Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  When they first expanded the original hole, Arnold and his men cut huge blocks of ice that they hitched to the back of a truck to pull them out of the water. Each new block they moved convinced them that they had created a most inefficient system. When Geoff nearly fell into the icy waters while trying to lasso a rope around an ice block, Malik and Arnold realized they had seen enough. Malik started cutting much smaller chunks of ice, pushing them under the frozen ledge with the long aluminum shaft of a light harpoon used for seal hunting. Now, it took just minutes to open up a new hole. There were no trucks and no ropes, just a few Eskimos with chain saws and poles.

  The Eskimos walked a hundred feet farther, ready to do it again. Malik paced off the dimensions of the new hole. He and Arnold sawed through the perimeter of the rectangle Malik had marked with the sole of his sealskin mukluks. Then they cut the floating island of ice into pieces small enough for one man to easily shove under the edge of the surrounding rim. The Eskimos improved with practice. Each new hole took less time to cut than the one before.

  But the whales would not move. They stayed in the first hole, the one they knew. Malik thought the activity at the original hole kept them from moving on. He asked people to move away from the old holes to see what the whales would do without any humans to lure them. None of the media moved. Like others, CBS cameraman Bob Dunn nodded his head agreeably and said, “Sure,” but he didn’t budge. Malik did not understand. Why did he say he would leave and then not move?

  Even though each of the networks had hours of whale footage by Monday, October 17, the video of the whales was just too compelling. Reporters always had to chase their subjects. Now, their cameras, microphones, and pens could take all the time in the world recording the magnificent, if not tragic images of three glorious whales trapped in tiny holes. After traveling so far to see them, it was impossible to get up and leave.

  Everyone’s footage was so equally spectacular, the cameraman joked they were on the fast track to the first collective Emmy Award for television news photography. The conditions were so perfect, nobody could lose. Even I took great pictures. As with the fully automatic 35-millimeter cameras sold since the start of the decade, all you had to do was “focus and shoot.”

  The pictures transmitted back to the Lower 48 were so consistently stunning, the networks kept wanting more. The better the video, the more of it the networks aired. The more they aired, the more enthralled the public became. The more enthralled the public became, the more pressure was put on the rescuers to save the whales. Almost as fast as the story broke, the rescue was controlled by a force beyond anyone’s control, the force of collective human fascination. Operation Breakout was on autopilot, the first “focus and shoot” story of the television era.

  When the biggest event in Barrow’s history broke, the town’s top leader was nowhere to be found. The North Slope Mayor, George Ahmaogak, left town a week earlier, before the whales were national news, to attend an Alaska Federation of Natives meeting. But when the meeting ended and Barrow was the center of the world, the mayor didn’t come back. For days, no one knew where he was or when he would return.

  All the attention must have frightened the beleaguered mayor. George Ahmaogak was embroiled in controversy over more than the allegations of drinking and domestic violence. Not only was the coverage of the whale story on autopilot during the rescue’s early days, so was Barrow. It might not have had an official leader during those critical early days, but it still had its continued responsibilities. Arnold Brower called Dan Fauske, the North Slope director of finance. In the mayor’s absence, Fauske was the only person authorized to tap the borough’s treasury. He asked Fauske for money to feed his hungry men. Fauske planned the borough’s $200-million annual budget. Surely the borough could afford a few hundred dollars for doughnuts and coffee. Fauske agreed.

  Soon all the town’s unexpected burdens fell into Fauske’s shoulders. Randy Crosby called from Search and Rescue wanting more fuel for his helicopters. Since Saturday, October 15, the two SAR helicopters had been providing the media with nonstop shuttle service to and from the whale sight. Crosby had no idea what he was getting his department into when he agreed to give the NBC crew a free flight out to the whales. All the other reporters asked for equal treatment.

