Audition

by Barbara Walters

  Just when I thought things were back to normal, my frail father died. He was eighty-one years old. As it happened, I was having lunch with George Steinbrenner on August 15, 1977, when I got the call. I was heartsick but not surprised. I flew immediately to Florida to find that my mother, too, had been emotionally prepared for his death. Perhaps she was even relieved. For a long time she had watched him become progressively weaker and more dispirited and, for just as long, she had felt helpless to do anything about it.

  Since we had never really observed our religion, we didn’t sit shiva—the seven-day Jewish ritual of mourning—for my father. Instead we had a simple graveside service. I stayed with my mother and sister for a few days, then returned to New York. I had contacted the major papers, and my father’s obituary ran in all of them. Variety, the only one that would have mattered to him, gave his life a rave review, which included this wonderful line: “He believed in full lighting.” What better epitaph for a showman?

  I should have had a memorial service in New York, but I didn’t. It had been such a long time since my father left New York that I was afraid that no one would come. I envisioned my mother and sister and me sitting alone in an empty hall. Empty seats had always made my father angry. He would have hated not having a full house.

  I realize now that that was a mistake. Of course people would have come. Just look at the number of people who came to the dedication of Lou Walters Way, the street-naming tribute arranged by Mayor Bloomberg. My father was finally honored and remembered. I should have done it sooner.

  As for Castro, I saw him again two years later when he came to New York in October 1979 to address the United Nations. He invited me to dinner at the Cuban Mission on Lexington Avenue, and I asked if I could bring other members of the media to meet him on an informal basis. He said to bring anyone I wanted. This started the rumor that because I was acting as Castro’s hostess, we must be having an affair. I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but let me say once again, Castro and I were most definitely not lovers. No romance. Not even a pass. Nada.

  It was quite a dinner, though. Roone, of course, came from ABC News, as well as friends like Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, and Henry Grunwald, the brilliant editor of Time magazine. I asked the top editors of the other major magazines and newspapers in New York, all of whom came with the exception of A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor of the New York Times. He alone refused, saying he wouldn’t be in the same room as Fidel Castro. I didn’t invite any correspondents from CBS or NBC because I thought I might get a new interview with Castro out of the evening, and I didn’t want any competition. Not a nice gesture on my part, but then again, television is a tough game, and you don’t win by always being Ms. Nice Guy.

  Well, I didn’t get any interview, but after Castro agreed to talk on the record, all my print friends suddenly produced notebooks and for an hour grilled the Communist leader. He was as charming and funny as I remembered him—and just as good a short-order cook. After the interview, he went into the mission’s kitchen and cooked us all a delicious lobster dinner. He followed up the next day by having a live lobster delivered to each guest. Lobster diplomacy.

  It was to be twenty-five years before I saw Fidel Castro again. I had repeatedly asked for a new interview but never received a response. All I got from him was a Christmas card every year, hand-delivered by an official from the Cuban Mission. The card usually came by April, and I always hoped it would include an invitation to return to Havana. In October 2002 it finally did.

  Castro was seventy-six by then. He had outlasted nine U.S. presidents, all of whom wished he would vanish off the face of the earth, and was in the midst of his tenth, Bill Clinton. When we met back in the Palace of the Revolution, Castro told me I looked very well. “You look well, too,” I said. “Only you have gotten grayer and I have gotten blonder.” His ever-faithful translator, Juanita, was back at his side and I was happy to see her, still lovely but now gray-haired herself. We hugged each other, remembering our wild trip through the Sierra Maestra so many years before.

  Back in 1977 Castro told me that he would shave off his beard if the United States lifted the trade embargo against Cuba. In 2002 he still had the beard and, save for some shipments of food, the United States still enforced the trade embargo. The U.S. government also forbade American tourists from visiting Cuba, though some did, illegally. Other countries had softened toward Communist Cuba, and more than a million European and Canadian tourists a year were availing themselves of Cuba’s sunshine, beaches, and rum. Tourism is now Cuba’s biggest business.

