Buying the Night Flight Page 9

  When men in power were in crucial or dangerous times -- which was precisely when you needed to see them -- then it was something else again. Then they wanted to be with important correspondents, and then it was men. It was a syndrome it took me some time to understand and to work around.

  But these were minor things. Most important were the joys of the profession. Our odd little group of wanderers and seekers-after-little-truths was quite simply the most splendid set of princely misfits I have ever known. We had the equality of the hobo and the grace of the aristocrat. It was a splendid way of life -- and a deep commitment.

  IV.

  Santo Domingo: "You Didn't Have to Be Here"

  "No man knows whether he is a coward until he has been in a civil war."

  -- ANTOINE DE SAINT - EXUPÉRY

  My first chance to "be there" as a correspondent almost never happened.

  In 1965 I was back in the Daily News offices, fresh from my first gypsy year in Latin America and speaking perfect Spanish. I didn't have much to do except plot how to get back there as soon as possible. Then one day the news flashed over our machines: The Dominican Republic, long the personal plantation of the heinous Trujillo family supported by so many of the corrupt political and, in particular, senatorial groups in the U.S., had erupted in a democratic revolution.

  I found myself literally trembling with excitement: for the poor, long-suffering mulatto Dominicans, for the future of the Caribbean, for us. Of course I would go. Of course they would send me. Of course they would choose me. Like the good girl I had been raised to be, I waited. "Any minute," I kept thinking to myself that first day, as I sat in my chair and waited, "any minute, they will walk right out of their editors' offices and down the aisle and point their Uncle Sam fingers at me and say, 'Gee Gee, get packed for Santo Domingo. We want you!'"

  By the second day the waiting was becoming intolerable. I got the clips out on the Dominican Republic and sat there reading them avidly. Then late that day I got the news: the office had sent to the "D.R." Jim McCartney, a splendid journalist with our Washington bureau but one who had never been in Latin America and did not speak Spanish.

  At that point I did what all little girls, then at least, were taught to do. I sulked, brooded, spent hours and days going over every unfair and unjust thing that had happened to me at the hands of men-- but I didn't say anything. Not a cross word passed my lips. I kept this up for a week, then finally on Saturday I walked into the office of our editor, Larry Fanning, and exploded in wrath, "Give me a leave of absence. I'm going to Santo Domingo." Then I added, "No, I'm going anyway."

  "Gee Gee," Larry responded, his voice showing clearly his astonishment, "Gee Gee, what is wrong with you?"

  This was all clearly quite crazy, but in fairness to me, if we early half-"liberated" women were more than a bit mad, what would you call the men? For at this point Larry tried seriously to explain to me why he had not sent me immediately to this revolution in my South. "Santo Domingo is too dangerous," he told me soberly. "It is a street war, and you might get shot." Then he brightened and said, "Look, what I'll do is this: I'll send you to Vietnam."

  Vietnam? I stared at him in disbelief. This was 1965, and the war was at its height. "There," he went on, with total sobriety and deliberateness, "you don't have to be out on the street. You can stay in Saigon."

  Aghast at this incredible offer, I refused to abandon Latin America, and the resolution of our little conflict was for me to be sent down the next week, as the second string, when Jim left.

  Then, as I started to plan for the trip, a sense of panic struck and another "little obsession" took over. I became convinced that the moment I stepped off the plane, I would be shot. There would be no grace period. It would happen right away. And then we would have no correspondent at all. I walked around in a trance. I was terrified. I thought about leaving letters behind to my loved ones, for the end was clearly in sight. On the plane from San Juan to Santo Domingo, I spoke to none of the correspondents, thinking only of the moment when the plane door would open and I would step out. Saint-Exupéry wrote that no man knows whether he is a coward until he's been in a civil war -- and now I would never even get to find out what women felt.

  When the door opened and I stepped out into the sunshine, what I saw were dozens of marines, some of them lounging shirtless in the assuring tropical heat. In that languid scene I lost forever that kind of inordinate, unspecified, undifferentiated fear. There were times when I was afraid later, but never like that.

  Santo Domingo, in retrospect, was a revolution made to order for a young and idealistic correspondent. Totally unlike the wars of today, it was a nice clean revolution against a perfectly awful tyrant, with the U.S. government on the tyrant's side, and we young reporters on the side of goodness and light.

  The island itself was luxuriantly lovely. It was the island of Hispaniola, the first land in the New World discovered by Columbus on his epic voyage, and it was -- and is -- green and mountainous and surrounded by magically emerald seas. But its human history had contained only misery and tragedy. The dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, had ruled his fief throughout most of the twentieth century with a brutality and totality rare even for the Caribbean. A gnome of a little man, he bought off U.S. senators and politicians while oppressing his countrymen with brutish secret police whose trademark was the yellow Volkswagen. When one pulled up before your door, you knew your hour had come. Often Trujillo did the torturing and killing himself; he was an innovative sort.

  Trujillo's Dominican Republic illustrated the quintessential mixture of independence from and dependence upon the United States that typified most of the Third World, and especially these countries of the Caribbean, and that I, as a woman, particularly understood. In the last century the Dominican Republic had voted twice to join the United States, for instance, only to be turned down twice. All of the intricate psychological traumas of poor peoples who both love and hate rich and far more blessed neighbors were present here in intensified fashion.

