The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  For Jean Sawyer and her daughters, this grievous loss was also perhaps a grim reminder: For all the effort taken in thwarting them, storms of awful luck, like Depression winter winds, could still destructively whoosh out of nowhere in a heartbeat. Diane’s good friend ABC executive Phyllis McGrady views this moment as a turning point: “They lost their husband and father, these three real Southern women: charming, delightful, perfect manners yet unbelievably determined.” From this point on, Jean taught her daughters “they didn’t have to find a man to lead them through this world,” Mark Robertson says Diane told him. This was not your typical midcentury Southern mother-to-daughter lesson—proper young women in the region at the time were supposed to marry upon graduation from college—and it was one that Diane took to heart, with good result. She would become enormously successful as a single woman and would not marry until she was forty-two. In the wake of her father’s death, Diane’s determination leapt into overdrive. She surprised everyone by returning to the WLKY newsroom sooner than expected. Jim Smith recalls, “She was not out that long. She was determined to go on and do her job and we respected her for that.” Work emerged as an ennobling, distracting, consoling—and healing—device.

  Dogged dedication would become Diane’s defining characteristic, at once a key to her remarkable success and a challenge for her colleagues. Even now, long past the years of earning her due, Diane barely sleeps, is known to e-mail staffers in the middle of the night, and works (says a male producer whom she fired) “harder than ten people.” That dedication would guide her journey—and an eventful journey, artfully navigated, it would be.

  When this high-achieving Louisville girl had gone on to Wellesley College, she’d encountered Northeastern elitism (a little discomfiting at first) but had absorbed its useful value system, and had won distinction as a singing star. Then she utilized her instinctive ownership of the brand-new ideas about women and ambition during her two years at WLKY. Next—after her father’s death—she would blend personal independence with a political conservatism unshared by most of the emerging journalists of her generation, and she would work loyally, for eight years, for the most disgraced president in recent history. In that crucible—playing defense against an aggressive and triumphant press corps—she would sharpen her intellectual fighting skills. After that, she would meld her daunting work ethic with a deft humility in the service of proving herself to highly skeptical colleagues at her first major national news job. From then on she would soar, becoming, over the decades, a star in every TV news format, minting a compelling persona that was at once glamorous and serious—and winding up in the pinnacle position as a 6:30 anchor.

  Throughout, she has been impelled by that Methodist-sermon word—her father’s word, purpose. It’s a simple word, employed by a complex woman. Nicknamed the Golden Sphinx, Diane incites awe for being an unsurpassable player of the chess game of career machinations. But while her seductive charm and elegant indirectness are legendary, so is her generosity. Not everyone who has worked with Diane trusts her, though nearly all of them respect her.

  She witnessed fickle loss in her family and fickle cruelty in her community: mysteries that make a person seek answers to troubling questions. She was “never not sophisticated,” even as a poodle-skirt-wearing small-city girl, says her hometown friend Greg Haynes, and she married one of America’s most sophisticated men. Her curiosity, both about the painful mesh of agency and fate and about the world’s wide swath of arts and politics, is, she has said, why she keeps working. “Diane is the most curious person I’ve ever worked with,” Jon Banner, her original executive producer at World News, declares. And it is becoming more and more a curiosity of “purpose.” Her parents’ vanquished early hardship, her father’s death, the racial strife in Louisville: Those imprints would impel her to investigate social injustice and the deprivation—and stamina—of vulnerable children, resulting in award-winning specials that would become her mature career’s proudest achievements. The more years that passed from her days in Kentucky churches, the more notches carved on her belt of urbanity and accomplishment, the more she circled home.

  Not too many years ago, a friend of Diane’s heard that a close relative of his had died in a car crash like the one in which Erbon Sawyer perished. The friend was distraught. Diane was tough with him, but it was a hopeful toughness. “Look at me!” she ordered. “You can turn your pain into purpose!” She even repeated the exhortation, word for word. The friend, who didn’t know about Diane’s own swift return to work after she’d been devastated by her father’s 1969 death, was so struck by her mysterious adamance—and her passionate use of that folksy homily—that he muses now, “I don’t know where she got that. . . .”

