My new office was light-years from the press attaché’s splendid suite in the American Embassy overlooking the Place de la Concorde. Now, I was in the wonderfully ratty Herald Tribune Building, on the rue de Berri, barely a block off the Champs-Elysées. In fact, I was on the fourth floor—close to the second “R” in the vertical H-E-R-A-L-D T-R-I-B-U-N-E sign, ten feet square—surrounded on three sides by drafty windows, directly across from the Hotel California. I have been colder standing watch on a destroyer in the dead of a North Atlantic winter, but nowhere else.
We had heat, but only sporadically, and almost never after five in the afternoon, which meant before lunchtime in New York where editors were either asking for copy or waiting for stories. Typing with gloves on is harder than it sounds, especially on the slim Olivettis we all carried along with the dirty trench coats as part of the foreign correspondent’s uniform. Butagaz heaters (bottled gas) worked, if you were typing within their effective radius of four feet. We all prayed for inside, windowless offices, except on those not infrequent occasions when there was some boy-girl action in one of the hotel rooms across the street. Copy boys at the Associated Press newsroom on the seventh floor were charged with keeping watch on the street-front hotel rooms and alerting all voyeurs.
My “staff” consisted of Monsieur Jean, a sixty-five-year-old garçon de bureau, already retired from at least two earlier jobs. He worked only five mornings a week, getting the mail, stamping the few outgoing letters, filing the French papers, and coughing. No one I ever met smoked more . . . those musty, throat-closing, unfiltered Gauloises. He would also deal with our moneyman, a seedy-looking Algerian, who made daily rounds changing dollars into francs at the black market rate. A salary of $9,000 a year didn’t go far, but it went considerably further at 450 or 500 francs to the dollar than it did at the official rate of 350.
It was nothing to spend twelve hours in this grungy space, reading the papers, working the phones, filing—and playing gin rummy from time to time with my pal Art Buchwald, who wrote “Paris After Dark,” a column for the Trib. Once I raced back from lunch, late for an office rendezvous with my favorite aunt from New York, who had made a special point of interrupting a European vacation to see me. When I got there, only Buchwald was waiting for me to play some gin. “I wish you’d tell your cousin, or your aunt, or whoever the hell that was,” he explained, “not to bother you in the office.” Apparently, I learned later, he had told her I had gone to Germany suddenly, and wasn’t expected back for two weeks.
Buchwald and I have different recollections of our gin rummy games. I remember them as being extremely useful, given the miserable salary I was making. Frank White, the distinguished Time-Life Bureau chief, had actually willed Buchwald to me as a special going-away present, when he was reassigned back to New York. That’s the way I remember it. He has promised to tell his version in his own book.
One of the sorriest-looking men I ever saw in my life walked into the rue de Berri office one afternoon early in my Newsweek career, unshaven, his head swathed in bandages, and wearing a filthy double-breasted gabardine suit, caked with blood. He walked in unannounced, as so many people did in the afternoon, after the garçon de bureau left at noon, and handed me a plastic ID card for openers.
This was Frank Frigenti, and the card identified him as a graduate of Sing Sing Prison, where he had been incarcerated for murdering his mother-in-law, until he was deported to Sicily to hook up with other American undesirables like mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Giuseppe “Big Mike” Spinelli. Frank was in mucho trouble, plainly, and being broke was only the beginning. If I could spare 10,000 francs ($20), he said, he could give me a story about how Lucky and his fellow undesirables were doing in exile (“Lousy—bored out of their goddamn minds”). Sounded like a story to me, so I “loaned” him the 10,000 francs while I waited for a go-ahead from New York. It took forever, and by the time I finally got it, he was into me for more than $150. Then old Frank started diddling me by holding back on the juiciest details until he got some more money. I finally finished my story, “Gangsters Abroad,” but I couldn’t finish with Frank. He just wouldn’t leave the office, and I didn’t feel like throwing him out, given the nature of the crime for which he had been convicted and then deported.
In despair, I told him I had a columnist friend who could help him more than I could, and that’s how I dumped him onto Buchwald. Art came slouching into my office, took one look at Frigenti’s still bandaged head and still bloodied gabardine suit, and turned right around to leave. But Buchwald is more commercial, if not smarter, than I am. He took Frigenti, got him a hotel room and a bath, sat him down, and debriefed him for ten days. The result was Art’s first real book, A Gift from the Boys (the “gift” being a luscious blonde that the “boys” gave to their gangster pal, just before he sailed back to Italy as a deportee). He sold the book to the movies for $50,000, the first real money he ever made. Fifty thousand was real money in 1958, and I’ve been pissed off about Frigenti ever since.
In April 1954, with only a few months of “experience” under my belt as a foreign correspondent, most of which I had spent picking up accreditations, a Geneva conference was convened to try to arrange a truce and a peace between France and Indochina for the umpteenth time. I was told to get my ass down to Geneva and file an on-scener to go with the following week’s cover story on Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, plus some quotes from the austere and colorless man. I was scared to death, since—unlike the other correspondents covering the conference—I knew absolutely no one in the Dulles entourage, and the Secretary was widely known as a cold fish, hard to warm up. I had met him only once, and knew he wouldn’t know me from Adam’s off ox.
To improve my chances for even an accidental contact with anyone who might help me, I went out to the Geneva airport to meet the Secretary of State’s plane, and my heart sank even further. There to meet Dulles was my hero, James “Scotty” Reston, the New York Times’s best of breed. A few seconds later, Chip Bohlen, now Ambassador-designate to the Soviet Union, and who was going to be a critically important source for this conference, came down the ramp and greeted Reston, the way Damon must have greeted Pythias. “How are you, you old Scotsman?” I heard Bohlen ask, and cringed as Reston punched him playfully on the shoulder. These guys were buddies, and there I was, trying to get the attention of Carl “Mumbles” McArdle, the State Department spokesman, who never told anyone anything. The difference between, “Excuse me, Mr. McArdle, my name is Ben Bradlee, and I work for Newsweek,” and the intimate camaraderie of Bohlen and Reston was discouraging.
Back at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva, I sent a bottle of Old Overholt Bourbon up to McArdle’s suite, at the suggestion of foreign editor Harry Kern. It worked—eventually—and Carl got me fifteen minutes with Dulles, exactly one hour before my filing deadline. I like to think I can get people to open up, especially when I am not prying into something sensitive. But I could barely get John Foster Dulles to move his lips, even when I asked about his trip over and his health. My file that night left no footprints at all on the next issue of Newsweek. But it did convince me that I should hang around the bars and see what I could pick up from anyone who would move his lips.
Hanging around for that purpose late the first night. I watched William Randolph Hearst, Jr., the young heir to the Hearst publishing empire, roll into the hotel with his INS (International News Service) stars, Joseph Kingsbury Smith and the legendary Bob Considine, in tow. This was the team that had just won a Pulitzer Prize for their interview with Joseph Stalin. But before I got too impressed, Hearst and Considine started wrestling on the hotel’s polished marble floor, much to the amusement of the guests in the lobby bar. Lesson learned: there had to be more to getting Pulitzer prizes than I knew about.
It was here in Geneva that I got to meet my Newsweek colleague, Teddy Weintal, the magazine’s longtime diplomatic correspondent in Washington. Teddy Weintal had been a diplomat in the Polish Embassy in the thirties, when he defected, long before defection was viewed solely through a Cold War lens. He had fantastic contacts, gathered after years as a professional extra man, swordsman, and correspondent. He was hardly a friend to beginning journalists, and he didn’t write English particularly well, but years later, when I was about to replace the great Ken Crawford as Washington Bureau chief of Newsweek, and thus become Teddy’s boss, Ken told me how to handle Teddy. “Don’t tell him what to do. Don’t even fool around much with his copy. Just bring him in Friday afternoons, tip him upside down, and see what falls out of his pockets. That’s where you’ll find the best stories.”
I remember learning at the end of my first international conference that there was life after work, there was joy after fear. On Sunday morning I was invited to join the Chicago Daily News’s one and only Bill Stoneman, for his ritual Sunday breakfast of Aunt Jemima pancakes. Sunday afternoon, Crosby Noyes, the Washington Star’s European correspondent and a good friend, and I chartered a small sloop, and went sailing up and down Lake Geneva in a great breeze. And Sunday night, I got lucky with an old friend who had just separated from her Swiss husband. This was a different way of life.
Jean and I were still struggling along, even talking to a French psychiatrist about our troubles. That’s not comfortable in any language, but tough in a language not your own. For me, I was on this perpetual high, more and more in love with my life, but Jean and I were no longer in love. My adventure was consuming, and we were both at an impasse together, each of us increasingly vulnerable to someone who would share our needs and enthusiasms. My fling never had driven me to the point where life apart was unthinkable.