  In 1975, Fauske traded in the fertile rolling hills of western Iowa for the bleak white tundra of Barrow. He thought it would be a neat way to spend his summer before college. It was an exciting time. The Prudhoe Bay oil fields were starting to boom and so was Barrow. Fauske earned thirty dollars an hour delivering water he drilled through ten feet of ice in one of the thousands of frozen lakes on the tundra just outside Barrow. Things were so good, Fauske never showed up for freshman orientation.

  The Inuits saw Fauske as the one man who could help them make sense of their immense new oil wealth. He was white and smart, and he loved Barrow. In one of the best bargains they would ever strike, the Eskimos agreed to pay for Fauske’s college degree in exchange for his promise to come back and run the borough’s finances. When he returned from Gonzaga University, Fauske quickly whipped the North Slope Borough into financial shape. He not only raised more than a billion dollars to finance Barrow’s massive capital improvements program, his strict management also earned Barrow the highest bond rating in the country.

  Fauske agreed to reimburse Randy Crosby’s excess fuel costs but saw a financial nightmare on the horizon if he failed to crack down right away. Unable to reach him any other way, Fauske showed up at Ron Morris’s Tuesday morning meeting to tell him he did not have the authority to spend Barrow money without his approval. Morris told him all his costs would be reimbursed.

  “By who?” Fauske demanded.

  “The U.S. government,” Morris unconvincingly answered. Fauske knew a vague answer when he heard one, and he knew of nothing more vague than the “U.S. government.”

  Randy Crosby almost wished Fauske refused him more fuel. Maybe then he could get his hangar back from the television cameramen and technicians who had taken it over. While waiting for free flights out to the whales, the dozens of reporters and technicians lounging around drank his free coffee and ate his free doughnuts. They looked like raffish students at a sit-in.

  One of them spotted a basketball rim behind one of the parked helicopters. They started playing pick-up games using a dirty mechanics rag in place of a ball. Randy was glad to see them occupied.

  “Just be careful,” Randy pleaded, knowing he was at their mercy.

  “Watch that rag,” he told people who obviously weren’t listening. “Unless you all got four hundred thousand dollars for a new engine, don’t let it fall into the intake vent.”

  “Sure,” they said. “We’re always careful.”

  Colonel Carroll thought he was being careful, too. He tried to keep the media as far away from his Prudhoe Bay operation as he could. The hoverbarge operation was going poorly, and he did not want the hole rescue to bog down because of a few problems. He knew that the media could kill the story just as quickly as they created it. By Monday night, the 17th, the hoverbarge was only three hundred yards further from where it started the day. What should he tell the President the next day? Should he say that the operation was a disaster? He needed someone to talk to.

  At 5 A.M., Tuesday morning, Bonnie Mersinger phoned from the White House to start making arrangements for the president’s call. She was surprised to find the colonel wide awake. They had spoken just a few hours earlier and she was exhausted. What could possibly give the intriguing colonel so much energy, she asked herself. The slight breakthrough she thought she made with him the night seemed gone. Colonel Carroll was back to his formal self. He wanted to continue their conversation but he was too busy. Either it would happen some other time, or it wouldn’t happen at all.

  In just a few minutes, Bonnie told Carroll, Marlin Fitzwater would announce the president’s schedule for the day. She asked him for four to six minutes around 3 P.M., Washington time. As the hour for the talk
with his commander-in-chief drew near, the colonel displayed considerably less bravado than he had the night before. He was a nervous wreck and Bonnie loved it.

  “Whenever you want me, why you just say so,” he said, trying to draw on sapped confidence. She told him to stay in close touch. He would speak with several layers of White House bureaucracy before actually talking to “The Gipper.” The first layer, the White House Communication Agency, was responsible for providing all the president’s communication needs. The secretive office was manned by elite, highly trained Army, Navy, and Marine officers of the White House Signal Corps. A Signal Corps officer asked the colonel whether the National Guard would need the phone line they were using. For every presidential call, the Signal Corps wanted to establish control over a line several hours in advance. The colonel checked with Mike Haller, his press officer, who jokingly offered his gracious assent to the commander-in-chief’s use of it until lunch.

