As Bob asserted, the revolution of the 1980s changed the lives not only of Americans but of all “mankind.” That may sound like an exaggeration, but it was not. The economy of the entire planet took a turn for the better. As the decade began, Margaret Thatcher was already setting Great Britain on the road to recovery from socialist stagnation by privatizing moribund state industries, establishing a model that would be copied in varying degrees by other European countries. Deng Xiaoping was setting China on a new course from the horrors of Maoism by opening the door to capitalist investment.
But the Soviet empire was still presenting formidable challenges at the outset of the 1980s. Particularly worrisome were the inroads Communism was still making in our Western Hemisphere. And a certain segment of American opinion was still conducting a romance with the idea of Communist-style revolution. Bob and I were having a chat one morning in 1980 and agreed that we were both unsatisfied with the reporting coming out of the Caribbean and Central American region.
In Nicaragua, what had initially looked like a broad-based “Sandinista” movement to overthrow dictator Anastasio Somoza was showing signs of becoming a well-disguised Marxist coup. But it wasn’t being reported that way in the mainstream press, most particularly the New York Times, from which a good many other reporters took their cues, most particularly the foreign correspondents in New York and Washington filing dispatches to newspapers and broadcast outlets overseas. So we decided that I should go down for a close-up look.
First, I went to Jamaica, which is not a Latin country but had been of interest to us because of signs that its premier, Michael Manley, was becoming increasingly thick with Fidel Castro, the point man for Soviet imperialist designs on the Western Hemisphere. Manley was in no way ideological, but he was probably attracted by the fundamental commitment the Communists could make to small-country politicians, help in rigging elections, or eliminating them altogether, so as to gain lifetime tenure.
An election campaign was under way in which Eddie Seaga, a Jamaican of Lebanese descent whom Bob and I had met in New York, was trying to unseat Manley. Seaga’s aides, in showing me around Kingston, explained that they could tell how things were going by observing which party’s graffiti dominated in the various neighborhoods. That theory sounded a bit dubious, but it reflected the rather primitive form of democracy practiced on the island.
Seaga picked me up at my hotel for dinner at a hilltop restaurant. I noticed that his driver was keeping his foot down as we sped through the streets of Kingston. It dawned on me that I was riding with a candidate who had some reason to fear an ambush. Preelection violence had already claimed several lives.
Eddie won the election and began to purge Castro’s Cuban infiltrators from their camps in the hills. They were at a disadvantage because they didn’t speak the Jamaican English-based patois, and locals were afraid of these strange Spanish-speaking foreigners who appeared to be up to no good.
The Jamaican economy was not doing well. At the Kingston airport on my way to Panama, I noticed a remarkable number of Jamaicans with huge suitcases arriving and leaving. Smuggling was an active industry. I wondered how much was in it for Manley’s customs inspectors.
In Panama, I touched base with the U.S. Army’s Southern Command, then based in the Canal Zone, to see if the generals wanted to talk about security issues arising from the more active Soviet interest in the area. That interest had manifested itself in the setting up of a Russian Lada car distributorship at Colon on the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal. It did double duty as a KGB listening post, as was manifestly evident from all the antennae on its roof, a requirement not associated with selling cars. But the Southern Command generals were rather closemouthed about what was happening in this front of the Cold War.
They had good reason to be. Had they raised an alarm, they would almost certainly have come under attack from a leftist coterie in the U.S. Congress that included, among others, Connecticut senator Chris Dodd and Massachusetts congressman Edward Patrick Boland. Some key operatives in the Carter State Department also were taking a benign view of the leftward trend in Central America. So the Socom generals were quietly going about their business, hoping for a new administration in Washington that would give them more support. They would get one with the election of Ronald Reagan later that year.
Then I flew to Managua, Nicaragua. Marxist-Leninist posters decorated lampposts, a rather obvious indication of what kind of revolution the men who now controlled the once broad-based Sandinista directorate had in mind. The strategy of Cuban-trained Marxist Thomas Borge, who now controlled the army, and his cohorts was classical Leninism.
