Buying the Night Flight (56 page)

But after he effectively won the first round of the elections that prescient Sunday, I awoke on Monday morning in Moscow to the first astonishing piece of news: he had put the maverick (and honest) young General Alexander Lebed in charge of security. Tuesday he had gotten rid of the hated and corrupt Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. Wednesday he had purged all the dacha hangers-on, with their personal militias.... What a week!

But it was important mostly because, after Yeltsin won the second round on July 3, through an election process that, after all, did indeed "work" in Russia --- Yeltsin's acts had bought time for Russia. By the next election, the old communists would be so greatly diminished in numbers that they would be an unimportant minority. A true "New Russia" could emerge, somewhat democratic, if in its own way, and economically more modern.

***

Bosnia remained more complex. When I got to Sarajevo that July and saw that willfully destroyed city, I again was heartsick. But I was even more heartsick to see that our excellent troops had been sent there essentially to do nothing -- and leave. Without arresting war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, those mass murderers up in Pale, we were actually
recognizing and legitimizing
their mass murder. We would leave in December, and they would stay, all because Washington had the power, but, out of incompetent analysis and lack of will and courage, refused to do what was necessary to punish the aggressors and to let somebody "win."

I had been blessed to be able to grapple first-handedly with the themes of the twentieth century. Now I was beginning to see
the important new theme
in the world, and I feared for the twenty-first century in a world where America, the only truly "modern" country, was so easily and eagerly relinquishing its leadership.

But as deeply as Bosnia has moved me, when I now think of the rest of the world -- and what has happened in my lifetime -- I must say that I am not pessimistic. Two totalitarian systems and philosophies, those of Germany and the Soviet Union, both stand defeated by democratic nations and ideas. The Middle East is finally headed toward the peace between Israel and the Palestinians that so many of us prayed for. Latin America has essentially made the pivotal decision in favor of democracy and civil societies. Formerly impoverished, the Asian nations of the Pacific Rim shine as the economic stars in the global galaxy. Africa remains troubled, but its people no longer accept being poor and uneducated.

Insofar as the future is concerned, it does not seem very difficult to predict. The challenges for the developed world are: the danger of disintegration and decomposition of the nation-state and of civic society; the de-culturization of Western and other societies; and the weakening of the bonds that unite us -- particularly the irreplaceable bond of citizenship. All of these trends and tendencies span cultures and regions and are a direct result of the weakening of the power centers throughout the rest of the world. Therefore, the next battle, as I outlined in my book,
Americans No
More: The Death of Citizenship,
will surely be the fight for coherence within societies, and the next struggle will involve finding the answer to the pressing question "Who Belongs Where?"

When I was just starting out as a young correspondent, you see, I innocently thought that the world would improve in my lifetime -- in fact, with the accustomed immodesty of youth, I
knew
that it would inevitably get better. Now I opt philosophically with my late friend, the great and good doyen of Chicago society, Harriet Welling, who died in the late 1980s, much too early, at the age of ninety-four. During her life she repeatedly told her daughter, "I want to live long enough to see how it turns out." But before she died, she edited herself down. "I know now that it won't turn out," she said, "it will just keep going."

At times, of course, I tried to analyze why I had taken such a different road. During the 1990s, at the lovely wedding of the son of my two brilliant diplomatic friends, Phyllis and Robert Oakley, I had a gratifying conversation with an old friend of theirs.

"You are lucky to have a burning passion," she told me, as we chatted over champagne, "because you focus everything on that, and everything in your life falls into place. You have no doubts." A pause. "I had that when I was acting... " she said then. "But then I married and had children." I interjected, for some reason confiding in the perceived anonymity of strangers, that, "I have always felt that I was really doing something vaguely wrong." (Read: I have never done what my mother seemed to want me to do.)

She shook her head with disapproval. "That's a bad use of your time," she said. "You're lucky, you focused, look what you've created." She was relentless.

"I only know that I've done certain things, partly out of a moral or professional, compulsion, but more often just simply because I loved doing them," I said honestly. "But that passion --all that comes with a very real price tag. You have to exclude everything else, and turn your back on things that are worth a very great deal, like lasting love, like children, like the joys of everyday life."

Now she simply ignored my protestations. "A person like you has a lot of emotion," she went on, as I began to wonder again who really
had
sent her: the Oracle at Delphi, perhaps? "If you had gotten married, and had children, that emotion would have all been used up there."

This odd and unexpected conversation was making me thoughtful, even a little uneasy. "All I know," I finally said, "is that I'm very happy when I can get up in the morning and write -- and I'm very discontented when my days are just nibbled away. I get real crabby. You see, I like to feel at one with the world: I like the word 'affinity,' or knowing what you specially love and what really fascinates you. Whenever students ask me for advice, I always tell them I have only one piece of advice: 'Follow what you love.'"

Then the wedding couple arrived and the conversation ended.

That day reminded me, too, of the time in 1985 when I was asked by my hostess if I would drive Clare Booth Luce to a dinner that night. I was delighted. The tall, lithe, still-beautiful figure in a long swirling dress that made her seem even more romantic than she already was -- even at eighty-two -- was waiting in front of the Watergate. And from the moment she got into my tiny ancient red Fiat sports car, she was not discussing things, much less conversing, but peremptorily telling me things. In fact, I could not even get in a question, much less a comment.

Finally, this uniquely accomplished woman -- she had "only" been a congresswoman, playwright, ambassador, wife of the great twentieth-century publisher Henry Luce, newspaper writer, mother, conservative philosopher -- looked at me with an oddly searching look and said bluntly, "You did it right."

