Buying the Night Flight

  BUYING THE NIGHT FLIGHT

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A WOMAN FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

  GEORGIE ANNE GEYER

  INTRODUCTION BY MIKE ROYKO

  ****

  Garrett County Press Digital Edition 2011

  New Orleans

  Portions of this book were first published, in a different form, in The Young Russians by Georgie Anne Geyer (Copyright 1975 by ETC Publications) and her article "Enemies" in The Progressive .

  For more information, please address:

  www.gcpress.com

  Copyright 1983, 1996 by Georgie Anne Geyer

  Preface 2001 by Georgie Anne Geyer

  All rights reserved. Originally published 1983 by Delacorte Press as one of the Radcliffe Biographies, a series of lives of extraordinary American women.Updated Edition published by Brassey's in 1996. A University of Chicago Press edition was published in 2001.

  eISBN: 978-1-891053-16-0

  To John McMeel the incomparable founder of Universal Press Syndicate and the best friend that his "creators" could ever have.

  Preface

  Every once in a while when someone introduces me before a speech, I find my mind wandering and I soon discover myself thinking: "What a strange human being that must be!" Then I realize that I am the person they are talking about.

  You see, it just seems so odd all the interviews with the democrats and the dictators, with the heroes and the scoundrels, with the wise-men and the court jesters of the world -- Sadat, Khomeini, Qaddafi, Reagan, Saddam, Fidel (you-fill-in-the-blanks) -- not to speak of all the outrageous places!

  I find myself asking: Did I really live with the Marxist guerrillas in Guatemala for a week? Was I really put in prison in Angola under that take-no-prisoners regime? Was it really I who wandered around Central Asia in the dead of winter just after the Soviet Union collapsed, when that remote and unknown world was teetering on the verge of collapse? Or was that someone that I could only vaguely know?

  Then, as my mind weaves on, I realize that those recitations of interviews and of events, as curiously amusing as they may be to many, are not at all the way I see myself. I see my life to be a kind of seamless circle, in which interviews with leaders, in and of themselves, are in my own mind actually far less challenging than the entire process of figuring out how to get in and out of countries, piecing together those puzzles that are the perplexing components of all societies and finally writing fairly, and hopefully even felicitously, about what I have seen and done.

  But then, I have been doing the foreign work -- first, as a foreign correspondent with the venerable old Chicago Daily News, and then as a syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and the Universal Press Syndicate -- since 1964.

  This book itself was originally published in 1983 as part of the innovative Radcliffe Biography Series of women in our times. To my delight, since it is chancy to write about yourself, particularly when you are the "first" woman here and the "first" woman there, it generally received kind and enthusiastic attention and reviews. Readers, both women and men, seemed to find it a "happy" book, perhaps because I was trying not to pose as some ideologue, theoretician or theologian, but only attempting to share what a wondrous a thing it was and still is to me, being "out there" and being privileged to explore and write about the world.

  I originally called the book, You Didn't Have to Be Here, because that is what soldiers invariably say to foreign correspondents who turn up inexplicably, and without being forced to do so, in war zones: "What in the hell are you doing here?" they would exclaim. "You didn't have to be here." Their words expressed to me the special commitment of the classic foreign correspondent--and the special code of honor that morally compels you to accept being placed in danger if it is necessary to accomplish your work and to place yourself as a fair-minded observer to history. But when my editor urged me to change it to Buying the Night Flight , I only thought for a moment and then agreed enthusiastically.

  The title came from a quote from the great romantic French flier and writer, Antoine de Exupéry, who throughout all his rich life romanticized the joy of flying alone at night over strange and often uncharted worlds. "There is no buying the night flight," he wrote, "with its hundred thousand stars, its serenity and its moment of sovereignty." And those words--and thus this title -- captured not only the risk incumbent in the work, but explained one of the major reasons the foreign correspondent takes all those supposedly foolish risks: the thrill of discovery.

  But why now issue what will be the third edition of Night Flight , and why now as a new paperback?

  There are several reasons for this new publication by the University of Chicago Press.

  I believe that we are close to approaching a crisis in foreign correspondence that could spell deep trouble for our country--in fact, it already has -- and I wanted to reach the open and idealistic minds of our prospective young journalists, diplomats, military officers, international businessmen and businesswomen, and every sort of political analyst. The classic form of foreign correspondence, as exemplified by Vincent Sheean's Personal History and by such classic individuals as Ernie Pyle, Dorothy Thompson and Keyes Beech, is in danger of dying. There are still some extraordinary correspondents out there, risking their lives and their sanity--one need only think of the brave and often sagacious coverage of Bosnia, of Chechnya, of Sierra Leone -- but every year there are fewer of these.

