David Aikman is a best-selling author, prolific journalist, and renowned foreign policy consultant. His astounding résumé—for example, interviewing Mother Teresa and Boris Yeltsin—is the product of years of dangerous and thrilling journalist endeavors all over the world. Aikman had a knack for being in the right spot at the right time, enabling him to record some of history’s most unforgettable events. His success sprang, not from luck or coincidence, but from hard work, research, and preparation. In this lengthy excerpt we see the work of a man’s life take shape at his direction.
In the seconds after a gun is fired, many a man shows his true character.
Flinching is no sign of weakness. The harsh crack of the bullet exploding from the barrel can cause even the stoutest of hearts to flicker briefly. Eyelids flick shut, without choice, and a sharp ringing begins echoing down the caverns of the eardrums.
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The sound shakes the soul of a man, starting from the base of the spine and racing through the entire body. He is forced to stop—to remember that he is mortal and that his days on this earth have been numbered. But when the shock leaves and the ringing in the ears quiets a bit, there is a half-second pause in the moments after the shot, where a man must ask himself, “What must I do now?”
Life rarely awards stupidity and there is nothing honorable about risking one’s safety without thought or care. Recklessness is not a trait of true manhood. But some men are called to run toward the gunshot, toward the danger, and serve so that the rest of the world can stay safe and free.
Whether it’s the hell raging on the beaches of Normandy, a knife victim bleeding in an alley, or a raging fire, some men must answer to the call of danger. Seeing the need, they weigh the situation, look for the best course of action, and then act. The compulsion of duty outweighs fear. There is something different about these men—something that refuses to let them sit safely on the side while there are people who need help or while there is a job left undone.
And when asked, “Why risk your life?” the answer comes: “Because there’s no other way for the job to get done.”
Or, if you’re longtime Time magazine journalist and writer David Aikman, the answer is: “I didn’t sign up to be a journalist to drive buses. If you don’t want to get shot, don’t join the army.”
“I think a man is a person who is willing to take risks,” said Aikman. “Someone who is willing to restrain his appetite when it is appropriate—his desires—for the sake of being gracious to other people. It is a man who knows that there are physical dangers but he is willing to take the risks to encounter them when it is necessary for a particular job.”
The job that David Aikman thought he was born for did not involve danger. It was supposed to be a sensible job, suitable to the disposition of an Englishman, and never would have involved Aikman hitting the ground face-first in Cambodia as bullets flew around him, and rockets exploded.
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Raised in Surrey, England, Aikman went to private boarding school, and then attended Oxford University’s Worcester College—earning a degree in modern languages and graduating in 1965. He planned first to apply for the diplomatic service, but when he failed the entrance exams, he accepted a job as a banker for Barclay’s International.
“I had accepted a job after graduating, thinking that I would be sitting on a veranda somewhere with some sort of native fanning me with an ostrich feather,” Aikman said.
But Barclay’s had other plans for Aikman and they placed him “in a grubby bank, south of London, counting pound notes covered in mince meat.”
These were the days when a man was hired and would be expected to start at the bottom of the bank, as a teller, and then work up the chain of authority. It would require patience and a quiet long-suffering spirit—something an Englishman should have in spades—but when the president of the bank asked Aikman how he liked the job, his reply was direct.
“It’s awful.”
The honesty shocked the president, shocked him so much that he decided to send this young bank teller to the United States to learn how to work on Wall Street.
Banking had not stoked Aikman’s interest, but if the profession was going to be interesting anywhere, it would be interesting in the United States. After he arrived at the training center, he soon discovered that his dreams of rising above the level of the filing department were fleeting. He was stuck. He had relatives in New Jersey—Americans—and as he told them of his frustration, he began looking for some type of escape from the drudgery of Barclay’s.
While Aikman had accepted a job with a bank, with dreams of exotic leisure and interesting travel, he had a deeper desire and curiosity for life that could not be sated with a nameplate on a desk in a room with no windows.
There was a compulsion lurking in his soul forcing him out of the office. It had surfaced before in his life, an adrenaline rush captivating his imagination the last year of his undergraduate degree in 1965.
Sir Winston Churchill, the lion who had defended England with every last drop of his “blood, sweat and tears,” had passed away. A state funeral was arranged at St. Paul’s Cathedral and as Aikman watched the preparations, sixty-five miles away at school, he felt the pull.
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“I can’t just watch things happen. I’m someone who wants to be in the moment, to be part of it.”
So, on January 30, Aikman bundled himself into his “ramshackle fifteen-pound car” and sped off, praying each mile down the M40 that the car would hold together and he’d make it to the funeral.
He arrived early in the morning and took up a place on the sidewalk, directly across the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral. This was not the university crowd that Aikman had been living alongside; these people were working-class Londoners who ground out a living, believed in the greatness of the British Empire, and had no time for the latest philosophical foolishness that might capture the younger generation.