  II. PUSHING PAST DANGER

  It was September 27, 1997, and Christiane Amanpour was walking toward a building in Kabul, Afghanistan, that was supposed to be a women’s hospital. She was led there by the Red Cross and the European Union, whose members were increasingly concerned that the aid they were giving to support Afghani women was in fact being siphoned off for nefarious purposes. Afghanistan’s new Islamist government—the group that was now in control of the lower two-thirds of the country—had a sonorous name barely known to most Americans at the time: the Taliban.

  But if American viewers didn’t know the Taliban, they did know thirty-nine-year-old Christiane Amanpour, particularly through her reporting several years earlier, from the grievously embattled little country of Bosnia. She’d cut a distinctive image on CNN for half a dozen years now. In a TV landscape of neatly coiffed and perfectly made-up, often blond, suit-jacketed stateside female CNN anchors and only male war reporters, there she was, in “that ratty old parka that she wore three winters in a row,” as her friend and Bosnia colleague Emma Daly affectionately recalls it. Her thick black hair was as mussed as one would expect for someone standing not far from exploding mortar shells; her black eyes were intense; her approachably attractive face was bare. “Most men on TV wore more makeup than she did,” says a man who worked with her. American audiences were used to that deep, emphatic, English-accented voice of hers. It was an arresting voice—“posh and exotic” as her early CNN friend Sparkle Hayter describes it; “a voice,” her confidant and colleague Pierre Bairin says, “that could command an army.” She had reported the intentional rapes of women and the targeted killing of children, the constant shelling, the unique awfulness of a war launched against civilians in the middle of a European city, Sarajevo. She had reported the ethnic cleansing of eight thousand Muslim Bozniak boys and men during what came to be known as the Srebrenica Massacre, and she had pushed and pushed CNN into staying on the story and on subsequent stories she’d reported on atrocities, mostly with child victims, in Rwanda, Ghana, and Uganda.

  Her impassioned reportage had implicitly exhorted American viewers to attend to global strife, during a time when celebrity crime came to dominate the news. This was the 1990s, the era of the Tonya Harding case, the O. J. Simpson case, and the JonBenét Ramsey case. For Christiane, global news was personal. Her family had been forced out of Iran with the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and with an exile’s perspective she made it her mission to find stories of injustice and tell them in a way that would make Americans care.

  The Pentagon had started tracking her country-hopping on a map; she anticipated hot spots for them. A jaunty rhyme had been bandied about: “Where there’s a war, there’s Amanpour.” And a concept had been coined: the Amanpour Factor, meaning if she was there, the international community had better respond with humanitarian aid or else they’d be embarrassed. The formula, she found, did not always work. In Rwanda, the genocide coverage had failed to inflame the American public with the sympathy and foreign aid it deserved. She was determined to not see another atrocity neglected, as Rwanda had been, and it was this she had in mind as she covered this new story: Afghanistan’s Taliban.

  Walking to the building along with Christiane were a dozen or so European Uni
on and Red Cross officials and two of her CNN colleagues, cameraman Mark Phillips and producer Nic Robertson. Nic had been Christiane’s reporting partner when she went into Iraq toward the end of the first Gulf War. She had met Mark in 1993, while covering Bosnia.

  Christiane was never incautious or impetuous; she was the opposite of the thrill seeker that war reporters are stereotyped to be. Still, despite her realism about danger, she was unusually calm and steady when danger did strike. Mark had worked with her a lot in Bosnia and he had never seen her genuinely frightened. “She had no overbearing emotion—everything she did was measured,” he says. Did this come from being the responsible—even venerated—oldest of four sisters? Or was it a result of her unusual upbringing? Amanpour had been raised in stable, affluent Iran before her world came crashing down. After the Revolution, she had scrambled to relocate, living first in England with her family and then in the United States at college, where, among a glamorous and privileged clique, she managed to display an enviable aplomb. Her traumatic, globe-trotting years would instill an unusual resilience, which came in handy while she battled her way on air as a young, foreign reporter, and proved critical once she entered the high-stakes field of war reporting. It was in Bosnia that Christiane became valued for her on-air coverage. Bosnia had made Christiane a cruasader and a member of the conflict-reportage community that she would come to consider a real family. Bosnia had given her her calling, and now she was continuing with it, as she approached the Kabul hospital for women.

