by Wendy Walker
We appreciated having time to plan these highly demanding undertakings, but we didn’t always get it. I recall a summit in Helsinki, Finland, starting on September 9, 1990, for which we were given five days to prepare, start to finish. John Towriss, CNN special events producer, a good friend of mine since we did so much traveling and producing together, was with me in Helsinki for this summit. He recalls, “The local Helsinki newspaper did a story on CNN, the crazy American network that was trying to set up in less than a week,” he says. “We were in the midst of the Gulf War, and I’d been in Saudi Arabia where the average daily temperature was 155 degrees, when I was asked to fly to Helsinki, Finland, for this summit.
“In order to get to Helsinki from Saudi Arabia, I had a stopover in Frankfurt, Germany. I had all the wrong clothes after being in the heat of the desert. It was so cold in Frankfurt, I bought a sweater at the airport, which turned out to be the only cold-weather clothing I had the entire time I was in Finland. The local newspaper there took pictures of Wendy and me in our CNN jackets,” he reminisces, “and when I look back today, we looked like a couple of college kids in our varsity jackets, shivering from the cold. But we were carrying a lot more responsibility than a college kid does. We were doing our part in setting up coverage of a summit that could literally change the world.”
Among numerous summit challenges we faced was the fact that each of the four networks vied for the prime anchor locations. There were huge differences in the relevance of the locations, and the costs varied according to which sites offered the best view of the main event. Of course, each network wanted the advantage, which meant acquiring and paying for the prime positions for their reporters. But there really was no way to make these important allotments in a fair way so we used a draw.
We would put numbers in a hat from 1 to 4, and someone from each network would pull one out. Whoever got number 1 had the right to choose the best location, and it went backward from there. I always considered Towriss to be lucky since he had drawn much better numbers than I had over the years, so he was the one who inevitably drew the straw for CNN. And he often pulled the best numbers. He had pulled a prime location for this Helsinki summit and I was relieved because it promised to be monumental.
The thing is, while all the networks were like family and we smiled and supported one another overtly, we also were trying to outmaneuver and outfox one another all the time. In fact, we watched each other and our own backs like hawks, which added to the ongoing stress and battles against time we all waged. That’s known as good old American competition, which is pretty foreign in a communist country. I remember being in Moscow when we needed setups for the four networks. The Russians had a controlled press corps and it was difficult for them to grasp the concept of a free press. Why did we need setups for four cameras instead of one? Couldn’t we all share? We had to educate them about how we did things in America, and they had to educate us about what they could provide and what they couldn’t.
But the considerable discomfort, confusion, and pressure of these events on so many levels was always offset by the fact that those of us who were there saw history being made right in front our eyes. What an opportunity for a group of youngsters (only someone young could keep up with such insane scheduling and loss of sleep!) who knew we were changing the way the world communicated.
So much of producing summit coverage, wherever they were, was getting accustomed to the local timing and logistics. For example, at a 1988 summit in Moscow, I met with the CNN Moscow bureau chief as soon as we arrived there. It was early in the morning, I was ready to hit the ground running, when he said, “First things first. We need to make reservations for lunch. When would you like to eat?”
Exasperated, I said, “There’s so much to do, I really don’t care about lunch right now. Don’t bother with reservations. When we get hungry, we can go pick something up.”
“You don’t get it, Wendy,” he said. “You’re in Moscow. Food runs out here. We have to make reservations so you and your people have something to eat. Unless you want to work on empty stomachs all day.”
I was shocked but I acquiesced. We made it to our lunch reservation and I have to say that the food was horrible, fatty brown meat and wilted lettuce, but at least we got to eat.
I recall being in Beijing, China, when one of my close friends and colleagues, CNN reporter Charles Bierbauer, and I butted heads. I had the occasional disagreement with my colleagues because we worked too closely under strained circumstances for us to always see eye to eye. The flare-ups were petty and they amounted to nothing in the end, but I have to say, this disagreement with Charles taught me a good lesson.
We were walking down the street in Beijing, short on sleep, when we got into a heated (and ridiculous) argument about who needed to be more focused, a reporter or a producer, a topic that would be compelling only when you’re exhausted, running on empty, and you need to do something to let off steam.
Charles was busy telling me that his job was to observe, ask, synthesize, and then give his report. He described my job as “simple logistics,” which angered me.
“Well, whatever you call it,” I argued, “you owe me a lot. I do all this work on the setup and production so you’ll look good.”
“No, you don’t,” he replied. “You do your work because it’s your job. We both do this because it’s our job. I don’t do it for you and you don’t do it for me. Nobody gets any personal praise or recognition. I just happen to be in front of the camera and you’re behind it. If I fail or stumble or if you do, that affects us both. We owe everything to our jobs and the people who pay us. Beyond that, we don’t owe each other anything.”
He was right, I knew that, but I was too annoyed to admit it right then. I rolled my eyes, a habit I had that drove him crazy. He wagged his finger at me (a habit he had that drove me crazy), and he said, “Don’t you dare roll your eyes at me.”
“Don’t you wag your finger at me, then,” I responded curtly.