  After “Signal” secured the line, Bonnie called back to verify information for a fact sheet the president would use during his conversation with the colonel. Bonnie asked Colonel Carroll what kinds of questions the president should ask him. It was important the president sound up-to-date since the press office would release an audiotape and transcript of the call.

  At first, the fuss over a simple phone call seemed absurd to Carroll. But respect soon took the place of amusement. He learned that when it comes to the president’s communications, no detail was too small. Besides, as long as the endless preparations gave him an excuse to talk to Bonnie, he had no objections. Bonnie asked the colonel about the principal characters in the rescue. She went through her list of people and organizations.

  “What about the environmentalists?” she asked.

  “It’s Greenpeace,” Carroll said.

  When he didn’t add anything disparaging, Bonnie sighed in relief. The last thing she wanted was to hear the colonel start shooting off his mouth against environmentalists when the president was finally starting to care about them. Bonnie had purposely designed this phone call not to appear overtly political. She didn’t say anything directly. She just prayed the colonel would not make President Reagan look foolish. Bonnie had completed her advance work. She told Carroll that the next time they spoke would be after the president’s call. Once the White House Signal Corps tapped into the phone line, they took control.

  Colonel Carroll was in the cafeteria drinking coffee when the call came in from Washington. An ARCO secretary shouted his name.

  “Colonel Carroll,” she cried. “The White House is on the line!”

  “I’ll be right back, the president wants to have a word with me,” the colonel deadpanned to the nonplussed guardsman sitting next to him. He picked up the receiver in his cubicle and said, “This is Colonel Tom Carroll speaking.”

  “This is White House Signal. Please hold for the president.”

  A few moments later, at 3:03 P.M. Washington time, an unmistakable voice came on the line. “Colonel Carroll?”

  For a brief second, the colonel froze. His heart stopped beating and his mouth turned cotton dry. Could it really be Ronald Reagan—the president of the United States—who just asked for him by name?

  “Yes, sir,” said the colonel, now sitting straight and nervous in his chair.

  “This is Ronald Reagan.”

  “It’s a pleasure, sir.”

  “Well, I’m just calling to tell you how much I’m impressed by all that you are doing up there in this effort on the whales and to get an on-site report on the rescue effort.”

  “Very good, sir,” the colonel responded. “There are a tremendous amount of people up here who appreciate the fact that you’ve taken time from your schedule to call.” The president politely asked Carroll to dispense with the obsequious supplications and get to the whales. The colonel told the president about the bitter cold, but spared him the details of his problems with the barge. Carroll recited the names of everybody involved and their organizations, just as he had rehearsed with Bonnie.

  Bonnie, listening in on a White House speaker phone, laughed when the president deftly tried to cut short the nervous colonel. “Sir,” the colonel continued, unmoved by the president’s appeal for brevity. “I think this phone call will make a substantial difference in the morale of everyone involved. From the crews out there right now with the barge to the people working in Barrow. This is the kind of thing that makes it all worthwhile.”

  “Well,” came the president’s trademark utterance. “You can tell them all we’re very proud of you and what you’ve done up there. And I’ll let you get back to your rescue mission now. But just know that a great many people are praying for all of you.”

  Before he hung up, the president wished the colonel good luck.

  But even Ronald Reagan’s legendary luck wouldn’t be enough to get the mired hoverbarge across 270 miles of frozen Arctic Ocean to Barrow.

  12

  G’day, Australia

  To journalists, the “story” of the three trapped whales showed more than just the miracle of modern telecommunications. It demonstrated just how powerful they had become. Never before had they propelled so many important people to act so quickly and decisively to affect an event of such questionable significance. In the hands of just a few people, a tiny hole in the middle of the Arctic Ocean was transformed into a place of global importance, at least for a few cold October weeks in 1988.

  For one of the first times in the rapidly changing world of television news, a story of marginal significance was turned into one with major significance based solely on the uninformed judgment of people distant from the event. People in the know knew there was nothing newsworthy about the trapped whales; while people who knew nothing about whales had no idea how little they did know.