  As costs mount for such coverage and as the spurious idea grows in an increasingly inward-looking American journalism that "Americans are not interested in foreign affairs," newspapers and television are everywhere pulling back in the coverage of foreign news. Instead of TV network crews based in every European city, one or two will now work from London or even from New York. Only a handful of the biggest and richest papers have correspondents at all, thus diminishing the diversity of coverage and the richness of interpretation that we receive -- and thus crippling our awareness of our world, even as we impoverish ourselves on a personal level.

  The correspondents who do go out are often the aptly-named "parachutists." Since they are in El Salvador one day, Buenos Aires the next and Beirut the day after that, they can hardly be blamed for overly-violent coverage which, since they often lack any cultural depth or knowledge, is in fact the only thing they have the competence to describe.

  Walter Lippmann once said with posed cynicism that, "Journalism is the last refuge of the vaguely talented." Today we might paraphrase that to read: "Foreign coverage is the last interest of the many overly-ambitious young people who want only to climb ladders in place of flying on night flights."

  I hope therefore that this version of Night Flight can serve to inspire some young professionals -- some of those who may yet be wavering in the tension between striving only for personal ambition and demanding the joys of pure experience -- to again see foreign work as the greatest challenge in journalism; to make them think anew about the utilitarian ambitionist mode that has taken over so much of American journalism (next year, city editor; the year after that, managing editor; and no time for journalistic adventure, thank you!); and to exercise those incipient romantic and idealistic propensities that have always come naturally and so blessedly to the young.

  Since that old Casablanca romance about the world seems to be withering on the vine of that pure ambition, I also hope that this book will give young journalists (and, indeed, men and women of any age who still have the capacity to dream!) an idea of the sheer, wondrous romance that stirs within so much of it.

  Now, the dictionary defines "romance" as anything dealing with "the remote in time or place, the heroic, the adventurous and often the mysterious." And there is still romance in the world. When Humphrey Bog
art fell so hopelessly but nobly in love with Ingrid Bergman in a chance wartime meeting in Paris during World War II -- and the love affair was exquisitely told in the great film Casablanca after the war -- the very word "Casablanca" came to mean more than a film and infinitely more than simply arriving at an unusual place on the map. For when the couple met again, this time accidentally in the corrupt, war-torn city of Casablanca, it was clear that their romance signified an exaltation of feeling and a heightened perceptibility that is at the very heart of the romantic spirit. But it takes special eyes to see the romantic, and it takes an enlivened soul to feel it.

  Of course, being a romantic foreign correspondent is even more dangerous today than it always was. These ugly new "ethnic" conflicts and savage militia wars hardly present one with even the satisfaction and heroics that came with covering wars of olde; and of course, on the practical side, it is harder for male correspondents to go abroad with wives who today will not easily settle back and wait in Beirut or Hong Kong or Warsaw with the children while he goes off to cover the world and the wars. Yet, that too can be dealt with, as many couples now share foreign correspondent posts, often with substantial success.

  Most important of all, too many Americans -- and even many in the American journalism profession -- are fooling themselves these days about the rest of the world.

  How constantly -- over and over and over! -- we reiterate that we are now an integral part of the entire world and that no part of the world can be closed off and hidden away any more. How proudly we praise democracy, preferably our exact form, for opening up foreign countries to the rest of humanity. We cite soberly how capital flows bounce from country to country, and we properly wonder at the ability of men of power to send their accrued wealth across national borders, unheard and unseen. We speak with sober respect about the "Internet World" and about the "Information Revolution," as if they were indeed magical new genies whose word and power slips across the world as did the predictions of those old genies who sprang out of lamps in Baghdad or Aleppo and granted you your most precious and perfervid wish.

  We see ourselves as the "indispensable nation," as the "only super power," and as the "hope of the world," while in the same breath we choose not to know about the world we are so rhetorically and immodestly avid to dominate! Thus, in truth we choose not to know it. And now we too often risk living in virtual worlds of our own imagination, even while we deny the genuine trajectory of history.

  Surely this is not a way for serious people to look at the world -- and we have ourselves already paid for this lack of sobriety in Yemen with the deaths of 17 American sailors in the fall of 2000 and in Somalia years earlier with the deaths of still more of our soldiers. Others, of course, have paid far more heavily for this lack of seriousness, with 250,000 dead in Bosnia in large part because our own government wrongly analyzed the roots of the cause and 800,000 dead in Rwanda because our own leaders and the officials of the U.N. would not act in time. It is also worth noticing that, in every one of the recent conflicts since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the press almost always got the story right but was unable to convince our political and military leaders of the real roots and causes of these conflicts. Being there and being fair still makes all the difference.

  Finally, we come to the Internet World, which is being substituted by too many Americans for the real world of responsibly filtered and processed information. Surely the Internet, when used with even a modicum of common sense, can be a great force for education and understanding. But many Americans today look upon it as a magical thing. They do not want to understand that human beings -- and very often faulty and limited human beings at that--are the ones who put that information on the Internet. Indeed, many young people seem to think that anything they read on the magic machine is automatically true. There is no process of culling out, as there is in the traditional press or, indeed, in any traditional organizational structure.

