To mark the OPC’s 75th anniversary, Dateline magazine has assembled a look-back through the decades with some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business who have sent us their memories of the biggest stories of their respective eras. We’ve broken it down by decade: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013
In 1974 I went to Lebanon as vacation relief for The Washington Post and learned soon enough that war correspondence had changed and changed irredeemably: good-bye to the illusion of official protection and government accreditation for foreign correspondents and welcome to infinitely innovative chaos, Hobbseian anarchy, car bombs, abruptly changing tactical alliances among pop-up armed gangs and asymmetrical warfare in which reporters became legitimate targets.
Indeed it was in Beirut, after a decade-and-a-half covering conflicts from the Congo to Vietnam, that I came to understand war reporting was on a new and accelerating path to unpredictable and ever nastier dangers.
That August it all seemed so easy. I had visited Beirut for years. I knew my onions. Old Lebanese friends and trusted sources provided chapter and verse. After a week’s reporting, my 2,000-word story stitched the clues together: Lebanon really was about to come apart at the seams and I had the color, quotes and anecdotes to show why.
I might have taken on board at least one obvious evil omen. Reuters, which handled the Post‘s copy (and that of dozens of other newspapers) punched my telex tape, but, fearing government retribution, refused to send it. Undeterred, I took the great cat’s cradle wad of telex tape and went down to the swimming pool of the Excelsior Hotel in Ain Mreisseh, home of the Caves des Roy nightclub, formerly one of Lebanon’s most famous hotspots, and had its telex operator feed the tape through the hotel’s machine.
After a pleasant hour at the pool, I verified the tape had landed intact in Washington, picked up my suitcase at the office and taxied to the airport in time for the evening flight to Paris. I cannot imagine that any other American newspaper would have run such a story then. Nor do I think any American paper would do so now. But the Post was riding high. That very month its Watergate coverage had played a critical role in forcing President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
In planning my story I had weighed the risks with my Beirut colleague who upon his return could–and did–proclaim his innocence when called on the carpet by the Information Ministry and threatened with expulsion.
I was banned until the following spring, when the conflict I had predicted indeed broke out. In fits and starts it lasted 15 years and claimed some 200,000 lives. Lebanon has yet to recover fully and (indeed today is being sucked deeper into the vortex of the current Syrian conflict). My personal punishment was to cover the increasingly nasty and innovative violence in Lebanon for years on end.
I soon appreciated one well-meaning Lebanese cop who early on stopped me from entering Tripoli by explaining the fighting I was so keen to cover had “nothing to do with the Marquis of Queensberry rules.” I still savor that uncharacteristic example of Lebanese understatement.
Over the years I was expelled at gunpoint from the office apartment, kidnapped twice, my life threatened more than occasionally. In 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, a treetop-skimming Israeli fighter pilot flew right over my head before dropping a bomb nearby which collapsed a six-story building from which his quarry, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, had recently exited.
That same year a man I had never seen before fired a revolver between my legs as I dictated copy from the lobby in the Commodore Hotel, the hack hangout. Doonesbury strips insisted its illusion of expensive protection included disguising Himalayan-sized bar tabs as laundry bills. In fact, unflappable manager Yusef Nazzal coined a fortune during the Israeli siege of Beirut thanks to his foresight in installing multiple telex and overseas telephone lines.
Of all the conflicts I covered over five decades, Lebanon stands out as a peculiarly urban war confined almost entirely to the precincts of its capital’s divided and mutually hostile halves; East Beirut with its militant Maronite Christians allied to Israel and West Beirut subject to the ramshackle authority of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its even more uncontrollable leftist Lebanese allies.
Somehow I emerged unscathed, at least physically. Along with colleagues, I learned to distinguish the characteristic sound of incoming and outgoing ordnance as well as that of the Commodore bar’s pet parrot’s excellent imitation.
We routinely parked cars in the getaway position. In bouts of prolonged fighting we learned to appreciate being able to drive fast down Beirut’s normally clogged streets. The first flak jackets appeared, still an oddity and not yet in the de rigueur kit.
I was not the only correspondent who lived in frequent fear of producing the wrong, or expired, pass at checkpoints manned by the proliferating militias requiring such talismans in exchange for safe passage.
All too often I was scared stiff . Much to the disgust of my excellent Los Angeles Times colleague, Joe Alex Morris, Jr., I once froze as we approached the dangerous museum crossing from East Beirut. He finally gunned his Fiat convertible and we raced back safely to the Commodore in West Beirut. Joe had no sense of physical fear and that alas, got him killed in the Iranian revolution in 1979.
I dealt with my near perpetual funk by getting out and talking to people. Recording others’ anguish somehow kept me functional. But I envied colleagues who did their reporting from the Commodore bar.
Over the years I was one of the few correspondents who regularly visited the Christian side of Beirut to report on the Maronites’ increasingly close relations with Israel. Bashir Gemayel, the headstrong young Maronite militia leader, once told me he could have me killed for what I’d written. I often wondered why he didn’t do so. I finally concluded he admired the very real chances I took to cover his frequently violent acts. Such were the traditions of a macho society.
My U.S. passport doubtless saved me and other American reporters on many an occasion. During much of Lebanon’s “little wars,” rules of sorts oddly obtained most of the time although a practiced eye was necessary to discern them.
That is not to say foreign correspondents were not fair game for deliberate intimidation. The Israelis, for example, had no compunctions about smearing the foreign press, based almost entirely in West Beirut, as frightened lackeys of the PLO shamelessly cowed into writing Palestinian propaganda to save its skins.
At one point, an Israeli submarine melodramatically landed American television showman Geraldo Rivera on Maronite turf to highlight our alleged pusillanimity and, of course, his heroics in reporting on what his hosts called “free Lebanon.”
In fact, Maronite militiamen, always quick to murder local Muslims and other foreigners, were still shy about killing Americans whom, against the odds, they at long last eventually entangled in the Lebanese quagmire.
The underdog PLO, routinely labeled as terrorists in much of the world, was equally forbearing, forlornly hoping the United States would recognize its national liberation struggle as legitimate and that the resident press corps somehow could help bring that about.
Israel’s ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon—and its subsequent 18-year-long occupation—drastically changed foreign reporting in Beirut. Lebanon’s long downtrodden Shia Muslims emerged as a formidable political, militant religious and military force called Hezbollah to fight the invaders.
Trained and financed by Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries, Hezbollah set about removing deep-rooted Western influence in Lebanon. Soon enough, western, and especially American, reporters were kidnapped in broad daylight as legitimate targets and held for years along with other hostages. That became a much copied pattern elsewhere.
Never again were western newsmen to feel as safe in the Middle East as I did in the 1970s.