This odd and unexpected conversation was making me thoughtful, even a little uneasy. "All I know," I finally said, "is that I'm very happy when I can get up in the morning and write -- and I'm very discontented when my days are just nibbled away. I get real crabby. You see, I like to feel at one with the world: I like the word 'affinity,' or knowing what you specially love and what really fascinates you. Whenever students ask me for advice, I always tell them I have only one piece of advice: 'Follow what you love.'"
Then the wedding couple arrived and the conversation ended.
That day reminded me, too, of the time in 1985 when I was asked by my hostess if I would drive Clare Booth Luce to a dinner that night. I was delighted. The tall, lithe, still-beautiful figure in a long swirling dress that made her seem even more romantic than she already was -- even at eighty-two -- was waiting in front of the Watergate. And from the moment she got into my tiny ancient red Fiat sports car, she was not discussing things, much less conversing, but peremptorily telling me things. In fact, I could not even get in a question, much less a comment.
Finally, this uniquely accomplished woman -- she had "only" been a congresswoman, playwright, ambassador, wife of the great twentieth-century publisher Henry Luce, newspaper writer, mother, conservative philosopher -- looked at me with an oddly searching look and said bluntly, "You did it right."
This time I was so startled, and so in disagreement, that I dared to remonstrate with her, even going so far as to say "Mrs. Luce, please.... "
Still lodged to the point of immobility in my pitiful but adorable car, Mrs. Luce raised her delicate iron hand. (Believe me, one could be forgiven if one mistook that hand for Napoleon's, pointing his troops toward Warsaw.) And so, like any sensible person, I stopped talking. "You did it right," she repeated. Appropriate silence still reigning on my part. "You did one thing," she said, "and you did it well." Pause. We continued in my middle-aged Fiat down Connecticut Avenue.
"I ... could have been a great playwright," she said, her voice different now, softer, but still also oddly defiant. Then she repeated it again, in a slightly louder voice, "I could have been a great playwright." in fact, on that half-hour trip, she repeated that same sentence no fewer than five times. Once we reached our dinner party, she held court and never spoke to me again.
I fervently disagreed with her -- I had always dreamed of the "perfect" woman or man, the person who did everything -- but I had listened carefully, since, in fact, we can never really know.
"Choices," we say to young women, "that's what it's all about." Well, in part.... We have given the younger generation of women the absurd and impossible idea that if they make the "right choices" they can "have everything," when not one living soul of us actually knows what "everything" is. But, is it really about choices? Or is it about knowing what we truly love and then following it dementedly?
***
On the turn of the century, at midnight January 1, 2000, I celebrated surviving the twentieth century with dear friends at the Cosmos Club in Washington, reminding myself of Kierkegaard's cogent warning that, "One can only understand life backwards, but one must live forwards."
In fact, this evening of celebration and sentimental journeying was in itself an event, which reminded me of how things had changed since that long ago day when I walked into the old Chicago Daily News building. Now, I had also become the first woman member in that lovely club, after it experienced a long and bitter fight over admitting women -- My, what trouble and mischief we innocent women have been causing the world, and most of it during my lifetime!
The year 1999 had been a busy one for me: a sentimental return trip to Central America, after the wars were over; an exclusive interview in Brussels with NATO Supreme Commander, General Wesley K. Clark; honorary degrees from Notre Dame College in Cleveland and from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois; a wonderful friends' reunion at our old family lake cabin in Wisconsin; interviews with the presidents of Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Croatia, and Macedonia; speeches in London on the terrorism at the American Bar Association conference and on Fidel Castro (yet again!) for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington.
In terms of my work, I was trying to dig deeper -- and at the same time, to work in ever expanding concentric circles -- and to ask, not only what was happening in the world, but how and why? The twentieth century that I had covered had been a century of the inspiration of equality and of the expectation of development for all peoples -- the twenty-first century would either witness successful institutionalizations of all that obsession for equality, or it could become a dark century of ethnic wars and genocide.
Thus, I was now determined to detail -- and in terms of national psychology, as well as in the more traditional terms of politics and economics -- the countries that were "working." The Omans, the Tunisias, the Taiwans, the Singapores, the Botswanas of the world! By now, we had real models; we knew what worked; there was really no excuse for excuses any more. It was also gratifying, but often in a sad kind of way, to see that so much of what we correspondents had seen and described as we covered stories from the inside out, had turned out to be true. When, for instance, I went to the UN again, in the fall of 2000, and talked to the peacekeeping operations officials, they fully and publicly admitted how much "evil" they had done with their stubborn "neutralist" refusal to distinguish between aggressor and victim in the poor Bosnias and Rwandas they were sent out to "protect." All I could think, again sadly enough, was that at least my conscience was clear, since I had desperately done everything within my power, and at considerable personal risk, to inform people of the dangers.
In many new ways, I seemed somehow to have reached that "center" that the great writer Jorge Luis Borges mentioned at dinner during an unforgettable evening with him in Buenos Aires in 1974. I had the oddest feeling that I had somehow made my way through the maze of life and that I now sat in the middle of a surprising calm, finally knowing where I was and maybe even what I was.
