Buying the Night Flight Read online

  Watch for trends in the world, instead of focusing on the sensationalist minutiae that so congest and contorts our newspaper columns and our television screens. Dig deeper, and then try to relate cross-cultural or cross-global patterns. As a matter of fact, this can be done -- indeed, should be done -- even here within our own country.

  In the mid-1970s I taught one fall quarter at Syracuse University. The subject was foreign correspondence, and I asked my students to find a part of the local scene that they could analyze in exactly the way an overseas correspondent would analyze a foreign country. One wrote about the local trailer camp; one covered and analyzed the local Indian reservation. They were smart and sensitive young men and women, and they understood immediately that we were trying to transpose the lessons of good foreign correspondence over the structures of this country and to learn about ourselves from the exercise.

  Finally, think of aiming at having the kind of "informed instinct" that you can employ so well in your analysis of the world and at the same time aim toward a "principled pragmatism" as one of the major values the world needs in leadership. Finally, employ in your approach to your journalistic subjects, in the words of my old friend, the great psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, an "empathic immersion." In short, immerse yourself in a subject and in a personality with as much understanding and compassion as you can, while trying always to bring to your interviews and to your analysis your own most polished and intuitive insight.

  Finally, remember always that writing, when done with intelligence, with spirit and with passion, is like a great love affair. Me? I'm still in love.

  Georgie Anne Geyer

  Washington, D.C.

  December 2000

  Acknowledgments

  Once when I asked a wise editor what exactly one should include in the acknowledgments for one's books, she responded with: "All the people who have helped you with the book." But that was a little difficult for me because legions of people all over the world, in every culture and in every language, have helped me.

  Even after all these years of writing, I still wonder at the way that men and women open themselves to journalists and writers and grant us the privilege of entering their lives and their souls, their dreams and their terrors. This is a particular honor in so many other countries, where suspicion is so often a constant handmaiden to existence. And so, first, I want to thank all the people, all over the world -- presidents, caudillos, and rapscallions, yes, but also the good, decent, ordinary people even more -- who opened their doors so graciously and generously to this young American writer during the years that she was "living" Buying the Night Flight. That I was pillaging their souls was incredible enough; that they actually helped such a shameless "thief" is even more wondrous.

  On the professional level, I am first grateful to the editor Merloyd Lawrence, who originally published this book with Delacorte Press in 1983 and to Radcliffe College for sponsoring it so beautifully in their "Radcliffe Biography Series" of American women in our times. I am at least equally indebted to Brassey's, Inc., that splendid publisher, and particularly to President Frank Margiotta and to editor Don McKeon for republishing the book this year and for doing such a fine job with it. Brassey's is a small publisher, which illustrates once again that "small" can exceed in literary and professional excellence.

  On the broader scale, the life that is related here would not have been possible without the tolerance and encouragement of my wonderful parents, Georgie Hazel and Robert Geyer, and my incomparable brother, Glen. I also want to thank Northwestern University, the Fulbright Program, the Chicago Daily News, where

  I worked so joyously for sixteen years, and my own Universal Press Syndicate, where I have been a devoted "creator" since 1980. Universal not only houses and inspires the finest talent in the world but is one of the most genuinely moral institutions in the entire world. Indeed, this book is dedicated, with deep affection and eternal admiration, to our president, John McMeel, but I would surely be remiss if I did not mention my two immediate editors, Elizabeth Andersen and Alan McDermott, two of the best and most agreeable professionals I have known.

  Looking back, I realize I have been blessed beyond belief, in an era when so many American institutions are sinking into the quicksand of cold personal ambition and civic vindictiveness, to have worked consistently with such superior organizations and with such charming and vibrant human beings.

  When we finished this updated version of Night Flight, as people have come to call the book over the years, Brassey's copyeditor noted in passing that the last two chapters were somewhat different from the first. I thought about that, and then I thought, "But of course, they are, I am. now thirteen years older." Wiser? Let's not carry things too far.

  -- Georgie Anne Geyer

  Washington, D.C.

  Introduction

  You'd have to say the odds were enormous and discouraging. In 1960 a Chicago bookie might have given 1,000 to 1 against Georgie Anne Geyer -- Gee Gee, as her friends call her -- ever being in the position to write this dazzling book.

  Consider what she was up against.

  Her ambition was to be a foreign correspondent. Fine. Most newspaper reporters want, at one time or another, to be foreign correspondents. It's the ultimate reporting challenge, covering another country, a war, a revolution. It's always been the glamor job of newspapering.

  The problem was (and still is) that only a relative handful of one thousand or so American daily newspapers had foreign reporters on their staff. The others picked up the news wires.

  And those who had the foreign assignments dug in and kept them until death or retirement. A city-staff reporter could grow too old just waiting for an opening.

  Beyond the lack of opportunity, though, there was the simple fact that most reporters -- even the very good ones -- weren't good enough. Foreign correspondents had to be outstanding reporters, exceptional writers, self-motivators, imaginative, determined, adventurous, able to cover a war or a fast-breaking revolution, and do a scholarly analysis of a country's history -- but written so clearly that a subway commuter could understand it.

