John F. Burns Answers Readers’ Questions on Experiencing History
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Version 0 of 1. After 40 years at The New York Times, John F. Burns, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, will next week conclude a distinguished career that included reporting from war zones like Bosnia, Iraq and Libya, and witnessing some of the most significant events of our time, among them the end of apartheid in South Africa and the tyranny of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. He answered readers’ questions about some of these experiences, his views on our future and his dreams of meeting Mao Zedong. Q. How do you plan to spend your time now that you are “retired”? — Robert Iadeluca; Amissville, Va. A. I’ll do my best to run from the word “retired” and anything that looks like I’ve settled for scoring in the 80s at the golf club and boring people to distraction with war stories in the pub. Happily, I’ll be continuing to write for The Times on a freelance basis, and that should keep me up to par, since none of the editors will cut me much slack solely because I’ve worn a groove at the paper over the years. My brief from the editors is to hunt down space in the paper and on the web on any story they may see fit to print. So if I vanish into the journalistic ether — if I “just fade away,” as Gen. Douglas MacArthur described as the fitting end for old campaigners — it’ll be my fault, not the editors’. Q. Mr. Burns, what do you consider the most important event you have covered in your 40 years of journalism with The Times, and why? Thank you. — Brian VanDeMark; Chester, Md. A. That’s a hard choice, but I’d have to save a place on the short list for the first big story I landed on Page 1, a banner-headline account of a fatal bombing at La Guardia Airport in the winter of 1975 that may have saved me from failing my probation at The Times after a nervous and uncertain start. My boss at the time, Arthur Gelb, the fabled metro editor who has a guaranteed place in the paper’s pantheon, was generous enough to overlook the fact that the story published under my byline was crafted from the panicked scraps I phoned in from the airport concourse that night by Bob McFadden, the crack reporter who turned the elegant “rewrite” into a high art, saving many a career beyond mine. Without that piece, there might never have been the chance to write at close quarters about Mandela’s walk to freedom in 1990, about Saddam Hussein’s resolute progress to the gallows in 2005 or about the manifold brutalities of the Taliban as they consolidated their totalitarian grip on power in Afghanistan, among the stories that propelled me back onto Page 1 in the years that followed. Q. How do you manage to not get mad at the injustices man heaps upon other humans? Especially children and women? Does it ever provoke you to take matters into your own hands and get justice, instead of being a neutral observer? — Mani Subramanian; Boston A. I’ve always felt that passion is a legitimate — an indispensable — tool for a reporter in the face of the malevolent outrages of war. But that can never be allowed to overwhelm what matters critically to a newspaper like The Times, with the trust it has with its readers to render balanced accounts that hold true to the facts, or as many of them as are accessible amid the tide of confusion and deceit that are the inescapable companions of violent conflict. That is the gold standard, the compulsion to which passion must always yield, and it’s one that Times editors work vigilantly to uphold — sometimes, to an extent that almost all war reporters have experienced at one time or another, recasting stories in ways that cotton-wrap all passion. But, bottom line, I have held stubbornly to the belief that the reporter’s duty is not to be neutral in the face of outrage so much as to be fair, the more so when neutrality has the damnable effect of making unequal things appear equal. Identify the villains, and depict them as the satanic killers they often are? Yes, but never at the cost of obscuring the perpetrators’ accounts in justification, however mendacious, of what they have done. For all that, it would be vain to deny that editors have their own bounden trust to save reporters — not infrequently so, in my case — from the excesses of their passion with the cruel but necessary judgment of the blue pencil. You ask if there has ever come a moment to take matters into my own hands? There have been great reporters who have — Ernest Hemingway would never have claimed to have been neutral in the Spanish Civil War, nor even always fair — but ours has not been an age that favors his kind of swashbuckling commitment. In our time, it has become common for young reporters to give as their moral code, indeed as their reason for choosing the profession, that they aim to create a better world. It is a handsome thing, but one that can foster a missionary complex — a hubris, even — that can favor a blindness to inconvenient facts to the advantage of others. Q. Gosh, what an honor to ask this question, as a reporter on health leave embarrassed to say why. Here goes: What is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done on assignment? What will you remember you’re most proud of years from now? — Ted Whipp; Windsor, Ontario A. An important component of any career spent in hard places is the ability to weigh risk intelligently against reward, and I’ve always thought that any bill of attainder drawn up in my case would have to include the occasions when I got that calculus disastrously wrong. A sense of adventure, a readiness to push the boundaries and a willingness to accept a degree of personal hazard — all are part of achieving success in the world of the foreign correspondent, as in many other fields. But those qualities can quickly carry over into the foolhardy and the headstrong, not to mention a risk to life itself. Venturing 1,000 miles into closed areas of China on a motorcycle in 1986 was not hard to justify for the chance it offered to discover what was happening in remote parts of the country as the leaden socialist dictates of Mao Zedong yielded to the unleashed pursuit of