by Byron Pitts
One of the church ministers, Reverend Joseph Andrews, joined the circle. He did something that really made me uncomfortable: he put both his hands on my head. Since I’m an inch or two taller than Reverend Andrews, he really had to stretch to place both hands up there. Just before we all closed our eyes, I caught a glimpse of Reverend Andrews and he had a big smile on his face. Reverend Andrews has a booming voice, even in regular conversation. One by one, the deacons each gave a short prayer, asking God to keep me safe in Iraq and to keep my family safe and worry-free while I was away. The whole time Reverend Andrews kept his hands pressing against the top of my head. He prayed last. “Lord,” he said with his Trinidadian accent, “be with our brother over in Iraq. Give him traveling mercy. And, Lord, let no harm come to him from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.”
When he finished, I felt a bit embarrassed for being so uncomfortable. But, more important, I felt a tremendous sense of peace. I could still feel Reverend Andrews’s hands on my head and the hands of the deacons. I walked over to my family, standing in the back of the church, with a look of complete contentment. I may not have been quite up to Iraq physically, but I was, as military people are fond of saying, “high speed and good to go.” I was ready spiritually.
Often, during the plane rides from New York to London, London to Amman, Jordan, and Amman to Baghdad, I thought about that small prayer group. Security protocol called for a small private security team to meet me just outside the Baghdad airport. It was made up of three armed men traveling in two vehicles. There was one driver and two armed guards in one car, and then me with one armed guard and driver in the other. The drivers were all trained to maneuver in traffic and to take evasive action in case of attack. It was a high-speed sprint from the airport to the hotel CBS used as its headquarters. But this was an uneventful trip until we got there. Just as we were about to enter the secured gates around the hotel, we heard a loud bang. I could see people in the hotel courtyard running and diving for cover. The security guard in the front passenger seat ordered me to get down. I was already wearing a Kevlar vest, but I knew not to challenge him at that moment. Our car accelerated a short distance and then stopped abruptly. “Out of the car, mate, into the hotel straightaway,” the British-born security guard yelled. Our hotel had just been hit by at least two mortars. One exploded and one did not. I wish I could say I started praying, but instead I asked God a question, “Lord, already? I just got here.” I didn’t wait for an answer—I ran for the hotel lobby. The unexploded ordnance was now resting on the ground outside the hotel. There’s a good chance that if that mortar had gone off, shrapnel would have sprayed the courtyard and most likely hit the car I was in. “Boy, were you guys lucky,” CBS producer Ben Plesser said, with his hand outstretched. “Welcome to Baghdad,” he added with a smile. Perhaps we were lucky, but that’s not how I saw it. For the next few minutes, my mind went back to my friends at St. Paul Baptist Church, who stood around me in a circle and prayed. I could feel their hands, especially Reverend Andrews’s hands on my head and hear his words “from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.” When we settled upstairs in the hotel in the CBS News work space, Ben said with a hint of surprise, “You seemed awfully calm for a guy who almost got nailed by a mortar.” My response was honest, “Not calm, just prayed up,” I said. Later that night, when I finally went to bed, I again thought about that prayer circle. I slept like a baby.
It was, by the standards of war, a relatively uneventful month-long tour in Baghdad. We saw some “bang bang,” as journalists are fond of saying, but no real close calls. Nonbelievers will contend those prayers had nothing to do with how things turned out. If safety and prayer were that easily tied together, why have so many people died in Iraq and elsewhere? My short answer is, I don’t know. I do know the prayers of those friends comforted me the way prayers I had heard my mother and grandmother and others utter over the years. Prayers that remind us that whatever the eventual outcome, God will have a hand in it. When my mother prays, she often says, “Lord, not my will but Yours be done.” That humble request has always worked for me.
