by Nick Bryant
Up until then, my good fortune had been to report Australia during something of a golden age in terms of its punch and relevance. Howard and Rudd were truly front-rank figures. After the global financial crisis, the world was agog at Australia’s success in avoiding recession, the ‘Wonder from Down Under’. There were few better countries from which to watch China’s inexorable rise, and to sample the mixture of dread and desire that it unleashed in the West.
Both these sentiments were to be found in Australia’s new defence strategy, which called for a military build-up to rebuff a belligerent China that would be financed, of course, by selling China still more resources. The ongoing drought, the Big Dry, coinciding with a resurgence of climate-change scepticism, made Australia as good a place as any to cover the global environmental debate, if only to make some sense of those two countervailing ideas.
On the cultural front, Cate Blanchett took Broadway by storm in A Streetcar Named Desire, a production I first saw in Sydney on the night that she had to retire after being hit by a flying prop. Geoffrey Rush scored a Tony in New York for Exit the King, an absurdist comedy that, again, I was lucky to see at the tiny Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills.
We got to celebrate the rise of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, a rare voice to break through from Aboriginal Australia, and the coloratura of Joan Sutherland, the Australian anti-diva. The rise of Tony Abbott even allowed us to bring the phrase ‘budgie smugglers’ to a global audience, along with footage of his skimpy scarlet Speedos. Alas, three of the stories that had the most impact back home – and the most hits on our websites, that modern-day yardstick of journalistic pulling power – were the sorry tale of a Queensland woman first mounted and then smothered to death by her pet camel; a shark attack on a swimming kangaroo; and a yarn from Alice Springs where a driver was pulled over in his Holden Commodore for leaving his five-year-old child unrestrained and using the seatbelt to secure his slab of unopened beer.
Dreadfully, the biggest story during my time in Australia was also the one I least wanted to cover: Black Saturday, 7 February 2009. When news of the first fatalities came through – the death toll by early evening was 14 – I thought there must be some terrible mistake: that they must be heat-related deaths rather than fire-related deaths, old-age pensioners wilting in the high temperatures. Were not Australian bushfires measured in the number of hectares of forestry destroyed or, occasionally, properties?
But soon after, we saw for ourselves the burnt-out cars that lined the road leading from Kinglake; trudged through the still-smouldering houses that littered the Victorian bush; listened to the harrowing testimony of survivors who told us how relatives, neighbours and pets had failed to outrun the flames; saw the bunches of flowers laid in makeshift memorial against the blackened landscape; and even felt for ourselves the heat of the flames.
Having covered such terrible disasters elsewhere, I did not expect to witness death in such large numbers in Australia, and in many ways Black Saturday continues to lie outside my comprehension. Unable to bear much more bereavement and ruin – the death toll that day rose from 14 to 178 – I took it as yet another sign that it was time to continue my retreat from frontline news.
Away from work – a phrase that I had not much cause to use in the earlier phases of my career – life was good. Exceptionally so. Perhaps for the first time in over a decade, I could purchase tickets to the theatre or opera with near certainty that I would get to use them. I loved being so close to the ocean, and I made sure to walk our pet Labrador, Skip, along the coastal path that links Bondi with Bronte at least three or four times a week. I also became such an enthusiast of Australian food – that most luscious flowering of post-war multiculturalism – that I ran the risk of becoming a bingeing Pom. I had more time to catch up on the latest novels, which had always been a lacuna in my reading, and even became a founding member of a book club that met on the first Wednesday of every month. Again, I could usually guarantee my attendance, which would have been unthinkable in either Washington or Delhi, where news had a regular habit of completely obliterating extracurricular activities. After covering a declining superpower and an emergent superpower, I rather enjoyed the simple pleasures of living in the world’s great lifestyle superpower.
