It had taken us a great deal of time to get this interview. Henry Kissinger had been very helpful because he had had good relations with the Chinese hierarchy since his first and historic visit to that country. Dr. Kissinger put me in touch with the proper people who put me in touch with the proper people who put me in touch, etc., etc. After many, many letters, we got the go-ahead, probably because Jiang Zemin wanted to persuade Congress to continue America’s favorable trade agreement with China.
We met on the beautiful grounds of the official state guesthouse in Beijing. We conducted the interview through an interpreter, though Jiang Zemin understood some English and even spoke a bit of it. He had a pleasant smile but cold eyes, and was given to quoting Shakespeare. When I asked him how he would describe the primarily student rebellion on Tiananmen Square the year before, he replied, in English: “‘Much ado about nothing.’”
It was hardly much ado about nothing, but he wouldn’t budge and even said he didn’t “have any regret” about the way the army sent its tanks against the students. He would, however, have handled it differently—by banning assembly on Tiananmen Square and thereby avoiding the use of lethal weapons. “‘A fall into the pit, a gain in the wit,’” he said, citing a Chinese proverb.
One of the enduring images from the siege was that of a young man standing in front of a column of tanks, blocking their progress toward the square. We had run the famous photograph of this lone figure, dressed in a white shirt and carrying a plastic shopping bag, over and over on ABC News. No one knew what had happened to him.
I had brought a copy of the photograph with me and I showed it to Jiang Zemin, full in the face. It took him by surprise, and his eyes became even more steely. He did not like the surprise or my question.
“Do you have any idea what happened to him?” I asked. “We have heard he was arrested and executed.”
“I cannot confirm whether this young man you mention was arrested or not,” he said. He answered, unexpectedly, in English.
“You do not know what happened to him?” I pressed.
“I think never killed,” he said.
“You think he was not killed?” I said.
“I think never killed,” he repeated.
That was it. We never did find out what happened to the man who braved the tanks.
When the interview was over and transmitted to New York, I wanted to travel a bit. Although I had been in China from that earliest visit with President Nixon, I was always working and had little opportunity to explore that vast country. This time I had my own plane ticket, but sometimes it can be very hard to get from one province to another. The flights can suddenly be canceled, delayed, or overbooked, as was the flight I had a ticket for. “Sorry, full,” I was told at the airport. So I went to the ticket agent and showed him a photograph of me with Jiang Zemin that had been on the front page of one of the Chinese newspapers. I felt sure he would say, “Come this way,” but he couldn’t have cared less. The plane took off without me.
A revolution of a different sort in the USSR drew me to Moscow in January 1991 to interview Boris Yeltsin, then chairman of the Russian parliament. One Soviet republic after another was declaring independence, the latest being Lithuania, and the Soviet Union’s president, Mikhail Gorbachev, had sent Soviet troops into the capital city, Vilnius, to shut down the television station. (By the way, my maternal grandmother came from Vilnius.) Fourteen unarmed Lithuanians had been killed and scores injured.
That was a story in itself. But then, so was the power struggle under way between Yeltsin, who supported independence for the Baltic states, and Gorbachev, who did not. I met with Yeltsin in Moscow in his ornate gold-encrusted offices in the building that houses the Russian parliament, called, curiously, the White House.
Yeltsin didn’t hold back in his criticism of Gorbachev. He accused him of “losing his common sense” and being “dangerous.” “How can it be possible to use troops against civilians at this time?” he said. And he chided the United States for turning Gorbachev into a folk hero. “You are blinded to certain things,” Yeltsin said. “You see only the personality of Gorbachev and an aura around him.” He was right. To this day Gorbachev is far more popular in this country than Boris Yeltsin.
It was widely rumored that Yeltsin had a drinking problem. He had evidently slurred his words during a lecture he delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1989, and there were other private reports about his excessive drinking. So I felt I had to ask, “Do you drink too much?”
It was one of those moments again, much like my questioning Qaddafi’s sanity to his face. Would Yeltsin take offense? Would he throw me out? To my relief he simply answered the question. “No. And I believe that, judging by the way I look, you can see that it’s not true.”
He was not, however, the portrait of health and fitness. His face was puffy and florid, and he sure looked like a drinker to me. But though I was pleased that he’d answered the question, I myself was in such distress that I’m not sure I was seeing straight.
I was suffering from severe lower back pain, and the almost-ten-hour flight from New York to Moscow hadn’t helped. I was therefore sleeping on the floor of the bedroom in my hotel. I was traveling, as I often do, with my hairstylist/assistant, Bryant Renfroe. After I finished this interview with Yeltsin, we were planning to take two days off and go to the glorious city of St. Petersburg, where I’d never been. We had a late-morning flight. I’d given Bryant a key to my suite, and suddenly I looked up from the floor and there he was. He had been watching television in his own room. “The Gulf War has begun,” he told me. “We’re bombing Iraq.” The only television set was in the living room, but when I tried to get off the floor, my back went into spasms. I couldn’t stand up, so Bryant slipped the bedspread under me and dragged me into the living room. Watching the images of the war was so upsetting that my spasms seemed minor. Bryant helped me off the floor. Forget St. Petersburg; we flew home immediately.