In the summer of 1954, Jean and I joined with Crosby and Tish Noyes, and Bill and Mary Edgar (he ran Press Wireless, the company we all used to file our dispatches), plus six or seven children, to rent an incredible nineteenth-century château forty-five kilometers east of Paris in the village of Boissy St. Leger. More than 800 acres, surrounded by a head-high stone wall, including a large pond, a working farm full of cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, and an odd, square swimming pool only four feet deep at its deepest point. The château itself had sixty-seven rooms, including a large ballroom, an antiquated kitchen in the basement, plus salles and salons galore. For this we paid 100,000 francs a month—less than $300.
Château Boissy St. Leger was owned by the Baron Rodolphe Hottinguer, a rich banker in Paris, whose title came through his Swiss banker forebears from Napoleon. We spent a summer there none of us will ever forget. Weekend parties that began Friday night, and continued all day Saturday through Sunday supper. Wives, especially Tish Noyes, cooked spaghetti. We jitterbugged in the ballroom, after endless lessons from Barbara Sulzberger. Her husband, Punch, later to become the publisher of the New York Times, was an intern in the Paris Bureau. We had long, wet picnic lunches, followed by long, wet or sun-filled walks. Noyes, Edgar, and I spent hour after hour cleaning the damn pool, which would be covered with green scum only hours after we scoured it. The inventive Docteur Dax cured the pool with a prescription of massive doses of sulphat de cuivre, or copper sulphate, which we learned later was some kind of poison.
The weekend that changed my life forever came in August of 1954, when our friends the Pinchot sisters hit town. Mary Pinchot Meyer, mother of three and wife of Cord Meyer, war hero turned World Federalists president and CIA biggie, and Antoinette Pinchot Pittman, mother of four, wife of Steuart Pittman, a Washington lawyer. They were both members of our Washington crowd—on the last leg of a European tour, to which they had treated themselves after seven years of diapers and dishes. And their lives were never the same, either. Mary and an Italian painter had fallen in love in Positano. Tony and I fell in love at Boissy St. Leger. I had picked them both up at their hotel in Paris on a Saturday morning, and taken them to the château, for sunlit hours of wine and food and talks and walks. Journalist friends, diplomat friends, French friends, British friends, children friends of all ages. A glorious time.
At night the feast started to move to a nearby moulin, where some other friends lived. Mary had hitched a ride back to Paris with someone. Jean went with others to the moulin. I took Tony with me. And we never got there.
Instead, we ended up in a little all-night café miles from nowhere, talking—shyly at first, then excitedly—about the state of our lives. As I left her at the hotel in Paris at five in the morning, I asked her to run away with me—for a night at a lovely moulin outside Paris. She made me wait until the next day, after she had talked with her sister. I think she sensed, as I certainly did, that there was a right-angle turn dead ahead, and once taken, there would be no turning back.
And, of course, there was a right-angle turn dead ahead, and there was no turning back. We ended up in a small, lovely room, overlooking a stream in what the Guide Michelin calls a bel endroit. And spent the next twenty-four hours exploring hungers that weren’t there just days ago, and satisfying them with gentle passion, new to me.
We drove back to Paris in awe, and silence.
By the fall of 1954, I was hopelessly, falling down, head over heels in love with Tony. Never mind we had only seen each other a few days. I knew it.
After Tony and Mary returned to Washington, I moved out of the Quai des Orfèvres and into a series of what might have been the only dreary flats in that beautiful city. Everything I owned fit into an old Chevrolet coupe. Jean sensed that this was the end. In her sadness she had found someone else who was kind, if temporary. In fact she soon wanted out, and took Benny back to Boston for good. I was distraught and guilty about the end of my marriage and the loss of my son, yet desperate to see Tony again, to test the strength of our love. But, before I could do that, she had to decide what her future was going to be, and then give me the signal that there might be a place for me in that future. She did that by moving back into Washington with her four children from the lonely isolation of the Pittman family seat in Davidsonville, Maryland. By November, we had made plans for me to go back to Washington, make that sneak back to Washington, and start down a difficult path.
I don’t remember what it cost to fly from Paris to Washington in those days, but I know I didn’t have it. So to earn airfare for me to fly to Washington and for Tony to fly to Paris, I began a second career as a freelance feature writer and as an occasional broadcaster. First, as a replacement for David Schoenbrun, one of the stars that Ed Murrow had collected for CBS News, along with Charles Collingwood, Alex Kendrick, Richard Hottelet, and Dan Schorr. Each summer David would take off for Normandy to work on some book about France, and his one-month vacation would stretch into three. And I could replenish my bank account: $50 for one minute of air time, with $100 a week guaranteed, whether I broadcast or not. It was easy, David had told me. Just sit down in front of the microphone, rip your collar open, spit on the studio floor, and start talking. It wasn’t easy. It was scary. But it was money.
At first I broadcast under my own name, but then Francie Muir complained to her husband, Malcolm Muir, my boss, that CBS was getting what she called “all that credit,” when Newsweek was paying Bradlee “all that money” ($9,000 a year). So I had to come up with a pseudonym, which I eventually did. Ben Lenox. Or Anthony Lenox, when I freelanced for the Washington Star or other newspapers. “Anthony” sounded more authoritative, more Foreign Office, with even the suggestion of a Sir Anthony Lenox. “Ben,” more eyewitness. But it was Ben Lenox who financed the first undercover trip back to Washington. (Later, after Schoenbrun returned from vacation, I had to finance my trips back and Tony’s trips to Paris by writing travel pieces for Pan American’s in-flight magazine. My fee, for one dynamite article exploring any place reachable by PanAm: one round-trip ticket between Washington and Paris.)
Except for the fact that we were virtually prisoners in the Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill for fear of being discovered, our time together was glorious. I did meet the four Pittman children, who were to be part of my family for the next twenty years. Tammy was one and a half years old, and still in Dr. Dentons. Rosamond was three, and she just stared at me. Nancy, five, and Andy, six and a half, just looked uncomfortable. And I met Tony’s mother, Ruth Pinchot, for dinner one night at Mary and Cord’s. Given the circumstances, everyone was civil and on their best behavior, except for Cord, who was visibly pissed. What he could see that Tony and I were experiencing was plainly threatening to him.
Tony was ready to admit—in her words—that the plaster was off the walls in her marriage, but she had not envisioned tearing down the whole house to fix it. Instead, she went into analysis, and chose to make no major change in her life until she was through with analysis. That put some much-needed realism into our love affair: we weren’t going to see each other for more than a week at a time, and we were going to get that week only when Tony could arrange for the peace and comfort of the children, when I could afford the trans-Atlantic flights, and when Newsweek and the news cooperated to provide consecutive days of calm . . . maybe four or five times a year.
Time together in France was pure joy, as we explored each other and the glorious corners of that romantic country. If the weather was cold, we would wander around the South of France, talking, taking picnics of local wines and cheeses into the fields, painting landscapes, believe it or not, living in castles one night, nondescript hotels the next. In Paris, we would walk the city from one end to the other, visit the barges on the Seine that doubled as restaurants or nightclubs. One special evening we took the redoubtable Janet Flanner, the New Yorker correspondent who wrote under the nom de plume of Genet, to Chartres, where the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch played an unforgettable concert in the thirteenth-century cathedral. Bats swooped and darted down from the vaulted ceilings, as the soaring music carried us miles and years away. At dinner and during intermissions Janet told us all about the castrati, young boys who were deballed in the eighteenth century to keep the soprano range of their voices. Janet Flanner wrote in The New Yorker more intelligently than any of the rest of us on French politics and French culture. I saw her often during the next year and a half, when I was trying to be a bachelor, and never spent a dull second listening to her restless, intelligent mind, just as I devoured every “Letter from Paris” she ever wrote for The New Yorker.
Time together in Washington was also joyous, but as long as our relationship was in the closet, it was also pretty much restricted to either an automobile or the four walls of a hotel room. Soon enough, though, I was asking Tony to marry me, and without her saying no—or yes—-that gave us an awful lot to talk about. I don’t remember spending too much time exploring the difficulties of doing it. That is not my style. I spent time trying to figure out how it could be done. I trusted Tony to determine the rightness—or wrongness—of a new life for the Pittman children, and for herself, with me. I missed Benny (it was only years later I understood how much) and I worked on finding a way to see him, now living with Jean in Boston, and integrate him into my new family, while working on the housekeeping details of a new life—housing, budgets, visitations—once I had decided that a new life with Tony was for me.
I had a small flat in the Place des Vosges that was even colder than my office. It was two rooms and a bath/kitchen so small that from the john you could easily turn on the tub faucet and the stove with one hand. These rooms were at the tail end of a very swell, if ancient, apartment, but it cost me only $100 American in cash each month. It had this fabulous view over the statue of Henri IV, but it had only Butagaz heaters, and they could not be left on when no one was home. That meant the temperature in the apartment was often below zero in winter when I got home. It got so bad once that my doctor, Jean Dax, put me in the American Hospital to thaw out. He gave me chest X-rays and a complete physical, even a Wasserman test, so that my stay would qualify under my health insurance plan.
