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.
— CHAPTER 6 —
EGYPT: FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
“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 aske
d 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.
I arrived in Beirut on a cool October morning just before dawn. Giant strobe lights lit what was left of the four-story marine compound. Huge slabs of concrete were perched precariously like dominos. Seabees were still using picks, shovels, and their hands to remove bodies from the smoldering rubble.
An FBI agent at the site told me that it was the most powerful nonnuclear bomb anyone on his team had ever seen. The force of the explosion had lifted the building off its foundation, and then it collapsed in on itself, crushing many of those inside.1 Had such a bombing occurred in the United States or Europe, the crime scene would have been cordoned off long ago. But this was Lebanon. So I wandered at will, unescorted, along the periphery of the blast and the stew of concrete, twisted metal pipes, shards of glass, chairs, bunks, clothes, scattered letters, birthday cards, and photographs—pictures of the marines and sailors with their girlfriends and families—all ash colored, crumbled.
Nothing in my relatively sheltered life had prepared me for such carnage. While I had written from Washington about “terrorism” and “Islamic militancy,” they were abstractions. I had never seen them. Now I had.
One dust-covered marine who had been digging through the rubble suddenly froze atop a mound of concrete. He plucked something out of the debris, cradled it in his arms, and began rocking back and forth. As I got closer, I saw that it was a dented, blood-smeared helmet—his best friend’s.
I stayed at the site for much of the day, interviewing soldiers, officers, military chaplains, bystanders—anyone who would talk to me—and taking notes on the largely futile rescue operation. Tom Friedman was writing a news analysis about why the attack had occurred and the mysterious group, Islamic Jihad, that had by then claimed credit for it, leaving me to report the bombing.
I saw courage and strength that day, as soldiers and civilians battled horror and fatigue to save anyone who might be alive under the rubble. I saw that not all the volunteer rescue workers were humanitarians. Toward dusk, one removed a wedding ring from a dead marine’s finger and stuffed it into his pocket.
I did not mention the theft or the marine in my dry account of the bombing that night, my first front-page, above-the-fold appearance as a foreign correspondent—a grisly debut.2 But I wrote that the timing of the attack was complicating efforts to identify the bodies. Because so many of the marines had been asleep or taking showers, they were not wearing their dog tags when the Mercedes truck rammed through the poorly defended compound’s southern perimeter and into the building’s lobby. By the day’s end, the military estimated the death toll at 193. It would rise to 299—58 soldiers at the French compound two miles away and 241 American marines, sailors, and soldiers—the deadliest attack on Americans overseas since World War II.
Exhausted and shaken, I returned to the site later that night after filing my story. I still hoped, illogically, that more marines might be found alive. I managed to interview one who had been guarding the entry post with an unloaded weapon as his “rules of engagement” required when the attack occurred. The Mercedes truck was large and yellow, he recalled; its driver had an intense, thin face, a black beard. And he was smiling.3
* * *
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that five-ton truck loaded with dynamite that the marine guard saw heading toward him in Beirut that awful morning was the future. The synchronized twin bombings marked the beginning of the age of asymmetrical mass terrorism by militant Islamists. The suicide attack—and the earlier strike in April against the US Embassy in Beirut—marked the de facto start of a war against America that would continue straight through to 9/11 and beyond. Lebanon was where it had all begun. I was present at the creation.
Ihsan Hijazi, the Times’s veteran local reporter, briefed me the next morning over coffee at the Commodore Hotel, where Friedman was staying after his own apartment was blown up. He predicted that we would find Iranian and Syrian fingerprints on the truck and its suicidal driver.
Syria had long controlled its neighbor Lebanon. Its forty thousand troops had occupied much of Lebanon’s territory since 1976, when Damascus was invited to help end Lebanon’s civil war, then in its second year. Syria opposed the May 17 agreement among America, Israel, and Lebanon’s Maronite-led government, which was intended to end the war. Lebanon had agreed to normalize relations with Israel, which had invaded that country in 1982 partly in response to repeated pleas from Lebanese Christians for help in the civil war and to oust the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had used Lebanon as its base.
The UN-blessed multinational peacekeeping force of American, French, Italian, and British soldiers had arrived in Lebanon in the summer of 1982, soon after the May agreement was signed, to oversee the PLO’s withdrawal from Lebanon and to bolster the Christian-led government. Damascus had not been asked to participate in the May 17 talks and would not accept its terms. The rejection of the accord by Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad, in turn, prompted Israel to ignore its commitment to withdraw, since its removal of troops was contingent on the withdrawal of Syrian forces. Without Syrian participation, the May agreement was worthless, Ihsan told me. But the Americans refused to acknowledge this reality. Iran, too, wanted to see the United States, the “Great Satan,” humbled in Lebanon, and these events had brought Tehran and Damascus together in a vengeful embrace.
Ihsan, a Palestinian Sunni Muslim and Lebanese citizen since 1958, loved his adopted homeland but had few illusions about the region’s violent politics. He knew Washington almost as well. Syria would not abandon Lebanon, but the Americans would leave, he predicted.
He did not criticize me for having quoted President Reagan’s vow to stay in Beirut in the lead of my story. After all, our tough-talking president had declared that terror would “never” force the United States to abandon its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
Ihsan smiled wearily. Words were cheap, coffins expensive, especially as the 1984 US presidential election approached. America would leave Lebanon. The West’s peacekeeping role had been doomed from its creation: there was no peace to keep.
Shiite Muslims had long ago become the country’s largest sect; Sunni Muslims were second, and Maronite Christians a distant third. The civil war that erupted in 1975 had obliterated Lebanon’s fragile cohesion. The dynamic, prosperous country I first visited in 1971 as a graduate student at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and aspiring reporter was no more. By 1983, Beirut was a physical and political wreck.
Ihsan urged me to report outside the “city-state” of Beirut. Lebanon’s future was being written beyond Beirut’s mutilated borders. Demography could not be denied forever. The country’s Shia Muslim majority was being mobilized throughout southern Lebanon. “Their day is coming,” he said.
In Jibchit, then a town of fourteen thousand, their day had already come. Fewer than forty miles southwest of Beirut, Jibchit was a planet away. As Ali, the Shiite driver Ihsan had hired for me, steered his battered yellow taxi deeper into southern Lebanon, I saw that Ihsan was right. In Jibchit, the idea that a country as secular, materialistic, and religiously diverse as Lebanon could ever become a theocratic state of any kind, much less an Islamic republic like Iran, seemed less preposterous.
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