The Story (8 page)

In college I devoured Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Germaine Greer (Betty Friedan was already passé), H. Rap Brown, and Frantz Fanon. Like so many others, I smoked dope and experimented with cocaine and LSD, reveling in the self-absorption that was a hallmark of the boomer generation.

Music and the arts were then my passion. I spent part of my year abroad between Barnard and graduate school in Brussels and London with my half brother Jimmy, who had started producing what became some of the Rolling Stones' greatest hits. Jimmy—who would tragically die at age fifty-two of heroin-related liver failure in 1994—was a son from my father's second, brief marriage. Since we hadn't spent much time together when we were young, I loved getting to know him. Though he was only six years older, he was already establishing himself as a musical force in London, the center of the sixties music revolution.

An avid R&B drummer and composer, Jimmy had remixed what became the Spencer Davis Group's first big American success—“Gimme Some Lovin',” whose driving beat made it a megahit in 1967. When Steve Winwood broke away to form his own rock group, Traffic, Jimmy produced its albums, too, among them the rock classic
Mr. Fantasy.

Although I had enrolled at the London School of Economics, I quickly lost interest in my courses, preferring to watch Jimmy work—usually from midnight to dawn. Unlike other producers, he rarely stayed behind the glass wall separating him and the engineer from the musicians in the recording studio. When Jimmy got into the music, a friend recalled, he would abandon his giant console where tracks were mixed and appear in the studio, accompanying the musicians on drums, singing along in harmony, or adding an original sound to a track: a washboard, a whistle, a flute, a tambourine, finger cymbals, congas, castanets, and, my favorite, the cowbell that opened the Rolling Stones' classic “Honky Tonk Women.”

Eddie Kramer, Jimmy's protégé and his favorite recording engineer, said years later that my brother was a true “musical impresario,” who, like our father, knew how to bring musicians together, rehearse them 'til they dropped, and excite them about their work. Jimmy was “unstoppable,” he told an interviewer.
⁴

Jimmy was just starting to work with the Rolling Stones when I arrived to live in London. Though the reigning dean of rock today, Mick Jagger was anxious back then about bucking the prevailing trends, Jimmy told me. Friends were showering him with unsolicited, contradictory advice about what to record next. Jimmy weighed in emphatically: stick to your roots, he told Jagger. Be who you are, advice he gave everyone he loved, which I, too, would take to heart.

As much as I loved the musical scene, I knew that it would not be the focus of my life—and I missed America. So when I had a chance to apply for a full scholarship in a master's program at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, I leapt at it. (The school, too, was short of women grad students. My class had four women and fifty men.) Thanks to Princeton, I fell in love with the Middle East and journalism.

In the summer of 1972, Princeton sent me to Jerusalem to write a paper required for my degree. The topic was one of Israel's early grassroots campaigns to stop the government from building an ugly housing compound on a hilltop overlooking Jerusalem, the eastern half of which Israel had annexed after the '67 war.
⁵

My academic paper reflected none of the excitement I felt. After I finished my research in Israel, I traveled through Cyprus—Israel was then isolated from its Arab neighbors—to Cairo; Amman, Jordan; and Beirut, Lebanon. After interviewing officials and as many ordinary people as I could, since I didn't speak either Hebrew or Arabic, I was sure there would be another Arab-Israeli war—and soon. I had seen much that wasn't showing up in the newspapers. I sent an essay to the
Progressive
about a group of Israelis who called themselves “black panthers.” These young Jews from North Africa, imitating their American counterparts, were protesting Israel's discrimination against Jews from Arab lands. The magazine published it. I saw my words in print and found my calling.

Six years later, over our lunch at the Army-Navy Club, Finney told me that he was about to be the
Times
's Washington news editor—the second-ranking post in the bureau.

He admired an article I had written for the
Washington Post
about how environmentalists had used the plight of the pink-footed booby, an endangered bird that nests on Diego Garcia, to stop the expansion of the American base on that Indian Ocean island. (I was pro-booby.) Finney, a former navy officer who had served in the Philippines, knew Diego Garcia well.