wealth among the rural poor. But it was never a good bet that Mao’s loyalists in the state security apparatus would accept the flagrant flouting of their authority, and my subsequent imprisonment for “spying,” for all the years of dinner table yarns that it yielded, proved embarrassing to the paper and disruptive to a Times foothold in China that had taken many years to establish. There were other times when the ambition to reach outposts that had remained beyond the reach of others yielded a more personal sense of reproach, a sort of sickness of the soul that I could have been so cavalier in gambling on the welfare of my wife, Jane, and our three children. When the children were all still quite young, I pressed the Soviet-installed Afghan president, Najibullah, to let me fly on an aging Soviet-built Antonov troop-carrying plane to an embattled enclave in the southeast of the country, around the government stronghold of Khost, that had become a totem for the ability of Moscow’s legacy in the country to survive the onslaught of the mujahedeen after Soviet troops had withdrawn. The Soviet ambassador called me in to talk to his military aide, a much-beribboned general, and they cautioned against the flight as far too risky. But I went anyway, and sitting there during the midnight flight, amid leaking barrels of gasoline and ruptured boxes of ammunition, with weeping Afghan soldiers prostrate in Muslim prayer and the marijuana-fueled pilots in the blacked-out cockpit banking sharply on the spiraling descent to miss a Stinger missile fired at the aircraft by insurgents on the heights above the town, I said a rapid prayer for myself, that providence would forgive me for my crass irresponsibility. When I’d made it safely back to Kabul, I realized the full idiocy of what I’d done in the fact that the resulting story had never been a strong candidate for Page 1, in any case, the more so for the fact that I could hardly admit to the extreme dangers involved without my editors concluding that I had gone completely round the twist. Q. After all the places you have traveled and written about, how has your view of the West changed? — Honora Perkins; Newcastle, Me. A. I belong to a generation of reporters who grew up in the wake of World War II, in the time of the Cold War, and our attitudes were formed by the Manichaean struggle between the nations of the West, with their culture of freedom and democracy, and the grim totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and the countries of the Soviet bloc. My own view was inevitably influenced by the fact that my father was a wartime fighter pilot who became a NATO commander in West Germany in the 1950s, and by my Times assignment in the early 1980s to Moscow, which was then still trapped in the miseries of pre-Gorbachev repression. The essentials of that, for me, have never changed. The United States, in partnership with Britain, my own country, and with other nations of the Western alliance, remains indispensable to such stability that there is in the world. It is enough to ask what kind of a world it would be if the United States were to be supplanted as the predominant power among nations — by virtually any measure, political, economic, military or cultural — by the states with ambition to displace the United States by midcentury, principally China and Russia. Having experienced life in both countries at first hand, and over a number of years, I’d have to say that it’s not the kind of world I’d much relish living in. For all that, the experience of the last decade, especially, has eroded some of my confidence — a common-enough conclusion, I would guess — that the West has the answers to the poverty and strife in the distant world, or even in quarters closer to home. The occupation of Iraq, and its disastrous consequence in the current conflict in Iraq and Syria, as well as the debacle that has become of the Arab Spring, so recently hailed as the harbinger of a new era of democracy and liberty across the Arab world, has demonstrated how powerful the forces of faith, tribe and sect — the old gods — remain, and how unyielding to the vision of a civic society that the United States and its allies promoted in Iraq, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives and billions of wasted dollars. Q. You have met innumerable personalities in your long career, but I am sure there is “the one who got away.” Who is that one person whom you would like to have met but never did? Congratulations on your long and fine career. — Pamela Lewis; Elmhurst, N.Y. A. There is a long list of candidates — many who “got away” — but I’d settle for Mao Zedong, who was in the last, turbulent years of his life when I started as a foreign correspondent in what we then called Peking in 1971. It was an assignment that opened the way for me to a job at The Times, which had a syndication agreement for what I was writing with my then employer, The Globe and Mail of Toronto, the only Western newspaper with a resident correspondent in China until The Times and other American papers opened their own bureaus later in the ’70s. Those first years in China coincided with the latter period of the Cultural Revolution, the 10 years of disastrous upheaval launched by Mao in 1966 to restore his personal power against a Politburo group that, in Mao’s words, had taken to treating him “like a dead uncle at a funeral.” Millions died, but Mao, for the most part, was nowhere to be seen, save on the huge “big character” billboards displaying his image and his revolutionary exhortations on every building and every street corner. One Chinese official questioned as to Mao’s whereabouts said delphically at the time, “The Chinese people’s great leader Chairman Mao Zedong is everywhere in general, but nowhere in particular.” Just so. The closest I ever got to him was when I briefly — very briefly — led the Peking Marathon in 1973. Within the first mile, the race skirted the outer wall of the Communist leaders’ Zhongnanhai residential compound — site of Mao’s encounter with Richard Nixon the previous year — between the massed crowds that were a feature of the time. Then, and later, when I was feted as a hero atop the Tiananmen Gate