Most importantly of all, I restored body and mind. Since the earliest days of my career, I had suffered from a fairly mild, though occasionally debilitating, form of social anxiety. I hated venturing into a crowded room, a cocktail or supper party, or any confined space, and tended to break out in a Nixon-style flop sweat whenever I did. My great fear, especially in the heat of the Washington or South Asian summer, was that it would happen live on air, and that my shirts would start mopping up sweat in the same way that blotting paper absorbs ink.
To avoid this happening, I deployed various strategies. At cocktail parties, I would always station myself on the fringes of the room close to a door. I also tended to drink very quickly, using alcohol not so much as a social lubricant but as a coolant, which, given its dehydrating effects, was ludicrous, I know. During assignments on the subcontinent, I took to wearing black shirts – I had about eight of them. This drew criticism from London, where colleagues seemed to think I was trying to ape one of our legendary foreign correspondents, the great Martin Bell, who always wore white. But it was the only colour that would camouflage sweat.
As I have always been gregarious and fun-loving, colleagues, friends and even family members would be surprised with this admission. My powers of concealment were strong. And I would not want to falsely portray myself as a nervous wreck. If anything, I always prided myself on never missing deadlines, of having the confidence to alter scripts with just minutes to go before broadcast and of keeping my cool in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Nor had I ever shirked any assignment, whatever the dangers. Oddly, however, the thing that scared me most was to walk back into our overcrowded newsroom in London, which appeared before me like a cliff face.
Sydney brought a much healthier lifestyle and a wife who ploughed me with vitamins, tonics and love. The results were pretty much instantaneous. After years venturing into trouble spots, I could muster the courage to walk into the middle of a crowded room.
To appreciate more fully the historical magnitude of Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, it is worth recalling what Washington looked and felt like in 1961, the year of his birth. For diplomats from Africa’s newly decolonised nations, the American capital was viewed still as a hardship posting, where restrictive covenants written into leasing agreements barred them from renting houses or apartments in the more affluent areas of the city and where they were routinely denied service in high-end restaurants, hotels and barber shops.
At Union Station, black passengers, or Negroes as they were called then, stepped from integrated carriages onto segregated trains to continue their journey south. Even after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order integrating the District of Columbia, the city’s schools, churches and residential neighbourhoods remained segregated.
The US Congress could boast just four black lawmakers, all of them congressmen rather than senators, and the chances of enacting a meaningful civil-rights bill were hopeless given the intransigence of southern Democrat segregationists, and the unwillingness of the young new president, John F. Kennedy, born of inexperience and indifference, to confront them. The founding fathers had designed Congress so that a tightly organised minority could always thwart the will of the majority, and the Southern Caucus had accumulated so much power that the Senate became known as ‘the only place in the country where the south did not lose the civil war’.
In Jack Kennedy’s Camelot, the most senior Negro appointee was a genial newspaperman called Andrew Hatcher, who served as deputy press secretary and who sat proudly alongside the president at his first televised press conference. Quickly, however, Hatcher became a target of derision for a White House press corps that remained overwhelmingly white. The affairs of state were far
too complex for the Negro mind, its members scoffed, and when Hatcher put his name to a press release containing a harmless typo – it misspelt Tufts University – there were calls for him to be sacked.
The most senior black New Frontiersman in the wider administration was Robert Weaver, a Harvard-trained economist, but his appointment came close to being scuttled by recalcitrant Southern Democrats who accused him of urinating in a New York housing project. Though the allegation was entirely specious, it played on the prevailing racial stereotypes of the time.
With neither Hatcher nor Weaver allotted much face-time with Kennedy, his most valued Negro employee was George Thomas. His task each morning was to lay out the president’s clothes.
Just as the Kennedy era was beginning, E. Frederic Morrow, who had served under President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the country’s first Negro presidential aide, provided a matchless insight into the mores of segregated Washington with the publication of his memoir, Black Man in the White House. Morrow had to work under all manner of restrictions, not least the injunction that he should never be alone in the same room as a white woman. Looked upon as a ‘big buck nigger’, the fear was that he would inevitably try to sexually molest any female colleagues. Only one woman in the White House secretarial pool volunteered to work alongside him, typing up memoranda penned by Morrow on how to advance the black struggle, which Eisenhower ignored completely.
