Audition (62 page)

We managed to finagle an extra hour from Begin, during which Aliza Begin served us all orange drinks and chocolates, then more orange drinks and more chocolates, until Begin finally said, “Enough.” We sat down to start the interview, in which we thought he was going to blame Sadat for the peace effort’s collapse, when the phone rang. Begin took the call in the kitchen. It was Carter calling from the Cairo airport.

The smile on Begin’s face was a yard wide when he came back into the living room. “I can tell you that the president gave me good news,” he said. “But that’s all I can tell you.”

We knew we were at the center of a big story, but we didn’t know what it was. We were frantic. Bob Frye, my producer, took his walkie-talkie and contacted the ABC bureau in Jerusalem. He was told that Carter had read a statement to the press at the airport that was being transmitted to New York. “Get it from New York and read it to us,” Frye told the bureau. So there we all were, including Prime Minister Begin, huddled around the walkie-talkie listening to Carter’s statement: “Sadat has agreed to”—and the walkie-talkie went dead.

We grabbed Begin’s phone and called New York. My assistant on this trip, Shirley Craig, took down the wording of Carter’s announcement in shorthand, then knelt beside Begin to read it to him. He listened silently as Shirley read, occasionally nodding his head in agreement. It was an unbelievable moment.

We immediately started the interview with Begin. He didn’t yet know the details of the agreement, so we focused on his feelings. Begin was as animated as I’d ever seen him, and although he tried to be calm and statesmanlike, it was obvious he was thrilled. It wasn’t a very long interview—he had to get to his office—but it was a portrait of peace in the making. Hooray! We had a scoop.

As soon as I finished I flew to Cairo, through Cyprus this time, to get the other side of the portrait of peace. There my luck ran out.

It was almost 11:00 p.m. when we finally got to Sadat’s residence in Giza, overlooking the Nile. I tried to persuade a security guard to take him a message that we wanted to have a few words with him, but the guard refused. So we were reduced (no kidding) to throwing pebbles at Sadat’s windows, trying to get his attention. Why we weren’t arrested I can’t imagine, but finally another guard consented to take a note from me to Sadat. The answer came back that he would not see us then but would be pleased to see me when he came to Washington to sign the final peace treaty.

That in itself was news. So at 2:00 in the morning I did a stand-up report outside Sadat’s house, announcing that the Egyptian president would be going to Washington for the official signing of the peace treaty. I was so tired that we had to do at least six takes. We were all delirious by then and grateful for a one-bedroom suite, the only hotel room available. Four of us piled into that one room and slept on the twin beds—Shirley, Bob Frye, and a reporter from
TV Guide
, John Weisman, who was doing a story on how television was covering the Sadat visit. He couldn’t get a room, so we said, “Join us.” I remember thinking that I hadn’t washed my hair in a week, so while they slept I showered and washed my hair with Egyptian soap. The funny things that stay in your mind. Finally, on March 16, 1979, we returned to New York.

It is said that journalists have to be objective and fair, and I like to think we are. But there is no doubt that the television networks were part of the peace process. During this whole Carter, Begin, and Sadat shuttle, television was able to run with the story much faster than the newspapers and way ahead of the newsmagazines. The print journalists were not happy. The new and not-very-complimentary phrase they used was “video diplomacy,” starting with Cronkite’s doctored split-screen interviews with Sadat and Begin and continuing through my interview with the two leaders at the Knesset and, later on, with Begin in Jerusalem.

But like it or not, television had become the dominant purveyor of news by the late seventies and was central to the story in the Middle East. As John Weisman later wrote in
TV Guide
: “From the very beginning, from Anwar el-Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem in November, 1977, the story was a TV story. Indeed, if Vietnam had been the world’s first TV war, the Israeli-Egyptian agreement was the world’s first television peace.”

Golda Meir’s observation was more cryptic. “I’m not sure in the end whether Begin and Sadat will get the Nobel,” she said. “But for certain, both should get the Oscar.”

They did indeed get the Nobel Peace Prize. And on March 26, 1979, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin finally signed the formal Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in an elaborate ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. I went as a guest of Senator John Warner. Finally I wasn’t working and could savor the moment, but not for long.

