Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  Hoggart asked him why he had felt the sudden need for nicotine. ‘I always like a smoke after being made love to,’ the minister replied.121 (I suspect he used a slightly different form of words, but Hoggart was writing for a respectable family newspaper.) That was the Clinton effect.

  If radio listeners in the UK came to associate me with bedtime, because of the time of the evening when I was usually on air, in the US, my voice was more usually associated with breakfast. Newshour, the BBC World Service news programme that I presented for more than twenty years, is broadcast on public radio stations in more than 200 cities in the US, and as I worked only on the lunchtime edition (lunchtime in the UK), I was on air early in the morning in the US. Once, when I presented the programme from Durham, North Carolina, where we were helping to inaugurate a new studio complex for the local public radio station, more than five hundred people turned up to watch us in action. I told them that I was astonished to see so many of them so early in the morning, especially since watching a radio show being transmitted is not a great spectator sport. (I think I used the phrase ‘like watching paint dry’, but perhaps I undersold the sheer novelty of seeing a bunch of Brits running around like headless chickens.)

  In Boston, where being British is almost like being an honorary citizen, I was recognised (or rather my voice was recognised) by a waitress in an Italian restaurant. ‘Are you Robin Lustig of the BBC?’ she asked, after having taken our order. Ruth was with me and, as nothing remotely similar had ever happened in the UK, from then on, whenever people asked her what her husband did for a living, she would reply: ‘He works for the BBC. He’s quite big in Boston.’

  Americans who find mainstream US broadcast news coverage less than adequate often turn to the BBC to fill in the gaps. For them, the attraction of Newshour is that it brings them news of places that tend not to make headlines on Fox News or CNN. And anyone who speaks with an English accent sounds to many Americans as if they must be better educated, and therefore more knowledgeable. It is, of course, a woeful perception error, but it inevitably works to the BBC’s advantage.

  BBC radio shows are broadcast in the US mainly on public radio stations that, unlike the BBC, are largely dependent on advertising and individual and corporate subscriptions, rather than being funded by a licence fee or directly by the government. So, each year, they hold fundraisers, and they broadcast endless appeals to their listeners for financial support to help them stay on air. For several years, many stations asked BBC broadcasters to record these appeals, as they found that they raised more cash if the begging was done in an English accent.

  This caused some qualms among senior BBC managers who had misgivings about the BBC’s name being used, in effect, to extort cash from listeners. So we arrived at a messy compromise: my colleagues and I would record a message that said something like: ‘If you enjoy listening to Newshour, you will know that you need [insert name of radio station]. Here’s how you can support [insert name of radio station again].’ And then another, non-BBC voice would say: ‘Call 1-800 xxx now to pledge your support.’

  That way, we could argue that we never actually asked for cash and the BBC’s saintliness remained unsullied. Or so we liked to think.

  There were no qualms, however, when some stations invited BBC presenters to be guests of honour and after-dinner speakers at events that had been organised for some of their most generous donors. We were treated like Hollywood superstars, which was a pleasant change from the total anonymity to which we were accustomed back home. It was also a rare opportunity to meet some of our listeners and hear what they liked – and did not like – about our work.

  I was often asked, especially in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, why the BBC insisted on interviewing pro-Bush neoconservatives, as well as the more liberal critics of the administration, given that they were already getting plenty of airtime on mainstream US media. My reply was that the BBC was not the Bush-Bashing Corporation, and that we attached great importance to representing all viewpoints, not only those with which our listeners agreed. But I was left with the very clear impression that many of our listeners would have liked a lot more Bush-bashing.

  One station, WBUR in Boston, went further than most in cultivating a close relationship with BBC broadcasters by inviting some of us to host their shows as stand-ins for their regular presenters. In general, I think their listeners liked the change of sound, although one caller did once tell me on air: ‘I thought we fought a war of independence so that we didn’t have to listen to accents like yours any more.’

  I often wish, when the future of the BBC is being discussed, that some of the corporation’s UK critics could listen to its supporters in the US. For them, even if they live in the richest country in the world, the BBC represents something that they can only dream of: a broadcaster beholden to no commercial interest and to no government diktat. It is a broadcaster that exists only for the public good – to inform, educate and entertain – and that, as a consequence, produces programmes that are the envy of the world.

  So why do the BBC’s American devotees not help pay for it? Good question, and one that I suspect will eventually be resolved in the next few years. I am in no doubt that they would be happy to pay – indeed, I have often been asked, ‘Where do I send the cheque?’ when I have told Americans about the BBC’s ever-tighter financial constraints.

  There are, of course, plenty of exceptions. The army veteran whom I met on the Fort Bragg golf course was certainly not among the BBC’s greatest fans; nor were the protesters in Boston who greeted chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and me at a public meeting with banners labelling both of us as anti-Semites.

