Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  During these years our bureau of three or four reporters covered a lot of budgets, a goodly number of scandals and elections, and the ceaseless ebb and flow of government and politics, sometimes with what might be called distinction. But I could never dispel the feeling that the truly important parts of the power structure remained unseen, like a huge machine whose operations were 90 percent underground. I concluded that the real business was conducted in secret, at closed meetings of the Board of Estimate, which passed on all city projects; in off-the-cuff meetings between real estate developers and borough presidents; and at long, leisurely lunches in Brooklyn or Queens steak houses. On those occasions when I wrote an investigative piece, the reaction was instantaneous. It reminded me of Mike Royko’s line that “a reporter is to a politician as a barking dog is to a chicken thief,” and I felt we should be producing dozens and dozens of such stories every week.

  Though I didn’t always realize it, my reporting sometimes took me to the same haunts my father had frequented. I have a vivid memory of interviewing an assistant district attorney in the Bronx: We left the templelike courthouse on the Grand Concourse and went to a cozy bar, where after a few drinks he filled my notebook with off-the-record nuggets. Thirty years later, I came across a letter written to my mother by Jack Turcott, Barney’s Daily News colleague in New Guinea. Turcott reminisced fondly about their reporting days in New York—in particular a press conference in the Bronx courthouse, called to give out information on Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of Lindbergh’s baby. The melee of fifty reporters was so wild, the elbow jabbing so intense, the prosecutor lost his glasses. Turcott and Barney left the shouting horde, repairing to a nearby bar. To their delight, half an hour later the prosecutor’s press secretary walked in, told them his boss had not spoken a word, and then provided a full account of what he would have said. “Barney and I had a second drink and then we agreed that the man who doesn’t get excited always gets much further than the man who erupts,” he wrote.

  In March 1975, I received a call at home from Paul O’Brien, the press spokesman for the city comptroller, Harrison Jay Goldin. He sounded shaken and, after giving an ironclad pledge to allow him to talk off the record, I understood why. The city had just held a sale of notes and bonds—a tradition-laden ceremony, during which banking syndicates place their bids in a little green tin box in a chamber in the controller’s office—and something unheard of had occurred: The box was empty. No one bid. O’Brien sounded like the voice of doom. “What’s this mean?” I asked. He didn’t equivocate. “No one is willing to loan us any money.” “But how about the city’s bills?” “We can’t pay them.” “But … the policemen, the firemen, sanitation workers … what’s going to happen? Who’ll pay them?” “Not us. We’re broke.”

  And so began the long saga of the fiscal crisis, a story with twists and turns that kept New York on edge for months. The Times left most of the daily coverage to me and a young colleague, Steve Weisman. Although scores of press conferences were held by city officials who sought to explain and justify their budgetary legerdemain, I remember exactly one. After half an hour of arcane mutterings by James A. Cavanagh, the portly deputy mayor, I raised my hand and asked, “Is it too late to drop this course?”

  One result of the fiscal crisis was that the foreign desk began to look kindly on my request for a foreign assignment. For years, I had wanted to go abroad, but I had a problem. The starting point for many foreign correspondents was to go to Vietnam. I was implacably opposed to the war and, given all the stories I had heard about my father in World War II, I couldn’t conceive of covering a conflict that I did not wholeheartedly support. That struck me not just as antipatriotic but, on some level, deeply wrong. Years later I realized my stance was absurd, but at the time I steadfastly refused to consider a posting to Saigon. As Asia was cooling off, however, there was another part of the world that was heating up—Africa. When I was offered the job of West African correspondent, to be based in Lagos, Nigeria, I leapt at it. Nina was game. We figured our girls, Kyra, then four years old, and Liza, two, were young enough to adapt to a new country without trouble. For Nina, who had obtained a master’s degree in theater arts from Columbia and another one in child development from the New School, it meant embarking on a future without a clear career route, but she was up for adventure.

