Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  An agronomist who was serious about transforming Haiti’s economy, Preval was quiet, disciplined, and utterly lacking in charisma. I interviewed him the morning after his election, and he promised to take on the tough economic issues that Aristide had ignored.

  To my surprise, Preval tried to deliver, challenging the ruling families who had been running Haiti’s few lucrative industries as private monopolies for generations. He refused to fuel inflation by printing money, tried to privatize state businesses, opened the country to competition, and enforced the tax code. On a trip to Washington, he quickly impressed Clinton and his national security team.

  But Republicans, led by Jesse Helms, viewed him as no improvement over Aristide. Haiti was a convenient way of attacking Clinton’s foreign policy. Helms blocked millions of dollars in aid until Preval investigated dozens of political killings that had occurred during Aristide’s reign. But without friends, Preval had little authority to investigate anything, and none of his predecessor’s mass appeal. With Aristide undercutting him at every turn, the new leader couldn’t form a cabinet or pass his austerity program. Without the required economic reforms, Haiti would not be able to qualify for $1.2 billion from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that might have brought it back from disaster.

  The Clinton administration had lost interest in Haiti’s continuing nightmare. Boat people were no longer washing up on Miami’s shores, and the White House no longer felt pressure to find a solution. Haiti was abandoned until its next crisis.

  I felt guilty about our short attention span, and worried that we had left the story too quickly. Two years later, I talked the network into sending me back to cover Haiti’s first legislative elections under the new regime. Little had changed. Mounds of garbage still blocked the streets. Unemployment remained at 80 percent. Pollution was rampant. Hunger, disease, and illiteracy were still the worst in the Western hemisphere. The U.S. and international aid groups had helped spark riots by demanding painful budget cuts, government layoffs, and other economic reforms. Investors were still reluctant to return because of continuing violence, despite America’s best efforts to train a new police force. The head of the State Department’s Agency for International Development told me it was “a little like the Wild West” in our country—and it would take more time to develop a system of laws.

  In legislative elections, fewer than 10 percent of the people even bothered to vote. Why should they trust the ballot box? American election observers told me tally sheets were altered. Ballot boxes were stuffed. In half the provinces the police ordered people to vote for their favorite candidates. After so much promise of reform, democracy was still a distant hope. Without U.S. troops on the island, it was difficult to persuade the network that Haiti’s plight was a story of interest to an American audience. After filing a few reports, I was told to come home. I left our Haitian staff, Andre and Sergo, with a real sense of failure and loss.

  In 2004, Haiti blew up again. By then Aristide was back in power, after sitting out one term. But the man who had inspired so much hope a decade earlier had come full circle. His dictatorial style of governing was inspiring the same kind of rebellion that had helped him replace the military dictators. Aristide’s former supporters turned against him and were marching on the capital. Even Jimmy Carter, Aristide’s most prominent American supporter, concluded that the Haitian leader had become politically corrupted. And over the course of the past decade, Haiti had become a serious strategic threat to the United States, a major transshipping point for millions of dollars of cocaine destined for the United States. U.S. investigators believed 8 percent of the illegal drugs arriving in this country came through Haiti, but Aristide’s government had not arrested or prosecuted a single major drug trafficker in more than a year.

  Aristide was now threatened by a rebel army approaching from the north and a student movement for peaceful change demonstrating in the streets of Port-au-Prince. Secretary of State Colin Powell signaled the Haitian leader that he should consider stepping down peacefully. In Port-au-Prince the U.S. ambassador, James Foley, carried out back-channel negotiations. Under heavy U.S. pressure, Aristide agreed, but only after the Americans promised to help him escape with his family, his bodyguards, and, State Department and Haitian officials claim, a considerable fortune. Even his departure was controversial. Once safely in temporary exile, Aristide told members of the Congressional Black Caucus that U.S. officials had kidnapped him and even dictated his letter of resignation.

  An angry Powell told me it was absurd, “absolutely baseless,” and that Aristide had left voluntarily after negotiating his own terms. In fact, Powell had made fifty calls between ten o’clock Saturday night and eight o’clock Sunday to meet Aristide’s financial and security demands. Even after all that, no one wanted to take him in. Aristide and his family were in the air for an hour and a half while Powell and other officials frantically called foreign leaders to find some place for him to go. As soon as I reported these telling details, I received a furious call from one of the leaders of the Black Caucus, California congresswoman Maxine Waters. She and Aristide’s other longtime supporters, including Senator Chris Dodd, remain convinced that the United States had deposed the Haitian leader. But with Aristide gone, Haiti finally qualified for international aid that had been frozen since 1997 because of the continuing political chaos.

  My experiences in Haiti had given me confidence that I could find a way to combine my Washington experience with more firsthand experience on the ground. Over the next few years, I had remarkable adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, China, the Middle East, and Cuba. It was not as easy as having a more narrowly defined beat, like Congress or the White House. It was often more difficult to “sell” the stories to the New York producers. But the pictures were compelling, the stories were important, and above all, I felt that I was stretching myself, growing stronger and more confident as a correspondent. And the knowledge I had from covering foreign policy briefings and hearings on the Hill was now enriched by experience on the ground in all parts of the world.

