Buying the Night Flight (51 page)

So much for undeserved compliments.

But by the time I came to it, it was a different -- a diverse and diffuse -- world. Instead of a few, there were several hundred columnists, although probably only twenty-five were really of influence in the country and these mostly in the eastern papers. The all-purpose columnist, of which I was a modern version, was giving way to the highly specialized columnist -- in science, in urban affairs, in lifestyle. Papers were experimenting with different ways of bringing the readership into the op-ed pages and also of bringing in individual specialists. Some insisted upon using their foreign correspondents or specialists as columnists.

Some of the effects were salubrious, because it did bring readership participation, and specialists did give depth to the pages. But something, too, was lost. The pages began to look like a hodgepodge of strangers to the regular reader. Who, after all, can pit himself and his ideas against a stranger identified only as "a housewife from Pasadena" or "a clerk from Winnetka"? As for the regular reporters doubling as columnists, to me it was disastrous. Once the reader knows, really knows, what you think about something, you are lost as a reporter. Your value is gone, your objectivity is finished. Most of the papers that were so enthusiastic about this soon gave it up.

Roy Fisher, the former editor of the
Daily News
and later dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, best characterized this sort of page as one with a "cacophony of voices that you cannot trace to their origins."

As I went along, I asked friends who are columnists what they do, and most do more or less the same. All think in seven hundred words and all laughed when I quoted my friend Deane Lord's dictum that, "Writing a column is like being married to a nymphomaniac, it's nice but ... "

Sydney Harris, whose longevity in writing an excellent thought column is simply staggering, told me he had no system except perhaps a subconscious one. "I just write what wells up in me," he told me. He feels that the column must be consistently minimally good; that it would never be really poor. He tries to change pace from time to time because columns should not be too predictable. Remember, he told me rightly, people like personal things; they want to know about you.

Joseph Kraft told me that he (1) stays close to the front-page news,

(2) balances his column between domestic and foreign news, and

(3) only writes when he has something personal to say.

American column-writing, of course, is totally different from foreign column-writing. One day in Istanbul, Oktay Eksi, one of the great Turkish columnists, told me his style. "I go through the files, then consult with the editors." The difference -- the big difference -- there is that he would and could never write anything against the basic policy of the paper. In the U.S., on the contrary, columns often are taken precisely because they represent a different point of view from the editorial board.

But I must admit, in truth, that being so much on one's own -- making all of one's decisions without benefit of really any institution or editor behind one -- was often difficult. One felt very alone. I often recalled with wistful sentiment the old days on the Daily News, when we had our loving band. On the other hand, I was "free." When I remonstrated one day to a lady at one of my speeches that, yes, fine, I was "free" but I was free to work eighteen hours a day seven days a week, she said, with such truth, "Yes, but you are morally free."

On the best days -- on the confident days -- I reveled in that moral freedom and I reveled in my wonderful network. People called in from all over the world --and often the very damndest people. I had the Mujahadeen in Iran, the Palestinians in Beirut, Latin revolutionaries, very super-respectable people with the Jamaican government .... It was all quite wonderful. It was my world. I had created it and only I could pull the strings together. Most of all, I was proud that they all knew they could trust me. They could, indeed, although as a woman it had been at least three times as hard to build up that trust -- that trust that so deeply coincided to both the old female morality and to public ethics.

Even as I settled into my blessed new life and even as I really began to know it, I still questioned, within myself, how I chose what to write -- and how. Then one day Eric Rouleau, the fine correspondent of
Le Monde,
answered the question for me.

"How do you work?" he asked. (Journalists are always searching not only their own but one another's souls, for we are the world's consummate rummagers.)

When I answered, more than half apologetically, "Well, I tried planning, I made charts, I tried to balance everything and ... well ... I finally just decided to write on whatever I feel most strongly about that day ..." Eric answered:

"But, of course! That is the
only
way to do it. One can only write what comes from deep inside oneself."

Other Worlds Traveled: From Ideals to Images

"The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where image has more dignity than its original."
--Daniel J. Boorstin, "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America"

If my days in Iraq seemed unreal to most "normal" people, and should my time listening (and listening, and listening) to Fidel Castro seem unusual, well they can surely be forgiven for questioning the essential sanity of such a person. (I have often enough questioned it myself.) Yet I have always felt that correspondents are not only centered securely within the moral and philosophical borders of American life, but that in many ways they actually exemplify American values in that their sense of adventure is always challenging the frontiers of life.

It was later, in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was writing my column and dwelling more on opinion, that I began to see, in journalism as well as in civic life generally, the degree to which those old traditional American ideals were being replaced by the same falsity, celebrity, and imagery that was transforming so much of American life. Two examples in my own life are illustrations.

In 1984 I began my Castro biography, and did it because he seemed to me to exemplify in his very person the revolutionaries and charismatic leaders that I had met. Indeed, I became convinced that, if one could really dissect and analyze him, it would be possible to discern much about the other leaders who shared his traits and embodied the imagery of his leadership.