This time I was so startled, and so in disagreement, that I dared to remonstrate with her, even going so far as to say "Mrs. Luce, please.... "

Still lodged to the point of immobility in my pitiful but adorable car, Mrs. Luce raised her delicate iron hand. (Believe me, one could be forgiven if one mistook that hand for Napoleon's, pointing his troops toward Warsaw.) And so, like any sensible person, I stopped talking. "You did it right," she repeated. Appropriate silence still reigning on my part. "You did one thing," she said, "and you did it well." Pause. We continued in my middle-aged Fiat down Connecticut Avenue.

"I ... could have been a great playwright," she said, her voice different now, softer, but still also oddly defiant. Then she repeated it again, in a slightly louder voice, "I could have been a great playwright." in fact, on that half-hour trip, she repeated that same sentence no fewer than five times. Once we reached our dinner party, she held court and never spoke to me again.

I fervently disagreed with her -- I had always dreamed of the "perfect" woman or man, the person who did everything -- but I had listened carefully, since, in fact, we can never really know.

"Choices," we say to young women, "that's what it's all about." Well, in part.... We have given the younger generation of women the absurd and impossible idea that if they make the "right choices" they can "have everything," when not one living soul of us actually knows what "everything" is. But, is it really about choices? Or is it about knowing what we truly love and then following it dementedly?

***

On the turn of the century, at midnight January 1, 2000, I celebrated surviving the twentieth century with dear friends at the Cosmos Club in Washington, reminding myself of Kierkegaard's cogent warning that, "One can only understand life backwards, but one must live forwards."

In fact, this evening of celebration and sentimental journeying was in itself an event, which reminded me of how things had changed since that long ago day when I walked into the old
Chicago Daily
News
building. Now, I had also become the first woman member in that lovely club, after it experienced a long and bitter fight over admitting women -- My, what trouble and mischief we innocent women have been causing the world, and most of it during my lifetime!

The year 1999 had been a busy one for me: a sentimental return trip to Central America, after the wars were over; an exclusive interview in Brussels with
NATO
Supreme Commander, General Wesley K. Clark; honorary degrees from Notre Dame College in Cleveland and from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois; a wonderful friends' reunion at our old family lake cabin in Wisconsin; interviews with the presidents of Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Croatia, and Macedonia; speeches in London on the terrorism at the American Bar Association conference and on Fidel Castro (yet again!) for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington.

In terms of my work, I was trying to dig deeper -- and at the same time, to work in ever expanding concentric circles -- and to ask, not only what was happening in the world, but how and why? The twentieth century that I had covered had been a century of the inspiration of equality and of the expectation of development for all peoples -- the twenty-first century would either witness successful institutionalizations of all that obsession for equality, or it could become a dark century of ethnic wars and genocide.

Thus, I was now determined to detail -- and in terms of national psychology, as well as in the more traditional terms of politics and economics -- the countries that were "working." The Omans, the Tunisias, the Taiwans, the Singapores, the Botswanas of the world! By now, we had real models; we knew what worked; there was really no excuse for excuses any more. It was also gratifying, but often in a sad kind of way, to see that so much of what we correspondents had seen and described as we covered stories from the inside out, had turned out to be true. When, for instance, I went to the
UN
again, in the fall of 2000, and talked to the peacekeeping operations officials, they fully and publicly admitted how much "evil" they had done with their stubborn "neutralist" refusal to distinguish between aggressor and victim in the poor Bosnias and Rwandas they were sent out to "protect." All I could think, again sadly enough, was that at least my conscience was clear, since I had desperately done everything within my power, and at considerable personal risk, to inform people of the dangers.

In many new ways, I seemed somehow to have reached that "center" that the great writer Jorge Luis Borges mentioned at dinner during an unforgettable evening with him in Buenos Aires in 1974. I had the oddest feeling that I had somehow made my way through the maze of life and that I now sat in the middle of a surprising calm, finally knowing where I was and maybe even what I was.

By then, of course, I was worried about foreign correspondence: about my insane, wonderful and creative profession. "We correspondents could go anywhere we pleased," the great Ernie Pyle had written, "being gifted and chosen characters." But now I was worried that so many of those gifted and chosen characters were being killed in action in inordinate numbers -- 1994 was the bloodiest year in history for our profession. I worried about newspapers reducing overseas coverage, about all the glib talk about the world's becoming a "global village" (when, in fact, it is going the other way), and about the "information network" that will make us all instant brothers and sisters (when the threats inherent in the info-revolution are actually pushing many peoples back to combative ethnicities), and about so many places becoming so dangerous, with correspondents targeted so deliberately that journalists are no longer even "there" to record events (the Algerian civil war was one of the worst examples of this).

Meanwhile, however, thoughtful people were also beginning to affirm, in a new protest, that far from becoming fossils of a more romantic era, foreign correspondents are actually now more important than ever! As Dean Peter Krogh, of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service phrased it in his retirement speech in the spring of 1995: "In an age of real-time, multimedia, interactive forms of communications, there is a tendency to declare obsolete (or at least dispensable) the diplomat and the foreign correspondent in the field. We still do so at our peril. The myriad forms of instantaneous communication threaten to substitute immediacy for insight, reaction for reflection, sentiment for judgment, hyperbole for reality, and deniability for integrity."

As Peter spoke that day, I again pondered the incredible percentage of our information about the world that we get from that happy, scrappy, crazy, intellectual, foolish, endangered band of brothers -- and now some sisters -- roaming about "out there," abnormally happy, uniquely challenged, and outrageously hopeful about life. Ninety percent?