By then, of course, I was worried about foreign correspondence: about my insane, wonderful and creative profession. "We correspondents could go anywhere we pleased," the great Ernie Pyle had written, "being gifted and chosen characters." But now I was worried that so many of those gifted and chosen characters were being killed in action in inordinate numbers -- 1994 was the bloodiest year in history for our profession. I worried about newspapers reducing overseas coverage, about all the glib talk about the world's becoming a "global village" (when, in fact, it is going the other way), and about the "information network" that will make us all instant brothers and sisters (when the threats inherent in the info-revolution are actually pushing many peoples back to combative ethnicities), and about so many places becoming so dangerous, with correspondents targeted so deliberately that journalists are no longer even "there" to record events (the Algerian civil war was one of the worst examples of this).
Meanwhile, however, thoughtful people were also beginning to affirm, in a new protest, that far from becoming fossils of a more romantic era, foreign correspondents are actually now more important than ever! As Dean Peter Krogh, of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service phrased it in his retirement speech in the spring of 1995: "In an age of real-time, multimedia, interactive forms of communications, there is a tendency to declare obsolete (or at least dispensable) the diplomat and the foreign correspondent in the field. We still do so at our peril. The myriad forms of instantaneous communication threaten to substitute immediacy for insight, reaction for reflection, sentiment for judgment, hyperbole for reality, and deniability for integrity."
As Peter spoke that day, I again pondered the incredible percentage of our information about the world that we get from that happy, scrappy, crazy, intellectual, foolish, endangered band of brothers -- and now some sisters -- roaming about "out there," abnormally happy, uniquely challenged, and outrageously hopeful about life. Ninety percent?
During that same fall of 1995, we had a memorable gathering -- a "War Correspondents' Day," which starte
d with a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery, where several years ago, and with military support, of course, we had erected a little monument to the war correspondent. With what joy we had greeted our old friends, our old "companions of the road" who are said by the great travelers to often become even more dear than family, because you share the road, and thus the risks. I looked out at all those bright, weathered faces, and I kept wondering: "Why did we all love each other so much? What on earth moved us all to live such lives?" Of course, being foreign correspondents, we ended this day of memories with a lot of eating, drinking, hugging and utterly outrageously inflated storytelling.
When I spoke that morning in honor of our colleagues who had died in our odd service, I noted that "Once again, now on the peripheries of Europe, diplomats are preening, dictators are falsifying, and men of power are ignoring the victims. And once again, it is only the correspondents on the ground -- those lone sentinels, those courageous souls -- who are bringing us the little, and sometimes the big, truths of politics and warfare, of ambition and human pride...."
Then The New York Times' Vietnam era's David Halberstam, who moderated the memorial service, introduced me, saying that "In a world where, sadly, journalistic fame has less and less to do with journalistic accomplishment, she remains a beacon of the real thing, a reporter's reporter, intelligent, tough-minded, brave, admired by the toughest jury of all: her peers."
Perhaps I was so deeply touched by David's unexpected words because, at least momentarily, it confirmed some of my decisions. You see, like so many women -- and men as well -- I did not know an awful lot of things in my life, and I did not experience many important ones. I never got married, never had children, never knew those special gifts of the supposedly "normal" life. I missed some stories and failed to understand others until too late. Because of the possibilities of American journalism and its great professional family, however, I was privileged to have nearly unlimited access to the centers of human talent and of the human spirit. I knew the best men in the world, and many of them even loved me as much as I loved them. My family blessed me with a real capacity to take a tremendous joy in living; and I had a small gift of writing that, combined with an insane curiosity and a Teutonic stubbornness, allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do, and with very little wasted time.
Above all, I knew what I loved most and I followed it, and so, in the end, I had that special blessing of the wise St. Augustine, who told us poor mortals that we would only begin to know happiness through "knowing the order of the loves."
I knew what I had to do first --- and that, I did.
About the Author
Georgie Anne Geyer was the first woman foreign correspondent in our times. She broke all the rules, as a young twenty-seven-year-old from the south side of Chicago, by going to Latin America for the old Chicago Daily News . Along the way, she interviewed just about every president, revolutionary and rascal, learned five languages and explored myriad cultures. Now, as a syndicated columnist for more than twenty-five years, she writes three columns a week for more than 120 newspapers in the United States and Latin America. She is author of seven books, including Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro, Waiting for Winter to End: An Extraordinary Journey Through Soviet Central Asia , and Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship . She is a regular panelist on PBS's Washington Week in Review and other programs.
Geyer's many awards include the Maria Moors Cabot Award and the Overseas Press Club Award. She was one of the questioners in the 1994 presidential debates. She has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and the Chatauqua Institution, and has served as announcer at the annual Gridiron Show in 1994. Her life was the subject of an unauthorized television series, Hearts Afire, in 1993, and her Castro biography has been made into a miniseries by Showtime and Hallmark Entertainment, Inc. She insists, however, that her greatest honor was being an answer in a New York Times crossword puzzle. On her gravestone she wants the words: "My God, it was fun!"
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