And so I rolled, he wagged, and eventually we got to our location and stopped arguing. I guess we were so attuned to each other, we were like an old married couple. We knew each other well enough to have a good fight, but when the chips were down, we were there for each other 100 percent, and we never decided who owed what to whom.
Charles was also with me in 1992, when we landed in Tokyo where President George H. W. Bush was scheduled to attend a state dinner for 135 diplomats. Right after we landed in Japan, a reporter from each network was given a short interview, a five-minute sit-down, with the president, and when it was Charles’s turn, he informally asked the president how he was doing.
“It was a long trip,” Bush said. “I feel a little tired and achy, to tell you the truth.”
“We’re all worn out,” Charles told him reassuringly.
About two hours later, President and Barbara Bush arrived at the home of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa where they were greeted warmly. The dinner was covered by a pool camera, and CNN was pool that night so I had to monitor the dinner. As the president and the prime minister sat down to eat, the producers and reporters sat in our work space where we could see the action inside the banquet room on a monitor from that one small camera feed. We all relaxed a little bit as we chatted, had a bite to eat, and got ready to shut down for the night.
Not so fast! I was chatting with Charles about something insignificant, thinking about going to bed soon, when someone said, “Hey, did you see that? Where’s the president?”
We all stared at the monitor. There was the table, there were the prime minister and his guests, but the president was nowhere to be seen. It seemed that he had vomited on the prime minister and then fainted, slumping to the floor beneath the table. Barbara, his wife, had rushed over and gotten on the floor beside him, trying to revive him. We had no idea what had just happened and we all picked up our phones to find out. That was when a call came in from Atlanta. One of the network’s health correspondents said, “We just heard that the presiden
t died. And that they’re flying his body back home. Is it true?”
“No. I don’t think so,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything. But I’ll find out.” I called around to anyone who might have the information. If it was a rumor, we needed to nip it in the bud before it got reported. If it was true—well, I didn’t even want to think about that.
I got in touch with a reporter standing outside the prime minister’s home. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Is the motorcade moving?”
“Yes. But we’re not sure where they’re going or who’s in the car.”
As we continued to make calls and tried to verify what was happening, we all received a computer file saying, READ ME! I froze for a second. This was our message alert system, letting us all know that there was an important message that we needed to read right away. When we opened it, it said something to the effect that although we had no confirmation as yet, there were rumors circulating that the president had died.
At CNN Atlanta, anchor Don Miller, who has since passed away, had been on the air. The network was on a commercial break when he got the READ ME! message. Looking troubled, he asked his producer, “Are you sure you want me to report this?”
“Yes,” his producer said. “But we don’t have much information. Can you ad-lib the story when we’re back on the air?”
While this was going on, I called Dorrance Smith. Remember him? I had met him at Ethel’s and wanted to be him? Well, now I had his job and he worked for the White House as part of President Bush’s team and was with us in Japan. “Dorrance,” I said, “we’re getting reports in Atlanta that the president is dead.”
“He isn’t,” Dorrance said with assurance. He had just seen the president. “He’s alive and he has a nasty flu.”
Don Miller was getting ready to report the unwelcome and disturbing piece of news as he somberly looked at the camera and said, “This tragic news just in from Tokyo.”
But I had gotten a call through in time. At that point, his producer interrupted him and literally shouted into his earpiece, “No. Stop. Don’t read it.”
Thank God Don knew how to think on his feet. He managed to stop himself in midsentence and say, “Well, we’ll get back to that story.” And he went on to something else. We all exhaled. If that report had gone on the air, it would have been catastrophic. So, in effect, we nearly killed off the president that night, but we rescued him and ourselves in the nick of time. Good going, Don!
Perhaps this false rumor had spread like wildfire because it came on the heels of President Bush’s diagnoses of atrial fibrillation and Graves’ disease during the preceding twelve months. But this was typical of how the news worked. I can’t tell you how many times something like a simple dinner with little to no import in the larger scheme of things suddenly became an international story. And we had managed to avoid spreading rumors and causing America and the rest of the world to panic. Who took the credit for that? None of us and all of us.
In 1989, I produced coverage for a US-Soviet summit in Malta, an archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Summits were always an exercise in controlled chaos and this one was no exception as we quickly realized the limitations of Malta’s technology. We were all pushed to our limits, it was freezing cold outside, and John Towriss and I were in the work space well past midnight, arranging everything for the talks that would begin at 6 a.m. the next morning. “Wendy,” John said, looking at me through bloodshot eyes, “I’m going up to my room and try to knock out a few hours of sleep.”
Anxious to grab whatever sleep was possible, I went to my room, too. But sleep didn’t last very long for me or for John.
“I lay down on the bed in my clothes,” says John, “and I dropped off immediately without even turning off the lights, only to hear the phone ringing. It seemed like I just fell asleep five minutes before when I reached out to grab the telephone. I sat up with a start and said, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
CNN anchor, Bernard Shaw was calling John. A quick glance at the clock confirmed to John that it was not his imagination. He truly had just lain down.