I believe prayer works best when uttered from the bent knees of an optimist. A minister friend asked me once if my cup was half full or half empty. I stuck my chest out and proclaimed half full. His response was startling, Why are you optimistic only half of the time, he asked. Why not be optimistic all the time? Why not say your cup is constantly running over? That’s always struck me as an awfully tall order. Is it possible to be optimistic all the time? Over the years my life’s been touched by a handful of people who have that kind of optimism, and they have helped me recognize and increase my own spirit of optimism. We all believe in putting the best face on a difficult circumstance and in anticipating the best possible outcome. We choose to be optimistic. At her core, my mother is one of these optimists. Despite what my grades showed or what a psychologist said, she believed my cup was running over, that I could do great things with my life. Optimists don’t allow doubt to linger or to discourage them from their goals. There is something else this group shares, and that’s toughness. Optimism isn’t based on any pie in the sky naiveté. It is a hard-earned choice.
I believe that kind of optimism as much as anything got me to 60 Minutes full time in January of 2009. Sure, I worked hard, and plenty of people had to sign off on it—from the show’s executive producer, Jeff Fager, to the president of CBS News, Sean McManus, all the way up to the president and CEO of CBS, Leslie Moonves. They all had to be in agreement. Certainly my agent, Richard Liebner, played a role in negotiating the deal. But none of that would ever have happened without the spirit of optimism that’s covered my life and the silent prayers of many people. Getting to 60 Minutes was a thrill, but staying there, that now takes up most of my energies. It’s never been about the destination for me. It’s all about the journey. One of the best things about being at 60 Minutes is the amount of time devoted to a single story. Research often takes months and on occasion years. Over time there’s a chance to spend hours with the people you interview. Many of them are famous and have harnessed power in their own ways. A few I’ve met have reinforced or taught me things far beyond their professions.
Pete Carroll is my kind of optimist. He’s the head football coach at the University of Southern California. His Trojans are one of the most successful college teams in the nation. Carroll certainly collects his share of high school all-Americans and has one of the top coaching staffs in the country, but he also has one of those contagious spirits. I met Coach Carroll while doing a profile on 60 Minutes. The story was as much about what he does outside of football as about his success on the gridiron. He’s part of an effort to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles through a program he started, called A Better L.A. One night he took us along when he went to South Central Los Angeles, into several neighborhoods known for gang violence. It was well past midnight, just a few days after a big win against Ohio State. Pete’s been making such visits for several years, and this was the first time he ever allowed television cameras to accompany him. He chatted with gang members and gang wannabes, and with community activists who share his desire to make L.A. a safer place. Carroll’s been criticized for his work, accused of being naive and in over his head. But he laughs it off. He has also been given credit by some in law enforcement in the city for helping to reduce the level of gang violence. He believes it’s possible for a person to win at whatever they put their heart and effort into, from sports to business to living their life day to day. He doesn’t just believe it—he lives it. Twice he was hired as an NFL head coach, and twice he was fired. A lesser person might have just curled up in a fetal position and turned the lights out. Not Pete Carroll. He said, “Okay, let me go. Let me move on to the next thing.” He processed the criticism, learned from it, and moved on, just as Clarice would have prescribed. When 60 Minutes first approached Carroll about a profile, he was hesitant. But in the end, he decided to cooperate. Wearing his perpetual big smile, he told m
e off-camera before the first interview, “I’m going to trust you guys and that means I’m in.” That’s another quality of an optimist, a commitment to give themselves fully to things they believe in.
An optimist takes stumbling blocks and turns them into stepping stones. Dr. Paul Farmer is a living example, and that’s partly why I profiled him for 60 Minutes. He’s the co-founder of a group called Partners in Health, an organization that provides medical care to poor people around the world. He divides his time between his home in Haiti and Rwanda. Paul’s childhood makes mine look like a day at the beach. He was raised near Weeki Wachee, Florida (near Tampa), by working-class parents. He was one of six siblings who spent part of their childhood living on a bus. I’ll repeat that: they lived on a bus. Because he grew up poor, he recognized the lack of health care and the lack of dignity associated with poverty. He had spent a lot of time in Florida with migrant workers from Haiti, so his relationship with the country was part of his early development. He went to Duke on a scholarship and later earned a medical degree at Harvard, where he committed himself to providing both quality health care and dignity.