  Except: This was not a hospital.

  Once they walked past the facade, they realized that “the building was a half-constructed shell,” Mark Phillips says. He and Christiane and Nic “saw no women in distress.” In fact, they didn’t see a single woman, in distress or otherwise. Three so-called security guards boxed them in—blocked Mark, Christiane, and Nic from moving farther and from retreating—and one of them shouted to a farther-off sentry, “The foreigners are here!” Christiane, Nic, Mark, and the EU and Red Cross personnel who accompanied them were surrounded. In five or ten minutes Taliban militiamen careened through the streets to the site, jostling up and down in the open backs of their flatbed trucks. They stormed the building shell, shouting wildly, pumping aloft their Kalashnikov automatic rifles—AK-47s. One of the men, sighting Mark’s running camera, grabbed it from him, then struck Mark on the head with his rifle—once, then a second time. Christiane stood to the side, watching silently. “Christiane and I had been in these situations before. If you got involved you were going to get whacked,” Mark says.

  Fear now rippled wordlessly through the group of Westerners: All of this furious machismo was hip-shot; there was no order or logic to any of it. It was one thing when fundamentalist or fascist regimes had rules; they were at least consistent, and you were forewarned. But here, as Emma Bonino, the European commissioner for humanitarian affairs, who was one of the besieged, recalled, “No one was in charge.” This was “a situation of random terror.” Christiane and the others were now loudly declared “under arrest.” The official charge was photography, which was now apparently illegal (especially photographs of women, though there were none in the hospital). More realistically, the militiamen were protecting themselves from being exposed for extorting the Red Cross funds.

  Christiane, Mark, and Nic were pushed by the Taliban into the Red Cross van that had delivered them there. The Red Cross workers tried to stop them. The Taliban threatened to shoot the Red Cross workers.

  The van driver, rifle to his back, was ordered to drive the detainees to a large field, where they were herded out by the Taliban and forced to sit in formation in the sun.

  One of the armed men walked up to Christiane and stared at her and spat out the words—in Dhahri, a language close enough to her native Farsi for her to know it—“You’re Iranian!” It wasn’t her celebrity that made him ascertain this. “Christiane has a certain look—they just knew,” Mark believes.

  As an Iranian and a foreign woman, Christiane was a double target for the Afghan Arab members of the Taliban, who were particularly vehement and who, as a result of complex recent history in the Muslim world, hated Iranians. The man looked at her, ran his finger across his own neck, gesturing I am going to kill you. He walked slowly around the group, staring at her, circling while Christiane averted his gaze. She stayed astonishingly cool, but he did not relent. “I’d been with Christiane for years, and I had never seen her nervous,” Mark says. “Now she was. She was very nervous.”

  The fear of losing her life was particularly pointed at this moment. For years—all through her twenties and thirties—Christiane had concentrated on her work. She believed she might never marry or have children and she was pretty okay with that. To be sure, she’d had lots of romances during these years—with journalists, photographers, dashing men, heroic men, single men, and, if rumors are to be believed, at least one married man. She’d been the subject of a roman à clef in which she’d been a droll, swaggering femme fatale. Then she met Jamie Rubin, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s spokesman. They immediately clicked. Considered one of Washington’s most handsome bachelors, he was besotted right away. Though Christiane and Jamie were often in different parts of the globe between their patches of time together, the intensity of the romance was such that, when they were together, even their cynical journalist friends were moved to render over-the-top appraisals. “If you walk between them, you could get burned,” said Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “It’s a zoning violation.”