As I headed back to America in time for election day, ‘Black Man in the White House’ had taken on a much more favourable connotation. It was certain by now that Obama would defeat John McCain, and the best gig was to be in Chicago for his victory speech at Grant Park. As a late fly-in, I was assigned to Washington, which turned out to be an unexpectedly close runner-up. For, in a city unused to eruptions of happy emotion, the reaction bordered on the delirious. Thousands of exultant young people, a high proportion of them African-American, converged on Lafayette Park across from the floodlit White House, brandishing ‘OBAMA/BIDEN’ campaign signs, clutching red, white and blue balloons and whipping their American flags from side to side. Some chanted ‘Olay, olay, olay, olay’ in the manner of South American football fans. Others shouted ‘Yes, we can. Yes, we can’, the impudent mantra of the first-term senator.
The crowd swelled so quickly that I dare say it could have overrun the White House lawn. But now there was no need. According to their chants that night, these Obama supporters already had ‘taken back the capital’ and mentally evicted the incumbent, George W. Bush. With the party going until sunrise, it was almost impossible to sleep. From the blaring car horns to the joyous cries of the crowds, it was as if Brazil had won the World Cup and relocated the victory party from Copacabana Beach to Pennsylvania Avenue.
As someone who had spent far too much time studying and writing about the civil-rights movement, I never thought I would live to report on a black Democrat becoming president, still less witness these kinds of scenes in Washington, which remained a predominantly African-American city. If it were to happen at all, I’d thought it would be an accident of history rather than a Whiggish progression, and that the first African-American president would hail from the Republican party – a right-wing Colin Powell-type, perhaps, or a mega-rich black business leader with evangelical leanings.
Obama’s great success, of course, was to de-emphasise his blackness, to bleach his colour, and to refuse to locate his candidacy in the context of the tumultuous decade into which he was born. In the 1980s, Jesse Jackson had framed his candidacy as a natural extension of the civil-rights movement and boasted that ‘hands that once picked cotton will now pick a president’. Echoing the great anthems of the struggle for black equality, his campaign slogan was ‘Our time has come’.
In complete contrast, Obama eschewed the vocabulary of black resentment and black entitlement. He offered white voters the opportunity to feel good about themselves rather than feel guilty. Though he received the endorsement of veteran civil-rights leaders, such as the great John Lewis, he refused to portray himself as their natural heir.
When, through a quirk of scheduling and a quantum leap of history, he ended up giving his acceptance speech at the Democrat convention in Denver 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from the pulpit of the Lincoln Memorial, Obama referred to the ‘young preacher from Georgia’ rather than mention King by name. To become a history-defying candidate, he became something of a history-denying figure.
Fortunately for Obama, however, the 2008 election did not turn on the question of tolerance, or become a referendum on race. The global financial crisis, the ongoing problems in Iraq, plus the lapses and folksy incoherence of Sarah Palin helped shift the focus. Moreover, McCain, who himself had been the victim of racist smears, was too honourable to play the race card.
On that high, holy night in Washington, my editors instructed me to write two dispatches that could be broadcast around the world at the instant of a victory declaration: one for if McCain became president-elect and another for Obama. Needless to say, it was necessary only to compose one dispatch.
Most American journalists wanted to write this story – and to be part of it – which went a long way towards explaining his swooning press, especially during the elongated primary season and the months of trench warfare with Hillary Clinton. Some particularly dewy-eyed reporters even rhapsodised about the beauty of the mole on the left side of his nose.
Obama also came to enjoy the near-universal respect of the press pack, all of whom had devoured his autobiography Dreams from My Father and seen in it a quality of wordplay that they themselves would struggle to match. Doubts lingered about his cerebral air, and whether he had enough of the mongrel in him to slug it out in the Washington bear pit, but from the moment he addressed the Democratic convention in 2004 with his paean to post-partisanship, every political journalist who considered these things rationally knew they were watching a once-in-a-lifetime politician. An African-American was in the White House – one who would issue the orders and make the rules – and the Washington press pack looked forward to covering this black Camelot.