“I tried to wake myself up fully,” says John, “while Bernie droned in a slow, narrative kind of reporter-speak, ‘Hi, John. This is Bernie.’ ”
“What’s up?” John asked him, still groggy.
Bernie went on, “Well… I’m looking outside the window.”
It couldn’t have sounded more bizarre as Bernie continued speaking, using his words slowly and clearly, as if he were doing an on-the-air report. “A storm of terrific ferocity is blowing here. Our satellite dish is moving. Yes, now it’s flipped over. It’s broken. The satellite dish is broken. And our set seems to be taking a lot of water. Yes, water is now washing over our set.”
While Bernie was talking, John ran over to the window and looked out. A monsoon of massive proportions was crashing down from the heavens, and he gazed with horror at our beautiful set on a ledge out over the water as the downpour lashed up over the TV cameras.
I got the same call from Bernie, maybe in not such a formal manner. I dragged myself out of bed, threw on some clothes, and ran down to see what was going on. As soon as I saw the problems, I quickly called various crew members and woke them up. “Get down here right away. We have to get all the lights down and the cameras need to come inside.”
We all got pelted by the storm while a crew member climbed a ladder. With three guys holding the ladder against the wind, this agile man meticulously detached the lights and pulled them down. He made it back down the ladder and we all stared with horror at the mess in front of us. We were in a storm to end all storms, we were physically wiped out and drenched and so were our cameras, and the gales had flipped over our satellite dish that now lay on the ground, smashed to pieces. And we were scheduled to be on the air in five hours.
We called Atlanta to report our problem and find out what help they could give us. They called all around Malta, waking everyone up, to see if anyone had any spare satellite dishes. No one did. Then we began to call our colleagues at the other networks to see if they had unused time on their satellites. We wanted to know if we could connect to theirs until we found a way to broadcast. We came up blank again. Everyone was using every minute of available time they had.
Finally, John called the owner of our hotel. A lovely and cooperative man, he offered to call his brother who was a local sheet metal worker. When this angel in rain gear arrived in the middle of the night with advanced electronic knowledge and some used parts, he began picking up pieces of our broken satellite dish. He took the struts, banged them against soggy trees to straighten them out, and used a rivet gun to cobble together a makeshift dish with pieces of sheet metal he brought with him. He formed them into the rough shape of a satellite dish, our technicians connected the electronics, and amazingly, the thing worked! John and I were a little worse for the wear, but we got the job done. In fact, we always did, by hook or by crook, as they say. And we did it because that was the job we had been hired to do.
In line with what Charles Bierbauer had articulated to me in Beijing, getting this job done took every one of us putting our heads together and making it work. No one owed anyone a thing except for our shared obligation to CNN, which had hired us and paid our salaries. We did our jobs, and with the help of a few angels along the way, we were up and running when the time came.
Along with John and Charles, I have to add Gary Foster, head of the White House press corps, and CNN reporter Frank Sesno, to my list of colleagues whom I think of as brothers. When we landed in Geneva for the very first Soviet-US summit in 1985, possibly the end of the Cold War, Gary stood at the bottom of the stairway, sending each of the network crews and producers to various camera setups that had been prearranged. As I recall, the energy in the air was palpable since no one knew what was about to happen and most everyone had their doubts and confusions.
The truth was that in the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, his opponents saw him as a cowboy, an anti-Soviet cru
sader who was dangerous, ill informed, and just might precipitously start a war. A large part of his platform throughout his presidency was his stance that America was seen as weak among other international powers. A great many Americans were fearful that this “cowboy” leader might decide to build and employ new generations of nuclear weapons.
This was a logical conclusion since during his first term, President Reagan, “Mr. Tough Guy,” never met with a Soviet leader. Instead, he sent George H. W. Bush, his vice president, in his place. When he was taken to task for this, he famously said, “They keep dying on me.” That was true. A number of Soviet leaders died in office, and Reagan was criticized for not attending the funerals and not making an effort to meet the successors.
Judging from his rhetoric, his attitudes, and his desire to build a nuclear shield in Europe, a pet project he called Star Wars, it appeared that there was no way this president would ever talk to the Soviets, much less try to negotiate a peace agreement. But the president’s rigid stance eased when he had a talk with his close friend and ally British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher and Reagan, both hard-core conservatives, had been close before Reagan came to power. Some even went so far as to call them soul mates. Now that the prime minister had declared that Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, was not “doddering,” like others may have been, but rather someone the West could do business with, Reagan was ready to meet with him. A new era was dawning, and a summit was planned in Geneva that would see these Cold War foes searching for a way to communicate.
There were worries about how well Ronald Reagan had been briefed for this all-important summit. Frank Sesno, our anchor that day, recalls the summit in Geneva vividly. “I was standing in clear view of the meeting place from my stakeout position,” he says. “The building was a mission called Martha’s Château. Gorbachev had already arrived, he was inside, and there was Ronald Reagan, walking deliberately into the mission, followed by his military aide who carried the nuclear codes in a briefcase, which we referred to as the ‘football.’ How incredibly dramatic to see the president who had labeled the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ walking into the lion’s den with the nuclear codes in tow that could launch missiles capable of destroying the planet.”