Personal History (70 page)

On February 1, we had an audience with the emperor and empress. This formal interview with the sovereign, we were told, was the first he had granted to a woman in her own right. Despite the pomp and high drama associated with the occasion, the whole visit had a musical-comedy aspect to it. Before we were escorted into the meeting place, we were briefed by a striped-pants equerry, whom we asked whether we should shake hands with the emperor, bow, or what.

“His Majesty would be very pleased to shake your hand,” the attendant replied in a tone, Oz recalled, that suggested we should treat the emperor as we would any “regular god.” Once briefed, we trooped into a hideous audience room, laden with overstuffed furniture with antimacassars on the plush brocade coverings. The emperor and empress appeared, and we all sat down stiffly, with the emperor and me on a kind of love seat across from Oz, interpreters close by for all of us. There was a long silence while we waited, as instructed, for the royals to begin the conversation. The emperor had a way of wringing his hands and sort of bouncing up and down, so much so that Oz, who was sitting across the room, recalled that “every time he went up in the love seat, Kay went down.”

What the emperor began with was the question, which was duly translated, “Is this your first trip to Japan, Mrs. Graham?” I heard myself saying, “Yes, it’s my first trip, and Mrs. Elliott’s as well, but Oz was here during the war … uh, er …I mean many years ago.” I could almost feel Oz trying not to laugh. None of the conversation was gripping or important; rather, it was stilted and artificial, painful even. After one long stretch of silence, I actually volunteered, “Well, Your Majesty, we understand you’re interested in marine biology,” and then told him about Oz’s being on the board of the Natural History Museum in New York. That topic, too, went nowhere.

We had worried about how we would know when the interview was over, but quite abruptly the emperor turned to his wife, they arose as one, we all shook hands again—with, as Oz said later, the emperor appearing to be “so unused to shaking hands that he watched his hand go up and down to make sure he got it back”—and it was over. The retainer in striped pants assured us the meeting was a great success.

Everywhere we went throughout Asia, Vietnam was the principal subject of discussion. After a stop in Hong Kong we flew on to Saigon for a
closer look at the country that would get so much of our attention over the next decade. We landed at an airfield that seemed equally divided between civilian traffic and military helicopters and fighters—a fantastic jumble of peace and war. Saigon at the time was ringed by the Viet Cong, with very few “safe” roads leading into and out of the city. The Viet Cong came right onto the airfield at times, and just a few weeks before our arrival a bomb had gone off on the fifth floor of the Caravelle Hotel, where many from the American press stayed, and where we, too, were staying. I took some comfort in being on the fourth floor.

This visit, in early February 1965, was in the days when the number of American advisers was mounting but still relatively small. We were not yet directly involved, but
Newsweek
had two or three correspondents there and the
Post
had one. After a briefing by army officers the day following our arrival, we lunched with General and Mrs. Westmoreland. Throughout this trip, I used letters home as a way of setting down my observations and experiences. Of Westmoreland I wrote: “He is an inarticulate soldier-type of a peculiar kind. If he is bright, it is as a technician because he certainly doesn’t communicate—is tense and uneasy and almost scared.”

Oz and I, Bob McCabe, and Bill Tuohy of
Newsweek
all left right after lunch in a small helicopter for a visit to a nearby—about twenty-five miles away—base not far from the Cambodian border, on the top of “Black Lady Mountain,” on the outer edge of a patch of land completely dominated by the Viet Cong but used by the Americans for radio communication with planes in the area. When we got in the helicopter—a Bell UHIB called a Huey—I was startled to find that we were to sit on a bench situated horizontally in the small cab of the helicopter, which had its sides off so that your feet were on the edge of the cab. I was right behind the pilot and tried to look cool, as though this sort of thing was routine for me. When we took off, leaving the sides or doors of the helicopter behind, I held my breath. I was even more startled at seeing soldiers toward the rear of each side holding loaded machine guns.