A year later I returned to Moscow for another interview with Yeltsin. By then he was the president of Russia, the first freely elected president. Gorbachev was gone, and so was much of the former Soviet Union. In December 1991, the month before this second interview, it had collapsed into fifteen separate countries.
The date of this interview was January 31, 1992. Yeltsin, who had survived several assassination attempts, was about to come to America to meet with George H. W. Bush.
Concerns about his health were higher now that he was president. By his own admission he suffered from insomnia, migraine headaches, and depression. He’d go missing in Russia for days, even weeks, without official explanation and the stories about his drinking bouts were escalating. Some observed that his speech was slurred even when he took the oath of office as president.
So I put the same touchy subject to him that I had the year before. “What is being said in some of the American papers and magazines is that you have been drinking too much as a result of pressure.”
Far from being offended, Yeltsin seemed happy to answer the question. His defense, I thought, was rather original. “Sports and liquor just don’t go together,” he said, detailing his physical exercise regimen: long workouts twice a week and shorter daily ones combined with a cold shower.
“Do you think it’s your enemies who are spreading these stories?” I asked him.
“Or maybe it’s just people who are looking for sensational stories,” he said, perhaps meaning people like me. “First they spread rumors and then they wait for a reaction.”
Despite at least one attempt to impeach him, Yeltsin would manage to hang on to the presidency for another seven years. He resigned in December 1999, after selecting a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, to succeed him. (Yeltsin died of heart failure in April 2007.) Putin was later elected president in his own right, and in 2001 I returned to Moscow to interview him. Our interview was held late at night, and he was late. No matter. I was used to that.
The plan was for President Putin and me to walk
down one of the Kremlin’s endless marble hallways while we casually exchanged pleasantries in English. But Putin had not advanced very far in his English lessons. “How are you?” I asked him as the cameras followed us. “What, please?” he responded. “How are you?” I tried again. “I am what?” he replied. Not a great beginning to the piece.
The interview itself, in another elaborate room with marble floors and gilded furniture inherited from the czars, went quite well. After much trial and error, my producers and I had devised an efficient way to work with interpreters. In times past we had had the interpreter sitting by the non-English-speaking head of state, but inevitably the head of state would turn to face the interpreter instead of me. So we came up with a better game plan. We put the interpreter in a separate room where he or she listened to my questions through earphones and then repeated them into a very small earpiece in the head of state’s ear. The answers were then repeated into my ear. Because the interpreter was not seen, the head of state looked at me.
A lot had been made of George W. Bush’s remark on meeting Putin for the first time—“I looked this man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” (I understood, because when I do an interview I look straight in the person’s eyes and I can tell by the slightest expression, a squint or a flinch, where I have hit home. Good thing for journalism students to remember.) In any case, I agreed with Bush’s assessment of Putin. He had friendly eyes and, in person, hardly seemed formidable (though he held a black belt in judo). He was small and lithe and easy to talk with, even through the interpreter.
I questioned him, first of all, on Bush’s statement about his soul, a remark which by then had been ridiculed in the United States. Putin smiled. “It’s difficult for me to say what he saw in my soul, but I can respond to those who smiled in response. I believe it’s not accidental that he, not they, became president of the United States. He sees better and deeper and understands the problems more accurately.”
What concerned him the most then was Russia’s failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks on New York. “I had the feeling of guilt for this tragedy,” he said. “We had talked about the possible threats to the United States, to other countries, but [our special services] were not able to determine who, where, and how they would strike.”
Putin was, in fact, the first world leader to phone President Bush after the attack. “I expressed our solidarity with the American people,” Putin told me. “Because of acts of terrorism in Moscow, perhaps I understood better than many people what the Americans felt. The American people understand that in this dire moment in time, they are not alone.”
As the interview went on, I wanted to know more about Putin’s personal side. If I’d had the nerve to ask Qaddafi if he was insane and to ask Boris Yeltsin about his drinking problem, I had to ask Putin a question that had gone through my mind from the moment I knew I was going to do the interview. I hadn’t written it down on my list of questions, in case any unfriendly eyes saw them. The moment came toward the end of the interview when I felt our conversation was comfortable enough so that he wouldn’t be insulted. We all knew that Putin was a former KGB officer. Here was my question:
“Did you ever order anyone killed?”
“No,” he replied. “In fact my work was more intellectual, political information gathering, analysis, and so forth. So thank God, nothing like that happened to me.”
These days, as the list of the murders of some of Mr. Putin’s critics grows longer, the question is being asked again. Putin and his administration, of course, deny any involvement.
In the late winter of 2002 I had the most interesting foreign experience in years when I had the opportunity to travel through Saudi Arabia and interview pretty much anyone I wanted. Saudi Arabia’s image in America was very shaky after the violent events of 9/11, when it was revealed that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens and that the mastermind of the attack was another Saudi, Osama bin Laden.