  Trujillo's attitude toward women was in the purest Latin tradition. He adored his little, gnarled, peasant mother. He visited her every night after "work." He built a phallic statue in her honor on the precise spot where he was born. All other women were to be used.

  Trujillo had, finally, been killed by a courageous cabal of Dominicans in 1961. His squalid and ruthless reign had been followed, with John F. Kennedy's blessing, by a true democracy. Juan Bosch, a genuine "democrat" (and a fine writer), had returned from three decades of exile in Cuba to be the island's first elected president. But then in 1963 the old Trujilloite military, who were still very much around, overthrew Bosch's fragile regime. By the time we got there in 1965, what we saw was another heroic attempt by the Dominican democratic forces to regain power from the Trujilloites. But with a difference--President Lyndon Johnson had by then abandoned the Kennedy dream. Convinced that the democrats were "Communists," he had sent thirty thousand American marines to put down this highly desirable, moral, and workable revolution.

  The situation was a journalist's dream. Into the big, then-elegant Hotel Embajador poured the foreign correspondents, the diplomats, the generals, the Haitian leaders in exile, the Norman Thomases on endless fact-finding trips, and every kind of curious hanger-on. After the 7:00 p.m. curfew every night we argued, drank, brawled, and fought the Battle of Santo Domingo. Everyone became deeply and emotionally involved. Indeed, the arguments were so bitter between the "democrats," who supported the Boschist "constitutionalista" rebellion, and the conservatives, who supported the Trujilloites (as much in the name of power as of anticommunism), that we divided up on two sides of the bar every night. Once, at the oceanside Vesuvio Restaurant, feelings ran so high that we had to separate two tables to keep the diners from strangling one another. In the U.S. contingent people like Dan Kurzman, Jack Skelly, Bob Boyd, Dick Reston, Ward Just, Jim Pringle, John King of the State Department, Les Whitten, and I shared a tremulous sense of mission. We had the irreplace
able unity and comradeship of firemen, rushing every day to the same fire.

  Every morning, filled with excitement for the coming day, we would set off in cabs (our "democrat group" usually packed in together, naturally) through the marines ensconced around the hotel, through the war-wracked streets, and down to the "Old City," which the rebels held as their ground. There at the checkpoint only the journalists could go across. We were the only people to "be there." In the to-become-famous Coppelia Building, we usually found Luis Caamaño, the colonel who had suddenly been swept to power in the coup. Caamaño, a laconic, mustachioed, square man, would regale us with the news of the day.

  What seemed wonderful to me, and still does, is the fact that we -- and only we -- could go to all sides. Only we could know every thing. Only we could put all the pieces of the complicated puzzle together. They were relative truths, these truths that we dealt with. They were not "the truth" that philosophers or theologians deal with, but they were perhaps even more important because they were things that you could come with certainty to "know."

  Despite my editor's worries I encountered only one problem as a woman, and it was a problem apparently impossible to resolve. Even in the rebel zone, with fighting going on all about us, the Domini cans, with their Latino spirit, would bring out chairs for me. Folding chairs. Hard-back chairs. Whatever was available. Larry Fanning wanted to send me to Saigon where I couldn't get hurt. And here the Latino revolutionaries insisted upon my sitting down during battle!

  One day I was covering the official, highly formal signing over of the National Palace, a center of the fighting, from the Dominicans to the Brazilian or "neutral" troops. Four Latin generals, all resplendent in medals, gold braid, and red epaulets, sat on four folding chairs under an almond tree. We -- thirty male correspondents and I -- were pushing in closer to overhear the military chatter when suddenly one of the generals, seeing me standing, which was intolerable, got up with a little flourish and brought over his folding chair.

  "Señorita, por favor, " he said.

  Gritting my teeth, I sat down on the chair for a few moments and then, as soon as I courteously could, got up and pushed in closer.

  This little drama was repeated four times. After half an hour I looked about and the entire Yalta-esque little scene had changed. I was standing, the four Latin generals were standing, and four of my un-regal male colleagues were lounging on the vacated folding chairs.

  ***

  First revolutions are like first loves: one works through the webs of one's personality in both. I was determined to do things my way, and that meant working as a woman and staying very much a woman. To have become a clone of the male journalists would have been not only to deny my own female identity, but to lose values that should be incorporated into this and every craft. This also had to mean never asking for any quarter; I did my job, I never asked for favors, and I tried to help other correspondents whenever I could. The result was a group of magnificent friendships, filled with affection and with humor and with irreplaceable memories, lasting to this day. The firemen (and one firewoman) at the fire!

  I had very distinct ideas about the woman's new role -- and about what our values should be and about how we should behave. Early, for instance, I made two hard and fast rules for myself. First, I would never use my sex in any way and, second, I would not allow anything outside myself to change me in any way that I would not change myself. I saw quite clearly that women really had a double moral- ethical indemnity, for we were or should be ethical persons in our work at the same time that we were also constantly called upon to be moral women in our personal lives. I didn't mind this --what I minded in life was not that it asked too much of it but that it asked so little.