  And add to that Gee Gee's most serious handicap -- as an old rewrite man at the Chicago Daily News put it: "Her sexual persuasion."

  She was a female when females on newspaper staffs were just about as common as snail darters.

  I should correct that. There were women on newspapers. You could find them in the "women's pages" writing fluff about fashions and home furnishings and raising children. Women's work, the editors called it.

  But out in the newsroom -- and the Chicago Daily News was typical of major newspapers of that era -- a woman was as rare as a teetotaler.

  A woman would usually have the education beat. The editors' thinking was that since most teachers were women, and they dealt with children, covering them really wasn't a manly job.

  And there would be one or two women on general assignment. But it was a specialized form of general assignment. A tragedy occurs? Send one of the women to do a three-handkerchief sob story. Political campaigns? Have a woman interview the candidates' wives. Ditto for the wives of ball players and other celebrities.

  If necessity required that one of the females cover a major story, the headline usually began: "Our Gal at..."

  This was the man's world into which Gee Gee somehow elbowed her way more than two decades ago, emerging from the women's pages a tough, determined, brilliant young reporter, cleverly concealed behind an irrepressible smile, apple cheeks, and honey-blond hair.

  "She's nuts," we all laughed, in our basso voices, when Gee Gee made clear her intentions to become a foreign correspondent. The Daily News was fortunate to have a small but highly regarded foreign service in those days.

  We were still chuckling when she managed to get herself assigned to South America.

  But the laughter subsided when Gee Gee began trooping into the mountains for exclusive interviews with revolutionaries, when she demonstrated her uncanny ability to sense where th
e big story was going to break next, and when she began filing those sensitive, perceptive interviews that have become her trademark.

  As Professor Henry Higgins might have exulted, for the wrong reasons, of course: "By God, she did it!"

  And she did. After a while we began taking for granted the Geyer exclusive from this or that Latin American country. If someone was going to beard Fidel in his den, we knew it would be Gee Gee.

  As the years passed Latin America wasn't big enough to hold her and she became one of those genuine, and rare, globe-hopping correspondents. The Middle East, Russia, Poland, Africa -- wherever the dateline originated, the quality was unsurpassed. She had not only become a foreign correspondent, she had become a great one.

  She made it look easy. So easy, in fact, that even her friends didn't know how tough a job she had: The long process of studying the countries, the developing of news sources, the weeks, months, even years, of painfully inching toward that impossible interview. The stories she filed barely hinted at the dangers, the discomforts, the grueling hours, the personal sacrifices.

  This book, which should be read by anyone interested in foreign affairs, journalism, and the professional growth of a woman -- as well as anyone who wants to read one hell of an exciting story -- finally tells us what it was like.

  Gee Gee is now a syndicated columnist based in Washington. But that doesn't mean she is a Washington columnist. Not if that means working the cocktail parties, the dinner parties, the press clubs, the carefully rehearsed official briefings.

  That's not Gee Gee's style, thank goodness. Her style is still to grab a suitcase and catch the next plane.

  So we still don't know where Gee Gee's byline might pop up next. El Salvador? Warsaw? Oman?

  But we do know that wherever it originates, her name on the story means we're getting the best.

  Mike Royko

  Chicago

  Buying the Night Flight

  I.

  To Die in Guatemala

  "The guerrilla war in the mountains ... is the only way to revolution."

  -- FIDEL CASTRO

  The hut they led us away to that moonless midnight was a long wooden shack that stood alone in the forest. It sat on the far corner of one of the aristocrat's big haciendas, and the sardonic joke of the whole thing was not lost on us -- we were with the Guatemalan guerrillas and the hacendados or landowners were precisely the people the guerrillas were sworn to destroy.

  As we groped in the darkness we found a hard dirt floor, which was used mostly for storing machinery. It must be little used and the area sparsely populated, or else why would they bring us here? Miguel, our guide, led us with a very dim lantern into a small separate room at the end of the hut. In it stood two canvas cots with blankets, and not much else. There we were. Henry Gill, the fine photographer who worked closely and collegially with me on the Chicago Daily News, was already getting testy over this whole unwholesome situation. Our guide, the mysterious Miguel, a handsome, curly-haired young student obviously of excellent lineage, carrying an attaché case full of obscure books, was playing the revolutionary game to the hilt. He would do at least one thing we wouldn't do: he would eventually die for its curious satisfactions.

  Miguel left us for a moment, then returned with two rough-hewn pots which he delicately placed several feet apart in the other room. "El servicio," he said with a comical gesture. One was for me, one was for Henry. It did not bother me in the slightest, but Henry was mortified. I was far more worried about other things, like getting out of this whole thing alive.

  "You are to remain here for twenty-four hours," Miguel told us in a low whisper before he left. "We'll come for you tomorrow night. While you're here you must observe absolute silence. There will be workers on the hacienda passing right by the shack from the early-morning hours on. Some might come into the other room for tools. We'll bring you food when it's safe." Then he bade us sleep well and was gone into the opaque black night that was all we yet knew or felt of the Sierra de las Minas.