Frederick Josiah Bradlee as a twenty-four-year-old Army second lieutenant stationed on Governor’s Island in New York. Two years earlier, he had been an All-American halfback at Harvard. Two years later, he was a runner for a Boston bank.
Josephine deGersdorff Bradlee at twenty-eight, with Connie on her lap, surrounded by Freddy, RIGHT, and me. She was only twenty years old when she married—beneath herself, according to her half-German father, but he was wrong way wrong.
Josephine, known as Jo, was a real beauty. She was also co-holder, with Walter Lippmann’s wife, Helen, of the girls’ high-jump record at Miss Chapin’s School in New York.
Dressed to the nines, just before the crash in 1929. Blue blazers and white duck shorts, from a visiting British clothier, and a stocking at half mast from God knows where.
Freddy as a young actor. He left Harvard in the winter of his freshman year and landed three straight Broadway parts in his first year. Theater critic Wolcott Gibbs named Freddy and Montgomery Clift the year’s best ingenus.
Me as a senior at St. Mark’s School—three years after a siege with polio, en route to Harvard with three highest honors and a pass in physics, and still unfamiliar with curve balls.
Freddy, the boy ingenu, on the cover of Life.
That’s me in a breeches buoy, being pulled from a tanker to a destroyer, both going 15 knots, in the Pacific war zone. After two weeks on one destroyer, I’d be hauled back to the tanker for further transfer to the next destroyer to come alongside for refueling.
Jean Saltonstall Bradlee and I in a different war zone (note the clenched fist)—a Vogue story on home leaves. We had been married for more than two years, and had seen each other about two months.
My father, known as “B,” and Connie (and cigarettes), at her wedding in 1947 on the lawn of the house in Beverly, Massachusetts. He looks proud that he hasn’t had too much to drink. She looks relieved—and lovely.
The first edition of the New Hampshire Sunday News goes to press in the summer of 1946, as Blair Clark, LEFT, and Bernie McQuaid look over a page one proof. Their friendship brought Jean and me to New Hampshire. Blar’s friendship kept us there.
This is my journalist’s accreditation card, the one the French government pulled when it booted me out of the country for trying to talk to Algerian rebel leaders in the mountains of Kabylia in Algeria in 1956. The expulsion order was rescinded before my expulsion.
The Israelis had captured an Egyptian submarine during the Suez Crisis. They blindfolded the sub captain and, to confuse him, drove him around Haifa for two hours before delivering him to Israeli naval intelligence headquarters, only 200 yards away.
One of the few times I remember actually interviewing President Kennedy, pad and pencil in hand. The start of a smile on his face suggests this was a set-up for a Newsweek promotion.
President Kennedy with the Pinchot women on the porch at Milford, Pennsylvania. Tony Bradlee and Mary Meyer surround JFK and their mother, Ruth Pinchot, who had changed from a Greenwich Village liberal to an ardent supporter of Senator Goldwater.
The Bradlees and the Kennedys in the White House family quarters before dinner one night. Jackie thought she was showing too much leg.
A stuffy picture of two of the unstuffiest men I ever met: Phil Graham with Fritz Beebe, the Wall Street lawyer who presided over the Post Company after Phil’s death.
I seemed to be spending a lot of time in courtrooms during the seventies and eighties. Here I am walking into the federal court house, pretending to be some Mafia don ducking photographers, with Phil Geyelin.
And here I am leaving another federal court house with Katharine Graham. It looks as if we won, at least a round.
Katharine getting a fix on the next day’s Watergate installment from Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Howard Simons, and me. Carl’s hairdo was calculated to further his hippy image, and thus to irritate the Nixon White House—and me, a little.
The movie All the President’s Men made folk heroes out of us all. Here are Dustin Hoffman (Bernstein), Robert Redford (Woodward), and Jason Robards (me) playing hardball with Jack Warden and Marty Balsam as caricatures of Harry Rosenfeld and Howard Simons.
In the middle of Watergate, the French newsweekly L’Express used this picture of me to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. (I couldn’t help feeling the cover it had planned fell through at the last minute.)
In the composing room at the end looking at page one of the first edition, headlined simply, “Nixon Resigns.”
A belly laugh from “Mums”—probably caused by Art Buchwald’s “toast”—at the party she gave for my tenth anniversary in 1975.
Time in between, when I was “alone” ïn Paris, became suddenly tough for me. At first, I was like something out of The Sorrows of Young Werther, moping through any day I wasn’t on the road reporting, daydreaming, reliving the last visit, punishing myself by going to bed early and alone. There I was a bachelor in Paris, living out every man’s dream, but behaving like a moping monk. When I finally tired of that act and resumed a normal life, it was as if my determination was suddenly being tested, by strangers, and by wives of friends or acquaintances. A shared ride home would turn complicated. Sudden knee pressure could not be explained as accidental. Dinner partners would appear less interested in food than me. Eye contact across crowded rooms could develop in ways new to me. One woman, the wife of a friend, ambushed me one night in the shadows of the arcades under my apartment in the Place des Vosges. Even two of Tony’s friends tested the waters, to my astonishment.
All my life, I have had an active fantasy life about sex, but always there had been insurmountable obstacles in the way of turning fantasy into reality. First, in my Boston, nice girls didn’t fuck, and nice boys were taught control. We used to joke about how “they” put saltpeter in our food at boarding school, while suspecting it was true. Second, the sex life of a young naval officer on a destroyer in the South Pacific was the oxymoron to end all oxymorons. Third, a new marriage between the inexperienced and the inhibited was no place to learn, or it was no place to learn in our case. I thought of myself as a one-man dog, a one-woman man, and I was rattled to discover that under difficult circumstances I was not.
I didn’t stay rattled, especially when all of a sudden Tony said yes to one of my once-a-visit proposals. I had a ring at the ready, specially made for me by my pal René Tupin, managing partner of Cartier, and a fellow member of an eating club called Bistro Anonyme. Conversation and energy now centered on the details of arranging for us to get married in Paris, and for her children to stay with us in France for one year. In return for having the children for the first year of our new life, we had to agree to return to Washington, and that meant I had to get a job in Newsweek’s Washington Bureau, or somewhere else. Suddenly there was a lot on my plate, but a decision had been reached and I could concentrate on the news, which I felt I had neglected.
The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the subsequent French departure from Southeast Asia fanned the flames of nationalism in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and increased French determination to resist any further deterioration of their colonial power. The French attitude toward North Africans was incredibly condescending, even to someone not yet sensitive to all the evils of racism. The French “tutoyered” Algerians from Paris to Algiers, using the familiar form, much the way whites in the American South talked then to Negroes with whom they lived and worked. The French loved to argue with Americans about racism in the United States, and deeply resented any suggestion that racism was at the heart of their feelings about North Africa and North Africans.
All through the early 1950s, confrontations between whites and North Africans increased in frequency and severity fast enough to widen the responsibilities of the European correspondent of Newsweek to include regular trips to all three of the French “colonies” in North Africa: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. I would leave Paris after deadline late Friday, catch the daily Air France flight to North Africa, getting off at Biarritz, renting a car for the quick drive to the Shaws in nearby St. Jean de Luz for a late supper. After a weekend of tennis, conversation, wine and spaghetti with clam sauce—maybe a bullfight in Dax, or even in Pamplona across the border—I’d catch the same plane coming through Biarritz on Sunday night, in time to spend a week, or two or three, in Rabat, Algiers, or Tunis. When reporting on a story was done, I’d manage to leave after deadline on a Friday night, on the flight that stopped in Biarritz for another wonderful weekend.
Reporting those trips was a bit tougher. The French lumped all journalists under. “Enemy.” The “pieds noirs,” the ordinary French settlers in North Africa, many of them Corsican, were extremely conservative politically. They felt betrayed by the French intellectuals, and were terrified that France would abandon them. They would make you an honorary pied noir at night, while trying to drink you under the table, and then do whatever they could to make your life miserable the next day. My especial bête noire was French Army Colonel Jean-Baptiste Biaggi. His mission was to explain to me how determined the pieds noirs were to hold on to North Africa up to and including armed resistance to the French government. The native North Africans, especially the Algerians, were just as suspicious, but more inscrutable, and unless you spoke French with a Savannah accent, there was always the risk you would be mistaken for a Frenchman. And that put you behind a dangerous eightball. In the casbahs, as in the streets, a North African in a djellaba could be on a peaceful stroll, but he could also be carrying a machine gun, and your life could depend on which one it was.