He had also read some of my other freelance articles for
Science
magazine, the
New Republic
, and even my stories for National Public Radio, where I worked part-time as a national security correspondent.

I greatly admired Finney for having infuriated government officials with articles about how scientific advisers to the government had subsequently gone to work for companies seeking government contracts. Many of the 2,500 articles that carried his byline in his thirty years of reporting focused on the development of nuclear weapons, the satellite technology that guided them, and the arms race they had produced. There was nothing that John did not seem to know about the Atomic Energy Commission and nuclear proliferation, my first obsession since Las Vegas.

Despite his criticism of government, he respected Washington's institutions and the often anonymous civil servants who sustained them. “What they are doing is so thankless,” he said, reflecting an unfashionable empathy for federal officials.

Finney confessed that he enjoyed having lunch with me because, unlike most women, I did not seem to mind the permanent cloud of pipe smoke that enveloped him. A binge cigarette smoker, I liked the smell of pipe tobacco and even cigars.

Would I be interested in joining the
Times
? he asked, popping the question casually.

I tried but failed to appear equally cool. Of course!

Finney said he would recommend me to A. M. Rosenthal, the
Times
's executive editor. I shouldn't get my hopes up, he warned, but the timing
might be propitious. The paper was hunting for “qualified” women reporters, tiptoeing around the women's lawsuit. Though I was five years out of graduate school, had not attended journalism school, and had not worked full-time for a wire service or a daily regional newspaper—the traditional training grounds for
Times
reporters—I might be offered a job. I would, of course, have to spend at least six months to a year on the Metro desk in New York.

My elation evaporated. I can't do that, I told him.

“Why on earth not?” said Finney, a polite man who seemed stunned by my reluctance.

The reasons were personal, I told him. I had recently become romantically involved with someone and did not want to leave Washington, I said, carefully avoiding the man's name.

“You mean Les Aspin?” he asked. Finney had heard that I had moved into the Georgetown home of the Wisconsin Democratic congressman and Pentagon gadfly, whom I had gotten to know years earlier through my work for the
Progressive
.

“Surely you would not sacrifice a job at the
Times
because of a boyfriend?” he said, a statement more than a question.

“Oh yes I would. You can't take your typewriter home to bed with you at night.”

Finney suppressed a smile. Perhaps I was not such a radical, his eyes suggested as he tamped down a wad of tobacco in his pipe. Well, he added coyly after several puffs, perhaps we could work around that “constraint.”

“Don't discuss your living arrangements with Abe when you see him next week,” he counseled.

Finney gave me a long list of topics I was
not
to discuss with the formidable Abe Rosenthal, the brilliant journalist who had revolutionized news coverage at the
Times
but was a polarizing figure inside the paper. Abe could be “challenging,” another early mentor, Bernard Gwertzman, the
Times
's State Department reporter, had warned me.

Abe was impossible; his moods swings were a legend. He was also
smart, original, and utterly committed to the paper. He was determined to keep ideology out of the news sections. He knew, of course, that objectivity is an illusion—that every story's headline, word count, and placement reflect a judgment. Bias can be evident in the stories that the
Times
chooses to print, or print for only one edition, or delay publishing, or bury in the back of the thick Sunday paper or on Saturday, the week's least-well-read paper. Abe believed in making the news columns as impartial as possible and confining opinion to the editorial and op-ed pages, where it belonged. Violations of this ethos, however subtle or unconscious, could be punished ruthlessly.

Friends had warned me that Abe could be harsh and irascible one moment, schmaltzy the next. Nan Robertson, quoting another reporter, called him “a cross between Caligula and a Jewish mother.”

I flew to New York for the meeting, replaying my earlier conversation with Hedrick Smith, the debonair Washington bureau chief who was planning to offer me a job as a reporter for the paper's financial section, provided that Abe approved.

Would I take any available slot in Washington? Rick Smith had asked me.

“Absolutely anything.”

