Special Heart: A Journey of Faith, Hope, Courage and Love

by Bret Baier

  A few months later, with scripts or teleprompters nowhere to be found, Bernie stood on the rooftop of the Hotel Al Rasheed in downtown Baghdad and reported live to the world on the first incoming missiles and bombs of the Persian Gulf War. I have often wondered if Bernie’s popcorn needs were sufficiently taken care of in between bomb blasts that night in Baghdad.

  During summers at DePauw I would travel south from Greencastle to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where I worked at WJWJ-TV based in Beaufort. The first year there I was a volunteer, with no pay or benefits. To be perfectly honest, the sensational golf courses scattered around Hilton Head more than made up for the fact I wasn’t getting paid. I started out being a gopher and doing whatever I was asked to do, but over time the folks at WJWJ gave me more and more responsibilities. It wasn’t long before they started trusting me to shoot interviews, edit tape, and help put together news packages. Eventually, I wore them down and they let me produce my own stories and even appear on air.

  South Carolina was a good fit for me, so after I graduated from DePauw I returned to Hilton Head and became what WJWJ called their Low Country bureau reporter. I liked to call myself the Low Country bureau chief, but in reality I was a one-man band: reporter, cameraman, sound engineer, editor, janitor, driver, and office manager all wrapped into one. The station’s mother ship was in Beaufort, but I was on my own out on Hilton Head Island, about an hour’s drive away. I came up with my own story ideas, wrote scripts, shot video, and edited everything down for the evening newscast produced out of Beaufort.

  There were all the normal go-it-alone TV reporter challenges like trying to frame up a stand-up shot by guesstimating how tall I was next to a tree or lamppost, or adjusting the camera focus by using a pile of leaves on the ground where I would eventually stand. But the tricky part of the job was my tight deadline. Even though the evening newscast was at 6:00 p.m., my personal deadline was 3:00 p.m. because I had to finish my story, then race to the Hilton Head airport so I could load my clunky three-quarter-inch tapes onto an old prop plane that made a daily afternoon flight across the Port Royal Sound to Beaufort.

  If I happened to miss my 3:00 p.m. deadline and that plane, I would have to drive to Beaufort, deliver my tapes by hand, then trek all the way back to Hilton Head, a real pain for someone who was trying to maintain an evening social schedule. So to get my tapes on that flight, I was often forced to do my best Dale Earnhardt impersonation and haul that beat-up old two-toned red and blue boat of a WJWJ station wagon from the bureau to the Hilton Head Airport. More times than I care to admit, I drove directly onto the tarmac of that little airport, hazard lights flashing, while I leaned on the horn the entire way to prevent the pilot from taking off without my tapes.

  I’ve often thought the pilot of that prop plane probably got a big kick out of messing with the TV boy by intentionally idling at the end of the runway till he saw that red and blue blur of a station wagon careening down that dusty airport road, all so he could enjoy a nice Low Country belly laugh at my expense.

  When I wasn’t driving on the tarmac of the Hilton Head Airport you might find me lobbying my bosses about yet another golf course we needed to inform our viewers about. But more often than not, I would probably be on the beach shooting video for a piece about the nesting habits of the loggerhead sea turtle, or possibly at a town council meeting covering the latest raging Hilton Head political controversy. The annual debate over the color of the azaleas to be planted on the median of highway 278 was always particularly heated and scintillating.

  I didn’t earn much money in those days, so when I wasn’t chasing down loggerhead turtles on the beach or thinking deep thoughts about the various shades of azaleas, I worked a few other jobs to help make ends meet. On the weekends I tended bar and waited tables at the local Applebee’s. On weeknights, I delivered food all over the island for a company called Restaurants on the Go. Once I showed up at a home with a food order and a middle-aged man answered the door.

  “Hey, you’re the guy on channel six, right? I just saw you!” he said.

  “Yessir,” I replied. “Thanks for watching! Now, did you have the calzone or the crab legs?”

  One big upside to working in South Carolina at the time was its rich history of political figures, not least of whom were the two sitting United States senators who would occasionally pass through Hilton Head for a fund-raiser or ribbon-cutting event of one kind or another.