Pedro Chamorro, son of the La Prensa editor whose mysterious assassination precipitated the Somoza overthrow and the creation of the Sandinista directorate, had visited us in New York and had been optimistic about the transition to democracy. But not long before my visit, the Marxists had pulled off the second phase of the revolution, by seizing control of the directorate and forcing the moderates out. Nicaragua had become a Castro-Soviet satellite.
In short, there were two revolutions, as the redoubtable Shirley Christian would later write in her perceptive book about the takeover. “The first was broadly based, aiming at establishing a western-style democracy; the second was narrowly based, seeking a Marxist-Leninist state.” The second one succeeded as well.
I visited Pedro at his La Prensa office on the dusty main street of Managua. A thin young man, he was chain-smoking, obviously nervous. He told me why. A young Russian who had just become the Soviet ambassador to Nicaragua had visited him recently with a pointed message, to wit, “We’re in charge here now.” It would be only a matter of time before La Prensa was shut down. The newspaper whose editor reportedly had lost his life opposing Somoza (although the circumstances of his murder were never clearly established) would be one of the victims of the new dictatorship that succeeded Somoza.
I wrote a bylined piece about all this, scooping the reporters who were supposed to be covering Central America. I won the Daily Gleaner prize from the Inter American Press Association twice for this and other coverage of the area.
Our annoyance at the press complacency about Soviet-Cuban expansionism in Central America was heightened in 1982 when the Times printed a bylined piece by its Central American correspondent Raymond Bonner, purporting to describe a massacre in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote by Salvadoran soldiers with American advisers. It was obvious that Bonner had sources in the Cuban-sponsored insurgency.
Out of our growing annoyance at this kind of tendentious coverage, I wrote an editorial, toughened up by Bob, called “The Media’s War,” taking the New York Times to task for printing a story based entirely on the claims of the Marxists that other reporters had refused to credit. We reviewed past tendencies of Times reporters to swallow the Marxist line, including Walter Duranty’s cover-up of Stalin’s crimes in the 1930s, Herbert Matthews’ glorification of Fidel Castro in the ’50s and a piece by Sydney Schanberg, of “Killing Fields” movie fame, who had written before Cambodia fell to the murderous Khmer Rouge that life would be better for Cambodians after the meddlesome Americans left the area. And now we had Ray Bonner reporting as gospel what he had been told by Salvadoran guerrillas, a story other reporters had passed up as impossible to substantiate.
The editorial had immediate impact. I was invited to go on the PBS “MacNeil/Lehrer Report” to defend our position. The Times sent Schanberg, who unsurprisingly was fuming at our mention of him. His anger probably worked against him on television. I said that it is not uncommon for reporters to find revolutionary movements appealing out of a belief that the revolutionaries are fighting for the rights of “the people.” But unfortunately, the people often end up with fewer, not more, rights.
I could have enlarged on this point were there time enough, noting that this concern for the people is very much in the American Populist tradition, but that Soviet-style populism was very different. It had proved to be sustainable only through harsh police state methods. The revolutions in Central America were backed by the Soviets as part of their imperial designs.
In what was perhaps a bridge too far, I added that, of course, some reporters are Marxists. Schanberg, furious, challenged me to name one such reporter, but I simply remarked that Marxist beliefs aren’t uncommon: “There are college professors all over the country who call themselves Marxists.” The specific reporter I had in mind wasn’t Schanberg, but a young lady who had once covered Latin America for the Journal who, unadvisedly, had once told Dow Jones president Ray Shaw that she was a Marxist. She later left the Journal.
Whatever sympathies Sydney may have had before the Khmer Rouge takeover—and he was only one of many reporters critical of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia—I certainly didn’t think he was a Marxist in 1982, 10 years after witnessing a genocide conducted in the name of Marxism. He had seen a living hell, and I admired him for staying in Cambodia to cover this horrible chapter of history. I had not savored an emotion-laden debate on national television with someone who had experienced what Sydney had. But it was my job to defend our position.
I felt like I had been through a wringer as I walked out of the Channel 13 studio into a cold rain, wondering if I had libeled anyone. When I got to Penn Station to catch my train, there was a woman screaming into a telephone for someone to come and get her. “I don’t have any money!” she yelled. Then, in the waiting room a vagrant had attempted to slash another with a broken wine bottle. I said to myself, “My God, will this night never end?” When I finally got home, Jody assured me that I had handled things well. That was good news, even if it did come from a not altogether objective observer.
