The Story (10 page)

While the
Times
was in the disclosure business, it was institutionally averse back then to invading the private space of even the very public people it covered. The paper tended to be even more discreet about its own sexual and ethical lapses. The
Times
, of course, had conflict-of-interest and nepotism rules, often haphazardly enforced, almost invariably at the expense of women. Editors and other supervisors, for instance, were not supposed to fraternize with reporters or those they supervised. But a succession of senior editors often disregarded this rule: editors' dalliances with secretaries, reporters, and other subordinates were well known among the staff.

Rick Smith's decision to assign me to the SEC, I learned, was based not only on a fortuitous opening in the department but also on a need to ensure that I would not be covering national security, politics, or other areas of potential conflict-of-interest with Les Aspin. Although I had been writing about these topics long before I was romantically involved with him, I agreed reluctantly not to write about them for the
Times
as long as Les and I were living together.

The
Times
was no monastery. But male journalists were rarely, if ever, scrutinized as closely as women were. While my male colleagues would often boast about having cultivated or slept with the secretaries and assistants of powerful men they covered, women reporters who were suspected of sleeping with their sources, or who openly socialized with them, were the objects of vicious gossip.
Spy
magazine, a forerunner of irresponsible internet bloggers, profited from the fascination with the
Times
and those who worked for it. The fact that I was living with a congressman was of interest, not to mention resentment in some quarters of the paper. Being linked with other powerful men whose friendship I enjoyed magnified that interest. But prior to my romance with Les and even after it, contrary to the many stories in
Spy
and other gossips, most of the men with
whom I was romantically involved were fellow journalists, none of whom I worked for.

To ward off gossip, I tried to avoid discussing Les at the office. But gossip about us continued. What most of my colleagues did not know was that after only a year at the paper, my relationship with him was quietly unraveling.

Long before I began dating Les, I had admired him. A Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University who had been one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's “whiz kids” in the 1960s, he had a small but close-knit group of national security–obsessed friends—among them, Les Gelb, who soon became my colleague and the chief national security analyst for the
Times
; Frank Wisner, a gifted foreign service officer who served as ambassador in both Cairo and New Delhi, India; Mort Halperin, a brilliant defense and policy analyst; and Richard Holbrooke, then an assistant secretary of state for Asia. Most of them had risked their careers by opposing the escalation of the war in Vietnam, which they had initially supported.

Les had been married for nearly a decade. The marriage ended for reasons that he wouldn't, or couldn't, ever explain. We had started dating a few months after his separation.

We had much in common, apart from our Wisconsin connection. We both cared deeply about national defense and foreign policy, and we both wanted to make a difference. Elected in 1970 on a recount by only a few votes from a southern Wisconsin district, Les had been influential on defense issues since he had won his seat at the age of thirty-two. Because the First District was conservative and nominally Republican, he had to spend much of his time raising money and shoring up his political base. This meant returning to his district almost every weekend.

Early in our relationship, which began before I joined the
Times
, I accompanied him occasionally on trips to Kenosha. During the difficult '76 campaign, I spent nearly a month with him in Wisconsin, watching election politics from a vantage experienced by few journalists.

Campaigning was grueling. Whatever glamour it held for me soon
dissipated as I watched Les endure the biannual ritual. I would help his staff hand out campaign literature while he schmoozed at farms, factories, schools, shopping malls, union halls, and the endless meetings of private voluntary organizations crucial to American democracy. The campaign staff was almost always with us. On those rare fall nights when we weren't eating chicken at a Rotary Club dinner, we would drive from his house on Lake Beulah, where he had learned to sail, to Lake Geneva for a late-night dinner at the Playboy Club. He was not much of a drinker: one gin and tonic, heavy on the tonic, was a big night. But he loved to dance, which, given my family background, was a godsend. Other men may have enjoyed ogling the bunnies. Not Les.