  Was that why he was now wearing a business suit, I asked, instead of his trademark military uniform?

  “Barbara, precisely in order to seduce you and for you to be kind to me, to have pity on me,” he joked. “You have more questions than the U.S. Air Force has missiles.”

  So his sense of humor remained intact. As did his absolute power. Before our arrival we had requested an interview with Juan Miguel González, the father of Elián González. Elián, you will remember, was the five-year-old refugee from Cuba whose mother had drowned at sea while fleeing to America in 1999, thrusting Elián into the center of a highly publicized, impassioned custody fight between his vehemently anti-Castro relatives in Florida and his father in Cuba, championed by Castro. Elián, whose Miami relatives appealed his extradition to Cuba all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, had been returned to his father, Juan Miguel, in 2000.

  The drama had riveted the United States for months, but our request to interview the father in Cuba had been turned down—until my interview with Castro. The next morning Juan Miguel was sped to Havana in a government car. Elián was “very happy” to be back in Cuba, his father told me, producing a picture of the boy, then just shy of nine. “He’s almost as tall as I am. He’s doing karate at school. He’s a green belt.”

  That good news about Elián was hardly surprising. He had become a poster child for Cuba and appeared often at Castro’s side in film clips of national holidays. Castro himself was said to have five sons and many grandchildren, including a set of triplets, but, as in my past interview, he wouldn’t admit to any relationships. When I asked him why, after all these years, he replied, “It’s prohibited to go into my personal life. It’s not our way.”

  “What’s to hide?” I said.

  “It’s my human right,” Castro joked. “I cling to my human right to defend my privacy.”

  I kept asking. And finally he admitted. “Yes, we have descendants and all that.”

  I pressed him about the triplets.

  “Well, I think there are some triplets around. I’ve heard they exist.”

  That was it for anything personal about Castro.

  Castro presented me with a farewell gift when we left Havana—a picture book of old combat photos from the Bay of Pigs, titled Memories of a Victory. The text was in Spanish, of course, as was the attached note, translated here: “For Barbara, in whose terrible hands I fell again after 25 years. I promise that I will never try to escape. It’s impossible, and I think with affability about our next meeting, arranged for 2027.” It is signed “Fidel Castro” and dated October 7, 2002.

  Whatever you think of his politics and ideology, he has cut a huge figure in modern history. When he was taken seriously ill in July 2006, no one knew for days whether he was even alive. I was working on this memoir when I heard the news that he was in the hospital for surgery and immediately e-mailed the Cuban foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, to express my concern and ask him to extend my wishes to Castro for his speedy recovery. Lest you think this was a purely beneficent gesture, I also sent a separate e-mail requesting an interview when and if Castro was strong enough.

  I received no reply from Fidel Castro and now I never will.

  The Historic Interview: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin

  THE QUESTION I am most often asked is: Of all the interviews you have done, which is your favorite? Well, “favorite” is not a word I would use, but
if I had to choose the one that meant the most to me it would be the late president of Egypt, Anwar el-Sadat. He changed the world. At least he tried to. In bringing about peace, if not friendship, between Egypt and Israel, he took the first great step toward compromise in what remains one of the most contentious and complicated areas of the world. Sadat had foresight, courage, and charisma. He was, in physique, a slim, small man, but in his heart he was a giant.

  If I also had to choose the time in my professional life that meant the most to me, and of which I am proudest, it would be those same years in the midseventies in the Middle East. I played a small part in those difficult, tumultuous, and now historic times, and I cherish the memories.

  A month after my father’s death, I went to Beirut to interview Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. I had been trying to get an interview with the elusive head of the PLO for years, and in September 1977 he said yes. There was no ABC newsmagazine like 20/20 back then, and so the interview was scheduled to air on ABC’s Sunday-morning news program Issues and Answers.

