogs, depending on who was describing them. My first sources were people from one service grousing about a rival service.
When the next big story broke, I was caught off guard. The battleground wasn’t the skies over Libya, but the halls of Congress. This time the weapons weren’t jets and missiles, but leaks and rumors. The combatants weren’t even in uniform—they were civilians from the White House and Congress—and I had no idea how to cover them.
The story began when President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower to be secretary of defense. A former senator from Texas, Tower was a proud and determined man who was small in stature, the way Napoleon was small. One of the rules he lived by was that the US Senate was an exclusive club, and he was a lifetime member. Tower had to be confirmed by his fellow senators, but he considered that a formality.
I was the only person more oblivious than Tower about what was going to happen. I knew where the Capitol was; you couldn’t miss the dome on the skyline. I knew vaguely that it was split into a House and a Senate and divided among Democrats and Republicans. I had a degree in political science, but through no fault of my professors, I knew more about nineteenth-century political theory than about how Washington actually worked. I was not at all prepared for what was about to unfold right in front of me.
I looked for a seat in the ornate Senate room on the first day of confirmation hearings. The reporters who covered Congress knew where to sit, and most of the Pentagon reporters also covered military issues on the Hill, so they knew their places, too. Photographers clattered up to the front and sat on the floor to be closer to the action. The senators themselves stood behind their seats, touching each other lightly on the lapels or the arm, trying to appear earnest while the cameras whirred and clicked.
Once again, I found myself walking onto the set of a play I hadn’t even read. I didn’t know the other actors or the plot, and I definitely did not know the ending. I was going to have to pay attention and improvise my part. I took an empty chair at the end of a table, half expecting to be told to move, but the hearing was called to order and the room went quiet.
I listened to his former colleagues praise Tower’s many contributions to the Senate and the nation, his familiarity with the military, and his leadership skills. They pontificated about the heroic armed forces in this historic period, peace through strength, and the global dominance of the greatest military ever fielded in the history of mankind. They really talked like that. I wrote it all down, and mentally composed the first paragraphs of what I would write. After the hearing, I went back to the office and filed my story, which went on the wire for hundreds of papers that would appear the next morning from Florida to California and around the world.
My mornings began when, right out of bed, I went down to the lobby of our condo for my copy of the Washington Post. Neighbors subscribed to the New York Times, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal, so I also glanced at those front pages. One morning during the Tower hearings, I looked at the
newspapers in the lobby and felt sick. My stomach dropped, and a prickly tingle of shame spread across my skin. John Tower dominated page one of every paper, but it wasn’t the story I had written from the hearings. These stories had nothing to do with the hearings. They were way better stories. And for Tower, way worse.
There were reports of Tower grabbing military women on the flight line, getting drunk on official trips, and generally being an obnoxious, pompous jerk. Somebody was out to get Tower, and they were leaking insider details from across his long career. Many of his offenses had been documented on paper at the time, but had been buried by the bureaucracy until now. A routine hearing that began with everyone playing by the rules had turned into a feeding frenzy, and Tower was the main course. This was good news for the reporters covering the story, except for me, because I had no idea how to find the juicy bits.
I went to the office with my tail between my legs. Even as a child, I did not need to be told when I had screwed up, but one of my editors did me the favor anyway. Everybody else on the desk told me what they thought with the looks on their faces. The silence from the reporters was worse. I should have asked my colleagues for help covering Tower, but it had not occurred to me that I needed help. Many reporters and editors in the office had deep sources on the Hill, but nobody had offered to share or even gave me a heads-up. This was a time when I could have used some adult supervision. I felt humiliated, powerless, lost, and alone.
That night I stayed at work until 9 o’clock, making calls to find something new on the story. Then I walked to The Jefferson hotel, not far from the White House. I was not a bold reporter, or even that self-confident, but I did not like to fail. I hesitated walking into the quietly elegant lobby, but I pushed myself into the barroom. Tower was sitting on a stool with another person, their backs to me. He was short and round perched on the high stool, his hair slicked back, and still dressed in a dark suit from the hearing. Otherwise the bar was empty.
“Senator,” I said.
He turned to look at me.
I introduced myself, my voice cracking with nerves. “I just think that it’s not fair,” I stammered, “that all this stuff is coming out and you are not getting to tell your side.”
“Thank you,” he said in a slow Texas drawl, “but I’m not going to say anything to the press right now.” He turned back to his drink.
I didn’t get a story, but I felt better. I walked out feeling self-assured, that I could do this. What if he had talked to me? That would have been a giant scoop. I felt we had a connection now, that he knew me as an honest broker who would tell both sides. It really wasn’t fair that anonymous sources were leaking defamatory stories without verifying them. In one day, he had gone from being—at least in the media—a respected former senator to a lecherous drunk. You could say anything about Tower and not get called on it. I was willing to tell his side, and maybe he would confide in me. In the meantime, if I could have gotten my hands on some of the bad stuff, I would have poked him with it until he burst.
In the end, the Senate rejected Tower, for the first time in history denying a new president a cabinet nominee. The job of secretary of defense then went to a politically safe choice, a little-known congressman from Wyoming named Dick Cheney.
I didn’t do well on the Tower story, but I learned how to get better. One of the good things about covering Washington was the amount of paper produced by the federal bureaucracy, a bountiful garden of reports, studies, analyses, and internal memos. Human sources were important, but a paper trail could be verified. Some reporters insisted on two sources for a story, but two people still could be wrong or deny it later. That’s what the mayor of Chicago and her husband did to me after they cut off the Tribune’s access to City Hall and then lied about it. Something on paper was irrefutable evidence.