  When I was making my documentary series Looking for Democracy, in which we examined different forms of democracy around the world, we started in Orange County, in southern California, where they have more elections than anywhere else on the planet and therefore, arguably, could claim to be the most democratic place in the world. They elect all their local officials, including the man who runs the local water purification and sewage plant, and, in some places, they even vote on town planning applications.

  But, as so often in the US, there was a downside: hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants – ‘undocumented workers’ – most of them from Mexico, who had no right to vote and played no part in the democratic process. If it was democracy, it was Athenian-style, with an invisible slave class whose voices were unheard and whose views were ignored. But this was America, so they were delighted to talk to the man from the BBC.

  One of the many joys of being a foreign correspondent is that sometimes you see things that local reporters either have never noticed or simply take for granted. Reporting for the BBC meant being able to travel beyond the Beltway, to leave behind the Washington hothouse of politicians, lawyers and lobbyists and take to the road to talk to ‘real’ Americans.

  ‘Middle America’ – that vast and varied expanse that lies between Washington DC and New York on the east coast and Los Angeles and Hollywood on the west coast. The America, in other words, that foreigners hardly ever see and where not everyone is a liberal. And where better to take the temperature of Middle America than in Rolla, Missouri, a town of some twenty thousand people that likes to style itself ‘the middle of everywhere’, on the grounds that exactly the same number of people live to the north and south of it, and to the east and west of it.

  Ahead of the 2008 presidential election, Catherine Miller and I set off in a rented car from Chicago to drive 450 miles southwest to Rolla, roughly following the line of the old Route 66 that took the victims of the 1930s rust belt depression to what they hoped would be new opportunities in California. Along the way, we passed close to Peoria, the traditional Middle America of showbiz. We also visited an ethanol plant, stopped off in Hannibal, on the banks of the Mississippi, birthplace of Mark Twain, and went on a tour of the Budweiser brewery in St Louis.

  Every time we stopped, we gathered material and recorded interviews to b
e sent back to London. And, because we were now fully paid-up members of the BBC’s brave new multimedia world, I wrote a daily diary for the World Tonight website and we published our photographs online. Radio was now so much more than mere sounds and voices, and we had to think constantly of what John Birt had chosen to label ‘multi-platform content delivery’. I was never convinced that licence fee-payers appreciated how much more they were getting for their money.

  We had decided to broadcast from Missouri because ever since 1904, with just one exception, it had voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election. It was justifiably proud of its bellwether status, but we well and truly jinxed it: in 2008, just weeks after our visit, it narrowly chose John McCain, not Obama, and in 2012, it got it wrong again by choosing Mitt Romney. Perhaps too many Missourians felt like the immigration officer at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, who, when I told him why we had come to the US, remarked: ‘I ain’t never gonna vote for a man with a name like Obama…’

  In November 2008, Barack Obama won the election with 53.8 per cent of the popular vote, a bigger share than any winning presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984, and, as the first black President in US history, he became an instant global celebrity. Significantly, a higher proportion of white voters chose him than had voted either for John Kerry in 2004 or for Al Gore in 2000. Being black, it seemed, was no longer an insuperable obstacle to electoral success in a country still riven by racial tensions. There was much talk, which I tried hard to avoid during my many hours of election night broadcasting, of ‘new beginnings’ and ‘new dawns’. I have always been suspicious of sweeping claims.

  With the exception of Alberto Fujimori, the son of Japanese parents who was President of Peru from 1990 until 2000 and who ended up in jail for human rights violations, Obama was the first minority head of state to be democratically elected anywhere by universal franchise. So, at some point on election night, I asked the former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner if he could imagine French voters electing a non-white President.

  The long pause before he answered spoke volumes.

  I plead guilty to being obsessed by US politics. In mitigation, I argue that who leads the most powerful nation on earth is of no little importance to the rest of the world. I also, as a theatre lover, cannot help but admire the sheer drama of US politics: the larger-than-life characters, the sudden upsets, the tension of the TV debates – it is politics designed for the Age of Sensation. It may not lead to good government, but it certainly generates plenty of excitement. If anyone ever doubted it, 2016 provided more than enough proof.

  In 1968, when I was still young and impressionable, I watched the Democrats tear themselves apart in Chicago, when the police used tear gas to break up protests during the party’s chaotic convention and a grumpy left-wing outsider called Eugene McCarthy threatened to derail the officially favoured candidate Hubert Humphrey. (In 2016, Bernie Sanders bore more than a passing resemblance.) Lyndon Johnson had chosen not to run for a second term as anti-Vietnam War protests looked like sinking his chances; Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated. That November, the Republican candidate Richard Nixon beat Humphrey by less than one percentage point of the popular vote. There was never any shortage of excitement – and this was at the height of the Cold War, when we believed that we were just one button-push away from nuclear oblivion.

  Four years later, Nixon smashed the Democrats’ George McGovern with 60 per cent of the popular vote – and two years after that, facing impeachment over his role in the Watergate scandal, he became the only US President in history to resign. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, then another George Bush – there was never a dull moment.

