Audition (78 page)

The inside of the tent was bright orange and green, green being Libya’s national color and the traditional color of Islam. I was wearing a pink knit suit. Qaddafi arrived wearing a white suit, a green shirt, a white cape lined in green, and white alligator mules. He looked absolutely stunning but all I could think of was that between his white suit with the green, the green-and-orange tent, and my pink suit, the viewers were going to have an awful headache.

I disliked Qaddafi because of his support of terrorist groups and his determination to drive Israel into the sea, but in the two hours we spent taping the interview, he answered every question and betrayed no hostility toward me. Neither did I to him. He did, however, have a curious posture. Never once did he look at me. Occasionally he would look to his left, where his interpreter was sitting (though he seemed to understand a good deal of English and sometimes would correct the interpreter). Still, I would look him in the face, and he would look to the left or down or up, but never once did he meet my eyes. I thought it might be because I am a woman, but my colleague George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed him some years later, told me he had the same experience.

I began my questioning of Qaddafi by asking simply, “What do you think is the greatest misconception about you in our country?” He answered in a long, rambling diatribe against the Western media, which, he claimed, would “show pictures of me next to skulls, to dead bodies, and they’re not reflecting the true picture of me.” I politely disagreed. “Your misconceptions about us,” I said, “are as great as our misconception about you.”

The misconception theme continued, which gave me the opening to ask the question that so many people in my country were wondering about: Was he insane? Seems to me that whenever we don’t like a foreign leader, we question his sanity, but I had to ask. I tried to phrase it so it wouldn’t sound too hostile. “While we are talking about misconceptions, can I ask you something directly which may seem rude? In our country we read that you are mad. Why do you think this is?”

Instead of taking offense he threw back his head and laughed. His convoluted answer about being loved by “the majority of ordinary people in the four corners of the globe” was not necessarily reassuring, but at least he didn’t kick me out. Indeed, he seemed quite satisfied at the end of the interview and asked if there was anything else I wanted. I said two things. First, I wanted to visit what had been reported in America as a factory for creating chemical weapons and other WMD, but which his people told us was making medicines; second, I wanted to meet his family, particularly his wife. “No Westerner has seen them on camera,” I said, “and meeting them might help people understand you.”

On the first request he said that he himself did not have the power to make those arrangements. Oh, yeah? Instead, he would ask the commissioner in charge of the plant if it was possible to visit. It turned out, although we asked again and again during our three-day stay, that it wasn’t. So much for that. As for meeting his family, Qaddafi said he would think about that and let me know.

I waited for five hours in my hotel room, passing the time by eating Libya’s delicious blood oranges. (Tripoli is in fact a beautiful city with a busy bazaar, welcoming people, and beautiful beaches.) Then came the knock on the door. “Come immediately,” said one of Qaddafi’s aides. And back we went to the tent, where Qaddafi’s wife, Safiya, and four of their six young children were waiting.

Safiya Qaddafi, his second wife, was a tall, stunning woman. Her children, lined up on either side of her, looked at me with hatred and fear in their eyes. I was the dreaded American from the country that had killed their little sister. “Our children consider all Americans like monsters, like Dracula,” Safiya said to me. “When the people here want to get their children’s attention, they say, ‘Look out or the Americans will come for you.’” Safiya, a former nurse in a Tripoli hospital, had met Qaddafi during his recuperation from an automobile accident. They fell in love and married after he left the hospital, and became the parents of five sons and one daughter. “If my husband was really such a villain,” Mrs. Qaddafi said to me, “do you think I would have stayed with him until now?”

At the time of this interview Qaddafi was, as I have mentioned, our sworn enemy. But he has done an about-face. In a dramatic shift in December 2003, our former terrorist foe became our new best friend when Libya announced it would give up its nuclear arms program along with other WMD. Among the reasons for Qaddafi’s change of heart, one columnist wrote, was the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons by U.S. forces in Iraq, and Safiya Qaddafi’s demands that her husband do more to protect their now grown sons from the same fate. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is, it wouldn’t be the first time that a strong wife influenced her husband.

