But most notably, I specialized in covering a different kind of scoundrel, the political variety. My news director felt all those years tracking Philadelphia’s Democratic political machine qualified me to tackle the colorful characters of Maryland’s crony politics, made nationally famous during the bribery investigation of the state’s former governor, then–vice president Spiro Agnew.
There was Irv Kovens, the godfather of Mandel’s crowd, who financed all his campaigns, and Bootsie, the governor’s estranged wife, who locked him out of the Governor’s Mansion in Annapolis when she discovered he was having an affair with a beautiful blonde whom he later married. In the course of the bribery trial, the governor broke down while discussing his divorce settlement, for which he had borrowed forty-two thousand dollars from an order of Roman Catholic missionaries for back alimony payments. Who could make this up?
The federal trial was in Baltimore, forty-five miles from my home in Washington. I’d speed up I-95 to get to court in time each morning. During a rare July 4 court session in 1977, I got two speeding tickets, five miles apart. Meeting me in Baltimore each day was a courtroom artist, Roxie Munro, a freelancer who later left Washington to become a highly successful graphic artist, with many New Yorker covers to her credit. During the course of the lengthy trial, in the late seventies, profound technological changes were transforming our business, the first of many tectonic shifts that expanded our reach as broadcasters. When the trial began, we were commuting to and from Baltimore. By the time it was over, we were reporting live, by satellite, a new technology that revolutionized our profession.
At first, I could cover only the morning and early afternoon testimony, ordering artwork to illustrate key witnesses, before having to race back to Washington in time to go live on the six o’clock news. Roxie would finish painting the illustrations in the backseat of my mustard brown Toyota, waving the poster-sized sketches out the car window to dry them in the breeze. I would drive down I-95 and outline my script at the same time, but without the benefit of a cell phone or any other means to communicate my progress to the editors. We’d run into the newsroom and give the sequence of sketches to the director. Then, at the very last minute, I’d put the illustrations, some barely dry, on easels in the studio. The control room would switch back and forth among the illustrations, as the stage manager flipped the cards by hand and I narrated my text, sitting next to Gordon Peterson, the anchorman.
Rarely did we have time to tape anything in advance. Gordon, a veteran newsman who has anchored local news in Washington for decades, has the rare gift of making people who appear with him sound smarter than they usually are. Mentoring us all was Jim Snyder, who built a news organization that dominated the Washington market for years. He was demanding, somewhat taciturn, and alternately fatherly and tough. Above all else, he loved the Mandel saga and wanted to give it as much play on the air as possible. Between Jim and Gordon, I had a road map to the rich political history of Maryland politics. Now I needed to immerse myself in the gritty details of the political drama unfolding in Baltimore.
In today’s age of computer graphics, our techniques for covering the trial seem primitive. But by the time the jury was considering its verdict, we had our first satellite truck and were able to feed the artwork back to our studios in Washington as I stood in front of the federal courthouse in Baltimore and narrated my script. It wasn’t a live feed from Kabul, but it seemed very cutting-edge at the time. Fighting off feelings of inadequacy after being on top in Philadelphia, I plunged in and tackled what was, for me, alien terrain. At the time, I had no idea my enthusiasm for the story would lead to another turning point in my career—the job at NBC.
The Mandel trial story was so compelling, and the demands of the daily narrative so relentless, that it became a crash course in the basics of television reporting. In addition, the technology was changing rapidly; we were all but inventing it as we went along. NBC executives were watching. Often in my career, big changes took place more by accident than design. I would have stayed at the CBS affiliate in Washington happily, surrounded by as talented a group of local reporters as was ever assembled on one team. But in 1978, Mrs. Graham, advised that the U.S. Supreme Court would likely decide against cross-ownership that permitted newspapers to own television stations in the same market, sold the Post’s D.C. station. We were being traded to new owners, The Detroit News, because of a rule—since rescinded—that greatly hurt the quality of local television news by divorcing stations from their newspaper owners. When a call came from NBC, some good-hearted executives at Post-Newsweek persuaded the new station owners to let me out of my contract. On August 1, 1978, I started work less than a mile away, at the NBC News Washington bureau on Nebraska Avenue, where I have worked ever since.
I lived only a mile from the office. For a city girl, I had, with the help of my indefatigable mother, found a very different kind of nest: a Victorian cottage facing a national park on a winding country road, only five miles from downtown. It was just four rooms, too small for my furniture, but a perfect retreat from the craziness of the news business.
I had come a long way from Philadelphia, but I had not yet closed the book on my coverage of Frank Rizzo. Only a few short years later I went back, but this time as a network correspondent to cover one of the mayor’s patented power grabs. He was trying to change the city’s charter so that he could run for a third consecutive term. Not surprisingly, he had become a national story with his outrageous suggestion that supporters “vote white.” At the same time, he blithely called suggestions that he was racist “hogwash.”