Morocco with its casbahs and dancing girls and palaces was the most glamorous. I remember driving from Rabat to the Haute Atlas Mountains for a tribal feast one day, sitting in the back seat of a Citroën with John Wallis of the Daily Telegraph and Serge Bromberger of Figaro. To help pass the time on the endless drive, we had brought along one of the infamous dirty books in the Traveler’s Companion series. Whoever was sitting in the right-rear seat read a page, tore it out, passed it to his left, and out the window it went after the man in the left-rear seat had finished with it. A special kind of pollution.
Tunisia was the most modern, despite the glories of ancient Carthage on the outskirts of Tunis. Habib “Bibi” Bourguiba, Jr., son of the prime minister, seemed a modern revolutionary, and determined to help his country achieve its independence within the system. He counted foreign journalists as his own particular preserve long before he joined his father’s government, and went out of his way to guide them around.
But Algeria was always the toughest country in North Africa for me to decode, and thus the one I spent the most time trying to understand. Thousands of Algerians lived in France, working the most menial jobs. Many of them lived in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris at the bottom of Montmartre, a giant slum hostile to whites, not unlike Watts in Los Angeles came to be ten years later. Foreign correspondents would visit the area regularly looking for some rebel spokesman, some representative of the FLN (Fédération de la Libération Nationale), or fellagahs, as they were known. They were not so hard to find, but their bona fides were almost impossible to establish. No journalist—of any nationality—had done credible reportage about the FLN and its leaders.
It is in this context that I set off on a trip to Algeria in February 1956, ostensibly on an assignment to do a piece on the French Army’s efforts to combat sporadic FLN attacks throughout the country. I had started on this assignment when I got into a taxi outside the Hôtel Aletti in Algiers at 11:00 P.M., February 6, a Monday. Here’s what happened next, according to a letter I wrote six days later to Arnaud deBorchgrave, Newsweek’s foreign editor;
There was another passenger in the front seat, next to the driver. We started talking, and I said something about for an American it was hard to get both sides of the story, to find a bona fide representative of the other side, the FLN, to know what it really was, how it worked in the field. They pulled off the road, and stopped. I was sure I had their interest, and started assuming they could do something for me. I started asking a lot of questions, and they kept interrupting me to ask me even more. Especially, how did they know I was an American correspondent. I gave them my conditions [for an interview]: I needed to be able to take pictures, I needed to see some guy who could prove to me he was “a big cheese” in the FLN, I needed to see uniformed troops with arms. I also needed to be able to ask any kind of questions, to say and write what I wanted. The car started up again. I gave them my card, with the hotel St. George’s telephone and room numbers. They told me a Monsieur François Delorme would call me next day. Needless to say, I don’t know these guys’ names, nor could I possibly identify them.
Next day, sure enough, a Monsieur Delorme telephones, and asks me to meet him at the Café Le Paris, right near the Monument des Morts, in Algiers’ main square. I told him I’d be wearing a brown sweater and red scarf. I go there, sit at the bar, and right on time in walk two Arabs, both young. One looking very natty, almost zoot-suitish, with wavy, black oily hair, a black moustache, and a thin, almost hatchet face. The other was about the toughest-looking dude I’ve ever seen, a fellagah for sure, I thought, with short stubby fingers so heavily ingrained with dirt they’ll never be clean. I bought them each a cup of hot milk, while we talked about the weather, and then off we took, on foot, through the streets. We went into one bar, looked around and walked out, down the street to another bar, and sat down. Right away they asked me to prove I was an American, which I did. They told me I had been followed all day by the FLN, and would be for the duration. They told me if I squealed to the French, I would never leave Algiers. And they told me finally that they would take me to an FLN état-major, where I would be able to interview, photograph, and identify a rebel leader. I guess it is Krim [the vice premier]. They told me I would not know where I was since I would be blindfolded. They said I would be gone 48 hours or less. They said they didn’t give a damn what I told French police when I was arrested, for I wouldn’t be able to tell them anything which would compromise the FLN.
I still don’t know anybody’s name in this cloak and dagger série noir, and they very solemnly gave me their word I would be safe. I said how the hell could they promise that, and they simply said they could. They finally told me they would contact me Friday, and said I should bring only a toothbrush and a comb, after asking me “vous chaussez à quoi” [What size shoe do you wear?]. I told them to call between 11 and 4 because I thought I would be writing then. Actually since I learned Thursday of the Friday riots being scheduled, I wrote all Thursday night—till 5 A.M. Friday—filed early Friday morning, and spent all Friday on the streets. So I missed their call, but there was a message here at the hotel for me to meet Monsieur Delorme at 10 Saturday morning, again at Le Paris. I was there. So were they (same two). We got in the car and I thought we were off as we drove more than an hour into the countryside. But we finally stopped at some country café, and there I was told that the trip had to be postponed on account of snow. The pass was blocked, they said.
That brings us up to date. I’m just waiting.
I would like you to know why I decided to go ahead with this, and thus scrap our original idea to spend this week with the French Army.
In the first place, I know from a letter that you were interested in seeing if we could pull off such a story—and so am I.
Second, it is a thousand times better story. Everyone is out with the army this week—Grover, Clark, Stoneman, plus many British. So, it’s already old hat, and it never was too much of a story. But no one (except Barrat)* has done the FLN, and even Barrat did it when there was little fat in the fire, and under completely undramatic circumstances. Here, then, is a worldwide exclusive, which will get us picked up all over the world, all for 48 hours, which if I don’t run out of guts, won’t be too difficult.
Third, I honestly don’t think I will get kicked out of France, though I will almost certainly be arrested and questioned when I get back to Paris. But to avoid getting kicked out, I think we will have to proceed carefully—the timing has become more difficult because of the postponement.
a) Mitterrand is Minister of Justice, and he is a friend, or was.
b) I propose—presuming I get back to Paris Thursday—to rush the pictures to you, and then cable the story, as soon as I can stop shaking, either from Paris (via the less easily monitored commercial) or from Brussels if necessary. I feel that we must run at least one of those atrocity pictures (to convince the French—and the world—that we are not taking the position that these fellagah are nothing but national heroes), and I suggest we run the one of Allier, because he can be part of my story. It is the least ghastly and he is French.
c) As soon as you cable me the story is running—and the pictures—I propose to go to Mitterrand myself, tell him what I have done, how I did it, and tell him everything I saw. This procedure will make it utterly impossible for France to indict me for “nondénonciation de crime contre l’état,” which is the rap they arrested Barrat for. I won’t get in trouble with the FLN, because I actually will not know the only thing that threatens them—to wit, the location of their headquarters.
d) When we appear, the press is surely going to come to me, and if you agree, I would propose to tell the press just what I have told Mitterrand.
There is only one more thing. I am going to end up with some wonderful pictures, pictures that I can sell for a hell of a price, pictures that we cannot possibly use. To reward myself for risking my peau, I would like your permission to do so. Of course, not until we are on the stands, and of course with Newsweek credit.
I sat in my hotel room for three days, waiting for the call that never came. To pass the time, I smoked some dope for the first time in my life—some hashish that I had been given by Jean’s half sister in Geneva and carried halfway around Europe waiting for an appropriate occasion. I was completely nervous, scared that I might do things I would never do if I wasn’t high. I bolted the door to my hotel room in the St. George, filled up my pipe with the hash, and fired it up.
Nothing happened. Nothing. And then I went to sleep. Woke up an hour later, reloaded the pipe, and went to sleep again. And that was that.
When it became obvious that Monsieur Delorme had disappeared, I flew back to Paris, and next morning went to see Ambassador Dillon to let him know what I had been up to in Algeria. As I was leaving the embassy I got a call from my maid, telling me that the cops were scouring the Place des Vosges for me. And when I got back to my office on the rue de Berri in a taxi, I was suddenly surrounded by cops and black Citroëns. Two cops got me by the elbows, lifting me off the pavement, and asked me to come along with them. I was protesting and asking for information, but just when I needed it I couldn’t remember the French word for “warrant.” It’s hard to ask some burly French cop if he has a warrant when you don’t know the word for warrant (mandat d’amener). In their car, the commissaire turned to me and said, “Bradlee, you are the object of an expulsion decree, and you must leave France within forty-eight hours.” I kept asking them why, and got no answer, in the car, or later at the headquarters of the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, roughly equivalent to the FBI). For the next two hours. I sat in a small room, not allowed to use a phone, while one of my captors typed up a procés verbal, which added up to an admission that I had been arrested and served with an expulsion order. Expulsion from France didn’t fit in with my plans at all. Tony and I were to be married in July, and had arranged to start off our new life with a year—and four stepchildren—in Paris. It would be tougher and less exciting in Chevy Chase. I left the DST headquarters with the expulsion order, plus the words, “In view of derogatory information received about Bradlee, Benjamin,” but with no idea what the derogatory information was. Plainly it had to do with my abortive attempt to get to the FLN leadership, but since I had failed in that attempt and had written nothing, I was mystified.