Like most optimists, he had great clarity about his purpose in life and therefore drew great satisfaction, no matter the difficulty of the moment, in just having the opportunity to live that purpose every day. The program Dr. Farmer started in Haiti has become a model around the world for providing health care to the poor. In fact, techniques Partners in Health mastered in Haiti are being used in parts of Boston to treat poor patients in one of America’s great cities. Farmer, too, has a permanent smile etched on his face. Once, when I took a flight back with him from Haiti, as we were chatting, I realized he’d stopped talking. I glanced over and he was sound asleep. He had two books open on his lap, on top of notes he was preparing for an upcoming speech. His head was tilted back, eyes closed, and there was a slight smile on his face. He’s optimistic even when he’s dreaming.
There is a childlike quality to many of the people whose optimistic spirits shaped my life. In addition to their optimism, they all had the ability to laugh at life and just as easily to laugh at themselves. Laughter was often a miraculous ointment for the troubles in my life. It’s one of the many and most valued things I learned from my mother. “Son, sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying,” she’d say, and that’s exactly what we’d do. Often at night, just before bed, I’d sit on the side of my mother’s bed with my brother and sister. Some nights we’d snuggle next to her. And somehow, no matter what had occurred that day, she would find a way to make us laugh. There was no topic too sensitive or serious that we couldn’t laugh at it. From her failed marriages, to difficult bosses, to her own disappointments with relationships, nothing was out of bounds. She gave each of us a great gift, the ability to laugh at ourselves. It has served me well. At times, it’s been therapeutic. Other days, being able to laugh at myself or at a situation was just enough to keep me from losing control.
One of those days occurred on July 22, 2003. I was sitting in the CBS News office in Baghdad. It was late, and I was filling time the way I often did on this particular assignment: I was losing badly to producer Mike Solmsen at cards. Mike was a great travel companion. He could find good fried chicken anywhere in the world, talk passionately about Syracuse basketball for hours, and recite the best lines from movies like The Godfather and Pulp Fiction. All valuable skills when you can spend hours waiting at airports, on stakeouts, or like this particular night, waiting out rumors that Saddam Hussein’s two sons had been killed by U.S. forces in a firefight. The rumors had been circulating for hours. We couldn’t confirm the story, and it was too dangerous to try to drive from Baghdad to Mosul, where the alleged shootout was supposed to have occurred. Mike and I did the next best thing; we sat in the office and played cards. For hours we played cards. The rest of our team of photographers and engineers had gone to bed. Mike and I were often the last ones up. Through the years we’ve probably played more than five hundred hands of cards. I’ve won twice. Once I cheated, and the other time Mike let me win. Mike and I were about to start another hand of cards, as we sat in the office, when we heard a loud round of gunfire. It was close, too close. We’d both heard enough gunfire over the years to recognize when the sound was too close for comfort. Someone was shooting just outside our building. Actually, it sounded like our hotel was under attack.
“What should we do?” I asked Mike. With a deadpan expression, he looked me in the eyes and said, “What should we do? It’s pretty obvious. Get under the table, call New York, and finish our hand.” We both burst into laughter. We might be in serious trouble, but Mike was making jokes. It’s just what we both needed. Laughing allowed us to at least temporarily block out the anxiety we were both feeling. We did call New York. Our cameraman heard the gunfire as well, and he had managed to ease outside to videotape whatever he saw. What he saw were Iraqis celebrating in the streets of Baghdad. It was official: Saddam’s sons were dead. As is the custom in that part of the world, men celebrated by firing their weapons in the air. It wasn’t a crisis we were hearing—it was a celebration. A brief moment of laughter had kept us from panicking. We later filed our story. As it had so many times before, laughter had gotten me past a difficult moment.
Prayer, optimism, and laughter are all wonderful gifts. They are part of the foundation my mother used to raise her children. “If you pray hard, work hard, and treat people right, good things will happen,” she often said. She left out laughter, but it was certainly vital. Her foundation was now mine. I’ve found that status or wealth can last but so long and take one but so far. Patience, prayer, optimism, and laughter are their own renewable-energy sources. Mix in a relentless work ethic, and you might be surprised how far you can go.
