38 
ONE MORE TIME
2011
The Hollywood celebrities drew bigger ratings, but Barbara’s favorite interviews, and the ones that made her reputation in history, were of a more serious sort. She was “driven to interview world leaders and icons,” she said. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were on that list, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their negotiations in the Mideast. So were an array of dictators and despots, many considered enemies of the United States, some accused of corruption and brutality.
Late in life, at a forum at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a student asked if there had been anyone she had refused to interview, on principle. Someone who was just too notorious. She seemed perplexed by the question.
“I’ve done more murderers than presidents,” she replied. “I’m very un-judgmental.” In 1997, when Hugh Downs refused to interview sportscaster Marv Albert on 20⁄20 after he had been accused of sexual assault, she did the interview. That attitude presumably reflected the experiences of her childhood. She had grown up in a world that welcomed or at least tolerated mobsters and rumrunners and folks who might have spent some time in prison, or were at risk of going there.
Figures like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi didn’t intimidate her. They interested her. “Dictators and generals, that’s my speed,” she joked.
Barbara gave Americans an up-close-and-personal introduction to the Shah of Iran in 1977 from his palace in Tehran; on the air, he questioned the intelligence and competence of women as his wife, the empress, quietly protested, her eyes filling with tears. Barbara talked to Saddam at the presidential palace in Baghdad in 1981, his first interview for American television. In 1986, she sat down with the recently deposed dictator of Haiti, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and his wife, Michele, who denied stealing millions from their country. The setting didn’t bolster their credibility; they spoke from their sumptuous villa in the south of France.
She flew to Libya to sit down with Qaddafi in his tent in the center of Tripoli, amid palm trees and roaming camels; he laughed when she asked him about rumors he was crazy. She twice interviewed Russian president Boris Yeltsin, then returned to Moscow to talk to his successor, Vladimir Putin. She interviewed Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.
In 2011, at eighty-two, she would conduct her last session with the sort of notorious foreign leader she loved to encounter. The interview had the hallmarks of the ones she had been doing for decades: the indefatigable competition to land it, the relentless work to prepare for it, the keen performance once the cameras began to roll. And the controversy afterward.
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was supposed to be Diane Sawyer’s interview, assigned under the arbitration system that Ben Sherwood had set up after he became president of ABC News in December 2010 to impose more coordination and civility in the competition for big guests. Christiane Amanpour was pushing to land him, too. Barbara had been slowing down, anyway, albeit a decade or two later than most her age. In 2004, at seventy-five, she had stepped down as co-host of 20⁄20, the TV newsmagazine she had been appearing on for a quarter-century. In 2010, she aired the last of the Oscar night specials that she had been hosting for nearly three decades.
But she was still appearing regularly on The View and hosting her 10 Most Fascinating People specials each December. There were few signs that Diane was making headway with Assad as the “Arab Spring” uprisings ousted leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen. Syria had responded to protests with crackdowns and brutality, the beginning of a long and bloody civil war.
“This is a very important moment in Syria and all of a sudden Barbara announces that she’s got Assad,” Sherwood told me. “I don’t know how it happened. I think that she knew somebody somewhere.”
Of course she did. Barbara had held an off-the-record meeting in the Mideast with Assad and his influential wife, Asma al-Assad, years earlier, and in 2008 she had gone to Syria expecting an interview with him that didn’t happen. Then, in March 2011, Barbara attended a cocktail party hosted by the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, and met the ambassador’s daughter, Sheherazad Jaafari, also known as Sherry. Then twenty-one years old, she was working as a junior press aide in Syria’s U.N. mission and, as it turned out, had a close and friendly relationship with Assad himself. Somehow, Syria then offered Barbara the interview everyone wanted.
Diane protested that the interview was supposed to be hers, but Sherwood recognized the news value of the booking. Assad, an ophthalmologist by training who had succeeded his father as president of Syria in 2000, had never before done an American television interview. So much for ABC’s new orderly system for distributing the big interviews among the top talent.
As ever, Barbara’s preparations were meticulous. Tom Nagorski, then ABC’s managing editor for international news, was enlisted to give her a crash course on Assad and Syria. He was repeatedly summoned to her office, regardless of what other world news was breaking. “I soon learned that my role—apart from sorting out the various details for the trip—would be to sit for mock interviews and play the role of Assad,” he told me.
She would use her index cards, building a stack and reordering them. “She was both remarkably thorough and insecure, I thought,” Nagorski said. The card-shuffling continued all the way to Damascus. He called it “a chess player’s vision of the interview, thinking through various questions and potential answers and counters.”
Traveling to Damascus wasn’t simple, given the impact of the civil war that was raging. Nor was it safe for journalists once they were there. Security consultants employed by ABC warned Barbara not to leave her hotel except to do the interview. When she and her entourage were in Amman, Jordan, waiting to fly to Damascus, their flight was delayed because the Jordanian airline they were flying didn’t want its pilot and crew to risk staying overnight in Syria. They took off in the morning instead.
But she ignored the warnings to stay in the hotel. In New York, Sherwood got a security alert when she headed out to shop in a souk. “The lady just did what she wanted,” he said.
“We walked around the old city doing some filming and shopping,” recalled Alexander Marquardt, a thirty-year-old ABC correspondent covering the Mideast who accompanied her. “It was right before Christmas, and she was buying presents, including a vest for Whoopi Goldberg.” At one point, she scolded him for saying too much in front of Sherry, who had been assigned as their Syrian minder. Barbara didn’t want to give Assad a heads-up on what she was going to ask him.
Ten days earlier, Sherry had sent an email to Assad’s top aides with advice for the interview, including how to respond to questions about the regime’s violence toward its own citizens.