When first I was posted to Washington in the late-1990s, America was still the principle catalyst for global change and the sole superpower in a unipolar world. As it prepared to ring in the new millennium, US publishers rushed out a welter of self-congratulatory books on what had come to be known as the American Century. In the same spirit, the White House Millennium Council put together a time capsule that included a fragment of the dismantled Berlin Wall, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and footage of Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk, relics that captured for posterity America’s technological, military and cultural hegemony.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, I was at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial for a concert featuring Aretha Franklin, Bono, Chuck Berry, Will Smith, Tom Jones and a film by Steven Spielberg with the expectant title The Unfinished Journey. The organisers, seemingly untroubled by the niggardly fact that the USA had not made much of an impact for 776 of the past 1000 years, called this celebration ‘America’s Millennium’. It ended with fireworks skipping across the Reflecting Pool, which ignited the base of the Washington Monument. When fully illuminated, the 555-foot obelisk stood like a giant national exclamation mark, or even a magnificent imperial erection.
More than a decade on, despite all the talk about Obama’s election offering proof of the country’s capacity for renewal and reinvigoration, there were unmistakable signs that America was in decline. A recession. The sub-prime-mortgage crisis. The near evisceration of Wall Street. The self-inflicted wounds of Iraq. The insurgency in Afghanistan. A diplomatic world in which America no longer had a clarion voice. A detention centre at Guantanamo that remained open despite President Obama’s promise to shut it down, which undercut America’s moral leadership abroad. A colossal national debt, much of it held by its ascendant rival, China. A much-quoted report from Goldman Sachs predicting that the Middle Kingdom would become the world’s top economy by 2027
. A Fortune magazine survey with only two US companies in the global top ten: Walmart, the number one, and Exxon Mobil.
The shelves in Washington bookstores, weighed down by so much national self-confidence at the start of the century, were heaving now with titles devoted to America’s decline and the rise of the rest. Perhaps the satirical newspaper The Onion came up with the drollest take, greeting Obama’s victory with the headline ‘Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job’.
Though not a country usually associated with self-doubt, declinism had long been a theme in American commentary, whether it was post-Sputnik, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate or post-Tehran. Gore Vidal was even more precise when he identified 16 September 1985 as the date of the fall of the American empire. That was the day the Commerce Department announced it had become a debtor nation.
Each time, of course, America rebounded, but on this occasion a trifecta of morale-sapping convulsions had come within the space of a decade: 9/11, Iraq and the GFC. More disconcertingly for the Americans, China posed a much more lasting threat than either the Soviet Union, which did not have the economic efficiency to ultimately challenge the US, or Japan, a potential rival in the 1980s and early 1990s that never had a big-enough population.
For all that, I suspect that Washington will long remain the most sought-after correspondent posting and by far the most consequential: the capital of the world’s most dominant economic, military, diplomatic, technological and cultural power. An Anglo-centric world will continue to look to Silicon Valley for its hi-tech innovations; Wall Street for finance; Harvard, MIT and Yale for the gold standard in higher education and research; Hollywood for movies; Facebook, Twitter and Google for online smarts; HBO and AMC for the best in television; The New York Times and The New Yorker for the best in newspaper and magazine journalism; reruns of Oprah for daytime chitchat; southern California for fitness and lifestyle fads; New York for fashion; Houston and Cape Canaveral for galactic exploration; US research labs for the latest in biotechnology and nanotechnology; the great medical campuses in Boston, Chicago and Baltimore for disease breakthroughs; the San Fernando Valley for its silicone-implanted flesh; McDonald’s, Subway and KFC for its fast foods; Microsoft for its operating systems; Apple for its gadgetry; and the US Armed Forces and its American suppliers for the most up-to-date weaponry.