The interviews with Saddam Hussein and Mu‘ammar Qaddafi may have been two of the more exotic conversations I have had, but with Jiang Zemin, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission, I met another leader who at the time was hardly considered a pal of the United States. I sat down to talk with him in Beijing in May 1990. A year had passed since the famous fifty-day student demonstration for democratic reforms had been crushed in Tiananmen Square by Chinese security forces. It became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, though no one was sure how many people had died. Heads had rolled in the Chinese leadership, and Jiang Zemin was the new man in charge.

It had taken us a great deal of time to get this interview. Henry Kissinger had been very helpful because he had had good relations with the Chinese hierarchy since his first and historic visit to that country. Dr. Kissinger put me in touch with the proper people who put me in touch with the proper people who put me in touch, etc., etc. After many, many letters, we got the go-ahead, probably because Jiang Zemin wanted to persuade Congress to continue America’s favorable trade agreement with China.

We met on the beautiful grounds of the official state guesthouse in Beijing. We conducted the interview through an interpreter, though Jiang Zemin understood some English and even spoke a bit of it. He had a pleasant smile but cold eyes, and was given to quoting Shakespeare. When I asked him how he would describe the primarily student rebellion on Tiananmen Square the year before, he replied, in English: “‘Much ado about nothing.’”

It was hardly much ado about nothing, but he wouldn’t budge and even said he didn’t “have any regret” about the way the army sent its tanks against the students. He would, however, have handled it differently—by banning assembly on Tiananmen Square and thereby avoiding the use of lethal weapons. “‘A fall into the pit, a gain in the wit,’” he said, citing a Chinese proverb.

One of the enduring images from the siege was that of a young man standing in front of a column of tanks, blocking their progress toward the square. We had run the famous photograph of this lone figure, dressed in a white shirt and carrying a plastic shopping bag, over and over on ABC News. No one knew what had happened to him.

I had brought a copy of the photograph with me and I showed it to Jiang Zemin, full in the face. It took him by surprise, and his eyes became even more steely. He did not like the surprise or my question.

“Do you have any idea what happened to him?” I asked. “We have heard he was arrested and executed.”

“I cannot confirm whether this young man you mention was arrested or not,” he said. He answered, unexpectedly, in English.

“You do not know what happened to him?” I pressed.

“I think never killed,” he said.

“You think he was not killed?” I said.

“I think never killed,” he repeated.

That was it. We never did find out what happened to the man who braved the tanks.

When the interview was over and transmitted to New York, I wanted to travel a bit. Although I had been in China from that earliest visit with President Nixon, I was always working and had little opportunity to explore that vast country. This time I had my own plane ticket, but sometimes it can be very hard to get from one province to another. The flights can suddenly be canceled, delayed, or overbooked, as was the flight I had a ticket for. “Sorry, full,” I was told at the airport. So I went to the ticket agent and showed him a photograph of me with Jiang Zemin that had been on the front page of one of the Chinese newspapers. I felt sure he would say, “Come this way,” but he couldn’t have cared less. The plane took off without me.

A revolution of a different sort in the USSR drew me to Moscow in January 1991 to interview Boris Yeltsin, then chairman of the Russian parliament. One Soviet republic after another was declaring independence, the latest being Lithuania, and the Soviet Union’s president, Mikhail Gorbachev, had sent Soviet troops into the capital city, Vilnius, to shut down the television station. (By the way, my maternal grandmother came from Vilnius.) Fourteen unarmed Lithuanians had been killed and scores injured.

That was a story in itself. But then, so was the power struggle under way between Yeltsin, who supported independence for the Baltic states, and Gorbachev, who did not. I met with Yeltsin in Moscow in his ornate gold-encrusted offices in the building that houses the Russian parliament, called, curiously, the White House.

Yeltsin didn’t hold back in his criticism of Gorbachev. He accused him of “losing his common sense” and being “dangerous.” “How can it be possible to use troops against civilians at this time?” he said. And he chided the United States for turning Gorbachev into a folk hero. “You are blinded to certain things,” Yeltsin said. “You see only the personality of Gorbachev and an aura around him.” He was right. To this day Gorbachev is far more popular in this country than Boris Yeltsin.