I had yet another interview lined up with President Sadat at the Egyptian embassy at 4:30. This was a little nerve-racking in that we had to get the interview taped and edited in time to make the seven o’clock broadcast. We made it by seconds, but there was little joy at the Egyptian Embassy. Sadat’s courageous act was already being condemned throughout the Arab world. The Arab League would shortly suspend Egypt’s membership, and the leaders of Egypt’s former Arab allies would sever diplomatic ties with the country.

The atmosphere was very different in the Israeli camp when I interviewed Begin later that night. I remember the festive celebration in Begin’s hotel suite, where he and his staff were singing Hebrew folk songs.

What a golden time it was, full of hope and heroes and the promise of peace.

I would stay in touch with both Sadat and Begin. I spoke individually to them with some frequency, sent them cards on all the appropriate occasions, and did several more interviews with each of them. But events moved on. Sometimes tragically.

In October 1981 Anwar Sadat was shot at a military parade in Cairo by Muslim extremists who had infiltrated the army. The assailants considered Sadat a traitor. I was stunned and grief stricken when I heard the news. ABC asked me to help to find out about Sadat. Had he survived? Was he dead? I called the hospital in Cairo and managed to talk to one of his aides. I knew the answer when he told me that Jehan Sadat had left the hospital. She would never have left her husband’s side if he were still alive. Eight hours later the Egyptians officially confirmed his death.

Peter Jennings and I covered Sadat’s funeral in Cairo. Though dignitaries from the Arab countries were conspicuously absent, many other leaders came, including Menachem Begin and three former U.S. presidents—Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. Instead of the streets of Cairo being lined with mourners, they were empty and eerily quiet. Peter and I couldn’t decide whether people had stayed home because they were afraid or because they had turned against Sadat. Whatever the reason, it made for the strangest, saddest funeral procession.

Afterward I went to President Sadat’s house, as a friend, not a reporter, to offer my condolences to Jehan Sadat. We embraced, and then sat together and shared our memories of her husband. “You know, you were the only one I was ever jealous of because Anwar liked you so much,” she told me with a smile. (What a lovely compliment from a lovely woman who remains my friend to this day.)

Mrs. Sadat talked movingly about her husband in an interview with me three months later. She had asked him to wear a bulletproof vest to the parade, but he refused. “When God is ready to take me, he’ll take me,” he had said to her. “Okay,” she’d replied, “but you don’t have to help.”

He’d also had a premonition of his death. Their son, Gamal, was leaving on a trip to the United States a few days before the military parade, and after his father said good-bye to him, he called him back. “Gamal,” he said. “You must take care of your mother.” Jehan told me this with tears in her eyes. “My husband knew,” she said. “He knew.”

I felt depressed and discouraged when I flew home from the funeral. Another loss, another senseless death. I had no idea that I’d be back in the Middle East just a week later to attend yet another funeral, this one of my friend Moshe Dayan. Moshe had been sick for a long time with colon cancer and was even losing sight in his one remaining eye. The cause of his death was given as a massive heart attack. Personally I think the cause of his death was his life.

He had been denounced in Israel for his failure as minister of defense to anticipate the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Many Israelis had never forgiven him—until his funeral. Thousands of people now turned out to pay their final respects and file past his coffin. To Dayan’s widow, Raquel, they were hypocrites. “Where were they all when he needed them?” she said bitterly to me.

I was very close to Raquel and even lent her a black dress to wear to the funeral. (She didn’t have a proper one in her closet.) When the streams of people paying condolences left her house after the burial, I and a friend from America, Lola Finkelstein, helped tidy up and wash the dishes. My heart ached for Raquel and was heavy for myself as well. Moshe and I used to make the rounds of antiquity dealers in New York when he came to give lectures. He spent whatever extra money he had on ancient artifacts and had a remarkable collection at his home in Israel. Moshe Dayan was a man far ahead of his time. He was convinced that the only way to solve the Palestinian problem peacefully was to grant them autonomy, a controversial position then. He was one of Israel’s chief negotiators with the Egyptians at Camp David in 1977. He was also the author of several history books, including one on the Bible. Dayan was loved and hated, but he never cared what others thought of him. Like Sadat, he had an enormous personality, great humor, and charm when it suited him. He was an extraordinary general and totally original. I knew no one quite like him, and I am grateful that I got to know him as a friend.