We flew low, at about twenty-five hundred feet, over rice paddies and fields. The single houses below us, according to the major from the army’s public-relations department who accompanied us, belonged to Viet Cong sympathizers. Government people lived in armed hamlets surrounded by trenches and barbed wire. None too soon, we landed on a tiny helicopter pad, big enough for only two helicopters. The mountain was held by special forces—our advisers, mostly marines. We were met by a Steve Canyon–type figure, Lieutenant Saudlin, who felt even then that the relationship between the Americans and the South Vietnamese was frustrating and that it would take at least five years to judge the results.

On this mountaintop there were thirteen Americans and about a hundred
South Vietnamese soldiers. The entire area was laced with barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. Our guide claimed that they were quite safe there, though subject to harassments, and that the area was actually surprisingly peaceful. Around Thanksgiving, just a few months before, CBS had done a broadcast from the mountaintop, bringing in roast turkey for the soldiers. A live turkey had been dropped in earlier, and had been granted a reprieve from the feast, becoming a pet of sorts. The Vietnamese had hung a red Special Services scarf around his neck, and now he wandered around as if the entire zone were his fiefdom.

As we got ready to leave, one of the resident soldiers explained that when we took off from the mountaintop the helicopter would drop sharply before rising. I was grateful for the warning, which was not enough to calm my nerves but helped me understand my stomach dropping as I watched the gunners crouch over their weapons until we had left the ground safely behind us.

Only my extreme interest in seeing more of South Vietnam prevented me—who under normal circumstances even disliked elevators—from panicking during those helicopter rides, but I got back in to visit two villages in the Mekong Delta where pacification was said to have worked. We also went to the provincial capital of Ben Tre in Kien Hoa Province, and then drove on to a nearby hamlet, Binh Nguyen, where we met with an optimistic and determined province chief, Colonel Chou, who talked about how he was building strength in the hamlet. The Viet Cong had been creating infrastructure and developing people for twenty years, we were told, but the American advisers and the South Vietnamese military leaders still felt they were making progress. Only one American colonel cautioned that the Viet Cong seemed to be everywhere and to be willing to pay any price for their inroads.

I was unsure how to react to the things we saw, heard, and did. Certainly our trip was circumscribed by the public-relations officers who took us around. More important, my feeling that I knew very little about the history of the conflict and the issues involved meant that I kept to my normal approach of listening a lot and questioning little. I also tended to accept Russ Wiggins’s views on the main issues with which the
Post
wrestled, and I knew how strongly he favored American involvement in Vietnam. My habit of listening to what the men in my life said resulted in my leaving Vietnam with much the same views I had when I arrived—i.e., maybe we shouldn’t have been there in the first place, even in small numbers, but we
were
there, and there was no choice but to help the South Vietnamese in their fight against the communist guerrillas.

As Chal Roberts later wrote of Wiggins, he was “not a mindless hawk; he was repelled by the all-out war proponents.” Indeed, Russ was never
mindless about anything—he thought long and hard about the positions he took. The
Post
gained a reputation for strong support of American involvement in the war, and Russ supported Lyndon Johnson on the war throughout his presidency—not because he blindly went along with whatever LBJ put forth, but because he believed that the United States had to use its power to prevent the usurpation of legitimate authority from taking place around the world. But there was a great deal that bothered Russ about the predicament of Vietnam. He felt strongly that our advance knowledge of the 1963 assassination of Diem, the head of a state with which we were allied, created grave problems and the “spectacle of being a rotten and faithless ally.” In fact, he was always looking for an alternative to American involvement in Vietnam that wouldn’t destroy the international position of the United States government.

My own position on Vietnam continued to parallel Russ’s, changing only very gradually as time passed, until I had a son serving there, which gave me my own private view and inside perspective on the war, and until Phil Geyelin arrived to take over the editorial page and we gradually began to turn the editorial position of the paper around.