  Senator Fritz Hollings was a complete piece of southern construction with a deep drawl and laugh that was instantly identifiable in a crowded room. Hollings looked the part of a southern senator, with his silvery mane of hair and straight-from-central-casting looks. In fact, when Hollywood was looking to cast the role of a distinctive southern senator for a big scene in the Al Pacino film City Hall, Hollings was selected to play the part.

  A former presidential contender during the 1984 Democratic primaries, Hollings had a bit of ignominious fame by being the third, and often forgotten, name on the once-heralded Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing bill of 1985. Hollings, who always had spectacular navigational skills around the English language, said of his own balanced-budget legislation, “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings is a baaad idea—whose time has come.”

  Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, whose first campaign slogan exhorted voters to “Give a Young Man a Chance,” was still a relatively young man of ninety-two when I was working in Hilton Head. I could never get out of my head the idea that Ol’ Strom, as he was affectionately known in South Carolina, was born the year the Wright brothers were still gliding. Strom had lived the entire history of American aviation and even jumped out of a few planes over Europe as a paratrooper during World War II.

  On one particular occasion in the fancy ballroom of a Hilton Head hotel, both Fritz and Strom were working the room at the same time, always a treat. There was a sumptuous buffet table loaded with all sorts of Low Country offerings such as cucumber sandwiches, fried oysters, Frogmore stew, and what appeared to be a small mountain of fresh shrimp. Upon seeing this spectacular gastronomic presentation, Ol’ Strom headed right for Shrimp Mountain and proclaimed, “Shrimp! I love shrimp!”

  All perfectly fine and a totally understandable tribute given all the wonderful delicacies being displayed, but what followed next is something I will never forget. Not only did Strom unceremoniously start stuffing shrimp into his mouth, he also proceeded to stick handfuls of the catch directly into his pockets. No embarrassment. No napkins. No nothing. Just suit pockets filled with finely prepared fresh shrimp.

  I thought, “Gheesh! Here’s a long-standing United States senator, for gosh sakes. Can’t his staff do a better job of getting this guy some shrimp once in a while?”

  I guess Ol’ Strom just wanted a little snack for the long car ride home.

  A bemused smile on his face, Hollings took in the Strom buffet line episode as if he had watched this scene play out a thousand times before. I suppose we should all be thankful Strom didn’t have a taste for cocktail sauce. Even though I was on a very strict budget in those days, I am proud to report I did not stuff anything in my pockets for my own car ride home.

  Not necessarily because I was an eyewitness to the Strom shrimp episode, but about this same time I started getting itchy and thinking it just might be time for me to move on. Hilton Head had been a fantastic learning experience for me, and the folks at WJWJ could not have been any nicer. But, counting my college summers, I had been working down there four years. You can do only so many loggerhead sea turtle nesting stories in one lifetime.

  I think I actually made my decision to leave Hilton Head in the middle of a five-hour, knock-down, drag-out town council debate on whether the awnings at the local TGIF restaurant should be red and white, or, because of the sensibilities and sensitivities of a higher-end leisure town like Hilton Head, might the community be better served by the colors maroon and gray.

  Before Fox News ever came along, my reporting on the Hilton Head TGIF color-scheme contro
versy was always “fair and balanced.” But truth be told, I was a bit of a traditionalist and personally preferred red and white. I sure hope they got that color scheme figured out down there. To this day, I cannot pass up reading a good article about loggerhead sea turtles. And I definitely cannot walk by a buffet table with shrimp without breaking into a big Low Country grin.

  Leaving Hilton Head with no specific job prospects, I decided to move back to Washington, D.C., a city that made a huge impression on me during my American University–Bernie Shaw days. My long-term goal was to work in Washington for one of the networks, so D.C. seemed like the perfect place for me to shake the sand out of my sandals, regroup, get my résumé reel in order, and start sending out tapes. A few friends of mine had moved to Washington to attend law school and were living in a great house on Capitol Hill right behind the Supreme Court. Despite the rigors of studying law, my friends all seemed to be having a lot of fun. They also happened to have a spare bedroom, so that pretty much sealed the deal for me.