  At that time in the eyes of the West and Israel, Arafat was the number one Palestinian terrorist for his violent campaign to secure an independent Palestinian homeland. At the same time he was a hero and champion to the Palestinians, many of whom had either fled or been expelled from Israel and now lived in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon. Arafat was a powerful figure in the bitter mosaic of the Middle East.

  It was a very uneasy time in Lebanon. To simplify what was a very complicated struggle, the country was winding down from two years of civil war between Christian and Muslim militias. At the same time the PLO was also launching rocket attacks into Israel, and Israel was responding in kind.

  Although the situation was volatile, I was concentrating so hard on what I was doing that I didn’t consider the danger. I was also in good hands in Beirut. To work with me ABC had sent a very talented and nice senior news producer, David Jayne, who had spent considerable time covering the war in Vietnam. Also along on his own assignment was Larry Buckman, an ABC radio correspondent.

  We waited for days in the ravaged city to see Arafat. Once a beautiful and prosperous banking center for the entire Middle East, Beirut had been all but destroyed by the violence. The modern buildings in the city’s center stood empty, their windows shattered, as did the abandoned resort hotels along the Mediterranean. (The images of Beirut in 2006 following the Israeli air strikes against Hezbollah, another pro-Palestinian terrorist organization, looked eerily similar.) While we waited to see Arafat, the PLO took us on what Moshe Dayan had told me would be a propaganda tour of some of the refugee camps. We filmed the camps, and propaganda or not, there was no denying that the Palestinians lived in squalor. Human waste ran through the streets and alleys, and there was garbage everywhere. Little children cried out, “Revolution until victory!” the PLO’s anti-Israeli slogan, as they ran through the litter with wooden rifles, pretending they were shooting Israelis.

  Because there was no satellite transmission at that time between Lebanon and the United States, ABC chartered a plane and David Jayne flew the refugee camp footage to Amman, Jordan, where he could transmit it to New York. Then he returned to Beirut.

  Our meeting with Arafat took place suddenly one evening when, without any explanation, we were put in a car and driven by a circuitous route through the city—I know we went down several blocks more than once, occasionally in opposite directions—until we stopped in front of a very ordinary apartment building with washing hung out to dry from the windows. That was the PLO’s tactic then (and later, Hezbollah’s) to blend in with the civilian population.

  Arafat was waiting for us in a heavily guarded apartment up three steep flights of stairs. His head was bare when we entered, and I remember being struck by the fact that he was bald. I’d never seen a picture of him without a cap or his kaffiyeh. When it was time to talk he then put on his kaffiyeh.

  The long-awaited interview turned out to be as limp as his handshake. He played the same game he always did, coming close to saying he would recognize the right of Israel to exist, then backing off. Arafat always held out the possibility of peace in public interviews, but we knew he took it back in private interviews with his own people. Still, we were happy just to have the interview, and the next day David Jayne set off once again to Amman, taking along Larry Buckman, to satellite the footage to New York. I was going to go with them but at the last minute decided not to. It didn’t seem to make sense for me to go to Jordan for one day since I needed to be back in New York to appear on the program on Sunday, so David and I agreed we would meet in Paris on Friday for the flight home.

  He never arrived. I waited for hours in Paris with increasing anxiety until I received the terrible phone call. The charter flight David and Larry were on had exploded on takeoff from Amman. They had both been killed along with the two Jordanian pilots. Investigations were launched, but no explanations were ever found.

  David and Larry were dead. Gone with them was most of the tape of my interview with Arafat, but that was nothing compared to the loss of their lives. I felt it was my fault. They were in Amman because of my interview. I would get the glory. They got death. I met with their families when I got back to New York. They never blamed me, but I could not help but blame myself.