Work never seemed to end, a constant source of friction between us. While he knew how important my work was to me, Les was invariably crestfallen when I canceled a dinner or vacation because of breaking news. Though he rarely complained, his quiet disappointment was more painful than anything he could have said. I felt increasingly guilty: it was becoming obvious that I valued my job more than spending time with him, and that my relationship with this kind, intelligent man was in trouble.

It wasn't just the age gap between us—a decade did not seem all that significant. Rather, I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the role of congressional wife-in-training—with being the “other half” of a very public figure. A legislator's life is often thankless. Social life in Washington revolves around working dinners. Impromptu votes at all hours require one to be on the House floor, often late at night. Weekends are spent in the district or on the phone raising money.

I resented the lack of privacy. Many of Les's normally considerate constituents had little compunction about calling his home at any hour, on weekends or holidays, with complaints about government or not having gotten some government service.

Although I was breaking news on my SEC and banking beat, I missed covering national security. In summer, I would accompany Les on trips to Colorado to attend the Aspen Strategy Group, a deliberately nonpartisan group of mostly men, and an occasional woman, who would spend a week debating a national security issue in the morning and climbing mountains
or biking in the afternoon. The Strategy Group was my definition of heaven, and topics ranged from how best to secure oil supplies in the Persian Gulf to prospects for the reunification of Germany. I yearned to present a paper there myself one day, which I did eventually.

Our mutual interest in national security, our friends, and trips to venues like Aspen kept my relationship with Les intact longer than it should have been. Another source of solace, and common bond, was Junket, a rescue mutt, mostly sheepdog. Junket, named for those infamous congressional outings to exotic places financed by corporations and other lobbyists, normally slept under Les's desk at the office and under the bed at home. He rarely left Les's side when he was in Washington. On weekends when Les was in Kenosha, Junket was my ward, accompanying me to the Washington bureau and virtually every other place I went.

Given my unpredictable hours at the paper, even Junket was almost more than I could handle. It was becoming clear to me that I would never have children or possibly a fulfilling marriage. But I was consumed by journalism, so that prospect did not trouble me. As my unmarried women friends watched their biological clocks anxiously, I watched deadlines. Where was my maternal instinct? I sometimes wondered. “Missing in action,” Les would reply.

Though he never pressured me, I sensed that Les wanted more than I could give. As we began leading effectively separate lives, I was spending more and more time with my friends from the Washington bureau and presidential appointees our own age who worked on Jimmy Carter's White House staff or as equally coveted “deputies” of his agencies. Many of those friends were our sources, and vice versa. And some of my friends, Arthur Sulzberger and Steve Rattner in particular, disliked Les, whose reserve they mistook for indifference.

There was never a quarrel—just a calm but painful discussion. Les was sad; so was I. Junket refused to emerge from under the bed. We agreed to spend some “time apart” to see how we felt, but both of us knew that I was not coming back.
¹

Les and I remained close. We celebrated when he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee in 1985, and grieved when Junket
died in 1989. I never stopped admiring his defense expertise and centrist, pragmatic, nonideological approach to military matters, which greatly influenced my own views and thinking about national security and foreign policy. Though his opposition to Vietnam had brought him to Congress, he played a key role in convincing his fellow House members to support President George H. W. Bush's 1991 invasion of Iraq, an unpopular stance among many fellow Democrats. When he became President Clinton's defense secretary in 1993, he told me that he looked forward to restructuring the defense sector in the aftermath of the Cold War. But his tenure as secretary was brief. The loss of American lives in Somalia in 1993 due to inadequate military support, which critics blamed on him, prompted his resignation, at Clinton's request. A profound blow, Les never recovered from losing the job he had wanted for so long. Having struggled for years with a congenital heart ailment, he died of a stroke in 1995, at age fifty-six. I miss him still.

“Gamal!” I yelled.

The air-conditioning had gone off again. And the lights, of course. There was no telling how long the power outage would last. The screen of my computer, installed soon after I had arrived in July 1983 as chief of the Cairo bureau, went black. I lost yet again much of what I had been writing and neglected to save.