to the Forbidden City for being the only foreigner to compete — notwithstanding a finish that placed me somewhere around 1,120th, an hour or more behind the winners. I understood then, for just a moment, what a heady thing it was to be feted by a million or more people waving their Little Red Books and their sea of red flags. But no sighting of Mao, for all the tumult. And what would I have asked him if I had met him? It’s a question that has coursed through innumerable dreams in the years since, along with a nightmare element that always recurs — after getting through those Zhongnanhai gates, and ushered into his presence, I’ve found in my dreams that I’d forgotten in the fluster to bring my notebook and pen. Mao, insistently avuncular, put it right in a jiffy, pulling a gold-nibbed Parker fountain pen from the pocket of his high-collared Mao jacket and handing me — what else? — a notebook bound in red leather. Psychologists, go figure. Q. John, from the perspective you’ve gained over many years of watching and analyzing world events, do you see the next 100 years becoming globally more peaceful or more violent? Or just more of the same — endless bloody regional and ethnic conflicts to contain or play to advantage? — John Leydon; Aldie, Va. A. How remote it all seems now, the optimism that swept the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the specter of nuclear holocaust lifted, we hoped that our children would grow up into a world that for them, and their children, would be less fraught than ours, and that of our fathers and grandfathers who fought on the Somme and the Rhine. And how wrong that has proved to be. The end of the military confrontation with Moscow has proved to be a distorting prism, with Russia turning so swiftly back toward its old habits of authoritarian repression, imperial ambition and hostility to the West. Who could have foreseen the terrifying scourge of the Islamic State fanatics, 13 years after the Sept. 11 attacks sent the United States to war in Afghanistan to uproot the malevolence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda? And who can explain that a world with a battalion of billionaires and the ability to land robotic explorers on distant comets has two billion people, nearly a third of mankind, still trapped in grinding poverty? Who can say if the blood-dimmed tide of ethnic, sectarian and regional strife will ebb, and when? Will the measures we take to protect ourselves from the violent discontents of the world end by eroding the freedoms won by the generations who built the West? None of this can be safely foretold. But if the experience of wide areas of the world over the past 40 and more years has taught me anything, it is that even a halting reconciliation of the conflicts that wound the world will rest, in this century as in the last, on a powerful, outward-looking America still primed to shoulder the burden of leadership in the world. Q. John, if you had the power to change one thing in this world, with no strings attached, what would be the one thing you would do? — Alicia Sommers; Great Falls, Va. A. Sorry, but I’d like to offer three commonplace ideals: 1. To see to it that the Western world’s huge food surpluses are effectively distributed to ensure that no child — nobody, for that matter — should ever go to bed hungry. 2. To use more of our wealth in the Western world to support basic medical care in the poorest parts of the globe, and to do so as part of restructured aid programs that eliminate the theft of so much aid money by corrupt politicians. 3. To round up all of the world’s armory of Kalashnikov rifles — all automatic weapons, for that matter, that are not under tight control by governments that observe civilized standards — and destroy them in a giant scrapyard crusher. Q. Why was the United States so ignorant when we invaded Iraq in 2003? Whose fault was that: our government, journalists, the people? And does the learning curve have to be so slow, costly and deadly? — Thom Gunn; Greenbank, Wash. A. In the face of how disastrously it has all turned out, it’s a question that many of us with footprints on the American role in that war should feel compelled to answer. It’s never going to be enough to say, as I can, that I was never a proponent of the American and British invasion, and that I saw my responsibility, ahead of the invasion, to chronicle, from Baghdad, the grotesque excesses of Saddam’s enforcers against his own people, the scale and murderousness of which have had few parallels in the modern world outside of Khmer Rouge Cambodia and the North Korea of the psychopathic family Kim. If that helped pave George W. Bush’s way to war, there was not much in what I wrote that could have been written in any other way; the outrageous brutality was Iraqi society’s most obtrusive characteristic, chronicled for years by the world’s most respected human rights groups. Saddam’s rule, over 24 years, had become a Murder Incorporated, to an extent that sickened even those of us who had spent long years in some of the world’s other nastiest places. Like so many others, I was never convinced by the principal justification advanced for the invasion, that Saddam was hiding a stockpile of forbidden chemical and biological weapons, because the evidence was fragmentary and inconclusive. But I did feel, as did most of my Baghdad-based American and British colleagues, that action to end Saddam’s tyrannicide, for the sake of his own people, would have at least a sound moral foundation. What we failed to do, and it was crucial, was to step back from the day-to-day pressures before war to look at the deeply fractured society in Iraq that would emerge when the carapace of Saddam’s terror was lifted. It would not have been easy, given the relentless efforts of our government “minders” to keep us from talking to all Iraqis who were not stool pigeons for Saddam, but a closer reading of the country’s long history of sectarian and tribal schism — combined with a keener ear for the warnings of many of the West’s finest Middle East scholars — might have schooled us to warn how improbable a venture the West had embraced in seeking to bring a Western-style democracy to Iraq. |