  Down at City Hall, my colleagues congratulated me on my new assignment. But not everyone understood. One day, I ran into Howard Golden, then a Brooklyn councilman. He and I were cordial to each other but hardly close. His face fell as he put his arm around me and led me off to a quiet corner near the grand marble stairway. “John,” he said, his voice oozing concern. “I hear they’re sending you to Africa. What happened? Did you mess up?” For him, New York City was the universe and City Hall was the solar system, and the idea of giving it up was beyond comprehension. I hastened to assure him that it was my life’s ambition. He walked away shaking his head.

  For months I prepared for my assignment, reading up on Africa, getting inoculations, and undergoing briefings from officials in Washington, including one at CIA headquarters. My request for a resident visa to live in Nigeria wasn’t approved. It wasn’t denied, either; it was simply left to languish in limbo. Finally, the foreign editor suggested that I head off alone, find a country in West Africa to base myself in, and then send for my family. I left on a cold day in January 1976. Nina and the girls were there to see me off. I kissed them and then walked up the red carpet of the futuristic passageway of Saarinen’s TWA terminal, carrying my portable Olivetti.

  Only a short time earlier I had received that mysterious package from Chicago that contained my father’s last notebook. At this point I was keenly aware that I was following in his footsteps. All the stories I had heard about him had had their effect. The myth was irresistible. Part of what I was and what I felt had come from him, even his restlessness. Now I was about to test myself on the same ground that had become his last stand.

  CHAPTER 18

  As a newly minted foreign correspondent, I found my entry into Africa anything but easy. Six hours after arriving in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, I ate a hot dog and collapsed with food poisoning. My father, too, my mother had said, had begun his foreign tour with an illness—except that his was caused by a bad batch of vaccine.

  After two days in bed, sweating out a recovery, I was able to get up and investigate the capital, looking into communications and airline connections to see if it would be a suitable base for covering the continent. I decided against it—there seemed to be too many white Frenchmen pulling strings in back offices. So I moved on down the coast to Ghana. I liked Accra immediately—the languid, sultry air, the sweetness of the people, whose universal greeting was, “How is life?” Rickety buses painted with philosophical fragments such as DEATH OF MOTHER IS END OF FAMILY and THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN plied the potholed streets. I registered at the Ambassador Hotel, which had seen better days—my room had only one working lightbulb—and requested a call to New York. “Certainly,” said the cheerful desk clerk. He could book the call for Saturday morning. I looked at a calendar: It was Wednesday. I concluded Ghana was a bit too laid-back for a bureau.

  During these initial weeks, I felt a need to communicate with the foreign desk, to let the editors know what I was up to, a hangover from my days as a local reporter. But after a couple of calls, during which it was obvious that my editor was barely listening, it dawned on me that no one in the home office was waiting to hear from me. At first, the realization made me feel as if I had fallen off the edge of the map. Here I was, contending with all these logistical difficulties, and they didn’t even care. Then the implications sank in and I felt a flood of joy. I was liberated. My schedule, my life even, was my own affair. I alone was responsible for myself and my family. Now all I had to do was to prove that I was worthy of this freedom, that I could be a top-notch correspondent, that I was smart enough and quick enough to be Barney Darnton’s son.

  In Accra I
managed to meet the Nigerian high commissioner, an expansive gentleman who served me tea and enjoyed discussing New York’s fiscal crisis (I was just the man for that). He chuckled while mopping his brow and smoothing the wide sleeves of his agbada, a spectacular embroidered robe. During our third meeting, he abruptly leapt up and pumped my hand. In a stentorian voice, he announced that he was going to give me a present: permission to enter Nigeria on a onetime visa.