Journalism in Cairo in the early 1980s was challenging. But I loved it. Most of the time. The first woman to cover most of the Arab world for the
Times
, I was thrilled with the assignment. What did a few blackouts matter? Or taking Pepto-Bismol with every meal?

Gamal Mohieddin, who had been the
Times
's office manager for thirty years by the time I arrived, entered my blacked-out office with two cups of steaming tea and a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes. My latest effort to quit smoking was failing: in lieu of Marlboros, I smoked Gamal's Cleopatras, telling myself that bumming cigarettes didn't count and wouldn't kill me.

“You might as well quit,” he said, referring not to my smoking but to my work. “It's our transformer. We won't have power for hours.” A dignified
man with an infectious smile, Gamal specialized in
sabr
. The word meant “patience,” a virtue I lacked.

Another of those infuriating words was
bukra
—“tomorrow.” “
Bukra fil mish-mish
,” my Arabic instructor had taught me: “Tomorrow there will be apricot blossoms.” Which meant that something you needed yesterday would probably remain unavailable.
Mishmumkin
, or “impossible,” was more definitive. It meant that the permission needed to visit a project, an official, or anything connected with the Egyptian military would not be granted. But the most infuriating staple word was
insha'allah
, or “God willing.”

Would the transformer be fixed by Monday? I asked Gamal. “
Insha'allah
,” he sighed.

We laughed and lit cigarettes. Gamal was a marvel, as imperturbable as the Nile, as full of humor and forbearing as Egypt itself. A Nubian whose family came originally from the Sudan, he was tall, thin, and darker than the average Egyptian. Since it was a weekend, he was wearing his white galabiya, the traditional loose-fitting robe that many Egyptian men wear at home and prefer to the Western-style shirts and jackets that officials wear to work. Gamal's was always snow-white and freshly starched and ironed.

Like many Egyptians, he was quietly but fiercely patriotic. If he had trouble accepting the fact that the
Times
had appointed a relatively young woman as his boss, I never felt it. He sensed that I loved Egypt and was endlessly curious about it, which was all that seemed to matter.

Our tea break was interrupted by Charles Richards, the
Financial Times
correspondent, with whom the
Times
shared its dilapidated office. The normally unflappable Charles was agitated. Who did we think had carried out the bombings in Beirut?

Gamal and I looked at each other. What bombings?

Charles's words tumbled out: there had been two huge explosions in Beirut at the compounds of the French and American “peacekeepers,” a contingent of 1,500 American soldiers, mostly US Marines, who were trying to keep a nonexistent peace in Lebanon. Many were dead or wounded. There had been no attribution. Was this the work of the mysterious Islamic Jihad (long before
jihad
became a familiar household term), which in April
had claimed responsibility for a car bomb at the US Embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-two people, seventeen of them American citizens? Was Iran, Islamic Jihad's suspected host, to blame? Or Syria? Or Iraq? Or all, or none of them?

I tried phoning Tom Friedman, then the
Times
bureau chief in Beirut, but the lines were swamped. Tom would clearly need some help if the attack was as bad as Charles reported. Then the foreign desk called. Could I get to Lebanon?

“Tell them no,” Gamal said. “Beirut airport is closed.”

“I'll drive,” I replied.

“From Cairo?” Gamal asked, only semiaccustomed to my often unorthodox solutions to obstacles.

No, from Israel, whose troops were still occupying parts of Lebanon. I would take the evening flight that had linked Cairo and Tel Aviv since Egypt and Israel made a cold peace in 1979. Next, I'd find an Israeli taxi that could get me north to the Lebanese border, and then a Lebanese driver willing to drive me still farther to Beirut from “Dixie,” as journalists called Israel when we worked in Arab countries. The trip would probably take most of the night (and several hundred dollars in cash). Gamal rolled his eyes, handed me another Cleopatra, and started booking a flight and lining up taxis.