Soon after the attacks, the Saudi royal family hired Qorvis Communications, a PR firm in Washington, to cast a better light, if possible, on the kingdom’s image. I had been asking the Saudi government for permission to go there for quite a while, and suddenly the permission came through. So I packed two long black skirts, a black scarf to cover my head, and off I went with Martin Clancy, a camera crew, and a Qorvis representative, Judy Smith.
I wanted to interview then Crown Prince Abdullah, who was the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia during the long illness of his half brother, King Fahd. I was told I could meet him but not interview him on camera. If he ever did an interview, however, he would do it with me. Well, good luck and fat chance. But I was glad to be introduced to him anyway in the royal palace in Jeddah on the Red Sea with its magnificent sculpted gardens.
What an eye-opener. Lest anyone think the Saudis are insular and out of touch, consider the entire wall of television monitors—I counted thirty-four—in the main reception room. Everything was on, from CNN and Al Jazeera to all three of the American morning shows—and even The View! In fact, I was a celebrity of sorts in the hotel beauty parlor because the manicurist watched The View.
Aside from the noninterview with Abdullah, we were given extraordinary access to travel across the kingdom. We not only went to Jeddah but to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and to the southern region of Asir. The Saudis hoped that we would show an enlightened country with a fairly well-educated population. Indeed, we found that to be true in some of our interviews, especially with members of the royal family who spoke perfect English, as they had been educated in the United States or Great Britain. The princes were charming and sophisticated as were their wives, who wore abayas (long black robes) outside their homes and low-cut gowns by Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta inside. Their homes were exquisite, many with indoor fountains and air-conditioning—outdoors! Some of the living rooms were as large as hotel lobbies. Though alcohol is forbidden by Islam, they drank the best French wine, and, though satellite TV was forbidden by the government, they watched whatever they wanted.
There were, in fact, satellite dishes on the roofs of houses all over Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the government looked the other way because more often than not, the images on Al Jazeera were of Israelis attacking Palestinians and bulldozing their houses.
I know this chapter is supposed to be about heads of state and here I am, going on about what would become our one-hour television Special on Saudi Arabia. But without the Special, I would not eventually have gotten the interview with King Abdullah (King Fahd died in 2005), even though much of what we found in Saudi Arabia was hardly complimentary.
We had begun our journey in the southern part of the country, where we met with two fathers of three young men who were among those accused of participating in the 9/11 attacks. Obviously none of their sons had returned home, yet each of the fathers, interviewed separately, said that his son, and in one case, two sons, were just away and would certainly shortly be back. No amount of conversation on my part about documented accusations made a difference. If there were documents the United States was lying and so was Saudi Arabia.
The high school textbooks we saw were particularly disturbing in the repeated depiction of Jews. One, for example, had a story about a talking tree behind which a Jew is hiding. “Muslim, come forward,” the tree calls out. “There’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” When we asked a government minister why the textbooks contained this kind of material, he said he, too, deplored the fact and the books were being corrected. To my knowledge they have not been.
Equally disturbing were the university students I interviewed. One told me he considered George Bush as great a terrorist as Osama bin Laden. Another claimed that Zionists must have attacked the World Trade Center because four thousand Jews stayed home from work that day. Furthermore, the student said, the Jews were responsible for every war throughout history. I countered with the facts, but I did not argue with the students. Their harsh prejudiced views revealed so much about
aspects of the country’s culture.
Then there were the religious police, the mutaween, who prowled the streets and malls to make sure not one inch of a woman’s flesh was showing. It is well known that women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, nor can they travel or be admitted to a hospital without permission from a male relative. They can’t even have a cup of coffee in public with the opposite sex. Neither could I. I deliberately sat in the men’s section at Starbucks in Jeddah to see what would happen and was politely but firmly escorted to the women’s section.
We ended our visit to Saudi Arabia with a brief interview with Abdullah bin Laden, thirty-five, one of Osama bin Laden’s fifty-four siblings or half siblings. Abdullah holds a Harvard law degree and was living in Boston until after 9/11, when he was spirited back to his own country. This interview had been arranged by Saudi Arabia’s influential ambassador to the United States, His Royal Highness Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud. Prince Bandar thought it would help the reputation of the bin Laden family, still one of the wealthiest and most important in that country. The ambassador practically had to drag Abdullah in front of my cameras and we got almost nothing out of him. He denied, of course, that he and the rest of the family had anything to do with his half brother, but the man was too nervous to say more than that. Still, we had talked with a bin Laden, which was more than anyone else had done at the time and it made for great on-the-air promotion.
The one-hour Special on Saudi Arabia aired in March 2002. It did extremely well. It was exotic, and people were curious to hear from brother bin Laden. Because it presented a good deal of material critical of Saudi Arabia, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t hear about the interview King Abdullah had promised me. Time passed. Katie Couric went to Saudi Arabia for the Today show and was able to do a brief what we call “walk and talk” three-question interview with King Abdullah. I gave up any thought that I would ever get an interview with him until, out of the blue, a Saudi official called in October 2005. If I was still interested in interviewing the king, the official said, I should put in my request right away. The king evidently remembered his promise to me, and although he had had many other requests, he was willing to honor mine. I was impressed and back I went to Saudi Arabia with my long black skirts and scarf.
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