When I went back to see Ambassador Dillon and enlist his help in getting the expulsion order canceled, he just laughed. “Best recommendation you could get as a reporter,” he said, but he sent the deputy chief of mission, Ted Achilles, over to the Foreign Office to inquire and protest. The French press was strongly critical of the government and supportive of me, endowing me with qualities (“known and esteemed by his colleagues”) that had gone unremarked for years. My biggest problem was John Denson, the crusty, irascible Newsweek editor. He wanted me to get kicked out of what he called “the cradle of liberty,” and to “get into all the newsreels.” Quai d’Orsay friends were telling me “this is madness,” and urged me to shut up, while they made it go away. Finally, with Dillon and Achilles leading the way, we got the expulsion order “suspended.” But that wasn’t enough for Denson. Now he wanted the suspension “repealed,” and it took another few days to get that done.
Despite the fact that I had failed to get the story, my arrest put me on the map. As a foreign correspondent I had been what I had been for two years. Except for my colleagues, and a few insiders in Washington and Europe, no one had paid much attention to me or my work. But now I was enjoying my first fifteen minutes on page one. I had arrived professionally, in some strange way that I didn’t understand. I failed to recognize this first example of how celebrity can change the meaning of events.
The day my arrest was on the front page of the Paris Herald Tribune, Susan Mary Patten asked me to lunch, somewhat to the chagrin of the scheduled guest of honor, United States Representative to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge. Susan Mary was married to Bill Patten on the American Embassy’s political staff (and after Bill’s death, to columnist Joe Alsop), and ran a “salon” on the rue Weber. I was just a bit scared, to tell the truth, unsure of what was going on, but her hospitality was a kind gesture, deeply appreciated. I didn’t stop to think whether the invitation meant that I had arrived in some new, uncharted waters.
But never mind page one or guest of honor, no one would tell me exactly what the hell had happened to me, why I had been arrested (and haven’t to this day). Only gradually did it emerge, a whisper at a time, that somewhere along the line in Algiers my North African contacts had changed from FLN rebels to agentsprovocateurs working for French intelligence. I sensed the presence of the fine Corsican hand of my “friend,” Colonel Jean-Baptiste Biaggi, who was to become one of the leaders of the French settlers, and who would fight to the bitter end against President Charles de Gaulle and Algerian independence some years later.
The sheer joy and romance of being a foreign correspondent is hard to explain, even harder to exaggerate. Even when it’s essentially boring—an interminable, no news foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva, for instance, or yet another new prime minister in France’s Fourth Republic—the reporting has to be done. The story has to be filed, then one often partakes in some really creative bitching by the best bitchers outside the Army, followed by exhaustive discussions about what to eat and where to eat it. Expense account living encourages gastronomic risk taking, and imagination.
Even when it’s dangerous—a war, a revolution, a plane ride in an uninsurable vehicle, where the old bromide about the pilot wanting to survive as much as you do seems at least debatable—the adrenaline high is incredible, and long-lasting. Listen to a war correspondent talk about a night under fire in Vietnam’s III Corps, and thirty years later it will sound like last night. Listen to a foreign correspondent who wandered in fear and consternation through the streets of Budapest in the fall of 1956, and you will hear passion forever, no matter how much the story is filtered through modesty, true or false. Listen to a man who will never be the same after seeing Rwanda and know the power of history, seen firsthand.
In between boredom and danger lie oceans of plain delight. And in those oceans you find stories like Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco . . . the romantic love story of a beautiful Hollywood movie star and a real-life prince, regardless of the dubious quality of his princely lineage. On the luxurious Train Bleu overnight from Paris, Crosby Noyes of the Washington Star, Art Buchwald, and I formed a latter-day Three Musketeers—united against all enemies, sharing all risks and rewards, one for all, all for one. Our unity was quickly tested at the Monte Carlo railroad station when we couldn’t find a taxi. We fanned out in search, seemingly forever, when Noyes finally found a Renault deux-chevaux cab. These cars were smaller than Volkswagens, barely big enough for two passengers and two small suitcases, much less the Three Musketeers. But we were desperate. Noyes grabbed it, I jumped in, and off we went to our hotel, passing Buchwald en route, shaking his fist and shouting something about the Musketeers.
Actually, it was shortsighted of us to strand Art, because he was the only Musketeer with any connection to anyone involved with the wedding. He had seen Grace Kelly once, and he had actually shaken hands with Rainier, which was more than Noyes and I could say. My “connection,” such as it was, was hardly promising. One of my St. Mark’s School roommates had a brother, whom I barely knew, whose wife, whom I did not know, had been a classmate of the bride, and was now a bridesmaid. She was also born hostile to journalists, and this hostility had been honed to enmity by the creeps who were running the wedding.
None of us had a single credential to any of the parties whose guest lists and shenanigans an anxious world and impatient editors were waiting for. Between us we could muster only a single “pool” ticket, to some decidedly second-rate event. It was this moment when Buchwald pulled a rabbit out of his hat with what I have always believed was the best column he ever wrote, in a distinguished career of writing funny columns. The reason he didn’t have a ticket, he wrote, was because the Buchwalds and the Grimaldis had been feuding for centuries, ever since the thirteenth century. According to Buchwald:
The reason for the feud is lost somewhere in the cobwebs of history, but it was a time when one of my ancestors, then working for the Viking News Service, covered a battle that Rainier Grimaldi fought against the Flemish Navy. Rainier I, then an admiral, decreed that only members of the Associated, United and International Press associations could accompany him into battle, but my ancestor, disguised as a Genoese sailor, hid on board the flagship and scooped the other three news agencies by four years. . . .
And so it’s gone down through history. There was talk that Charlotte de Grammont, daughter of the Marshal de Grammont, who married the Duke of Valentinois on April 28, 1659, was in love with Rudolph Buchwald, then a court reporter for the News of the World. But we only have Rudolph’s diary as evidence, and every one in the family knows how unreliable he was.
Just last year, my Aunt Molly from Brooklyn was making up her guest list for my cousin Joseph’s wedding to a nice girl from Flatbush.
I suggested she invite Prince Rainier, who was then in the United States.
“No Grimaldis,” she said, “will be allowed at Joseph’s wedding.”
“But Aunt Molly,” I protested, “this is the twentieth century. We’ve got to forget ancient family feuds. Prince Rainier’s a nice fellow.”
“I don’t care for myself,” Aunt Molly said, “but you know what a long memory your Uncle Oscar has. Besides, has Prince Rainier invited Joseph to his wedding?”
Of course, Art got his invitation—to the church, by personal courier from the palace, as soon as the Paris Herald Tribune hit the streets of Monte Carlo. And now Noyes and I were high and dry. I was able to dredge up an old acquaintanceship with Tom Guinzburg, whose father was the founder and editor of Viking Press. Tom was married to another bridesmaid, the actress Rita Gam, and I invited them to join Crosby, Art, and myself at some fabulously expensive restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean. But we got nothing. Zero. Miss Gam just sat there, staring moistly and silently ahead. Gorgeous, but mute. As a journalist, I always preferred my sources gorgeous and talkative.
But the food was incredible. That was one of the glories of France. When you start sucking air on a story, there’s always a little one-star restaurant within easy reach where journalistic frustrations can be overwhelmed by food and wine. Suck air in Zagreb, and both you and the readers suffer. Suck air in Monte Carlo, and you can always eat at the three-star restaurant in Cap d’Antibes, and let the readers suffer alone.
The other great royal romance in Europe during the fifties, of course, involved Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend. I didn’t cover that, territorially co-opted as I was by our London correspondent, but watched in breathless awe as one of my colleagues—and pals—covered it in the greatest detail, although he was nowhere near Belgium, where Townsend was licking his wounds, or England, where the princess was being held in durance vile. In fact, my colleague was in the South of France with a female person not his wife. In fact, he was in the South of France with the wife of a colleague. Every morning and evening, he would call his Paris office. A loyal secretary would read him the wires, and the best of the French dailies’ exclusifs. He would then hang up, write, call his office back, and dictate: “Dateline—Ostend, Belgium.” Or whatever.
Tony and I were ready to get married long months before we actually pulled it off. First she had promised herself to complete analysis, before making any major move, and that took a full two years. Last, Jean Dax, the miracle doctor, moved heaven and earth to get a fast Wasserman certificate for Tony. In between there were the normal thousand things to do, complicated by small hurdles like oceans, divorces, and separation agreements and by the unforeseeable, all-powerful news. Algeria, for instance.