  During the summer of 1994, about the same time Newt Gingrich and his band of Republican revolutionaries were on their way to winning the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, I found myself living in D.C. and tending bar at the top of the Center Cafe in Washington’s Union Station to make ends meet. I used every cent of my tip money for postage so I could send résumé tapes out across the country.

  Although I knew I wasn’t yet experienced enough to land a big-time reporting job in the D.C. television market, I made a few brassy attempts anyway, only to be shown the door. But thanks to the tip money from mixing margaritas at the Center Cafe, my tapes eventually stirred some interest in several local television markets across the country.

  The next thing I knew, I was on the road to Rockford, Illinois, and a reporting job at WREX-TV. I briefly considered taking a job in Amarillo, Texas, but to an East Coast boy, Amarillo seemed to be about thirty-seven hours from the next closest town. No offense to the fine folks of Amarillo, but when I traveled there for an interview, I actually saw an honest-to-goodness tumbling tumbleweed, and it scared the daylights out of me. Just two hours from Chicago, Rockford seemed to have its tumbleweed situation under control, so that choice was fairly easy.

  Rockford was an interesting place to work. Although they seemed a little disinterested in the challenges facing the loggerhead, I worked on a wide range of other stories, including many dealing with crime, racism in schools, and drugs. I lived in downtown Rockford and once produced a piece about drug dealers in my own neighborhood by setting up the camera in my apartment and shooting the story out my kitchen window: the offer of drugs, exchange of cash, arrival of the police, everything. If I hadn’t had to go into the station to edit my piece, I could have stayed in my pajamas all day and finished the story sitting at my kitchen table while drinking a cup of coffee.

  After Rockford, I headed south to North Carolina where I took a job as a general assignment reporter at the highly rated CBS affiliate in Raleigh, WRAL-TV. Over the course of my career in journalism, I’ve had a lot of interesting first days on the job, but my first twenty-four hours at WRAL took the cake.

  The day started out tame enough, with my photographer and me heading to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to produce a story about Title IX college sports programs. While we were on the UNC campus getting ready to do some on-camera interviews we got a call on the radio that a tornado was about to touch down near Zebulon, a very small town about twenty miles east of Raleigh.

  Unceremoniously, we threw all our equipment into the van and raced toward Zebulon, about an hour’s drive from Chapel Hill. While we were on the road approaching the town we looked out our van window and saw a funnel cloud. We stopped along the road so the photographer could shoot video of the tornado touching down, then we continued to a trailer park where several dozen homes had been damaged or destroyed.

  It was a mess, a heartbreaking disaster area with several folks milling around, confused, crying, and trying to reconnect with their loved ones. I remember trying to help a woman find her young daughter when suddenly a police officer came by and hollered, “There’s another one coming. Another one is coming. Another one is coming!”

  All of a sudden everyone started running in the same direction toward a ditch by the side of the road. Being in the TV business, we, of course, shot video up until the last second before we, too, dove into the ditch and hunkered down for dear life with everyone else. Thankfully, the second funnel cloud kept moving and touched down about a mile away from where we were.

  Eventually my cameraman and I shot some more video, and with as much sensitivity as we could conducted interviews with several local folks, some of whom had lost everything. Despite the loss of property, everyone, including me, was extremely thankful there was no loss of life.

  Meanwhile, the station sent a transmission truck to meet up with us so we could do live reports from the scene. I wound up doing live shots all night long and producing a full package for WRAL’s 11:00 p.m. newscast. In the middle of gathering the elements needed for my story, I was also doing live hits throughout the evening for various CBS affiliates across the country.

  Barely making it back to my apartment in Raleigh for a few hours’ sleep, I returned to Zebulon at first light for appearances on the CBS morning show and some live walk-and-talks to show the path of the storm and the devastation. I had only been in Raleigh for a few days and was still living out of a suitcase. I barely knew the names of the anchors back at the station, let alone my fellow reporters. I was so new to the area I had to ask folks around me for the correct pronunciation of Zebulon seconds before I went on the air for the first time. I had pretty much been on the air nonstop for the better part of twenty-four hours, all on my first day on the job.