After our attack, Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal made a fact-finding trip to Central America, hosting local reporters at a dinner in San Salvador. Not long after, Ray Bonner was called back to New York and assigned to the business page. He later left the paper. We finally met as panelists at an Americas Society seminar on the Central American conflicts for New York journalists, a session where I was rather appalled at the tendency of members of the audience to indulge themselves in long speeches rather than asking intelligent questions.
Ray was remarkably amiable toward me under the circumstances, and I rather liked him. As I was leaving to catch my train, while the orators in the audience were still droning on, Ray asked me jokingly if I was going out to write another editorial. He later returned to the Times as a foreign correspondent in Asia, covering such events as attacks by environmentalists on U.S. mining companies in Indonesia. It was fairly clear that he did not sympathize with the American corporations.
An editorial I wrote in 1981 also made waves. Israel, fearing that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was shooting for a nuclear weapon by having the French build a power reactor for him at a place called Osirik, conducted a well-planned air raid and blew up the nearly completed reactor. We decided to support the Israelis, and I wrote the editorial. The State Department, of course, deplored this action, although I suspect that Reagan was secretly pleased. The Israelis who, then as today, had few friends, were denounced in the United Nations, and we were criticized for supporting this bold resort to violence.
I think our position looks better in retrospect, considering that Saddam started a war with Iran shortly afterward, used poison gas in that war and sacrificed a million young Iraqis to his megalomania during the inconclusive eight-year struggle. His attack on Kuwait a decade later had to be suppressed by an American-led coalition, and he was found to have a secret nuclear bomb project afterward. He remained a threat to his neighbors until the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ultimately brought his death. If the Israelis feared him in 1981, they had good reason.
I spent a lot of time in the 1980s indulging my continuing interest in international affairs with full encouragement from Bob. The Journal had provided me with a membership in the club atop the World Trade Center for the purpose of entertaining VIPs. In 1981, the club sent out a letter inviting members to join a tour. Leonid Brezhnev had decided that perhaps the Soviet Union’s dismal performance in international trade could be improved by hosting an international conference of World Trade Center members. The New York WTC invited club members to be part of its delegation. I thought it a good opportunity to go back to Russia without the hassle of getting a journalist visa, so I signed up as a “Dow Jones & Co. editor.”
I doubt that my little subterfuge prevented the KGB from pulling out my dossier, but the Soviets were on their best behavior and raised no objection. They even invited delegations from Israel and Hong Kong. A young Hong Kong man who owned a plastics company told me that he knew they had let the bars down entirely when they welcomed Hong Kong, the citadel of private capitalism.
Capitalists from all over the world were feted at “gala dinners” well lubricated with varieties of flavored vodka and mild Russian champagne. We were bused to the old capital, Vladimir, where a diorama in city hall depicts the sacking of the city by the Mongol Golden Horde many centuries ago. Jody, who went along, was particularly amused when some fellow passenger tried to give chewing gum to little boys hanging around our bus, only to see it snatched away by angry matrons who obviously feared we foreigners were trying to corrupt their children.
In Suzdol, where we visited an ancient monastery on June 21, we could see from our hotel window large women clad only in bikinis taking advantage of the long twilight to tend their private garden plots. Back in Moscow, one of the highlights was a party given by the Moscow Soviet (city council), which gave lie to the old myth that Communists were puritanical. The female dancers were lightly clad, and because they were Russian, their dancing was far better than anything you might see in a Las Vegas nightclub.
But alas, the façade of friendliness was paper thin. A young Jewish millionaire from Manhattan named Rudy who had entertained us all with his good humor was detained and strip-searched shortly before our departure for Helsinki from Leningrad. His offense had been to visit the suburban Moscow apartment of a female conference worker one night to get some idea of how she lived. He joined us on the plane but was shaken by the experience. His parents had suffered harsh treatment at the hands of the Nazis, and his interrogation had brought back those memories.
Our Finnair plane started taxiing even before everyone had strapped in, and a cheer went up when we left the ground. A pretty young Finnish guide met us at Helsinki Airport, saying sweetly, “I will take you to your hotel so you can wash off all that Russian dirt.” The Finns, who had fought the valiant Winter War against the Soviets in 1940 and had been threatened into uneasy neutrality at the outset of the Cold War, held no love for Russia.