Also, I was appalled by the Washington media’s facile reliance on hiding sources with anonymity. Admittedly, getting scooped with unnamed sources was particularly galling because I didn’t have any anonymous sources of my own. Now I saw that evidence on paper was indisputable, the source was there for everyone to judge, and no one could deny it later.
I needed better human sources, too, even just to win access to the documents. The armed services, for their own reasons, were happy to help. I didn’t work for the New York Times or the Washington Post, but I did write for hundreds of papers that served most congressional districts and military installations around the country. The leadership of the army, especially, made a point of cultivating me, or as they put it, getting me “greened up.”
Army leaders urged me to get out of the Pentagon and into the field, which was excellent advice. I genuinely liked many of the officers I dealt with in Washington, but it wasn’t until I got outside the Beltway that I understood how the real army worked. I traveled to posts across the country and went on a patrol between East Germany and West Germany. I spoke about military-media relations at the Army War College and the Naval Academy and visited with soldiers and noncommissioned officers wherever I could.
At an Arkansas training center for guerilla war, I spent the night running around the brush with the “opfor.” My guys were supposed to be irregular soldiers—the opposing force—against bigger units that parachuted in to fight the “rebels.” Everyone in the exercise, me included, wore special vests that lighted up when hit by lasers mounted on the weapons. We hid among the trees, popped up to shoot, and ran from the enemy.
The invaders were no match for my guys, who knew the terrain and how to fight. None of us got shot, but plenty of enemy soldiers were left “dead” on the battlefield. The young soldiers were in much better shape than I was, and I was exhausted after slogging through the thick woods until the sun came up. My back hurt, and blisters popped out on my toes. By morning I was so tired that my vision was blurry, and I gobbled candy bars and choked down a packet of dry instant coffee to stay awake.
The enemy that night was the 101st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles. My guys called them the “Screaming Chickens,” which everyone thought was hilarious. A long night in the Arkansas woods gave me a taste of what it would be like to cover US troops in combat, and the little feature story I wrote about my adventure would come back to help me in a funny way.
8
INVASION OF PANAMA
——— ON FAIRNESS ———
My experience with troops in the field paid off just before Christmas of 1989. Maru and I were with my family in Chicago for the holidays when the phone rang. My mom answered, and I saw her frown. She handed me the phone, disappointment on her face, saying it was Dale from the office. She knew the office wasn’t calling to wish us a Merry Christmas. Dale got right to the point: “Your current beat invaded your previous beat. You better get moving.”
Dale explained that my current beat, the US military, had just attacked Panama, a country on my previous beat in Latin America. The military mission was to overthrow dictator Manuel Noriega. The desk reasoned there was nobody better than I to cover the story.
From my mom’s house, I called sources at the Pentagon to ask how quickly I could get into Panama. They told me the country would be locked down for a week or so until US forces were firmly in control. The story could be over by then.
What about chartering a plane out of Costa Rica? I asked.
“They will shoot it down,” I was told.
The commanding general was Maxwell Thurman. He wasn’t called Mad Max for nothing.
Once an American ally, General Noriega had fallen out of favor with US officials and many people in his own country. In person, Noriega was surprisingly shy and insecure for someone who controlled everything in Panama and had manipulated the US government for years. The first time I met him, he was more nervous than I was. He did not seem to be a threat to world peace, but he was dangerous to Panamanians who opposed him.
I had witnessed just how dangerous when, almost two years before the invasion, government thugs armed with clubs and thick rubber hoses had sto
rmed the hotel where I was staying in Panama, hunting down opponents of Noriega. I was working in my room a few floors above ground when I heard crashing glass and angry yelling from outside. I looked down from my window and saw men charging toward the hotel entrance. Hiding behind the curtain and not quite believing what I was seeing, I picked up the phone to call the front desk.
“Don’t come down! Stay in your room,” the clerk shouted in English. “They are taking periodists,” meaning periodistas, or reporters.
There were banging thumps in the hallway, shouts of anger, and screams of terror. I opened the door a crack and saw bulky guys in civilian clothes pounding on the doors and dragging people into the hall. I quietly closed my door and made a plan. I didn’t want any of my Panamanian sources to get hurt, so I tore up the business cards I had collected, and ripped out pages from my notebook that might identify people. I flushed the bits of paper down the toilet. I typed up a few paragraphs of what I had seen, connected my computer to the phone in my room, and transmitted a brief story.
The editors in Washington fretted about my safety, but I told them just to edit the story and move it. They were sipping coffee and staring at computer screens in a quiet office building in Washington. I was talking in a whisper, while outside my room I could hear glass shattering and people screaming. I peeked through the curtains again and saw the attackers swinging thick sticks like baseball bats and chasing people, including reporters, in circles around the manicured lawn and tropical flowers outside the hotel entrance.
Just as suddenly, the attackers left. I watched them drive away, and then I carefully went down to the front desk. There was glass and blood on the floor. Chairs and tables were tipped over as if a hurricane had blown through the lobby. People were helping the wounded and talking excitedly about what had happened. Eight foreign correspondents and dozens of Panamanians were arrested. Noriega wasn’t winning the political argument, so he was going to fight dirty.
Finding the News Page 15