It was widely rumored that Yeltsin had a drinking problem. He had evidently slurred his words during a lecture he delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1989, and there were other private reports about his excessive drinking. So I felt I had to ask, “Do you drink too much?”

It was one of those moments again, much like my questioning Qaddafi’s sanity to his face. Would Yeltsin take offense? Would he throw me out? To my relief he simply answered the question. “No. And I believe that, judging by the way I look, you can see that it’s not true.”

He was not, however, the portrait of health and fitness. His face was puffy and florid, and he sure looked like a drinker to me. But though I was pleased that he’d answered the question, I myself was in such distress that I’m not sure I was seeing straight.

I was suffering from severe lower back pain, and the almost-ten-hour flight from New York to Moscow hadn’t helped. I was therefore sleeping on the floor of the bedroom in my hotel. I was traveling, as I often do, with my hairstylist/assistant, Bryant Renfroe. After I finished this interview with Yeltsin, we were planning to take two days off and go to the glorious city of St. Petersburg, where I’d never been. We had a late-morning flight. I’d given Bryant a key to my suite, and suddenly I looked up from the floor and there he was. He had been watching television in his own room. “The Gulf War has begun,” he told me. “We’re bombing Iraq.” The only television set was in the living room, but when I tried to get off the floor, my back went into spasms. I couldn’t stand up, so Bryant slipped the bedspread under me and dragged me into the living room. Watching the images of the war was so upsetting that my spasms seemed minor. Bryant helped me off the floor. Forget St. Petersburg; we flew home immediately.

A year later I returned to Moscow for another interview with Yeltsin. By then he was the president of Russia, the first freely elected president. Gorbachev was gone, and so was much of the former Soviet Union. In December 1991, the month before this second interview, it had collapsed into fifteen separate countries.

The date of this interview was January 31, 1992. Yeltsin, who had survived several assassination attempts, was about to come to America to meet with George H. W. Bush.

Concerns about his health were higher now that he was president. By his own admission he suffered from insomnia, migraine headaches, and depression. He’d go missing in Russia for days, even weeks, without official explanation and the stories about his drinking bouts were escalating. Some observed that his speech was slurred even when he took the oath of office as president.

So I put the same touchy subject to him that I had the year before. “What is being said in some of the American papers and magazines is that you have been drinking too much as a result of pressure.”

Far from being offended, Yeltsin seemed happy to answer the question. His defense, I thought, was rather original. “Sports and liquor just don’t go together,” he said, detailing his physical exercise regimen: long workouts twice a week and shorter daily ones combined with a cold shower.

“Do you think it’s your enemies who are spreading these stories?” I asked him.

“Or maybe it’s just people who are looking for sensational stories,” he said, perhaps meaning people like me. “First they spread rumors and then they wait for a reaction.”

Despite at least one attempt to impeach him, Yeltsin would manage to hang on to the presidency for another seven years. He resigned in December 1999, after selecting a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, to succeed him. (Yeltsin died of heart failure in April 2007.) Putin was later elected president in his own right, and in 2001 I returned to Moscow to interview him. Our interview was held late at night, and he was late. No matter. I was used to that.

The plan was for President Putin and me to walk down one of the Kremlin’s endless marble hallways while we casually exchanged pleasantries in English. But Putin had not advanced very far in his English lessons. “How are you?” I asked him as the cameras followed us. “What, please?” he responded. “How are you?” I tried again. “I am what?” he replied. Not a great beginning to the piece.

The interview itself, in another elaborate room with marble floors and gilded furniture inherited from the czars, went quite well. After much trial and error, my producers and I had devised an efficient way to work with interpreters. In times past we had had the interpreter sitting by the non-English-speaking head of state, but inevitably the head of state would turn to face the interpreter instead of me. So we came up with a better game plan. We put the interpreter in a separate room where he or she listened to my questions through earphones and then repeated them into a very small earpiece in the head of state’s ear. The answers were then repeated into my ear. Because the interpreter was not seen, the head of state looked at me.