“How about the SEC?”

“Sure!” I said. “But remind me: What does it do exactly?”

“Well, you are willing to learn about it, aren't you?” A declaration, not a question.

In the spring of 1977, the list of “no-go” topics reverberated in my head as I paced in front of the
Times
's New York headquarters, then the fourteen-story Gothic building on West Forty-Third Street, just off Times Square.

I was
not
to discuss Congressman Aspin, my sometimes leftist views, or political activism. Above all, I was
not
to tell Abe about my participation in the Columbia University student strike of 1968, which had paralyzed the campus for months and upended the university's administration. Abe had written a notorious attack on the protesters who had occupied the office of
Columbia's president. I hadn't occupied that office, but I had been among those more than 720 antiwar students from Columbia and Barnard, its sister institution across Broadway, who had seized and occupied four other university buildings before being removed by the police.

I shall never forget the thrill I felt pushing my way for the first time through the heavy revolving glass door into the lobby of the
Times
, which would be my home for the next twenty-eight years.

Abe was on the third floor—intense, operatic, and unforgettable. A short man whose thick, black-rimmed glasses covered shrewd, lively eyes, he received me in his sitting room at the back of his office. Decorated in Japanese style, with a shoji screen and wall scrolls, the room's décor—a reflection of his time in the Tokyo bureau—was intended to convey inner peace. But it didn't.

Abe, who had won a Pulitzer for his reporting from Poland, from which he had been expelled by the Communist regime, had a honed bullshit detector.

He seemed intrigued by my Russian-Jewish father and Irish-Catholic mother. How had that worked out? he asked.

“Not well,” I replied. There was an ugly divorce that began when I was thirteen and ended when I left high school at sixteen, I told him, feeling an instant, intangible rapport.

What did I consider myself: Jewish or Catholic? he asked—his second politically incorrect question.

“Jewish, I guess,” hesitating as I thought of my mother's intense attachment to her church and my years in Catholic school. “But I'm an agnostic,” I added. “Secular, really.”

What did I think of the new Home section, which was one of several new supplements—Sports Monday, Science Tuesday, and others—that Abe and his number two, Arthur Gelb, had created to emphasize “soft news” and broaden the paper's appeal to younger readers and advertisers? The new sections, which many in the
Times
cautious bureaucracy had resisted, saved the paper.

I hadn't read the Home section often, I confessed.

If I were ever lucky enough to join the paper, Abe said ominously, I
would have to be prepared to write for
all
its sections, or at least be passingly familiar with their contents.

Why had I graduated from Barnard in absentia? he asked, approaching dangerous turf. I had studied economics overseas at an institute at the University of Brussels during my last year at Barnard, I explained, and had also worked for a firm whose only client was the European Economic Community (EEC), as the European Community was first known. My research, I babbled on, had focused on the American Selling Price system, a nasty American tariff that had raised the price of European goods made of benzenoid chemicals by as much as 172 percent in the American market.

Abe's eyes glazed over. He was clearly not riveted by details of trade negotiations in Geneva and, I suspected, financial news in general. This was fortunate, since he quickly switched topics and did not ask me why I had spent my senior year overseas rather than at Barnard. Had he asked, I would have been forced to violate a John Finney dictum and disclose that I had fled America because I was more or less on the lam.

My arrest at Fayerweather Hall in the spring of 1968 had not been my only encounter that year with law enforcement. I had been arrested twice before in antiwar protests led by Resist, whose nonviolence I preferred to the more aggressive tactics and goals of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Resist did not want to “off the pigs” of capitalist America but to disrupt the Vietnam War by peacefully encouraging draft-age men to destroy their draft cards and go to jail or flee the country. I had been given a warning after my first arrest for a sit-in at selective service headquarters in downtown New York. After the second, at the New York offices of Dow Chemical, the producers of napalm, I had been charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest for refusing to move. I had been released “on my recognizance,” which meant that I could stay out of jail while the matter was being adjudicated if I did not violate the law again.