  As he turned and twisted and tried to settle down on his canvas cot in the darkness, Henry kept muttering, "We must be out of our minds, we must be out of our minds." I couldn't, in truth, totally disagree with him.

  For my part I curled up on my cot too, but only after taking a sleeping pill and accommodating myself psychologically to the new situation. In situations like this I reconnoiter the territory like an animal, sometimes only in my mind, and make my peace with it by absorbing it into myself and making it mine. I was doing that as I lay there, and soon I was perfectly and even peacefully part of this new place and time.

  That left me free to acknowledge and experience several other waves of feelings. I felt a tremendous, euphoric excitement because I knew that we were on our way and that it was unlikely now that anything could turn us back. I also felt the journalist's special excitement of doing something that not only had not been done before but that would be of encompassing interest. Only two months before I had stood in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, listening to Fidel Castro rant before 300,000 persons, "The guerrilla war in the mountains ... is the only way to revolution. The people of Latin America will see that we were right." Now Henry and I were part of that revolution, which had the added piquancy that it was also a revolution our own country was trying desperately to destroy.

  The morning broke bright and hot through the shutters, and the long, tedious day came and went slowly, very slowly. We waited there like Trappists, each lost in his and her own thoughts and feelings about this strange adventure. I ate whenever they brought food and found it good: campesino black beans squeezed out of a plastic bag onto tortillas, fried meat, boiled eggs, plain white bread, and strong coffee. But Henry refused adamantly to eat and I observed (for only one of many times) how much more finicky men are than women in situations such as this. In the muted whispers in which we occasionally communicated, he argued that he might get sick if he ate. I argued cogently that he would be too weak to take the trip if he didn't eat.

  "Try a boiled egg," I insisted at one point. "How can a boiled egg hurt you?" I sat there peeling them and eating them.

  "All right, all right," he finally growled, as one might placate a nagging wife. He hit an egg on his knee to break it and the gooey fluid ran all down his pants leg. He had got the only uncooked egg in the batch and smelled very much like rotten eggs during the whole trip. I kept my advice to myself from then on.

  By nightfall we had both grown edgy. This was as far into the details of the plan as we had been entrusted and, trust notwithstanding, one had to wonder what would come next. "Put-yourself-in-their-hands" seemed the only possible approach to guerrilla journalism; but it did not rule out moments of doubt and even terror.

  At 11:00 p.m. we heard stirrings outside. Was it the hacendados or the military? My throat closed. But it was Miguel. "We're going," he whispered, still cheerful, and we started walking up a side road. Then suddenly the word went along the line of twenty-nine men in Spanish. "Everyone down." We lay for an hour in the cornfield, as a new moon inched up over the trees, while every soldier and policeman, rightist terrorist, and American official in Guatemala was searching for us. That was how it all began.

  ***

  Actually, of course, the situation had begun a long time ago. One would have to say it began that day four hundred years ago when the Spanish conquistadores marched down from Mexico to take the rich Mayan outpost cities of Guatemala. But while the other Latin American countries, led by Mexico in its 1910 revolution, eventually changed the traditional oppressive triumvirate of dictator-church-landowner and moved well on the way to becoming prosperous modern societies, only Guatemala, along with El Salvador and Nicaragua (and Paraguay on the continent), remained in this squalid feudal isolation.

  By the time we got there in 1966, while the rest of Latin America was on the move -- changing, developing, spurred on by each country's own internal impulses and by the excitement of John F. Kennedy's "Alliance for Progress" -- Guate
mala was not only stagnating, it was actually moving resolutely backward. In 1950, to cite just one indicator, 70 percent of the people had lived on a subsistence level. By 1963, 73 percent lived at that level. You could not even argue "trickle down" here.

  At the bottom of everything lay the huge Indian mass -- 65 percent of the population, stubborn, long-suffering, fatalistic, and jealously protective of old customs that had remained unchanged since the Spaniards came. It was this inert mass that allowed the military, sometime cynically employing the fig leaf of a party and often without one, over and over again to overthrow democratic regimes without the danger of any public uprising. It was this mass -- its ignorance, its disease, its isolation, and its utter passivity -- that shamed the university students and intellectuals and sent them into the hills in the 1960s as guerrillas. It was this mass that brought us there.

  But we were dealing with far more than just another guerrilla movement, or else it would certainly not have been worth the time, the expense, and the danger. We were seeing firsthand what could be the next post-Castro guerrilla movement of our era in Latin America, and the first one in Central America. Since Guatemala had had for a brief moment in 1954 a Communist government, the FAR guerrilla movement was looked upon by most analysts and diplomats as the next "Castroite" movement to attempt to take power. And if that happened, it would mean that Castro was not a single, isolated factor at all, but a movement that could crumble the stability of the Western Hemisphere with the force of his charisma, the simplicity of his message of revolution, and, of course, his guns. This was what we were testing, and, though doubtless it was more dramatic "to die in Spain" during the Spanish civil war, in the sixties in Latin America "to die in Guatemala" was a respected business.