She outlined the language he might expect to hear. “The idea of violence has been one of the major subjects brought up in every article,” she cautioned. “They use the phrases ‘The Syrian government is killing its own people,’ ‘Tanks have been used in many cities,’ ‘Airplanes have been used to suppress the peaceful demonstration,’ and ‘Security forces are criminals and bloody.’ ” Indeed, those turned out to be points Barbara pressed during the interview.
Sherry offered suggestions on how to respond.
“It is hugely important and worth mentioning that ‘mistakes’ have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organized ‘police force,’ ” she wrote in one of a series of emails later leaked by the hacker collective known as Anonymous. “American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are ‘mistakes’ done and now we are ‘fixing it.’ ”
She suggested trying to turn the tables, citing controversies in the United States. “It’s worth mentioning also what is happening now in Wall Street and the way the demonstrations are been suppressed by policemen, police dogs and beatings,” she said. The Occupy Wall Street movement had begun staging protests in September 2011. Assad could say that Syria “doesn’t have a policy to torture people,” she advised, “unlike the USA, where there are courses and schools that specialize in teaching policemen and officers how to torture.”
Barbara Walters and Bashar al-Assad sat face-to-face, almost knee-to-knee, in identical chairs carved of dark wood. The backdrop was a wall of burnished gold curtains, with a flag of Syria on a stanchion behind him. A small table held two crystal glasses of water and an ornate silver box. There was none of the on-air bonhomie that marked her interviews with Castro and Qaddafi. Afterward, when they stood side by side for a joint portrait, neither would smile.
She started with a softball. “Mr. President, you have invited us to Damascus and you have not given an interview to the American media since this crisis began. What is it you want us to know?”
Then the hardballs.
For nearly an hour, she posed the toughest questions, reordering some cards and skipping others, pursuing follow-ups on the fly. Foreign affairs scholars who had been skeptical beforehand praised her fearlessness. “Everyone who made snarky questions about Walters’ lack of qualifications to conduct this interview should be eating crow (and that includes me),” David Kenner of Foreign Policy magazine wrote in a favorable article with an insulting subhead, “Barbara Walters: Not Awful!”
“Much of the world regards you as a dictator and a tyrant,” she told Assad. “What do you say to that?
“You don’t have the support of your people. You know, sir, that many leaders in the region have been overthrown. You have seen, I am certain, the pictures [from] Egypt [of] President Mubarak in jail, pictures of, in Libya of Moammar Gadhafi killed. Are you afraid that you might be next?”
She ticked off alleged atrocities and showed him the horrific photos as evidence: A thirteen-year-old boy, arrested in April, whose body was returned to his family bearing scars of torture, his face bruised and swollen. A cartoonist who was beaten, his arms broken. A singer who wrote a song calling for Assad’s ouster, found with his throat cut.
“You have seen these pictures, have you not?” she asked as she showed them to him and to the world. “Are you remorseful?”
Assad, speaking fluent English, denied it all, calm and impassive in a dark suit and gray tie. He denied that he and his government had been involved in any wrongdoing. He expressed no guilt and no regret. “There was no command to kill or to be brutal,” he said. He disputed the news accounts by Western reporters and the investigation by a United Nations commission that concluded the Syrian government had committed torture, rape, and crimes against humanity.
He also used some of the tactics Sherry Jaafari had suggested, declaring that perhaps mistakes had been made by individuals, and countering that the United States didn’t come to this debate with clean hands. “There is a difference between having policy to crack down and between having some mistakes committed by some officials, there is a big difference,” he said. “For example, when you talk about policy it’s like what happened in Guantanamo when you have policy of torture.”
What is the biggest misperception that Americans have about what’s happening in Syria?
“OK, we don’t kill our people, nobody kill,” Assad said. “No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person.”
ABC aired the interview with Assad on December 7, 2011, starting with Good Morning America at 7 a.m. Eastern Time, then on The View, then on World News with Diane Sawyer, and finally on a special edition of Nightline. Insiders at the network noticed that Diane chose not to anchor the evening news that night; David Muir subbed for her. Her absence meant she didn’t have to introduce the exclusive interview that was supposed to have been hers.
“Good evening. Diane is on assignment tonight and we begin here with two major stories this evening,” Muir said. “Barbara Walters and her exclusive one-on-one with Syria’s embattled president, face-to-face as she asks, why the deadly crackdown? She’s right here tonight.”
A month later, Sherry sent a chatty email to Barbara.
“I applied for Columbia and hope to get accepted,” it read. “If there is any way you think you can give my application a push, I would really, really appreciate it. You did mention you knew a professor there.” She called Barbara her “adopted mother.” Two days later, Barbara did try to give her application a push in an email to Richard Wald, the former ABC executive then teaching at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
“This young woman, whose resume is attached, is the [daughter] of the Syrian Ambassador to the UN. She helped arrange my interview with Assad. She is only 21 but had his ear and his confidence,” Barbara wrote. She noted she had applied to Columbia. “She is brilliant, beautiful, speaks five languages. Anything you can do to help?”
Wald replied the next day. He had checked: She was applying not to the graduate program at the Journalism School but to the School for International Affairs. He said he would “get them to give her special attention,” although Wald told me he in fact didn’t do anything to intervene. When the emails were hacked and released by Anonymous, a furor erupted both about Barbara’s coziness with a source and about the university possibly giving special treatment for someone associated with Assad’s brutal regime. By then, Sherry had been admitted to Columbia but in the wake of the controversy decided to attend the New School instead.
Barbara released a brief written statement. “In retrospect,” she said, “I realize that this created a conflict and I regret that.”
Despite the mea culpa, it wasn’t at all clear she had regrets. She had none about landing the interview, however messy the road had been to get there. It was thirty-four years after her reputation-making interview with Fidel Castro, one that helped put her career back on track. Now Bashar al-Assad would close a record that no journalist was likely to ever break.