by Tom Brokaw
I wrote to say, “It’s not a hearing aid; it’s a Viagra drip.” He asked to note that in a new edition.
Why not?
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I altered other routines on the streets of New York. With my diminished strength and fragile spine I quickly discovered that Manhattan building doors require a full-body commitment to open on a cold day, of which we were having many. I’d look for someone coming through a revolving door or exiting a single-panel door and poach a ride. On subways I occasionally took the senior or handicapped seating with no hesitation or loss of pride. My expression conveyed to fellow riders, “I’m old, dammit, sick, dammit, and get out of my face.”
Well, maybe not that expression, but I was thinking it.
I missed my old life of jumping on a plane and racing off to a big breaking story. Colleagues began to remind me that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall was coming in November 2014, and shouldn’t I be going back?
That had been a signature moment for NBC News and for me. In November 1989, our enterprising foreign editor, Jerry Lamprecht, said, “There’s not much going on here; why don’t you go today? East Germany is in chaos and that’s a good story.” I agreed and left on an overnight flight.
Our first day in the divided city was notable for the ease with which we passed through Checkpoint Charlie and into the eastern sector, where I was able to interview dissidents who spoke of the feeble attempts by the GDR—the Communist leadership of the German Democratic Republic, as they called their Moscow satellite—to deal with the restlessness of the East German citizens, hostages in their own motherland.
We had satellite capability on standby but the story, instructive and interesting, didn’t measure up to the expense of a live feed, so I pretaped my segments and prepared for a second day, November 9, 1989.
Late that afternoon a GDR “information” officer, Günter Schabowski, was conducting a tendentious news conference when he inadvertently changed the course of history by mistakenly announcing new, liberal travel laws that could begin immediately. It came at the end of his news conference and as he left the room there was head-shaking confusion among the reporters. “Does this mean the wall is effectively coming down? GDR citizens can come and go as they please?”
My colleague Michele Neubert had prearranged an interview with Schabowski and so I rushed upstairs to get clarification.
Schabowski was relaxed and unapologetic about the confusion. “We have decided today to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic to leave the GDR through any of the border crossings.”
Any? I asked.
Smiling, he answered, “It is possible for them to go through the border.”
We later learned that the GDR Politburo planned many stipulations for the new travel and, incredibly, thought East Germans would travel to the West and then happily return to their old lives in the East.
I ran downstairs and yelled at some American reporters puzzling over their press conference notes, “It’s down, the wall. Schabowski just confirmed East Germans can exit through any border crossing.”
By the time we got to Checkpoint Charlie the word was out on the streets of East Germany and the GDR guard didn’t bother looking through our car when we stopped for inspection. I asked what he thought of the news. He offered a small smile and said, “I am not paid to think.”
At other crossing points, notably the Bornholmer Strasse bridge and checkpoint, GDR guards were attempting to deal with the rapid buildup of East Germans who wanted to go through the wall. They were getting little or no guidance from their superiors. The guards briefly wondered whether they were expected to shoot the demonstrators.
At Rockefeller Center in New York my colleague Garrick Utley, a longtime student of German history and politics, got in the anchor chair and interviewed me on my car phone. Others made sure the satellite booking was still good, and I raced to our office to prepare for that evening.
We began to get reports of crowds of West German students congregating on their side of the wall at the Brandenburg Gate, which was also our satellite transmission site. By the time I arrived it was like a pep rally, with the western students shouting at the young on the eastern side, in effect, “Come on over!”
GDR guards unleashed their water hoses, driving the students from the wall for a short time, but when the water stopped, the students returned, resuming their recruiting cries to the young in the East. We were very close to broadcast time and still we didn’t have video of East Germans actually crossing.
Then one of our cameramen arrived from the Bornholmer Strasse bridge, breathless, with the video we needed. The guards had decided not to shoot and, getting no coherent direction from their superiors, had opened the bridge to the West. The wall was breached.
At the Brandenburg Gate the water hoses trickled down as the West German students refused to leave, keeping up their shouted encouragement to those gathered on the eastern side. Then, suddenly, a young East German popped atop the wall, cheered by his generational new friends from the West, looking at once startled, apprehensive, and then happy when he was not hauled down by GDR guards.
At NBC News we had a worldwide television exclusive and I thought, “My god, this video will be around forever.” So I discarded the backcountry jacket I’d brought to Germany and relieved my colleague Mike Boettcher of a handsome blue topcoat he’d just bought in London.
It was so noisy and generally chaotic that just before we went on the air I told Bill Wheatley, the executive producer, and our control room producer, Cheryl Gould, in New York, “Just stay with me. I’m going to have to adlib most of this.” We opened with the unexpected scenes of throngs of East Germans on foot and in their tiny Lada automobiles, pouring through the wall at several checkpoints. It was a television moment that twinned the historic if confusing policy change with the visual effect of the announcement.
I stayed on the air after Nightly for updates and a late evening special report in which I asked for an opportunity to reflect on the changes I had witnessed as a journalist in my twenty-seven years on the job.
For me, 1968 had always been the year in bold print, when Lyndon Johnson was forced to step aside as president because his Vietnam policies caused such a revolt in the Democratic Party that he was in danger of losing the nomination to Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Then Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race and was assassinated just after midnight on the day following his victory in the California primary.
Earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis as he prepared for a rally on behalf of striking sanitation workers. Sixteen thousand American military men were dying in Vietnam. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago was riotous inside and outside the hall. The racist governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, declared for president, joining Hubert Humphrey for the Democrats and Richard M. Nixon for the Republicans in the contest. At the end of the year the astronauts of Apollo 8 became the first men to orbit the moon.
Standing at the Brandenburg Gate, I reminded our audience of 1968, saying I had never expected to experience such a newsworthy year again. However, in 1989 a new world was being formed. With Mikhail Gorbachev as the reform-minded general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful position in Russia, the Soviet satellites were moving toward independence. I was in Prague the night the Velvet Revolution separated Czechoslovakia from Moscow’s rule and spent time in Poland with the charismatic Lech Walesa, who led Solidarity.
Nineteen eighty-nine was that kind of year. Earlier, in June, I finished a commencement address at Tulane University School of Medicine on a Saturday morning and got a call from our news desk: Chinese troops had moved on young urban protesters who had taken over Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital, demanding more political and personal freedom after a state visit from Gorbachev, who was reforming Soviet political oppression.
By Sunday, June 4, we knew that many of the demonstrators had be
en killed by the army troops trucked into Beijing from the countryside. The capital was effectively under military rule.
I decided to go. It wasn’t easy. In Tokyo a helpful Pan Am agent explained that commercial flights were out of the question but that some governments were flying in supplies to their embassies. I made a middle-of-the-night appeal to Secretary of State James Baker to let me on an American supply flight. His aide called back. “Sorry. No.”
My new friend from Pan Am pulled some strings and I hopped aboard a British charter filled with food and medical supplies for the United Kingdom embassy.
Arriving in Beijing was an eerie experience. One of the world’s largest and most energetic cities was as quiet as a small town in Iowa on a summer day. Military guards were at every intersection and the normal, very heavy bicycle traffic was greatly reduced. For the first two days we relied on material from state television and what little we could record on backstreets in Beijing to describe the crackdown and the shake-up of the Chinese government, orchestrated by the diminutive but tough Deng Xiaoping. Deng knew that to survive China had to reform economically but he insisted the changes had to come from the top down, not from the streets.
On the third day one of my favorite cameramen, Tony Wasserman, who had flown in from South Africa, was fiddling with a cardboard box on the back rack of a Flying Pigeon bicycle, the ubiquitous form of transportation used by the average Chinese.
“What’s up?” I asked. My bearded friend in his African bush shorts grinned, held up a small video camera, and said, “Mate, I think we can make some pictures.”
We secreted the camera in the box with a small hole for the lens and took off for Tiananmen, me following behind on my own Flying Pigeon, which, as I remember, we got for twenty bucks from a used Flying Pigeon lot.
It worked. We rode past parked tanks in the square, armed guards everywhere and Mao’s outsize portrait on display as I described the scenes and the new climate of fear and military omnipresence. Just one Chinese cyclist caught on, pedaling up to the back of Tony’s bike and tickling the lens through the peephole.
We expanded our territory to some of the backstreets and markets on our second day, prompting a memorable encounter. A student rode up to my parked bike, looked around cautiously, and whispered, “Changing China—we need more and more of the Voice of America.”
He was referring to a weeklong series of reports NBC News broadcast from throughout China in 1985, as the pace of change was picking up under the direction of Deng. Beijing was becoming a modern capital, with luxurious hotels and free-enterprise cafés. The hutongs, rudimentary communal villages in the heart of Beijing, were being cleared to make way for high-rise apartments and stores carrying Ralph Lauren, Nike, and other high-profile Western goods.
I wanted to visit Tibet, I said to Beijing officials, the Buddhist kingdom now under the military if not the spiritual control of the Chinese government. Han Chinese who had no appreciation of the Tibetan culture were being shipped in from the country’s coastal areas to take up residence and the government infrastructure was under the control of Beijing. The Chinese government was happy to help until they discovered that my carefully arranged five-day trip to Tibet was not a feature on tourism. I was determined to show how the Beijing rulers were systematically trying to wipe out any memory of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who had fled to India with the help of the American CIA in 1959.
Meredith and I flew to Lhasa, the exotic capital, elevation just short of twelve thousand feet, and took in the monumental Potala Palace, where we shared a cup of rancorous yak butter tea, the local specialty, with a picnicking Tibetan family. It was a cordial and useful ceremony, for we learned how hospitable the Tibetan people would be and how to forevermore feign an appreciation for yak butter tea.
Chinese officials rolled out the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking lama, who stayed behind when His Holiness fled to India, becoming Beijing’s front man in the government’s attempt to say all is well in the Holy Land. He was a large man of few words who carried himself with the physical weariness of an actor in a role he reluctantly filled. With Han Chinese officials monitoring our conversation, he invited us to his home temple, Tashilhunpo Monastery in Xigazê, a sprawling city southwest of Lhasa reached by a tortuous mountain road under constant repair by work gangs with shovels and, when we were there, no heavy construction equipment.