Of the three people I admired most in the Middle East, only Menachem Begin was then still alive, but our cordial relationship eroded in 1982 during an interview in which I questioned him pointedly about the wisdom of Israel’s invasion and subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon. Although Begin was being roundly criticized in both the Arab and Western press, and his popularity had dropped sharply in Israel, he obviously hadn’t expected such criticism from me. After the interview he looked straight at me and said, “And you, too, Barbara?” He was very angry and never really forgave me for asking. To Begin, I was now just one more adversarial reporter.

After Sadat and Dayan died the chapter of my life in the Middle East more or less came to a close. I would interview Yasir Arafat again, this time in Cuba at a conference of nonaligned nations, and I would interview other Arab leaders: Jordan’s King Hussein, Libya’s Colonel Mu‘ammar al-Qaddafi, more recently, Hussein’s heir, King Abdullah of Jordan, and another Abdullah, the king of Saudi Arabia. But nothing would ever come close to recapturing the excitement of covering the peace process between Egypt and Israel in the midseventies and of meeting and knowing the great men of that time.

That is not to say there was no more excitement in my life. It just moved to a different hemisphere.

Exit Harry, Enter Hugh

T
HE OTHER QUESTION
I am most often asked is whether being a woman in what was, and still is to a degree, such a predominantly male profession has been a hindrance or a help? The answer, of course, is both. On the negative side there were the Frank McGees and the Harry Reasoners, who were threatened by the thought of a woman as their professional equal. On the positive side there have been plenty of men and women who had no concerns whether it was a man or a woman interviewing them.

That is usually the case, I have found, even in countries like Saudi Arabia, where women are so severely discriminated against. In 2005 King Abdullah chose me from among all the American journalists who had requested to do the first interview with him after he inherited the throne. The king evidently had no trouble being questioned by a woman, and furthermore by a woman whose head was only partially covered. It may be that Arab leaders welcome the modern image of them it projects. Or it might be as simple as their recognizing that Western female reporters have different customs and therefore not expecting them to adhere to the same strictures as their own female citizens.

There are other times when being a woman can be an advantage. Sex rears its happy little head, and a sought-after male subject chooses you to do the interview in the hope that somewhere along the line, the romantic side—or at least the flirtatious side—will surpass the professional.

Though, as I’ve said, Fidel Castro never made the slightest pass at me, I felt he liked me. Did he give me more of his time than he might have given a male journalist? Possibly. But there was no “possibly” about the intentions of the Panamanian dictator, Gen. Omar Torrijos, whom I interviewed in 1978. He saw me, liked me, and decided to give me special access. (Listen, folks, it sometimes works the other way. Nancy Reagan, for example, had a crush on, and friendship with, Mike Wallace and saved several of her post–White House interviews for him.) Considering that Torrijos’s attraction to me worked to my advantage, it was fine with me.

I was in Panama in April 1978 because the U.S. Senate was about to vote on whether to ratify a treaty negotiated by Jimmy Carter and Torrijos that would transfer the sovereignty and eventual control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. This was a very controversial issue at the time—and had the potential for danger. I had wanted to bring my assistant, Mary Hornickel, with me but my producer, again Justin Friedland, said no, it wasn’t safe. If the Senate vote went against the return of the canal, Americans were not going to be very popular in Panama, and if we had to get out of the country in a hurry, he didn’t want to have to worry about anyone but the smallest possible crew. So Justin and I went alone with one cameraman, a sound technician, and an ABC photographer.

General Torrijos, whose formal titles included “Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution” and “Supreme Chief of Government,” was a charismatic man with chiseled features that spoke of his Indian ancestry. He was said to have “the walk of the hunter,” meaning that he could come upon you silently from behind without your knowing it.