  And now, two months after falling in love, here she was: being threatened with death in a field in Kabul.

  The Afghan Arab’s threats escalated from gestures to words. He walked around her and said, “Iranian! I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna slit your throat!”

  Mark and Nic both felt very afraid for her—and helpless. In the past, they had defended her, even if she didn’t need it. What could they do now?

  Two of the detainees managed, sometime over the next few hours, to call the Taliban foreign ministry. When that agency declined to help, someone in the group placed a stealthy SOS call to EU headquarters. Two and a half hours into their ordeal, three male wire service reporters from the AP and Reuters strode into the compound. The Taliban came to understand that holding a group of EU and Red Cross workers hostage would get them unwanted media coverage and would promptly end their funding. After their hours of bravado, the Taliban caved on a dime. The captives were released. Mark was given back his camera—miraculously, almost hilariously, it was still running! The militiaman who’d confiscated it had never thought to turn it off.

  Back at the UN safe house, “Christiane was relieved that the long ordeal was over and her antagonist was gone. But she was very calm,” says Mark. Once she realized she was safe, it was back to the job. They had gotten footage! Mark had observed this kind of recovery from Christiane before.

  “Nothing fazed her,” he says. “She does not have a roller-coaster personality. It was just Christiane.” Once again, she had survived a near-death experience and kept her wits about her.

  • • •

  FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS, Christiane—soon married to Jamie and soon after that a mother—would report from a staggering number of conflict zones around the world, probably more than any other war reporter in history and almost certainly more than any other woman with a young child, a conundrum that she, a devoted parent, continually tried to reconcile. She worked outside the day-to-day in-house TV news establishment and was a singular, sometimes intimidating, presence—“a combination of bullishness, charm, manners, and a strong moral code,” as her friend the English novelist Bella Pollen puts it.

  She also dared fly in the face of the assumption that a female professional had to be self-effacing. “I have spent ten years in just about every war zone there was,” she said, accepting the Edward R. Murrow Award in September 2000. “I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific even
ts of the end of our century. . . . I’m so identified with war and disaster that wherever I go, people say, jokingly, that they shudder when they see me. U.S. soldiers . . . joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be employed next. I calculated that I have spent more time at the front than most military units.”

  It was when, in 2009, she took a job inside the system that she struggled. After seventeen years in the field, she had more than earned the right to an anchor post, and to a relief from the dangers and the family stress of nonstop travel. Like ex–war reporters before her—Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Peter Jennings among them—she was ready for a prestigious desk job. But Christiane would find that years of experience and momentous accomplishments didn’t make it less hard for foreign-accented women—and assertive, no-nonsense women—to succeed in traditional high-status posts.

  Every bit as ironic as being threatened with death right after you’ve just fallen in love is the fact that you can excel at the most dangerous, public policy affecting investigatives and yet fail at the safe and the chatty. Her response to challenge, however, carries echoes of Diane Sawyer’s earnest exhortation to “Turn your pain into purpose!” Christiane knew struggle, and she had never run from it before—not as a young exile, or as a scrappy minor-beat reporter, or as the world’s leading conflict journalist. “Never be afraid of failure or loss,” she has counseled firmly. Instead, “Use it.” Just like she did.

  III: PUSHING PAST TRAGEDY

  It was around ten p.m. on a weekday night in the spring of 2000, and Katie Couric was sitting in the greenroom of The Tonight Show, a plastic bib encircling her neck, her light brown hair about to be hot-combed, a makeup artist doing a touch-up. She would be going on Jay Leno’s show as a guest in a half hour. Improvised humor was one of the strong suits of the Today show host who, now at forty-three, had been the undisputed queen of what the TV industry simply calls “Morning” for nine years. She’d virtually grabbed that title the minute she ascended the seat as a chipmunk-cheeked, pregnant thirty-four-year-old from out of nowhere in 1991.