Jean and I were divorced in Paris, across the Place Henri IV from our apartment, in the Palais de Justice. Charlie Torem, from Coudert Frères in Paris, represented me, reluctantly. He knew and liked Jean. One afternoon in 1955, in a ratty little office in the very attic of the Palais de Justice, Jean and I showed up for the key moment in a French divorce, the tentatif de réconciliation, where the magistrate is charged by law with trying to bring the two litigants back together, to call off the divorce. “Monsieur,” he addressed me with apparent interest, “quand est-ce que vous avez quitté le lit conjugal?” Literally, when did you leave the conjugal bed. Actually, when did you last make love to this woman? I couldn’t remember exactly, and thought it was none of his business, but I’d been coached to say “at least a year,” which was probably accurate.
And that was that. A few days later Jean and I were divorced. Thirteen years of marriage, tied with foreign string in a foreign land, and put away on a shelf. Two people out of love, never really in love, never recovered from the unseen scars of almost a four-year absence. And one child of seven, loving his father and needing his father, facing a future he didn’t know or want, or cause. How is that a decent act? Can one man’s happiness ever be worth causing that kind of misery? Even knowing, or at least truly believing, that after a better, wiser search your wife will find someone else with interests that are more shared and more enjoyed? Even hoping, but never knowing, that your child will remain a vital part of your life, or become a vital part of your life again? All but convinced that your child will gain more from the happiness and stability of his parents’ new lives than he will lose from the unhappiness and instability of his parents’ old life.
I think the conscientious pursuit of happiness by itself can validate decisions to change, to try again, especially when failure to change will lead to lives of duplicity, dishonesty, and deceit.
The answers will always be unknown, if only because roads not taken lead nowhere. Jean did in fact find the right man, Bill Haussermann, a Boston lawyer whose kind patience with my son would place him in my Hall of Fame, if he hadn’t already been there. Ben was miserable for sure at what he felt was my treachery, but later he followed me into the newspaper business, after three months on the Kabul Times, such a strange place to start in the newspaper business, at the end of a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan. He returned to Boston, his beloved “Hub,” and as an editor at the Boston Globe he has made me enormously proud.
As usual under stress, I put my nose down, and my ass up, and start driving toward the next goal. My next goal was to marry Tony, and I started driving toward July 6, 1956, with all deliberate speed. We were married in an ornate salle of the ornate Hotel de Ville, Paris’s City Hall, a few blocks up the Seine from the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, and the Louvre. The ceremony was performed by a deputy mayor, a large, florid man who worked in the Renault factory in Paris. He spoke French with a heavy Russian accent, and paused in the middle of the ceremony to congratulate me on my obvious appreciation of the beauties of Paris, which I took to be a reference both to Tony’s looks, to her maiden name, Antoinette Pinchot, and to my address in the priceless Place des Vosges.
Members of the wedding party included her sister Mary, and Mary’s husband Cord Meyer, still together, however barely, Lionel and Toto Durand, the Buchwalds, the Torems, Jean Dax, and the New York Daily News correspondent Bernard Valery. Lionel Durand was one of the most remarkable men I ever met. He was my “assistant,” which does him no justice at all, since he was twice as smart as I was about most things, certainly about all things French. In an uncharacteristic moment of largesse, Newsweek had given me my choice: a secretary or an assistant, provided he or she was French (and therefore could be paid less money, and in francs). I had chosen Lionel, as the absolute best of the breed. He was the son of a French mother and a Haitian diplomat, married to a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. He was tall, dark, and handsome, incredibly well connected, especially to the cultural scene, where I struggled. He used the French familiar to Picasso, and was tutoyered back. He knew the leaders of the burgeoning French film industry, the literary shots, big and small. He was a fabulous asset to me and to Newsweek. *
Buchwald was my best man, stage-managing the ceremony while whining about Valery being late. We adjourned from the Hôtel de Ville to the Place des Vosges, trailing tin cans from our car, courtesy of Durand, who knew full well that the French had no such custom. And we drank bottle after bottle of champagne, toasting the miracle we had pulled off and the start of our great adventure.
In September 1956, Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev made a rare trip outside the Iron Curtain—to Yugoslavia—and free world editors in their infinite wisdom sent a mob of journalists to see what they looked like, closeup. Including me. Trouble was my editors had just sent me to Turkey for one of those room-emptying “NATO’s Southern Flank” stories that no one reads. I was intercepted at the Athens airport, and diverted to Belgrade via Salonika. More trouble arose when Bulganin and Khrushchev’s plane from Moscow and my plane from Salonika hit Belgrade at the same time. Guess who had to wait 10,000 feet over the Yugoslav capital, while the Soviet leaders paraded through the city?
That meant that for the first time in my foreign correspondency I had to write a color story about an event I never saw—and this was before television showed things over and over again. By now, I was enough one of the boys so that I could get a “fill” that I trusted. A “fill” is a fill-in, and for news organizations who are habitually outgunned by the opposition, they are an absolute necessity. My fill came from Crosby Noyes, Alex Kendrick of CBS, and Sy Freidin, then working for Collier’s magazine. When I had filed—after only a few hours on the ground—I had to face the question of lodging, since all hotel rooms had been sold for days. The senior American diplomat in Belgrade was Robert Hooker. He and his wife Dolly were old friends of my parents, but not yet of mine. They had turned down requests from their real press pals like Cy Sulzberger of the New York Times and were extremely reluctant to take me in, but finally Dolly agreed. She even drove me into Belgrade from #5 Pushkinova Pet the next morning, as we fantasized about the stir we would cause if the ambassador’s wife was caught in an automobile accident, wearing only slippers and an overcoat over her nightgown.
The Soviets were eventually headed for a meeting with Marshal Tito on the fortress island of Brioni, but before they got there they visited Zagreb and then drove north from Zagreb to Bled, the fabulous lakeside resort in the heart of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. The drive from Zagreb to Bled was hilarious, as the foreign correspondents were assigned four to a car driven by Yugoslav intelligence officers, who spoke at least some English since they would smile sometimes at various anti-Communist wisecracks. I was with Noyes, Ed Korry of the United Press, and Bill Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News. We kept getting stopped by Yugoslav soldiers, and with no help from our driver we had to talk our way through each roadblock. We finally elected Stoneman as our chief negotiator, after he lost his temper once. With a childlike smile on his face, and waggling his credentials in one soldier’s face, he said with a gentle smile, “I guess you don’t know who we are, do you, you dumb Communist son of a bitch.” Our driver could barely stifle his laughter, but we were always waved through.
The phone call was from Dan Avni, the press attaché (and maybe more) at the Embassy of Israel, and a friend and colleague from my press attaché days.* It was early morning, October 28, 1956.
I could hear the tension in his clipped accent. (Like so many Israelis, he had served in the British Army as a young man.) The tension seemed reasonable. The headlines were ominous. In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser had drawn a line in the sand when he nationalized the Suez Canal, and the British, French, and Israelis were about to react—with invasions. In Hungary, anti-Soviet sentiment had mushroomed into an anti-Soviet revolution. And in the United States, Eisenhower was in the last week of his run for reelection.
No one could have guessed what happened on October 24: a Russian army, including heavy tanks, had invaded Hungary to wipe out the anti-Soviet Revolution.
On October 29, Israel would invade Egypt “to eliminate fedayeen bases on the Sinai.”
On November 5—after almost a week of bombardment and bombing—the British and French would invade Egypt, landing paratroopers at the mouth of the Suez Canal in Port Said and Port Fuad, respectively.
On November 6, Eisenhower and Nixon were overwhelmingly reelected, and Ike was going to withdraw U.S. support from the British and French, effectively forcing an early cease-fire.
Avni knew how much I wanted to make my first trip to Israel, he reminded me in that early morning call on October 28. We had talked about it many times. Now, he said, would be a particularly good time. Right now. In fact, he told me, there was a TWA plane leaving that very night, and if I hurried, he thought I could still get a seat. In fact, just in case I could go, he had reserved one for me.
In fact, it was the last commercial plane to land in Tel Aviv before the Israeli Army drove the next morning into the Sinai, Gaza, and eventually to the Suez Canal itself. I was alone in the Dan Hotel, surrounded as usual by an army of Time-Life scribes, photographers, and—toughest of all to compete against—the subarmy of gofers who rented the cars, made the reservations, filed the copy, fought the censors, and left the correspondents free to report. But we were comfortable at Newsweek knowing that we were competing with words actually printed in the magazine, not words filed to the magazine’s rewrite staff.
This was my first shooting war since my destroyer days in the Pacific. I was nervous, and I needed a story of my own that would outlast the Israeli Army’s high-speed race to victory. My story was waiting for me at the head of the taxi line outside the hotel. I’ve forgotten his name long since, but when I asked the driver how I could get to the front, he said simply, “What about me?” Turns out he was on weekend leave from a unit that was fighting outside the Gaza Strip even as we spoke. He figured he could talk his way through the Kilometer 90 checkpoint, drive ten more kilometers to the front, watch the fighting, talk to the troops—“plenty of Americans,” he promised—and get me back for a late supper.