  Inside myself I was also beginning to discover what I wanted from this life. The little girl who had burst out in pique at Larry Fanning instead of expressing from the beginning what she wanted (which would have meant acknowledging that she had a right to express her wishes) was just beginning to give way to an adult woman. I was learning what the fashionable young people of the sixties never seemed to grasp: that you learn "who you are" not by pondering over it but by first learning "what you are" by "what you can do."

  In a sense I suppose I was an interim woman journalist--a creature between the harder, tougher, and basically anti-feminine generation of a few women journalists just before me, and the more fully liberated and very female reporters of today.

  The old approach can be seen clearly in the legendary Dickey Chapelle. I met Dickey once in the lobby of the Embajador. Small, slim to the point of pinchedness, and very intense, Dickey had covered every war she could get her hands on. Now she was dressed completely in marine gear, from the boots (heavy boots in the tropics?) to the water can (in a city with wonderfully scrofulous bars on every corner?), to the entire uniform. She was a brave woman and very nice as a person, but I couldn't figure out who it was beneath all that gear. She was later, tragically, killed in Vietnam--standing up in the middle of combat. That was not my style. I was not only a woman wearing sundresses and sandals every day in Santo Domingo, I was also a life-lover.

  We all felt the killing and in truth we all suffered over the war. One day I remember was the day we were called down to the house of one of the "constitutionalistas" to find that his guard had been murdered in an attempt on him. The children were running up and down the street with the dead man's brains on a stick, while we stood there staring at the pools of blood. Then there were the other days, the light days, like the days of the "Scotch war," when both sides deliberated over the fate of a warehouse of Scotch whiskey which found itself dangerously poised in a twilight zone between the two sides; what resulted was a lot of carrying of bottles back and forth, backed up by heavy strategic thinking. There was the Polish correspondent from Trybuna Ludu who (to his astonishment) was carted around by the American army just like any other accredited correspondent, and who was ecstatic that he had finally found a "real people's revolution."

  It was in Santo Domingo, too, that I began to see my job not only as reporting the day-to-day news but also interpreting the deeper sense of what was going on -- not only political analysis but also psychological interpretation.

  Indeed, in the troubled and fanatical young men (the best in the country) who were fighting the revolution in the rebel zone of the Old City (against the American troops), I found the first signs of a kind of pathology that was to spread through an increasingly troubled world. When we would go down to the Old City, for instance, the young rebels, driven to despair of a special kind, would say, "Kill us," and, "That's all you can do to us," or they would threaten to "burn the city." Jaime Benitez, then the brilliant head of the University of Puerto Rico, who had done the prime negotiating between the groups, told me then in words uncannily prescient, "What you have here is the problem of desperation. They get a suicidal feeling that is aroused by conflict with a great power. You have a small person, who's proud, and he feels that he has nothing to lose but his life, so, 'Go ahead and kill me.' This is what the rebels maintain as their final card. Or, they might kill themselves--or burn the city. That is in the tradition of the Spanish civil war, for instance. We see this in all weak peoples. We saw it in the South with the Negroes and in Vietnam. They are willing to take the act of self-immolation. This is a new factor in the sociology of conflict. The United States discovered, to its amazement, that some of our people are willing to be killed. It did not take this into consideration when it got into this kind of conflict."

  This was long before Jonestown and Beirut and Iran--but it anticipated brilliantly and frighteningly the new pathologies of politics that were arising in the world.

  Those of our "democrats group" were doing some deep and often angry psychological soul-searching, for it was all too clear to us that it was decades of American policy -- plus the present policy -- that had brought these decent and idealistic and courageous young men to this intense appointment with history. Washington had shamelessly supported Trujillo
until the end when the CIA wisely helped the Dominican patriots who assassinated him. But now, again, we were behind the old Trujilloite killers, and for many of us this was simply more than we could bear.

  One of the most disturbing things that had happened -- and that unquestionably contributed to the later stages of the revolution -- came in the behavior of the American ambassador, W. Tapley Bennett, Jr., a tall, cordial man of the American South. At the crucial moment of the revolution, the leaders--four of them--came to Bennett in the big, white American embassy building to ask him to intervene and stop the carnage. These were not any ragtag revolutionaries; they were leading people of the country, including the respected leader of the Senate.

  Ambassador Bennett told me the story, as he told it to other correspondents, apparently not even aware of what he had done. He told me he received them in his office only after they had agreed to leave their guns outside. He told me that they disgusted him because they were physically so "dirty," although the Trujilloites he was backing were morally the filthiest people in the world.

  Their message to him was a crucial one: They were appalled at the killing; they remained convinced that they would win, but they were ready to accept a truce; they wanted him to negotiate for them with the Trujilloites. In effect the revolution could be ended honorably for everyone.

  Even today, as I write this, I can feel the rage rising in me. Here an American envoy had an incredible opportunity, in a little country friendly to us, which had suffered for scores of years from our policies, to do something good and decent and workable. And what he did was to turn them away! He told them he would do nothing for them. He seemed quite ready to give the country back to the old killers.