After he lost his attempt to change the charter, I returned to do a story for NBC on what everyone thought would be the end of the Rizzo era. He wouldn’t grant an interview, so I went to his house, hoping I could talk him into it. On the day his successor was being sworn in, Rizzo came out of his house to joust with me, wearing a tan lumber jacket, feisty as ever. I saw him once more, in 1991, when he tried for a third time to recapture his old job. He had a new career as a radio talk show host, and had not mellowed a bit. During a televised confrontation, the seventy-year-old politician practically decked a local reporter, shouting, “I want to fight you,” and even called the newsman a “crumb, creep, lush coward.” Vintage Rizzo.
He was also still a dirty campaigner. In that final election, having by then become a Republican, Rizzo accused his opponent, the city’s district attorney, of being drunk because he staggered—even though the man walked with a limp because he’d lost a leg in Vietnam and used crutches. When reporters pressed Rizzo on how he knew his opponent was drunk, the former mayor answered, “You can be on crutches and still be under the influence.”
At our final meeting, Rizzo, a little grayer and some pounds heavier, welcomed me into his office and reminisced about his earlier days in politics. Why did he give up a big-bucks radio show to go back into politics? “I love the challenge,” he said, adding, “You know the best part? Dealing with the press. I love to go head-to-head with some of them suckers. I really do.” We made our peace.
Only a few months later, I was watching a budget debate from NBC’s Senate broadcast booth when the phone rang. It was a Philadelphia reporter asking me to comment on the death of Frank Rizzo. He had died of a massive heart attack in the middle of his comeback campaign. Once asked what he wanted on his gravestone, Rizzo had joked, “He’s really dead.”
When it was finally true, I cried.
CHAPTER 2
Understudy
I was thirty-two years old when on Thanksgiving Day 1978, I went to Georgetown, Guyana’s colonial capital, 140 miles away from Jonestown through dense virgin rain forest. One of the most significant experiences in my life as a journalist began with a routine phone call from the NBC assignment desk. At the time, I was a general-assignment correspondent, which meant covering everything and nothing. Having made the uncertain leap to the network, once again I had to prove myself. The only way I knew how was to answer any call, at any hour of the
day or night.
A California congressman, Leo Ryan, had been assassinated on a jungle landing strip near a place few Americans had ever heard of, Jonestown, Guyana. Guyana, in South America, is a country no larger than Idaho, situated north of Brazil and west of Suriname. Settled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, then colonized by the British two hundred years later, it stood apart from most other countries in the region because, even before independence in 1966, Guyana had a Marxist government.
Congressman Ryan had been investigating reports that some of his constituents were being held against their will by a charismatic but dictatorial preacher, a San Francisco demagogue named Jim Jones, who had transported his mystic theology combining Christianity and communism to the rain forests of Guyana. Ryan had brought with him a group of newsmen, including a correspondent, producer, and camera crew from NBC. Attempting to leave the next day with cult members who wanted to defect and were willing to provide evidence of widespread abuses, the group was gunned down by hit men working for Jones. Before escaping into the bewildering tangle of rain forests laced with streams, creeks, and marshes, the gunmen ran over to the wounded congressman and three newsmen and shot each of them in the head.
Two of the murdered journalists were NBC correspondent Don Harris and cameraman Bob Brown. Incredibly, Brown recorded the incident as he was dying, camera rolling until the final shot was fired, and he fell to his knees. His partner, soundman Steve Sung, badly wounded, along with Ryan’s aide, Jackie Speier, lay on the airstrip’s tarmac for twenty-two hours before being rescued.
By then, Guyanese soldiers had moved toward the commune and discovered the full horror of Jonestown: 913 people, including at least 276 children and a 108-year-old man identified as Pops Jackson. Their swollen bodies were decomposing in the tropical sun after a ritual orgy of mass murder and suicide as they followed the paranoid dictates of Jim Jones in a well-rehearsed plan. They had all drunk Flavor Aid, similar to Kool-Aid, laced with cyanide, some willingly, others, including the children, because they had no choice.
A colleague who had previously covered the war in Nicaragua, Fred Francis, had flown in and helped rescue Bob Flick, the NBC producer, who had not been wounded. Fred then finagled his way into Jonestown to get the first pictures of the disaster. Now the editor in New York needed more help covering the story. The Jonestown assignment would have been a challenge even if the tragedy had not involved fallen colleagues. With no preparation, I was flying to a Third World country to cover a massacre and mass suicide, on my own, without a clue as to what to do. I didn’t even know how to book a flight to go overseas for NBC.
There was no way to escape the emotional horror of what had happened. But for NBC, coming to grips with it was infinitely more complicated because this was a death in the family. As a reporter, my normal reaction, drilled into me over the past decade, was to remain loftily above the stories I covered. Jonestown blew that certainty apart.
It is easy to forget this now, but at the time Jim Jones was fairly well known and very well connected, having become something of a celebrity for having carved Jonestown out of the rain forest. He had endorsements from Rosalynn Carter and Vice President Mondale, largely because of his political clout in the minority and fundamentalist community on the West Coast. Jones’s flock were mostly of the same race (African-American), religion (Protestant), and economic status (poor) as many of the people of Guyana. The massacre and its aftermath was a potentially embarrassing story for the Carter White House.