And he was as good as his word. I filed the following story late that night, and it ran, word for word:
TO WAR IN A TAXI
Benjamin Bradlee, Newsweek European correspondent, is covering the Israeli front A veteran of Arab wars and revolts* (once arrested by the French for getting too close to the Algerian story), Bradlee flew to Tel Aviv from Paris in time to eyewitness Israel’s thrust which overran Gaza and broke the back of the Egyptian armed strength.
It’s a strange war. From Tel Aviv, the Gaza battlefield is less than two hours away, down the main highway leading south through Jaffa. I drove down to the front in a seven-passenger DeSoto Taxi. (Israel’s army command bars newspapermen from accompanying its troops.)
An hour and a half later, I watched the clash of Israeli and Egyptian armor in a fight that sealed the fate of Gaza. The battle unfolded literally before my eyes.
Overhead American-built Mustangs (World War II vintage) circled lazily before peeling off through moderate Egyptian ack-ack fire to attack selected targets with bombs, rockets and machine guns.
The scene of battle leaps suddenly from a countryside deceptively peaceful in the bright autumn sunshine: rich irrigated guava and orange groves; children playing shoot the chutes in air raid shelters of the roadside kibbutzim (farm settlement).
Minutemen: As one nears the Gaza strip, fields are either deserted or farmers are at work in them with guns slung across their backs.
Five miles from Gaza, an Israeli garrison waved “hello” from a frontier hut. Around the next bend, at the crest of a hill 1.7 miles from the Egyptian city of Gaza, the fighting raged.
At first I could see nothing but the city, silhouetted against the blue Mediterranean. Then an orange flash, a puff of smoke and the sickening thud of mortar fire. There are answering flashes and the roar of artillery, and finally the chatter of machine-gun bursts.
As I faced Gaza, Israeli troops moved up under cover of an artillery barrage. I scrambled to a rise of ground—a solitary grandstand seat from which to watch the fighting at close range.
Four fighters roared in from the south, hedgehopping at a few hundred feet. From their flight direction, I thought they were Egyptian and looked anxiously for a nonexistent ditch. But they were Israeli planes, picking off objectives pinpointed by ground-to-air radio.
I looked back to check the position of my waiting taxi. An entire battalion suddenly materialized from the deserted countryside. A tank-led task force smashed its way into Gaza from another flank.
It wasn’t much of a battle. Gaza, birthplace of the Biblical Goliath, showed few scars. Most of the fighting was on the outskirts, where Egyptians had been dug in.
Hands Up: An Israeli tank commander scoffed. The Egyptians, they were bad soldiers. They held their guns above their heads and tried to run. Then they threw away their guns and put their hands above their heads and surrendered. Similar cockiness, pride and contempt for Egypt is reflected all the way back to Tel Aviv.
In the cities of Israel, signs of war are hard to find. There are queues for buses (public transport has been requisitioned) and for gas. A few cars are camouflaged with a mixture of water and mud. An occasional window is striped with paper as a precaution against Egyptian air raids that never came. Old and faded curtains produce a relatively effective blackout. Automobile headlights glint dimly through blue-painted lenses. Newspapers show patches of white space, where censors got in their licks.
The Plain of Sharon was peacefully asleep beneath a starlit sky as I drove north from Tel Aviv toward Haifa. A single Israeli soldier guarded the highway junction where the road branches off to the Jordanian frontier, less than five miles away. Israelis note with satisfaction that their border with Jordan has never been more quiet in eight years of uneasy armistice.
These many years later that report sounds like a destroyer sailor talking, unfamiliar with military tactics, hyping the action just a tad, pleased with himself and the in-a-taxi angle.
A few days later, I was wandering around the docks of Haifa on another story, looking for details on the capture of an Egyptian submarine, when I suddenly spotted the submarine captain himself, sitting solemnly in full uniform in the front seat of an automobile, blindfolded. They had blindfolded him to make it difficult for him to figure out his destination. He was going to be interrogated at Israeli naval headquarters less than a mile away in the hills over Haifa, but they drove him around and around in circles for more than half an hour, trying to make it impossible to know where he was or where he had been. A picture of me, peering through a car window at the blindfolded Egyptian, appeared in the next issue of Newsweek.
I was and remain blown away by Israel and the Israelis, by their energy, by their arrogance, their condescension to those of us who are not accustomed to living within range of enemy guns, by their commitment, by their idealism. I never really understood it when Israelis told me how close their enemies were until I saw and heard those guns.
I was stunned by how American many of them were—in their aspirations and values, and in fact. If you yelled, “Anyone here from the States?” hands always went up. *
The Israeli Army had overrun the Egyptians in the Sinai so fast that the world’s attention was now focusing on Nasser’s nationalizing of the Suez Canal, and what the British and French were going to do about nationalization. The place to be was obviously the canal, but how to get there was not so obvious. Those of us who had rushed to Israel felt cheated because, even though we’d had a good little war, we had missed Budapest and the Hungarian uprising, going on at the same time. We were damned if we were going to miss out on Egypt, too.
I had sent the following advisory to the New York editors: “My chances of getting to the canal from Tel Aviv are nil. The Israeli Army command tells me they are not going [as far as] the canal; they’ll stop 10 kilometers short, and that looks like a mighty poor 10 kilometers to be walking alone.”
When a ride to Athens came up, I decided to take it, because there were several flights from Athens to Cyprus, including one at 9:00 A.M. the next morning, and whatever action the Anglo-French force took would start from Cyprus. I was at the Athens airport before seven, and talked my way onto the 9 o’clock flight by persuading the captain to leave 60 kilograms of freight behind in Greece. Of course, when I got to Nicosia, the British and French commands had accredited all the correspondents they were going to accredit. But they took one more, and one hour after the French Army landed at Port Fuad (next to Port Said), I landed at the already secure airport between the two.
Both cities were a mess. In these situations, the number-one problem for a journalist is always transportation. How do you get around in a city you’ve never seen, filled with people speaking a language you cannot understand? Just as it was gospel among my foreign correspondent friends to tap an Israeli Embassy (if there was one) for the best skinny, it was also gospel in those days to join up with Paris Match magazine photographers if you needed anything material like a jeep, or a pistol, or a fine dinner (and fine wine). The Match photographer I found was young Jean Roy (pronounced “Roi,” as in the French word for king), the cowboy to end all cowboys, married to actress Lola Montez. He wore French Army fatigues, and he had “liberated” an Egyptian Army jeep moments after it had been liberated by the French Army. Our crowd for the next three days consisted of Roy—the driver—David Seymour, the magnificent Magnum photographer known as “Schim,” who was working for Newsweek; and my old buddy Frank White, the Time-Life Paris Bureau chief, joined occasionally by Howard “Handlebars” Handleman, the European Bureau chief for the old INS. Thanks to Roy, we had a fine dinner of sole, salad, and a chilled white (French) wine in the basement of a bombedout house, hidden from scavengers picking over garbage in search of food.
Next day, we drove through a ruined city, teeming and deserted at the same time, looking in darkened, lightless morgues—and counting bodies until we puked. We watched trucks unload sacks of flour into crowds that hadn’t eaten in three days. I can still see Schim, a wisp of a man, standing on the jeep silhouetted against the darkling sky, quietly photographing mob scenes of Egyptians ripping sacks of flour apart.
Two hours later he was dead, and so was Roy.
While White and I peeled off to write and file our stories, Roy and Schim had driven down the canal highway and out of friendly territory, into no-man’s-land, and finally into Egyptian territory, where they were ambushed. White and I were writing when we heard the news. A different day—a day when we didn’t have to file, a different hour, when we still had time to write—and White and I would have been history.
Filing was somewhere between hard and impossible. The French offered to take my copy by motorboat to the battleship Jean Bart, which was moored in the Mediterranean somewhere. There it would be censored, they said, sent by radio to Toulon or Marseille (someday), and from there, maybe to PREWI, Paris, and on to New York. I figured there was no chance of that ever working. There were no civilian facilities up and working. So I bummed a ride on an Air Atlas plane to Akrotiri, in southern Cyprus, where the military had seized all communications. We finally found two spaces (there were no seats) on a four-engined York bomber-transport, WWII vintage, for a ten-hour, non-stop, non-pressurized flight to Hyères, in southern France, listening to the moans of a French admiral who had lost most of his balls in a jeep explosion a few hours earlier. From Hyères it was only three hours more to Paris, where I filed this dispatch:
Port Said is now an ugly, festering sore on the mouth of the Suez Canal. Its cemeteries are littered with hundreds of unburied dead, bloating fast under a scorching Mediterranean sun and black with flies.