  The following day, cameraman Mark Copeland and I went to the nearby town of Lizard Lick about five miles west of Zebulon to do some storm aftermath stories. Lizard Lick didn’t even have a stoplight in 1996 and was basically just a crossroads on the map with a small diner and gas station. When Mark and I walked into the diner, six big-bellied regulars were at the counter eating breakfast. As I walked through the screen door all six of those burly guys turned to me and said, “Well, hiyaah, Bret!” like they had known me their entire lives.

  With all the affiliate reporting I had been doing—and this just my second day on the job—I had probably appeared on WRAL only three or four times over the past twelve hours, and these guys at this small diner in the middle of nowhere were calling me by my first name. That encounter convinced me not only how popular WRAL was throughout the region, but it was a good reminder of the vital, up-close, on-the-ground role local reporters can play in a community, whether they are diving into the same ditch with their viewers or not.

  Many memories from those early days filled my mind as I cruised along I-85 and edged my way over to the right lane for the Georgia Tech exit and the final few blocks to the Fox bureau. A great space in the Georgia Public Television complex, the bureau was a huge step up from just a few years before when the entirety of the Atlanta bureau was in the living room of my 600-square-foot apartment.

  I absolutely loved working at WRAL and living in Raleigh, but when the brand-new Fox News Channel came along and offered me a chance to open a regional bureau in my hometown of Atlanta, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

  The only resources I had during those early days in Atlanta were a clunky fax machine, a cell phone about the size of a loaf of bread, and an end-of-the-world supply of Pizza Combos and Diet Coke. This was early 1998, about the same time news headlines across the country were screaming with stories about President Clinton and his relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. While the impeachment drums were beating on Capitol Hill and special prosecutor Ken Starr was becoming a household name, I busied myself with covering any number of non-Monica stories across the southeast—and there were plenty.

  In a few short years our fledgling Atlanta bu
reau had grown into a fully functioning news operation with full-time camera operators, producers, and even some real office space. My bosses in New York also hired a full-time bureau chief named Sharon Fain so I could work on stories 100 percent of the time and not have to worry about the million and one logistical details a bureau chief needs to deal with.

  It wasn’t long before the Atlanta bureau earned the reputation within Fox for being the crazy folks who would go anywhere, at any moment, to cover stories that no one else wanted or were too busy to cover: tornadoes, hurricanes, the search for the Olympic Park bomber in the North Carolina mountains, Timothy McVeigh, and the Elián González story that took me to Cuba several times, just to name a few.

  We also did our fair share of water-cooler/refrigerator-magnet stories, such as lawnmower racing in Alabama, UFO sightings in North Carolina, and the population explosion of rodents called nutria in Louisiana. Nutria became such a problem the state actually encouraged restaurants to come up with nutria dishes for their menus.

  I was easily spending three weeks out of each month on the road in those days. I was traveling so much I sometimes wondered why I kept an apartment at all. Maybe I should have just bought a cot and slept in the bureau like those congressmen who sleep in their Capitol Hill offices. Given the fact that most of my colleagues had actually seen my apartment and knew where neatness ranked on my personal hierarchy of needs pyramid, I doubt they would have gone along with that idea for very long.

  I was on the road for such long stretches I am fairly certain I still hold some Guinness Book records for killing the most apartment plants in a year. It wasn’t just me. Everyone in the Atlanta bureau had the same pick up and go mentality. In fact, it was a bureau requirement that we all have go-bags stuffed with fresh clothes and toiletries so we could pick up and roll on a moment’s notice.

  When it came to catching last-minute flights to the next news hot spot, we had it down to an absolute science. Upon receiving word we were needed somewhere across the southeast to cover a story, several of us would immediately pile into a car or a van loaded with all our television equipment and race to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. Pulling up to the outside drop-off point, our cameraperson would jump out to find the special baggage handlers we generously tipped to move our cases of equipment onto the plane. My producer Malinda Adams or I would run to the counter to buy tickets while the other would park the car. We would typically reassemble at the gate and all bundle onto our plane to wherever just as the doors were about to close.