I engaged in a bit of playfulness in the 1980s that was probably unwise. I was occupying my nightly trip home on the train by scribbling what I hoped might be a Cold War adventure novel. I found it relaxing to try to solve the problems of an unfolding plot, which involved an American involved in an effort by a Hungarian dissident group to wipe out the Soviet politburo with a bomb from a hijacked Soviet plane during a May Day flyover. One night, at a party given by the Chinese military mission to the United Nations in New York, I met a young Russian lieutenant colonel named Nicolai. I saw him as a possible source for Red Army lore for my book and perhaps a broader understanding of Russia that would aid my writing for the Journal, so I invited him to lunch at the WTC Club.
Looking around at the gleaming art deco furnishings, he muttered that I had obviously picked a place that would impress a poor Russian. But he softened up over lunch, and we had a good chat. He told me he was responsible for communications between the New York mission and the relay station in Cuba that linked New York with Moscow. I assumed that meant he was KGB.
Nicolai apparently assumed that I doubled as a CIA agent. Since Russian journalists overseas worked for the KGB, Russians ascribed the same dual role to Americans. Perhaps I was trying to open some sort of back channel. So Jody and I were invited to the next party of the Russian mission. There, I found myself the center of some interest. In what seemed like a carefully choreographed gavotte, a Russian brigadier approached and asked me about the prospects for greater trade between our two countries. I gave a polite answer citing the difficulty of extending credit lines, avoiding the real answer, that the Soviets didn’t make anything Americans would want to buy.
Then, the top-ranking officer, an admiral, came up to deplore the arms race, asking why we couldn’t freeze arms at the present level. Jody butted in to answer, “Because you have more than we do.” I, more diplomatically, said that the terms would have to include inspection on demand. I enjoyed this brief interlude playing arms and trade negotiator, but when Nicolai came to the office one day with a present (a book) and wanted to know what I could tell him further about the problems of the Abrams tank mentioned in a Journal story, I decided to break off the contact, lest I get a visit from the FBI wondering what the hell I was up to. I would have, of course, said, “I’m just doing my job,” and it would have been at least partly true.
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick invited Jody and me to dinner at her Waldorf Tower residence in July 1983 to honor Armando Valladares, the Cuban poet who had just been released after 22 years in prison for defying Fidel Castro. He would write a best-selling book, “Against All Hope,” about the brutality he suffered. We were pleased to be in the company of such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Time magazine editor Henry Grunwald. At one point, I expressed puzzlement about why some U.S. senators were opposing U.S. efforts to combat the Soviet penetration of Central America, when surely they were “loyal Americans.”
“I wouldn’t assume that,” the ambassador snapped back. I felt like I was being chastised for talking baby talk. She was a tough lady and good to have on our side in the Cold War.
Speaking of tough, Jody and I were in Waterville, Ireland, once for a European Union conference and were spending an evening in a pub drinking Guinness with some of our Irish hosts. After a round of “Rose of Tralee,” Ted Smythe, an Irish diplomat, told us that the reason there were so many excited young lads hanging around outside was that the Waterville Gaelic football team was in the next room celebrating their victory in a national championship match. He asked if we would like to have a peek at the celebration, so we scuttled past the bar and through the small door to look in on them. These hard-looking men were sitting at a long table with their women, knocking back Irish whisky. They seemed grim. “That’s the way they celebrate,” Ted whispered. We decided it was best not to disturb them.
The European Union conference was about the continuing evolution of the European community toward a single market. That process would continue steadily even to the point of most members sharing a single currency. It was always gratifying to watch this process unfold on a continent that had known so much bloodshed and sorrow over the centuries. Those were hopeful times for Europe. The Cold War was creating a lot of anxieties in Europe and America, but the common threat from the Soviets was helping forward-looking leaders forge closer ties between the United States and Europe and also fostered a common goal by the Germans and French to end their long history of bloody conflict and forge a unified Europe with open borders and the free movement of people. That now is an almost-completed project, although with some continuing glitches, of major historic importance.