  Traveling for NBC has had the added benefit of giving me a chance to learn from some of the network’s premier producers and camera crews, men and women who have a different set of skills than those of us assigned to Washington. They wouldn’t necessarily know the difference between an authorization and an appropriations bill, but they can land anywhere in the world, figure out how to tell the story, and find a way to feed it before deadline.

  Charlie Ryan and Mike Mosher are typical of their generation of network producers—smart, tireless, wonderfully competent. I worked with both of them at different times in Vietnam and Taiwan, among my favorite assignments in Asia. The joy of going to Vietnam was that my first visit was not during a crisis, and not under the pressure of deadlines. In August of 1995, Warren Christopher, then secretary of state, was going to Hanoi to establish diplomatic relations. What would the normalization of contacts between two former enemies mean? Nightly News bought my suggestion that I go a week earlier and learn about Vietnam’s gradual transition to a more capitalist economy.

  My arrival in Ho Chi Minh City was not auspicious. I had flown via London and Bangkok, carrying a change of clothes so that we could start interviewing people as soon as I landed. As it turned out, my extra shirt and slacks were a fortunate addition because my bags never made the transfer at Heathrow. It took a week for them to catch up to me. In the interim, I learned that Vietnamese women were a lot smaller than I, and that their traditional garb didn’t exactly work in my on-camera appearances.

  Over the next week we interviewed American and Vietnamese business executives, politicians, and workers about the evolving politics of Vietnam, first in Ho Chi Minh City, then in Hanoi. The South was overrun by Asian, European, and American businessmen trying to get a foothold in what everyone thought would be the next Asian tiger. But unlike Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia, Vietnam was still ruled by an aging communist politburo. We were shadowed everywhere we went by
a “minder” assigned by the Foreign Ministry to watch us and translate our interviews—and not, coincidentally, intimidate anyone who might have otherwise offered an opinion contrary to the official view.

  At least superficially, Ho Chi Minh City was very Western, a bustling capital of commerce. Far more surprising was Hanoi, which was less French than I’d expected, and exuberantly friendly toward Americans. With our Foreign Ministry “spy” in tow, we approached Hanoi across the Red River Bridge, which was flanked by two giant Coke bottles advertising that most American of products. I had a flashback to footage I’d seen of the same bridge being strafed by American bombers during the war. There were other dramatic contrasts between my mental images of Hanoi then and now. As I walked through the city, along the shore of the lake where John McCain had crashed and been taken captive, people would stop to chat, hoping to practice their English. Everyone was studying it, often at night classes held in the basements of office buildings where the only teaching tools were giant boom boxes blasting American songs, like the oversized radios you used to see on the streets of New York.

  We did a series of interviews with American businessmen, including oilmen from Mobil who’d had to give up their promising offshore fields during the Vietnam War and were now trying to recapture their investment. But Vietnam was struggling with its ambivalence toward permitting private investment. The people wanted Western consumer goods, but the aging communists who ran the country were not ready to loosen the reins on either political thought or economic power. Almost immediately, our tape editor, Steve Sung—sent over for the trip from our Burbank bureau, and familiar with a little Vietnamese—figured out that our friend from the Foreign Ministry was not accurately translating our interviews. (Steve was also one of the few survivors of the Jonestown murders, having been the soundman on our camera crew in Guyana. He still bears the scars from that shooting.)

  Fortunately, one of the businesswomen we met loaned us her secretary. In the hotel room at night we would retranslate the interviews, discovering entirely new shades of meaning. It was all I could do to be polite to our Foreign Ministry guide the next morning, but polite we were, given that he monitored every single word and picture before it was sent out via government satellite. He also held us up for a king’s ransom every time we fed our reports, demanding thousands of dollars more than any Western country charges for similar satellite time. Capitalism may be triumphant in most of the world but communism was not dying without getting its cut.

  Seventy-two million Vietnamese were hoping to become Asia’s next economic miracle. Only ten years earlier, people there were starving, forced to import their own largest crop, rice. The government provided jobs but little was produced, and inflation hit 800 percent. In desperation the Communist party started welcoming foreign investors, but only to partner with government-run companies. Asian businesses rushed in to take advantage of the country’s greatest strength—low-wage, highly educated workers. But everyone was waiting for the Americans who would arrive when diplomatic relations were normalized.

  There was an advance team of a few gutsy entrepreneurs willing to risk doing business in a country that did not recognize private property or contract law. One was a young African-American named Eugene Matthews, who had bought a Vietnamese yogurt factory. He and his friends were full of hope and expectations despite the frustration of doing business with the Hanoi bureaucrats. There were also a few Vietnamese benefiting from the transition. One family we interviewed, the Kims, were already millionaires who owned five Mercedes. Kim used to move supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Now he showed off his karaoke equipment, manufactured clothes, and talked about his plans for selling his products to America.