THIRTEEN
The Power of Forgiveness:
When Father and Son Talk
as Men
Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.
—Luke 6:37
For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
—Matthew 6:14
CAN YOU TELL BY now that I’m an optimist? I choose to see the bright side of most any circumstance. My closest friends say I’m easygoing and almost never get visibly upset or angry. I carry my faith right out front and acknowledge that every good thing in my life has some connection to prayer, whether my own or someone else’s. However, what is unseen is a heart that has been unwilling to forgive. I believe that God gives us power through our ability to forgive others and forgive ourselves. Nothing has drained me more of that power than my knot of unforgiveness. Like anger and fear, it kept me safe or, to my thinking, kept certain dangers at a distance. When TV’s Tony Soprano said one of his enemies was “dead to me,” I could totally relate. If someone crossed me personally or professionally, I would kill them off emotionally. I think that’s one reason my anger never turned to violence.
I remember when a distant cousin offered me heroin when I was about eight years old. I got mad and never went to his house again. I never talked to him again and I never told my parents. When a girlfriend in college went out with another guy, from the moment I found out I never spoke to her again, ever. Back in my midtwenties in the mid-1980s, a colleague at a local station (a nighttime assignment editor) sent an e-mail to our news director criticizing my work and making a few false accusations. I got a copy of his e-mail. I never confronted him, but I also never spoke to him again. Mind you, this was the man who gave me my news assignments every day, but for more than a year I would not speak to him. I would not call his name. If he addressed me, I’d simply look at him and walk away. Not the best way to cover the news—and it still surprises me that I didn’t get fired. I guess someone else in the newsroom was praying for me.
I could not forgive myself either. I can still remember every blown live report, every story where I’ve been beaten by the competition. For the longest time I kept a video diary of my worst work. Fortunately, I lost that videotape. An unwillingness to fo
rgive was perhaps the coating on the masks I’ve worn most of my life. Like a hard acrylic, it kept most people and most things from getting too close or close enough to hurt me. In many ways, learning to forgive has been harder for me than learning to read or learning to speak clearly. It took only twelve years for me to learn to read. Speaking finally became easy at twenty. Forgiveness seemed beyond my reach for the first forty-five years of my life, and I was okay with that, or so I thought. For the longest time, my life was littered with people I had killed off emotionally for one reason or another. But, for me, there was at least one body that needed to be recovered: my father.
The conversation with my father was the most-thought-out, researched, prayed-over conversation I’d never actually had. Probably as early as middle school, certainly in college, and every few weeks of adulthood, I’d rehearse “that conversation I’ll finally have with Daddy.” I had discussed it with everyone in my family. They all encouraged me, but I just never could bring myself to call him and do it. The whole birds-and-the-bees conversation had long passed us by. All the big “man-to-man” conversations I had already had with my mother. For the longest time, I struggled just to remember the sound of his voice. I never remember him congratulating me, saying he was proud of me, or ever wishing me well in school, in sports, or, for that matter, in life. I wanted no part of him. My last significant conversation with my father was when I was about twenty-five years old.
Baltimore wasn’t that far from Norfolk, where I was working at the time, so I had gone up there to reconnect with old friends. Out of respect for my mother, I often avoided my father, but my brother asked me to stop by and see him. I did, but I did not look forward to the visit with the joy and excitement one usually has for a long-distance parent. I dreaded it. I spent an afternoon with my dad and his wife. He questioned me about all aspects of my life and my job, even spoke proudly of me and my professional accomplishments. But what I waited to hear and wanted to hear was some acknowledgment of how he had behaved when I was young. I wanted him to tell me he was sorry. But he didn’t. When the afternoon came to an end and he talked about staying in touch, I told him, “When I was a boy, you had no time for me. Now that I’m a man, I have no time for you.” I was snarling when I said it, while my heart was breaking. I’d rehearsed those two sentences over and over again. Even down to my facial expression.