  The plane trip from Accra to Lagos normally took forty-five minutes. Mine, due to inexplicable delays, mechanical problems, the nonappearance of the flight crew, and the crush of a crowd at the ticket counter, took eight hours. I arrived at Ikeja airport wilted and worn-out and handed my passport to an immigration official wearing mirrored glasses and an imperturbable expression. He demanded to see my return airplane ticket. But why would I need that, I ventured, since I was coming in? Without it, he said, I couldn’t enter. Case closed. He summoned the next person in line. I protested. I begged. I mentioned a certain letter from a certain high official of the Times, complete with a stamp and ribbon, informing anyone who cared to read it that I was to be the officially credited correspondent for an important American newspaper. Could I introduce that document into our discussion? The man did not say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. The letter, I recalled, was in my suitcase, and at that moment I happened to look through a window and see the luggage truck crashing into an overhang. Bags were falling onto the ground, collapsing like accordions, bursting open. The baggage handlers walked off. Passengers, businessmen with set expressions, fatalistic from years of coping with West Africa, crawled along a conveyor belt to squeeze through the opening of hanging rubber straps, no easy task, since the belt was moving in the opposite direction. They looked like hamsters on a wheel. I joined them. I made it outside and miraculously located my suitcase, when the truck inexplicably took off. It drove around the terminal building to the front, where I and a few other passengers managed to leap off. I looked around, congratulating myself. I was in Nigeria. But then I remembered that my passport was still in the custody of the immigration official. I entered the terminal and saw an Air Ghana counter. I bought a ticket back to Accra, walked through to the arrivals area, and presented the ticket to the official. Without so much as a raised eyebrow, he stamped my passport, handed it back, and gestured me through. Clearly, Nigeria was unlike any other place on earth, a sort of alternate universe in which rationality and the normal laws of cause and effect didn’t apply.

  I found a taxi, which carried me for miles and miles along a stark highway, the driver stopping only once to renegotiate the price we had already agreed upon. The road was black except for candles flickering on roadside tables bearing pyramids of goods, presided over by big-busted women wrapped in flame-colored kaftans. Dark figures darted between the cars. I was dropped off at a white stucco house on Ikoyi Island. It had been rented long ago by the paper and was now occupied by an amiable Australian. He welcomed me with a stiff drink in one hand and a bottle in the other. I fell asleep with geckos staring down at me from the ceiling.

  In the morning, I slept late. I turned on the radio and heard military music. A shaky voice made an announcement: “I bring you good tidings. The government has been overthrown.” Ten hours in the country—eight of them asleep—not knowing a damn thing about Nigeria and still less about the government, I had stumbled into a coup. I dressed, ran out the door, and made my way downtown, through streets jammed with fleeing cars and pedestrians. At the Reuters office I was mounting the stairs when a man came running past me. “I’m Darnton, from The New York Times,” I yelled after him. He paused for a moment. “Colin Fox, Reuters.” He reached the bottom of the landing and shouted over his shoulder, “Welcome to Nigeria!”

  Luckily, my reporting reflexes kicked in. I located the bullet-riddled limousine of the head of state, Murtala Muhammed, abandoned on a highway, and saw the pool of blood in the backseat, where he had been riding. I teamed up with Fox—we rode around in his open MG, looking like clueless tourists—until the tanks took over the now-empty streets. Soldiers packed into Land Rovers pointed guns at us. “No road!” they shouted angrily, and we quickly retreated. Throughout the day, power seesawed between the military in office and the rebels challenging them, until finally it appeared that despite Muhammed’s assassination, the coup attempt had been beaten back. I filed through Reuters and spent the night at their office. As I lay on the wooden floor, the Teletype machines murmuring in the background, my stomach growling with hunger, I relived the events of the day. I felt a warm satisfaction. I had gotten the story out. My baptism had been difficult but successful. I suddenly felt that this crazy profession—with its camaraderie, adrenaline-fueled excitement, and proximity to important events—was right for me, that I had been born for it.

  The following day Fox and his family were expelled from the country—he had filed an overblown story on tribal violence in northern Nigeria, a sensitive subject six years after civil war. I left his office moments before it was ransacked and padlocked and saw him taken away in a Black Maria. Later I heard that he, his wife, and young daughter were taken up country, placed in a dugout canoe, and pushed across a river into neighboring Benin. Except for an Agence France-Presse man, I had become the only resident Western correspondent in the country.