  The real story was that great wisdom was not required for people in the media to obtain great power. The nonstory became a big story not in the minds of those who knew the most, but in those who knew the least. It was a story less about the whales than it was about how the whales became a story.

  The transformation from nonevent to big event happened in three clearly defined stages. First, the whales were talked about as possible fodder for harvest. Then biologists Geoff Carroll and Craig George heard about them. They called the Coast Guard who told the Anchorage Daily News. Within twenty-four hours, the story became the “kicker” for Tom Brokaw’s October 13, 1988, broadcast on the NBC Nightly News. Six days after Roy Ahmaogak found them floundering in slushy arctic waters, the three whales were national news. Stage one.

  The second stage lasted three days. From Thursday, October 13, through Sunday, October 16, the whales as news item rose steadily through the then-important half-hour network newscasts. In just seventy-two hours, the stranded whales went from “kickers” to “leads.” It took that long only because the networks needed a few days to get their equipment and personnel to the top of the world. When they first appeared on network television, the whales ended newscasts. By Sunday night, October 16, 1988, they started them. Stage two.

  But it was stage three that set the stage for the whales’ release. Once they led network newscasts, the world’s attention gave the rescuers added impetus to draw on the superhuman effort and extravagant resources they would need to save the grays. Early questions about how seriously the United States government took Operation Breakout were answered when President Reagan made his October 18 phone call to Tom Carroll. The President’s six-minute telephone chat with the Alaska National Guard colonel had some wondering what in the world was going on. Now, even the president of the United States was hypnotized by the plight of three marooned mammals on the North Slope of Alaska. With the imprimatur of a popular president, we could save our beloved whales in good conscience.

  Soon, the American whale mania had gone global. Foreign television crews began arriving on set further crowding a town already about to burst. Shortly after news of the president’s phone call ran on the wires, Ken Burslem answered a ringin
g phone in his Los Angeles office. Burslem was the Eastern Pacific bureau chief for Network Ten, one of Australia’s three commercial television networks. His assignment editor in Melbourne wanted to know more about the whales. Burslem told him that the whales were fast becoming the biggest story in America, bigger even than the presidential sweepstakes looming just three weeks away. He thought their plight would grip animal-loving Australians the same way it was mesmerizing the Americans. The Australian-based assignment editor gave Burslem the okay. Burslem booked himself and his crew on the next flight to Alaska. He wanted to be the first Australian to broadcast images of the whales to the folks Down Under.

  It took a few seconds for Burslem to recall what little he knew about the frozen north. He confessed to his editors back home that his six years as Network Ten’s U.S. correspondent did not begin to prepare him for an adventure on Alaska’s North Slope. If Barrow seemed remote to a Yank, it seemed downright intergalactic to an Aussie.

  Like most other globetrotting correspondents, Ken Burslem lived his life like a doctor on call. He kept two suitcases permanently packed for last-minute story assignments. He kept one at his office and the other at home. When he got the call to Barrow, he figured his regular gear wouldn’t be enough to keep him warm in the Arctic. It didn’t take a genius to figure out it was cold in Barrow, but as an Australian journalist assigned to cover America from sunny Southern California, he was utterly unprepared for the bone-chilling experience that lay ahead. It would be one of the most unforgettable of his twenty-five-year career.

  He grabbed a lightweight ski parka in the mistaken belief that it would keep him warm during his short stay just 1,700 miles south of the North Pole. After all, he thought, how cold could it be? It was the second week of October. The temperature was in the mid-eighties in Los Angeles, and back home the mild winter was stepping aside for another glorious Aussie spring. The three-man crew from Network Ten boarded their flight at LAX with the infectious smiles and pleasant demeanors native to mates from Down Under. When they stepped off the plane in Fairbanks, their jovial good humor was swept away in the subarctic wind. It was already minus ten degrees there—the coldest temperature any of them had ever experienced. Burslem didn’t know whether to panic or buy himself a case of beer.