“Can’t trust this Labor government.” Aikman heard murmurs as the crowd waited. “They’ll sell you down the river.”
It was the type of attitude Liberals might label “reactionary,” but these plucky hard-nosed Londoners revered Sir Winston Churchill and the stolid, honorable Britannia that he had represented. The man who thrust his jaw out and stood up to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler became the first politician to receive a state funeral, and the world paid tribute.
The gun carriage slowly carrying Churchill’s body had been previously used for four royal funerals, and as Aikman waited, the dignitaries started passing: General de Gaulle from France, Marshal Zhukov from Russia, and representatives from more than one hundred countries. It was a solemn moment, the kind that sticks in a young man’s mind.
“It was an extremely important moment. I felt that it would change history, and I wanted to be there,” Aikman said.
Aikman was not only blessed to recognize those history-changing moments, but he was also infected with the need to be there when history was made. It followed him the rest of his life, surfacing after his banking career began suffocating his joy. He looked at graduate schools, wanting to expand his knowledge of the Chinese and Sino-Russian relationships. He taught Russian to beginners at the University of Washington while he pursued his studies.
Outside the campus walls, bombs were going off and Aikman’s studies couldn’t drown out the anger of the 1960s. Aikman had stumbled into an epicenter for unrest. College campuses seethed in a fomenting mass of angry students protesting Vietnam, occupying office buildings and holding them under siege.
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By this time, Aikman had switched his major to history, studying the Russians. While reading about a student movement in the 1870s in St. Petersburg that Moscow called “back to the people,” where upper-class, “cosseted” college students took a summer and went out to the peasants to try and stir up a revolution and teach them to take power, Aikman heard chants from his window.
“Pow-er to the peo-ple! Pow-er to the peo-ple!”
And something clicked in Aikman’s head and turned his stomach. These people are not very bright, not very decent but—my gosh—are they trying to do the same things as the Bolsheviks? he thought.
He could no longer just listen to the “crude and unimaginative” spewed slogans, and Aikman decided to raise a challenge. He walked into the office of the campus newspaper and asked what it would take to get an article published. He walked out with a spot as a weekly columnist.
He wrote under the name “Francis Arouet,” the pen name of the French writer Voltaire, and started documenting the exploits of the students. Aikman had become disenchanted with students who would stage elaborate protests and make grand pronouncements—signing peace treaties with North Vietnamese students—all with little practical merit.
“I was quite concerned about the extremism of the student movement, and, to be quite honest, what I felt was the stupidity of my fellow students . . . Did they really think that student signatures were going to change the war?”
The columns started piling up for Aikman, and after a friend of his father’s handed three of them to the publisher of Time magazine, Aikman was soon on a flight to New York City. He accepted a position as a campus stringer—a part-time reporter only called into action for specific stories. Aikman was responsible for keeping Time tapped into the fury raging on college campuses.
Then the fury nearly burned Aikman. Working on his PhD in history, Aikman was finishing an exam and leaving a deserted classroom to head back to his tiny office. Due to radicals invading classrooms, all office buildings had been locked down, but as Aikman walked up the stairs, he passed a wild-haired student wandering down the stairs. Aikman didn’t think this “hippie-like character” would have been issued keys by the university. He made it up another flight of stairs before he smelled the smoke and saw the flames.
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This fellow has set fire to the building, Aikman thought, with a bit of surprise—and then took off at a sprint, hurtling down the stairs.
He burst through the doors of the building and spotted the man bolting across the grounds. Aikman pursued him along a path, and when one of his students saw him chasing the man, the student put his arm out and knocked the man to the ground. Aikman held him on the ground and—British citizenship notwithstanding—declared a citizen’s arrest.
This was on a Saturday, and on the following Monday morning, four students were shot at Kent State University. The cover of Time highlighted student protests and Aikman’s report of detaining the protestor made it into the publisher’s note at the front of the magazine.
A year and a half later, in 1971, Aikman talked his way into a job in the New York bureau of Time and spent time at the Washington bureau. He learned the basics of journalism, how to construct an inverted pyramid sentence and how to conduct a good interview.
“I’ve always felt that the best interviews are almost always like very good conversations, two bright people talking about something interesting.”
But for those who are to report and to write, curiosity is essential.
“There must be a willingness to report things you don’t agree with, and report them fairly,” said Aikman. “The best way you can tell if a reporter is a good and honest reporter is to get him to interview someone whose views he finds completely abhorrent, to report what the person says, to give the report back to the person and say, ‘Is that a fair representation of your views?’ If the answer is yes, then you’ve got a good reporter.”