From a practical standpoint, there was another problem: the two NBC producers assigned to take over were expected to switch instantly into combat mode and also deal with me, a newcomer at the network with no experience working overseas. They’d arrived in the country shortly after the murders, and, like many in Guyana, were fearful of retaliation. Perhaps to mask their fear, they were also angry with me and the desk editors who’d sent a novice, and a woman to boot, to cover such a difficult story. In the aftermath of the massacre, everyone who remained was psychologically damaged: the cult members most of all, but also the surviving journalists.
The capital was alive with rumors that roving hit squads from Jonestown had fled into the rain forest and would target any survivors, especially anyone from NBC. I was told by the NBC producers not to travel unaccompanied, but I had to get the story. Adding to the chaos and suspicion was the ham-handed behavior of the local police, Third World bureaucrats suddenly overwhelmed by an international media storm. They decided to hold possible material witnesses, including surviving cult members and several of Jones’s lieutenants, in the same hotel. Once grand, the Park Hotel was now a seedy colonial relic distinguished by a spacious veranda with a tall cupola. Waiters took soft drinks and meals to the rooms of the survivors, and the lobby swirled with conspiracy theories.
Falling back on my experience as a police reporter, I knew I had to find consular officials from the embassy, the local police, and the military—anyone who could provide real facts about the murderers of Don, Bob, and Congressman Ryan. Georgetown, with its palm tree–lined streets, was the sort of place where you’d expect to see vacationing tourists sitting in a hotel lobby drinking rum punches with little umbrellas. Instead, it now felt as though I’d stepped into a Graham Greene novel.
I walked the streets, knocking on doors, trying to get in to see American diplomats. I knew agents from the CIA were there, as well as people from the Justice Department, but it was all so hard to penetrate. You knew there were layers of the story to be told, but you just couldn’t get below the surface of things. Following the investigation was complicated enough. More difficult was trying to explain the unfathomable: why hundreds of people had submitted to the mind control of a madman and murdered their own children before killing themselves.
Then there were the technical challenges of filing whatever you did manage to uncover. This was years before video phones, satellite uplinks, and other ways to broadcast instantly from remote locations. Laptop computers? A future fantasy. The only way to file my story was to fly by chartered jet four hundred miles to the nearest broadcast satellite in Trinidad and Tobago. That meant getting the videotape out past Guyanese customs officials, who were becoming increasingly defensive about charges that they had ignored clear signs of Jim Jones’s madness because he was bringing desperately needed dollars to their impoverished country.
As I drove to the airport with my footage each night, my stomach knotted from fear that they would confiscate the film. I felt lost, not knowing what I didn’t know, but aware that I was out of my league. Fear of failure overwhelmed what would have otherwise been a more rational fear of retaliation from Jim Jones’s men. What I managed to repress, temporarily, was the emotional weight of the human tragedy we were sent to cover, partly because it was still theoretical to me. It wasn’t until I got my first glimpse of Jonestown itself, hundreds of miles away, in a remote clearing in the rain forest, that the full scale of the event hit me.
For days, we had been pressing the Guyanese for access to the site of the mass deaths. Finally, the government loaded a pool of reporters and cameramen onto vintage Guyanese Defense Force helicopters to fly to the airstrip near Jonestown where the murders had taken place the week before. For the first time, I was scared, haunted by memories of a helicopter crash during floods from Hurricane Agnes in 1972 that had killed a good friend, local CBS newsman Sid Brenner, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. When we got to Jonestown, it was clear that the government had tried to sanitize any sign of the murderous ritual that had unfolded barely days earlier. The area was cleared of bodies, but they couldn’t erase all of the evidence. It was eerily ghoulish, made more terrifying because what remained was so ordinary: a single child’s shoe, a playground with swings and other play equipment, a baby’s bottle encrusted in dirt. It looked like a summer camp that had been evacuated. Jonestown ranged over three hundred acres and included rows of cottages, dormitories, and workshops all lined up in tidy rows.
Time was limited, and the s
earch for visual evidence became a clinical scavenger hunt. We pointed out solar equipment and the pavilion from which Jones had exhorted his followers. Our shoes sank into the mud, which I kept trying to avoid because the bodies had decomposed in the summer heat, and I had a terror of sinking into what might have been graves. There was a terrible smell. With growing horror, I realized that the quagmire could not have been completely cleansed of dead bodies.
Unlike the other network correspondents, I was on my own. My producers, emotionally drained from having lost two colleagues, were hundreds of miles away, back in the capital. As the military started herding us toward the helicopters to leave the carefully staged press tour, a veteran CBS producer, taking pity on me, helpfully reminded me that there was very little time to shoot an on-camera stand-up showing me on location.
It seems so cold-blooded, but one of the notable things about a situation like this is that being part of the press pool helps create an artificial barrier, enabling you to distance yourself from your emotions at what you’re witnessing. Rather than being solely a death scene, the setting is now the backdrop for a television story. You can concentrate in a kind of robotic, instinctively journalistic fashion, and worry about being scooped by the other networks or not getting your camera in place in time.
Talking Back Page 9