The wards of the city’s candlelit hospitals are jammed with moaning wounded. Its morgues are clogged chest-high with dead. Streets are blocked with rubble or awash with broken sewer and water mains. Low-hanging wires threaten decapitation.
Black-veiled women sit motionless, quietly weeping in the rubble. Men in dirty striped pajamas and barefoot children pick through ruins for pots and pans. Dead goats and donkeys rot in the streets, unnoticed except for the stench. There is a choking, inescapable smell of death, smoke, and sewage.
Even before ships and airplanes brought in British troops, Port Said was devastated by RAF Venoms and Hunters, backed up by a naval bombardment.
Yellow Hearse: Lt. Gen. Sir Hugh Charles Stockwell, commander of the Anglo-French army task force, told correspondents just in from Cyprus that only 100 civilians were killed in Port Said. As he said this, we who had been there for two days followed a yellow Coca-Cola truck full of corpses to one of the three cemeteries. Twenty-seven bodies were unloaded. Those strong enough to brave the odor counted another 100 awaiting burial under the bright purple bougainvillaea bushes inside. There are at least 2,000 dead.
Gen. Sir Charles Keightley, commander in chief of the binational forces, assured newsmen on Cyprus there was no “shortage of food” in Port Said. We had just watched thousands of Egyptians rioting for food. Ignoring tank guns trained on them and troop-filled trucks which roared through the streets, they pillaged stores and attacked any fellow citizen who clutched an edible morsel.
Ghost White: One morning I watched a mob break through a barbed-wire barricade around an open-air flour depot in the center of town. Like the flies buzzing around them, they swarmed over 200-pound sacks, then staggered away with more than they could carry. Barely did they get more than five yards before being set upon by others. Nervous British troops watched the mobs, then fired machine guns into the air. The paratroop major in command radioed for tank reinforcements but, before the Centurions arrived, an English-speaking Egyptian timidly approached him with a better idea: “Get your soldiers to split the flour sacks with their bayonets. Then the people can fill small containers.” The major bought the idea. Egyptians plunged under human pyramids and came out with filthy baskets or aprons half-filled. Black-haired and dark-skinned men and women were powdered a ghostly white as they swept the streets for a last fistful.
I watched a small, ramshackle truck filled with barrels of stinking sunfish literally torn apart by a mob filling hands, pockets, even duststained fezzes.
In four days, only two hole-in-the-wall stores in the Arab quarter dared to open. I watched 200 people charge one of them and plunder its shelves clean in less than five minutes.
An Anglo-French communiqué announced: “The civil facilities of Port Said are being quickly normalized.” Two days later there was still no electricity, no water and no police. At the Egyptian General Hospital, the principal medical officer, Dr. Elezdeine Hossny, said in halting English: “It is horrible. I have to operate by flashlight or kerosene lamp. I have to work in the most unsterile conditions, getting buckets of water wherever I can find them. Listen to those moans. We had only 500 ampules of morphine on hand and they were gone days ago. Many of these people have bullets in their abdomens and legs. But we have no anesthesia for them.”
The doctor hadn’t left the hospital grounds in 72 hours, but said he had counted more than 500 dead. He took me through two morgues. One was piled high with bodies. The other was temporarily empty as two masked attendants swabbed blood off the floor.
Crude Wiring: The countryside is littered with Egyptian equipment (mostly British made) and British landing force gear, marked with a big white “H” to distinguish it from the enemy’s. There are many Russian T-34 tanks, mortars and guns. I watched a British Tommy shoot the lock off an abandoned Egyptian truck. It was empty, except for four Russian riot guns. The land surrounding Gamil Airfield is riddled with foxholes less than three feet deep (anything deeper strikes water) and a crude minefield of hand grenades, visibly wired.
The absence of any organized police generated terror in Port Said. One young Egyptian, spotting my green correspondent’s badge, broke through a mob and begged: “Can’t you get them to restore order? The jails were all emptied weeks ago and convicts were given weapons as soon as the bombardment started. Soldiers left more when they fled. There are thousands of guns hidden in houses today. Our homes and stores are being robbed. We are all helpless.”
Every street is alive with people, but these are unlike other Arab mobs. They are unbelievably polite and friendly to Europeans. For two days, I roamed freely in a jeep amidst the riots and pillaging. Wherever I went, the jeep was immediately surrounded. In French North Africa, riding in that unprotected fashion, I would have been promptly killed. But here Arabs want to talk. And they beg for food with pathetic hand-to-mouth gestures or ask for medical supplies for their families. We had traded a commandeered Egyptian Chevrolet truck against three cases of French K rations, but they lasted only a few hours. Now there is nothing to give them.
Two wars in three weeks, separated only by the Sinai Desert. My new wife—and her four children—were in Paris, and I was somewhere in the Mediterranean, doing what I felt I was on earth to do.
There was no real down side to living in Paris in the fifties, but the people one worked for liked Paris, too, and every so often they would decide to drop in on you. “Touring the bureaus” it was called then—and now. A chance for big shots to travel abroad in search of contacts and anecdotes which they could use later to prove to their friends that they were in fact big shots.
Malcolm Muir, Sr., was a case in point. He was the editor-in-chief of Newsweek, a small man to whom status among the rich and famous was vitally important. He and his wife Francie, a large woman, to whom status among the rich and famous was equally important, generally came to Paris and London once a year to polish their status. For weeks before they arrived, the correspondent had time for little else but prepare for the royal visit. Any failure, or even shortfall, in these preparations was likely to be fatal. An earlier European executive of Newsweek had bitten the dust solely because the limousine he had ordered to take the Muirs out to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s “moulin” in Gif-sur-Yvette outside of Paris was too wide to fit between the stone pillars at the entrance of the mile-long driveway. The heavens had opened with rain, and Malcolm and Francie had been forced to slosh through the mud for so long that even curtsying was a challenge.
The correspondent was in a classic no-win situation during these ceremonial visits. If General de Gaulle, in self-imposed exile at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, was unwilling to receive Mr. Muir, it was because the correspondent had no influence, surely not because the general had been bored to death last time he had to listen to the American businessman. If General Eisenhower couldn’t fit the Muirs into his schedule at SHAPE headquarters, it was because the Newsweek correspondent lacked clout. When the Muirs insisted on giving a cocktail party, either at our apartment or in a room at the Ritz, if their fellow big shots dropped by for a drink, it was to see the Muirs. If no one came, it was my ass. One of the longest forty-five minutes of my life came just before the first guests arrived for cocktails one night, while the Muirs and Tony and I tried to make polite conversation over the racket of four children under nine, and no one else. Finally, the doorbell rang and it was good old Paul Reynaud, age eighty, escorted by his assistant, our old pal deKemoularia. “Ah! it’s the President,” Muir said with his hands outstretched, and face beaming, convinced it was he, not Claude deKemoularia, who had produced the former prime minister. And I was alive for another year.
Sometimes, visiting firemen made less pretentious social demands. Harry Kern, the foreign editor, for instance. His major interests were good food and good wine, and he was knowledgeable about both, and the very finest exotic French lingerie. And if Kern himself couldn’t find time for a quick trip to the lingerie store, the Newsweek Paris correspondent was expected to volunteer.
John Denson, the remarkable character who was Newsweek’s editor for eight years, had different hungers. Mostly, John wanted company, and American food. He wasn’t remotely interested in seeing anyone new, much less any Frenchman. At lunch, even in the very best restaurants, he wanted hamburger, or scrambled eggs. At night, he would sit in the darkest corner of a nightclub, hiding behind dark glasses, drinking orange juice with a brandy chaser, and grunt every so often. But occasionally he would get horny and wonder aloud about what someone he was looking at would be like in bed. (Never mind, we all wondered, what the hell would he be like between the sheets?)
One night, late in some Left Bank joint, John found his eyes falling more and more on a tall, rangy, attractive blonde with broad shoulders, significant cleavage, and very theatrical makeup. A couple of brandies into the evening, John asked me to find out who she was. Well, I already knew. She was the well-known Coccinelle.
And she was a man.
“The hell she is,” John said, when I explained Coccinelle to him. “Look at those tits.” The tits were in fact impressive, but the papers were filled with news of Christine Jorgensen and her revolutionary sex change operation. I told John to take a look at her hands and especially her knuckles, but he would have none of it, and we asked her over to our table for a drink. I told Coccinelle that Denson didn’t believe his eyes, and John began to think I was trying to protect him from some predator he refused to see. It took almost an hour to talk him out of the joint, and back to his hotel room.
Denson took some getting used to, with his full-time dark glasses, and his habit of chewing while he mumbled. After one session with Denson, a young female researcher asked my friend, Gordon Manning, “My God, what were those nuts he was chewing?” and Gordon answered, “I think they were mine.”