  I flew to London and escorted Nina and the girls back to Lagos. I knew Nina was not one to break under hardship—in that respect, she reminded me of my father’s assessment of my mother. Still, her taste for adventure surprised me. The fetid streets, bordered by open sewers, jammed with cars, bicycles, and people carrying everything from small bundles to furniture on their heads, struck her as exotic. But I could see she was wondering how to set up a life for us here. After the grinding two-hour trip from the airport, she asked, “When do we get to the nice part of town?” We were just about to pull into our driveway.

  I set about establishing an office. I bribed a telephone repair man to obtain a line for a working telex. We enrolled Kyra at an international school. It was adjacent to a military barracks, and to get there each morning, we had to be cleared by guards waving automatic weapons. Lagos lived up to its reputation as a difficult place. Phones didn’t work, electricity was a sometime thing (NEPA, the electric company, was said to be an acronym for “no electrical power anytime”), and corruption was rife. Everyday transactions like getting gas meant forking over paltry bribes, called “dash.” The wet heat was oppressive. The streets were clogged with traffic jams euphemistically called “go-slows.” To try to unsnarl them, military police pulled out long whips and used them on feckless drivers.

  After fifteen months, it was our turn to be deported. I had written dozens of articles about Nigeria’s praiseworthy efforts to grow more food and surmount various other problems, but four or five of them proved displeasing to the military authorities. One was about piracy in Nigerian harbors, another about a military raid on the commune of a charismatic musician and political dissident whom I had come to know, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The American ambassador, Donald Easum, warned me that he had heard some rumblings of discontent from inside Dodan Barracks, the seat of the military government. I considered lying low for a while and concentrating on covering other countries, but then something happened that cried out for exposure. The two-and-a-half-year-old son of our steward, Martin Anoweh, fell ill one night. We rushed the child to the main children’s hospital, a crowded, dirty, and depressing place. After the medical person on duty failed to find a vein for an IV, the boy died of dehydration. The hospital treated the case perfunctorily, and the staff yelled that Martin was to blame for his son’s death. From that point on, we were forced to pay bribes at every step—to retrieve the body from the morgue, to cut through needless paperwork, to be allowed to enter the cemetery, and finally to persuade the grave diggers, suddenly “on break,” to bury the makeshift coffin. Martin was devastated. His grief was deepened by the cruelty of every official he encountered. A doctor provided me with accurate statistics on
infant mortality, proving that the problem was much worse than officially admitted.

  The story created a furor. Not long afterward, plainclothes police from the National Security Organization searched my office and my home, confiscated files, and escorted me to a prison compound surrounded by ten-foot walls topped with razor wire. Inside, a warden, a tall man stripped to the waist, with an angry scar encircling his midriff, confiscated my clothes. He placed me in a dungeonlike cell. During the next eight hours, I was interrogated several times by a young man sharply dressed in civilian clothes who asked me to identify my sources. I politely declined. Eventually, he told me that I had to leave Nigeria because my stories had put the country “in a bad light.” The next morning, Nina and our girls were placed in a holding cell while I was escorted to buy our plane tickets—on the first flight to anywhere. We were taken in separate vans to the airport, placed in detention there, and put aboard a plane bound for Kenya. Moments before takeoff, a man bolted up the ramp and tossed our passports in my lap. When we arrived in Nairobi, the foreign press corps met us at the airport, whisked us to a hotel, and treated us to dinner and drinks.

  We finished out the four-year assignment in East Africa, where life for foreigners was comparatively idyllic. West Africa was crowded and tumultuous. The climate and the tsetse fly had kept away Europeans. It was the center of culture and art, the historic empires of Mali and Songhay, the Gold Coast slave trade, and the sand-swept cities of the Sahara, where Tuareg in robes of indigo blue rode camels. East Africa was still something of a colonial preserve. It was the home of White Mischief and Hemingway’s green hills, the game parks, Isak Dinesen’s farm, and Masai warriors walking down the Nairobi sidewalks swathed in red kangas and carrying spears. Naturally, foreign correspondents based themselves in East Africa.