Our guesthouse quarters were just above pigsty standards. Fortunately we had our own sleeping bags, some water, and food from Lhasa. When I walked into our room Meredith said quickly, “Don’t touch a thing.”
I said, “I thought no hot water.”
She said, “Right.”
I pointed to an exposed lighting fixture in the ceiling in which water was pouring down a bare electrical wire, hitting the cement floor boiling hot.
At dawn the next morning we were escorted into an ancient chanting room at the monastery, which dates to the fifteenth century. It was a mystical scene, lit by yak butter lamps and the first rays of a new day making their way through cracked and dirty windows at the back. The ocher-colored wooden pillars had a dusky hue, exposed as they have been to centuries of smoke from candles and heaters fueled by yak dung.
Rows of wooden benches in a kind of amphitheater were filled with pubescent boys and their elders ranging in age from late teens to what appeared to be many in their eighties or nineties. All were wrapped in crimson robes trimmed in gold as they answered the head priest who led the chanting, pausing occasionally for a yak butter tea break. The tea was served by strong-armed teenagers who walked through the congregation with four-foot-long ornate wooden pitchers, replenishing the small wooden bowls that had been tucked into the robes of the faithful.
Meredith sat quietly at the back, surely one of the few Anglo women ever to attend morning services. We were both deeply impressed by the devotion to their faith of the priests, a faith that had no discernible connection to the central government in Beijing.
When we returned to Lhasa I decided to test the insistence of our Chinese minders that the self-exiled Dalai Lama no longer had any standing in Tibet. We sent our minder on a “shopping trip” with Meredith while producer Charlie Ryan and cameraman Gary Fairman and I began a casual walk counterclockwise around Jokhang Temple, the most sacred place in Tibet. Buddhist pilgrims, many on their hands and knees, come from afar to circle the temple clockwise, hands clasped, eyes cast downward. These devotionals have been going on since the temple was built in 647, the beginning of Tibetan Buddhism.
As a pilgrim approached I withdrew a postcard of the Dalai Lama I had smuggled into Tibet and held it at eye level. The reaction was instant and emotional. One after another, pilgrims reached out for the image, many of them moaning and weeping.
So much for the claim that the Dalai Lama had no standing.
Our minder returned and went ballistic, demanding the video we had shot. We gave him a blank roll of tape and agreed to leave the next day. Back in Beijing, our official hosts, senior government officers, were even more exercised, abandoning their English language skills and speaking to us only through interpreters, threatening to shut down the weeklong project and throw us out. The dispute was still unresolved when Meredith and I, celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, flew off to Dharamsala, the northern Indian home in exile of the Dalai Lama, to share with His Holiness what we had recorded.
We were guests in what amounts to a small, well-organized city in the foothills of the Himalayas, the center of the exiled government. We found ourselves unprepared for our host’s robust personality and utter absence of aloofness. Here was a man considered by his followers to be a living god and yet he had the demeanor of a successful mayor, a hearty handshake and boisterous laugh. He quieted when we loaded the videotape for screening and watched intently scenes shot in places he had not seen for decades. When the Panchen Lama appeared on the screen he inquired about his health but said nothing about his relationship with the Beijing government.
In 198
9, when the Panchen Lama died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one, stories began to leak out that he was a behind-the-scenes critic of Beijing’s crackdown on Buddhism and that, following the Cultural Revolution, he had argued for the restoration of the Tibetan language as the official language of the region. He had also publicly proclaimed his personal and spiritual friendship with the Dalai Lama.
In Dharamsala we were invited to witness His Holiness at morning prayer in a corner of his modest home, which resembled a fifties ranch-style house on the outer reaches of Malibu. First, he listened to the world news from the BBC on a portable radio, and then, sitting lotus-style, he launched into the prayers. I understood not a word, but the muscular recitation that went on for half an hour was irresistible. When I told him how moved I had been he laughed, grabbed my hand, and gave me the living god’s version of a fist bump.
I flew back to Beijing with a worldwide exclusive: the first network interview with the Dalai Lama, accompanied by supporting video from inside Tibet. By now the Chinese government was apoplectic. I asked Winston Lord, the U.S. ambassador to China, if there was any way to broadcast my reporting and not get thrown out. He was pessimistic, saying Chinese officials might ban NBC from doing any business in China.
Just then, a bulletin on the newswires: Lamas in Lhasa were rioting in protest of Chinese suppression of their beliefs, and the Han Chinese military had been called in to suppress the protest. I had a lead for my reporting and the Chinese officials let the transmission go out.
In the years since, I’ve seen His Holiness several times and I keep within view of my NBC desk a portrait of the two of us, laughing, as he drapes a prayer shawl over my shoulders.
Meredith keeps in a safe a ring he gave her as a gesture of friendship, not engagement, I presume.
Those are the experiences I don’t want to confine to memory. I understand I’ll be in a slower lane even if I put this cancer behind me but I do not want to become a Tommy-sit-by-the-fire. As for the treatment, by the first week of December we’d know the results from the late round of Revlimid as measured by the blood samples, the PET scan, and the bone marrow extraction. It had been four full months since my diagnosis and I was living the new normal.