  One day I was wandering through Hanoi’s congested streets when a young woman engaged me in conversation. In halting English, she sought to learn everything about my work, education, and family. On an impulse she invited me up to see her home. Taking off my shoes, I climbed a narrow staircase above a souvenir shop to reach her family’s living space, where the ceiling was so low that it was impossible for me, at five foot three, to stand. She introduced me to her parents, grandmother, and siblings. We had tea and dumplings. It was a completely open and spontaneous encounter, remarkable to me as a child of the sixties who had experienced Vietnam only as a foreign war, not a real place.

  On the night before Warren Christopher and the State Department press corps’ morning arrival we were editing a Today show story in Steve Sung’s hotel room, when Charlie Ryan got very quiet. He stretched out on the bed, and told me to finish producing the spot. I didn’t realize for a while that he was desperately ill, perhaps from some chicken soup he’d had for lunch. I called the consulate, but couldn’t find a doctor and didn’t want to entrust Charlie to a Vietnamese hospital. He toughed it out, but was dangerously dehydrated and a lot sicker than any of us had originally thought. Every once in a while Steve and I would hear a faint voice from the bed saying, “Make sure you let that shot last a few frames longer.” We probably could have edited the piece in an hour if we’d been on deadline. But having fallen in love with the pictures and interviews we’d shot, we fussed over every scene, barely finishing in time to cover Warren Christopher’s arrival. Fortunately, by morning Charlie was starting to recover.

  That day, twenty-two years after the last American bombing raid over Hanoi, the American secretary of state landed in his white-and-blue jet to restore relations with Vietnam. It was no accident that Warren Christopher’s first official act was to accept recently recovered remains, believed to be those of four American servicemen. There were still critics back home, like Jesse Helms, arguing that there should be no official contact until Hanoi had resolved the 1,619 remaining cases of men missing in action during the war. Joint American and Vietnamese teams had been digging for clues throughout the country.

  While the United States focused on the MIA issue, all the Vietnamese wanted was economic aid and trade. But Christopher told them they would not get full trading rights until they enacted further economic reforms, such as contract laws, a tax code, and property rights. Still, even without a trade agreement, there was a sweet sense of closure for Christopher. He had begun grappling with the Vietnam issue thirty years earlier as a young negotiator for Lyndon Johnson. But for many families of the missing, Christopher’s visit brought no relief from a lifetime of unanswered questions.

  For years afterward Vietnam’s hard-line communist leaders stalled any progress on trade agreements, disappointing Eugene Matthews and my other American friends in Hanoi. In 1999, I returned to Vietnam, this time with a different secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. In contrast to the adventure of traveling independently, now I was part of the State Department press corps. The Vietnamese were still hungering for American goods. A new motorbike was more important than ideology. But economic progress was much slower than most people had expected.

  Vietnam’s offshore oil and gas fields never produced the finds Mobil was seeking. Most of the wells they drilled were dry, and there were legal challenges from China, which claimed territorial rights over potential fields in the South China Sea. Eugene Matthews had to close his yogurt factory and return to the States. And Mr. Kim was not exporting his inexpensive suits to American markets. But while economic progress had stalled, there was one bright spot in America’s tentative new relationship with Vietnam, the joint exploration for MIA remains. Slowly, painfully, the United States and Vietnam were reconciling and, when possible, burying their dead. Representing America at the repatriation ceremonies was a Vietnam War hero and former prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton, Pete Peterson, appointed as the first postwar U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. With the help of other Vietnam War heroes, including John McCain, Bob Kerrey, and John Kerry, Clinton had taken the first steps toward closing one of the most painful chapters in U.S. history, or so we thought at the time.

  But, as we learned in the 2004 campaign, as long as there are Vietnam veterans, or people who protested the war, Vietnam will remain an
unresolved part of America’s political history. It cost Lyndon Johnson his presidency and, arguably, made an embattled Richard Nixon more prone to the political abuses that led to the Watergate scandal. It animated McCain’s political career and nearly ended Clinton’s before it started. And in the 2004 campaign, Vietnam service again became a touchstone issue in the contest between John Kerry and George W. Bush.

  My coverage of Vietnam resonated because so many Americans still think about the war and its political fallout. Unfortunately for those of us fascinated by foreign policy, the slow tending of economic or political relations that is the day-to-day job of diplomats rarely makes news headlines, in print or on television. There are too many crises, especially during times of war, interfering with a sustained examination of quiet diplomacy.

  During the 1980s, when the world was both simpler and slower, NBC viewed the State Department as one of its premier assignments. One of my predecessors, Marvin Kalb, reportedly had an extraordinary clause in his contract entitling him to appear on the flagship Nightly News broadcast three times a week, even if the producers didn’t want his stories. It was a benefit granted by Bill Small, who became president of NBC News after years of working with Marvin at CBS. Marvin’s guaranteed exposure was a measure of the status foreign news used to enjoy. But that was a different time and place, during the Cold War and before domestic issues began to dominate news coverage in the 1990s. By the time I came to the beat, that era of devotion to foreign news had long since passed. My challenge was to find new ways to tell interesting stories, and make viewers want to know more about places they’d never thought were relevant to their lives.