Aikman quickly encountered abhorrent views and was forced to prove his mettle as a good reporter. Assigned to Hong Kong for his first foreign post, he was thrust into the middle of a region torn by war in Vietnam and the advance of Communism seemingly everywhere else. He traveled to China, Burma, the Philippines, and Indochina.
Only four years after becoming a full-time reporter for Time, Aikman was in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, driving along with an officer, close to infantry combat and feeling the ground rumble with the crash of rockets.
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Evil lived in Cambodia. This was the time of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, of piles of innocent bodies and the deaths of hundreds of thousands—genocide caused by a madman and a party slavishly devoted to Marxist-driven social engineering. Aikman had heard the gunfire. His heart pumped adrenaline and even though he would readily admit that he felt fear—he wasn’t blind or ignorant—there was no question where he needed to be. Someone had to tell the story of these atrocities, to give voice to those people who might be forgotten—and he wouldn’t run from the sound of gunshots.
He talked to the men perpetuating these horrors, walking up to one of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge when the opportunity presented itself.
“You have to be willing to subordinate your own disgust or antipathy to the person for the need for good reporting,” said Aikman. “You’ve got to keep your own emotional reactions firmly under control, in order to make sure if the person says something interesting, you don’t miss it, because you’re fuming away over how horrible he is.”
Aikman never has been a reporter who filed reports from an undisclosed safe location. His articles for Time were written from the heart of a man fleeing government and an ongoing atrocity.
In 1978, a Time essay written by Aikman, “An Experiment in Genocide,” called Western leaders to account for indecision in the face of this evil. By putting himself into the crossfire, Aikman could report with eyewitness accuracy. But Aikman’s stories and articles never simply mirrored the present; they always had a firm understanding of the past. His knowledge of history kept him grounded and provided a lens through which he could write with clarity.
Aikman’s career résumé is staggering. He spent four and a half years in Hong Kong before being transferred to Berlin as the Eastern Europe correspondent during a time when dissident activity in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia was rising, and a day’s work might include being tailed by the secret police.
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He served as the bureau chief in Jerusalem during the leadership of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and was responsible for eleven Time cover stories in fifteen weeks. He was posted back to China and Beijing. He covered the Chernobyl disaster as bureau chief in Moscow. Then as the State Department correspondent, in 1989 Aikman landed a rare interview with Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn in May, and—following his sense of Chinese history and the Communist party—camped out in Tiananmen Square in June. Aikman knew the current student uprising had dramatically underestimated the willingness of the ruling Communist party to use indiscriminate force.
“I knew it wouldn’t end well,” said Aikman. “The government was just relentlessly opposed to being challenged, and this was just a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
He knew the government, knew their history, and knew that he had to be on the scene.
On June 4, Aikman watched government forces shoot students without pity, ruthlessly suppressing what he would later call “one of the most dramatic spontaneous upsurges in support of democracy by any national movement in the 20th century.”
A few months later, Aikman was on hand for the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia in November.
Aikman has seen tragedy and talked to evil. He described interviewing a spokesperson for Hamas, who talked about blowing up children, as a physically nauseating experience. He remains a hopeful man, without the morose cynicism that infects journalists of all ages.
“Faith is the best antidote to cynicism,” said Aikman. “Christians understand human nature because it is created in the image of God; it is capable of tremendous actions of good and altruism, but we’re flawed.”
Aikman’s Christian faith has been tremendously affected by the example of the Chinese underground church and those persecuted people who back up their profession of faith with action.
“Most of them I’ve met have either been to prison or are willing to be arrested and go to prison for what they believe,” said Aikman. “You’re dealing with people of extraordinary integrity who are willing to die for their faith.”
He finished his career at the Washington bureau in the early 1990s, traveling with the secretary of state and covering Russia after the Soviet Union fell. He became friends with Boris Yeltsin at this time, spotting greatness in this politico before anyone was writing about him and even saving the Russian’s life on one slightly humorous occasion. When Aikman left Time to focus on writing books after twenty-three years as a senior correspondent, he had filed reports from five continents and more than fifty-five countries.
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But he is still a humble, gracious man and speaks only quietly of his globe-stretching days.
The people he has interviewed provide his examples. He saw humility in Solzhenitsyn’s strength and in Mother Teresa’s love. He saw humility in Billy Graham, who would personally drive out to the airport to pick up Aikman and pepper the journalist with questions about his life.
The greatest are those who still think of themselves as the least.
In the seconds after a gunshot is fired, a man can prove his worth. But it is often not until the minutes and hours later, after the dust has settled, that the full extent of his character can be revealed. A man may withstand the hail of bullets, only to wilt in vanity under the praise of men.
Aikman never speaks too loudly. He is a gentle and gracious man who remembers that a journalist’s work is telling the story of someone else. He has faced death, but he knows that a gentleman is called to do his duty despite any danger, and at the end “comes away not thinking he’s any better for it.”