  Thus, at worst it can distort our critical thinking and substitute the bogus immediacy of emotion-ridden impulses for the far more sober reflection of the serious journalist, the person who is so steeped in the knowledge of his or her subject--whether science or Srebrenica, whether health care or the Hutus, whether cultural analysis or Cambodia -- that the reporter can be trusted to weed out the dross and to focus laser-like on the crucial aspects of a subject!

  Thus we must understand that the importance of "the gatekeeper"--the interpreter who stands in for the reader at the great events of history -- is not diminishing, but instead suddenly rising, on many levels.

  You are now probably expecting me to rend my garments or tear my hair or indulge myself in any of those biblical expressions of frustration over the diminishing numbers of correspondents working abroad today; but I am not going to do that. In fact, I am convinced that, in the world that is coming, the gatekeepers will, of necessity, be called back to duty.

  The annual meeting of the International Press Institute was held in Boston in the spring of 2000. The organization is made up of publishers, media owners, and a few working journalists like myself from all over the world. During that particular meeting, one after another of the most influential media leaders in the world spoke about the new role of the gatekeeper/correspondent.

  Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York Times, told the group, "Let's hold on to a central thought: 'This is a great time to be a journalist' People will continue to need a reliable guide through the mysteries of the Internet. It confirms what we know, that words are not powerful but that understanding is powerful--and that is what we do. In the future, there will be a lot of competition to the traditional media -- but that does not mean that the traditional media is headed toward destruction."

  The great American diplomat George Kennan had already argued passionately that we have never more needed human gatekeepers, or, as he called them, "filters," because they have that special experience of reporting in depth, along with the informed intuition that goes into making a great correspondent who can go through the masses of undigested and undisciplined "news" awash in the world and to put it together in a form that makes sense of the world.

  But perhaps the most eloquent commentary on the whole question of what newspapers and the news "business" in particular should be doing came from the brilliant analyst of the communications industry and communications psychology, Professor Neil Postman of New York University.

  Newspapers should, for a start, get out of the information business and into the knowledge business... I define knowledge as organized information -- information that is embedded in some context; information that has a purpose, that leads one to seek further information in order to understand something about the world.... When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information, knows how to relate information to one's life, and especially, knows when information is irrelevant.... The problem to be solved in the twenty-first century is how to transform information into knowledge, and how to transform knowledge into wisdom. If we can solve that... all the rest will take care of itself.

  One could not possibly define the problem better.

  ***

  Before we embark upon the night flight -- and I do believe that every human being has some of the magical seeking of the classic Night Flight inside herself and himself -- I want to take this opportunity to offer some advice to the students and young journalists who often ask me for guidance before they take off from their varied ports of call.

  As Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, "Avoid the cliché of your time!" Even when I was a child, I felt that if "everybody" was doing some thing, that was something to avoid at all costs. Real change in the world comes from the self-motivated, searching and inspired individual willing to test his or her sacred honor to do work that is noble and creative. In short, he or she must avoid taking the common road!

  Many young people, apparently consumed with the need to control, ask me: "How do you control your interviews?" They usually tend to be searching for clues to contro
l one's life, for shortcuts to it and for secrets, which will allow them to have everything now, right off the bat!

  I have to be honest and tell them that that just isn't the way it is. I have to tell them that the way you control your interviews (or any other part of your work) is to know more about the subject than the other person does. This advice, as you can well imagine, is seldom greeted with deafening applause. (In fact, most of the questioners don't like the advice at all, but in fact that is the way it is. Everything else is falsity--and that should never be a part of journalism.)

  Next, realize that nothing comes out of nowhere -- everything comes out of somewhere. All of the crises of nations, like the crises of individuals, have roots. What's more, those roots are knowable and analyzable, but you must literally dig for them and you must then have the knowledge and the courage and the honesty to correctly identify them when you discover and uncover them.

  Personal note: I always get upset when I see the word "unpredictable" applied to leaders, to political situations within countries or to cultural behavior in general. Saddam, unpredictable? Fidel, unpredictable? Ronald Reagan, unpredictable? Hardly. Their behavior is as tiresomely predictable as the sun rising and going down. But to find those so-predictable patterns of personality and psychology, you have to understand their cultural background, their personal family history and something of their own psychological responses to the world in which they grew up and grew old. (Another secret: That's the great fun of journalism!)

  Avoid at all costs the smart, know-it-all, wiseacre "get him" journalism that unfortunately typifies so many young journalists today in the "elitist press." They sit around wondering, "Who should we 'get' today?" while scoffing at any idea of patriotism, of citizenship, or of ceremony. These attitudes are incontrovertibly and disastrously destructive to the world that decent people everywhere are trying -- and too often, dying -- to build.