  I spoke about Larry’s and David’s deaths on the news. “Newsmen and women are supposed to be impersonal on the air,” I said. “It’s part of our code. But I couldn’t come back tonight without talking of my two colleagues who died Friday morning in Amman, Jordan.” Larry was “young and witty and the father of three little girls,” I told the viewers. David, too, was “young, only forty, and had four children. He was the loveliest man, the best and the brightest. It shouldn’t have happened. I know it’s the business we’re in, but I ache for their widows, their children and ourselves at ABC News.”

  At the end of our interview in Beirut, Arafat had taken the black-and-white kaffiyeh off his head, written on it in Arabic the words “Revolution until victory.” He presented it to me as a gift. My plan was to put it near the small, ancient oil lamp Moshe Dayan had given me to represent the enmities in the Middle East. But when, after I got home, Icodel unpacked my suitcase, she did not see the imagery. She saw an ink-stained piece of cloth and put it in the washing machine. That took care of that souvenir. I didn’t give a damn. The symbol had been rendered meaningless by the crash.

  David’s and Larry’s deaths, to me, were two more senseless losses in the morass of hatred in the Middle East. I had interviewed at least once many of the warring leaders in the region—Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Israel’s Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, and then the PLO’s Arafat. The more interviews I did, the more hopeless things seemed to me.

  Until November 1977.

  I was in Kansas City, talking with Dolly Parton for a Barbara Walters Special, when, during an interview with Walter Cronkite, President Sadat stunned the world by announcing that he was willing to go to Jerusalem on a peace mission. All he needed was a formal invitation from Prime Minister Begin to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The invitation was quickly forthcoming from Begin after CBS News reporters corralled him in a hotel in Tel Aviv and set up an interview with him in a hotel room. Cronkite skillfully knitted the two interviews together, making it appear as if the president of Egypt and the prime minister of Israel were talking to each other—a historical first in itself—and the networks’ race to Jerusalem was on.

  (Actually, earlier that same day, it was Peter Jennings, ABC’s chief foreign correspondent, whom Sadat had first told off-camera about his willingness to go to Jerusalem for peace. It would have been Peter’s historic story if he’d had a camera crew with him, but he didn’t. So he lost the breaking news to CBS and Cronkite.)

  Peter took another blow when Roone designated me ABC’s lead reporter on Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem. Peter’s objection was valid—he had covered the Middle East for a long time. Roone did it, he later said, be
cause of my strong relationship with both Sadat and Begin. Peter held this against me for years. I didn’t blame him, but I didn’t turn down the assignment. Sadat’s sudden announcement that he was going to Jerusalem on November 19, just five days after Begin extended his invitation, set us all scrambling.

  I flew to Tel Aviv on November 18 on the same flight as NBC’s anchor, John Chancellor, both of us wondering where Cronkite was. I learned the answer late that night, after interviewing Moshe Dayan on the prospect of peace with his former and formidable enemy. Exhausted after the long flight and the interview, I was sound asleep in my hotel room when the phone rang. “Cronkite’s in Cairo,” Roone announced from New York. “He’s got a seat on Sadat’s plane tomorrow to Tel Aviv. Chancellor may be on that plane, too. Get on that plane.”

  Right. I couldn’t call the Egyptians I knew in Cairo because there was no direct line between Egypt and Israel, the country that didn’t exist for them. So I got out my phone book and called Egypt’s ambassador to the United States, Ashraf Ghorbal, at his home in Washington. God knows what time it was, but I had to get a seat on Sadat’s plane. I pleaded with the ambassador, and he said he would try but could give me no guarantees. Two hours later he came through. “You will be welcome on President Sadat’s plane,” he said.

  But how to get to Cairo? There were no direct flights between Egypt and Israel, remember. I could take an Israeli plane to Cyprus and then transfer to a Cypriot flight to Egypt, but that wouldn’t get me there in time to make Sadat’s plane. Fortunately we heard about a French jet that CBS had chartered to fly in their satellite equipment from Paris to Tel Aviv. We paid the French pilots to fly me to Egypt. We would stop very briefly in Cyprus and take off again.