  The Boutwell auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama. It was 20 January 2009, the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, and I was in Alabama to witness the event from a part of the country where the memories of racial segregation were still more raw than almost anywhere else in the US. In 1956, when Nat King Cole had performed in front of a white audience in that same auditorium, he was attacked on stage by followers of the Ku Klux Klan.

  The World Tonight’s editor, Alistair Burnett, had thought long and hard about how we could cover the inauguration. Dozens of BBC correspondents would be in Washington, so what could we do that would still be fresh at the end of a day of saturation coverage? The answer was to send Lustig to Alabama to talk to people who had been in the forefront of the equal rights struggle.

  And so it was that, a few days before the inauguration, I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma with the Rev. F. D. Reese, who in 1965 had marched across that same bridge hand-in-hand with Martin Luther King.

  ‘I saw blood flowing that day … But now with a black man as President of these United States of America, I know that all our pain and suffering was worth it.’

  I rode a bus in Montgomery with Mary Smith Ware, who in 1955, aged eighteen, had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person. Six weeks later, another African-American woman, Rosa Parks, did the same thing, also in Montgomery, and became a national symbol of the civil rights movement.

  And outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, I met Carolyn McKinstry, who in 1963 had been just feet away from a bomb that had been planted in the church by the Ku Klux Klan. Four of her friends were killed when the bomb exploded.

  The people whom I met, and tens of thousands of other African-Americans throughout the Deep South, with their still raw memories of discrimination and violence, could scarcely believe what they were seeing as Barack Obama – ‘he looks just like us’ – took the oath of office on that bright, cold January morning in front of the US Capitol in Washington. In the words of the preacher at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the Sunday before the inauguration: ‘We were in the back of the bus. Now we’re in the White House.’

  For me, as someone who had been a politically active teenager in the 1960s, watching the civil rights struggle from the other side of the Atlantic, the names Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham all had powerful resonances. And to meet some of the people who had been part of that struggle meant a great deal to me. Sometimes to be reporter really is a privilege.

  Sitting in that Birmingham auditorium, surrounded by thousands of African-Americans as they watched a giant screen showing the inauguration ceremony in Washington, I witnessed levels of emotion that I had never imagined could be generated beneath a single roof. And when the veteran civil rights activist Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who had been one of Martin Luther King’s key lieutenants, entered the hall in a wheelchair, the crowd rose to their feet with a roar that might well have been heard 750 miles away in Washington. (Birmingham’s airport had been renamed Birmingham–Shuttlesworth in his honour just a few months previously.)

  It would have been easy – but wrong – to have been swept along on that tide of emotion. I had looked at the figures, and I knew that Obama had won a smaller percentage of white votes in Alabama than in any other state in the nation. So our coverage that night included not only the voices of exultant African-Americans, who made up only one quarter of the state’s total population, but also the voice of a white nationalist activist from a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. He called Obama a Marxist and said it was essential that the US must remain a ‘European’ nation.

  Even with a black President installed in the White House, the Deep South remained the Deep South.

  The relationship between a presenter and an editor is a delicate one. The editor is the boss, but things tend to work best when editor and presenter work as partners. Alistair Burnett and I worked as partners for a decade, not always with the full approval of our colleagues, who sometimes complained that our weakness for learned articles in learned journals (we tended to email them to each other late at night) did not always translate into riveting radio. Even I sometimes chafed at Alistair’s fondness for linking up with foreign policy think tanks and broadcasting length
y discussions on weighty global affairs, although I recognised that there could be real value in standing back from the noise of the daily news agenda to look at long-term trends around the world. In 2010, for example, as China was beginning to make waves with a more assertive foreign policy, we broadcast an entire programme from Beijing, where we got together with the US-based think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Tsinghua University. One of our panellists came up with a vividly telling image:

  Think of China as a seventeen-year-old, nearly adult, but not quite ready yet to shoulder all of an adult’s responsibilities. Whenever things go wrong – climate change, for example – the first reaction is along the lines of ‘Why should I clear up the mess? It’s not my fault.’

  In May 2010, Alistair was keen to mark the end of a UN gathering in New York called the nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference. It was one of those events that I automatically file under the heading ‘important, but boring’. Still, a trip to New York is never to be sneezed at, and my producer colleague Beth McLeod and I had already been discussing another story on the same side of the Atlantic that we thought was worth our attention.

  And so a deal was done. We would go to New York and labour mightily to produce some interesting radio on the subject of nuclear non-proliferation (we did get an interview with Henry Kissinger, who had signed up to a manifesto favouring a world totally free of all nuclear weapons, so it was by no means a wasted trip), and then we would head south to report from the border between Arizona and Mexico on a growing row over illegal immigration.

  Why Arizona? Because there were said to be half a million illegal immigrants in the state and 57,000 people had been stopped while trying to cross the border illegally the previous year alone. It was also a major entry point for drugs smugglers: marijuana with an estimated street value of $230 million had been seized in the previous twelve months.