We left Vietnam on February 10 and, after brief stopovers in Cambodia and Thailand, moved on to India for a dizzying few days. One of our most astonishing interviews there was with the white-coated population minister—or at least the coat had at one time been white and was now a dirty gray. He sat in a dusty office at his cluttered desk, on which were arrayed a variety of population-control devices, and he kept picking up an IUD inserter and playing with it, swinging it and knocking it against his palm. I will never forget his saying, “Many of the ladies, when they use the IUD, they complain of headaches, but I do not think the headaches come from the IUD. Rather, I think the headaches come from the in-laws.”

An all-night flight from New Delhi took us over burning oil fields that lit up the desert, to Beirut, still untouched and beautiful. The Lebanese never ceased arguing about Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian strongman, during our entire visit. From Lebanon we went on to Egypt, where we interviewed Nasser himself, from which meeting an ugly misunderstanding ensued. Nasser had a reputation in the Middle East for playing the East against the West, with Egypt benefiting from Cold War conflicts. East German President Walter Ulbricht had visited Cairo just the month before, and during our interview we asked Nasser if he had been pressured by the Soviet Union to invite Ulbricht. Nasser said no, although probably it was true. Unfortunately, the issue of
Newsweek
that appeared a few days after our interview reported just the opposite. That piece actually had no connection with our interview and had not been seen by me or by any of our
Newsweek
staff in Beirut at the time of the interview. We had tried to wire ahead a few lines from our interview, but they had not arrived in time
to be included. The interview was reported accurately in the
Post
a few days later, but by then Nasser had flown into a rage, calling us “liars seeking only to discredit us.” No amount of explaining helped. Eventually, I learned to accept most such unintentional mistakes and confusions with some grace and not to take them personally.

We flew home via Rome and London, where we mostly rested and partied. In Rome I had a passing flirtation with an attractive Italian journalist. Afterwards, Pam Berry encouraged my little fling in Rome by writing me, “Do be female and free and frivolous from time to time. It will be terribly good for you in every sort of way. I’d been worried that you would gradually immolate yourself in work. But when you walked into Cowley Street last Thursday I saw a huge difference though without knowing why.”

I worked as hard on this trip as I’d ever worked, but, far from being tiring, the whole experience was strengthening, and I returned with more energy and enthusiasm for my job than ever.

O
NE TRIP
I took that summer was just for fun—and it was that. Truman Capote had told me that he was going cruising with Marella Agnelli, the international beauty and wife of Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat. Marella had chartered a large sailboat for a tour of the Adriatic and through the Greek isles, and was inviting Truman and a group of her friends or relations whom I knew to be in the international jet set. I had come a fair distance in worldliness but not that far, so I told Truman that I wouldn’t fit in and would feel ill-at-ease, but eventually I accepted Marella’s invitation, though with great reservations.

This trip was different from anything I’d experienced before—and a reflection of my new life. It wasn’t something Phil would ever have done, nor would I have done it without him, and the puritan in me worried about it even then. Truman and I decided to get to our rendezvous with Marella via London in order to visit the Bruces and Pam Berry on the way. Adlai Stevenson had earlier suggested that he and I stay with his sister, Buffy Ives, at her house in Switzerland that summer, and I had been relieved to be able to tell him that I couldn’t, because of the Marella trip. On our arrival in London, my heart sank a little to find that Adlai was there, too, also staying with the Bruces at the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. However, the guests were so numerous that week that things were easy and agreeable. Adlai’s great friend Marietta Tree was also in London. On our third night, July 13, we all went off in different directions, he to do a BBC broadcast. When I came in from dinner, I noticed him talking to someone in the upstairs study. Since it was late and I couldn’t see whom Adlai was talking with and didn’t want to interrupt, I tiptoed past the
room and went to my bedroom at the end of the hall. I was still reading when the door flew open and in breezed Adlai, full of reproaches about my not having joined him and Eric Sevareid, with whom he’d been talking while waiting for me to return.

Adlai stayed in my room for at least an hour. When he departed, he left behind his tie and his glasses, so I crept quietly down the hall to his bedroom and put them in front of his door. The next day, when I got back to the embassy in the late afternoon, the butler answered the bell looking very glum and immediately asked me, “Have you heard about Governor Stevenson?”