Ever since that summer of 1966 in Cuba, when I had first watched him so intently, I was haunted by the picture of Castro at that July 26th celebration in the Plaza de la Revolutión. Ever since I watched for hours as two hundred thousand motionless and mesmerized Cubans stood in emotional and sensual thrall to the man, I wanted to know, "What is going on here?" But if my search for "Fidel," like all real adventures, started out only mentally in the plaza, it continued metaphorically on a series of cold, dark winter's dawns. It began with seemingly endless lists of people to interview and with hours so long that any reasonable person would surely have had the sense to lose interest and retreat.

I wanted to do more than write a biography, you see; I wanted the Cuban people to know within the lifetime of this dictator,
who he was
. And so I started out by making systematized lists of the Cubans and others that I had known over the years who had known him, often in his mysterious youth. Then I began a seemingly endless interviewing process that ultimately would involve my staff of two young women and me holding 500 original interviews in five languages in twenty-eight countries, as well as reading and categorizing more than 600 books and 700 pieces of periodical literature.

From the beginning, the personal interviews were unquestionably the most revealing, if only because these types of "charismatic" leaders obsessively guard and hoard their secrets. We were able to interview the three brothers of Fidel's beautiful and long-suffering wife, Mirta (they were married from 1948 to 1953). This research required several trips to Spain (one must sacrifice for one's work), and I will never forget my first long lunch that significant summer of 1984 with Mirta's sensuous and clever brother, Rafael, in Madrid. Having apparently decided that I was worthy of the secrets he had hoarded for so long, Rafael sat there and tossed bombshell after biographical bombshell at me.

Fidel's rude but wealthy Spanish father would take over land at night by moving the fences ... Fidel, always a violent child, tried to burn down the house and burn up his father's big car ... his favorite sport was basketball, but when he saw the other team winning, he would switch teams and make baskets for the opposing team ... he became a political gangster at the University of Havana and helped kill other gangsters ... when he married Mirta Diaz-Balart in 1948, he never gave her money for the electricity or for milk for their baby son ... and when they parted in 1953, the immediate reason was that Fidel, then in prison, deliberately and cannily switched letters to her and to his gorgeous mistress Naty Revuelta in order to free himself from (for him) such an execrably inappropriate bond as marriage. All of these facts were verified elsewhere.

I discovered, too, that at the Colegio de Belen, the teen-aged Fidel and his fellows studied the European Fascists with an attentiveness that bordered on obsession -- this was the Cuba of the 1930s, remember. He carried a Spanish-language copy of Hitler's
Mein
Kampf
around under his arm, traced the Axis victories across Europe on a map that hung on the wall of his room, and avidly mimicked Mussolini's every gesture and grimace as he stood --
Il
Duce's
young successor across the sea -- before the mirror.

Rafael had at one point hinted to me that Fidel's famous "History Will Absolve Me" speech --given during his 1953 trial after his "mad" and aborted July 26 attack on the Moncada Barracks -- had been patterned after one of Hitler's speeches. But, Rafael had no details. My first thought was that, if true at all, such a speech might well come from Hitler's famous "Beer Hall Putsch speech," which followed his failed putsch or coup against the government in Munich in 1924.

I went first to William L. Shirer's
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
and leafed through to the Munich pages, and soon became transfixed with what I found there. The final words of Hitler's trial speech replicated almost exactly those at the end of Fidel's Moncada speech, which would become the clarion call of his reign.

Hitler's ended with "the goddess of the eternal court of history ... acquits us," while Fidel's unquestionably derivative speech ended with his assuring the court of Santiago de Cuba, so many thousands of miles away from Munich, that "the goddess of history will absolve me." I began to realize that, during the 1930s, the Fascists were the Western world's model for the exercise of charismatic power over men. By our era, Fidel Castro had become that model.

From the beginning of the research during that summer of 1984, I was being told by my agent, Owen Laster, that he had a "very top editor" in mind who had "been interested in a book on Castro for a long time." The editor turned out to be none other than Alice Mayhew of Simon & Schuster, a petite, intense, rather austere woman who was something of an icon for many writers. By December 1983, we had signed with Alice for the Castro book as well as for a smaller book on Central America. From the beginning, I had an odd feeling that it had all been too easy, but for the moment, I only began to work very long hours.

By the last week in January 1985, completely unexpectedly, everything had changed. By then, I was sitting down for lunch with Owen in New York, when he looked at me and announced, obviously with some trepidation, "I don't know how to tell you this, but Alice is not going to publish the books." I was stunned. "She acted so strangely," he went on. "She was so apologetic, apologizing over and over ... and then she'd get very angry ... " When I telephoned her after that, she acted alternately guilty and angry with me, too, but the upshot of the entire episode was that both books were off.

Then, as I was by now really struggling financially to continue, through an article by Cuban-American writer Enrique Llaca in the prestigious Spanish-language paper
Diario las Americas
, I found that Alice, along with the gossip column's favorite Richard Snyder, president of Simon & Schuster, had been going to Cuba that winter to negotiate with Castro. In July, New York gossip columnist Liz Smith followed with an item that said Fidel had indeed signed with Simon & Schuster, and that they would publish something of his.

One of the foreign correspondents whom I have long admired is Tad Szulc. For many years this big, handsome, Polish-born bon vivant and wonderful writer was the senior
New York Times
correspondent in Latin America. At this moment, however, Tad was also writing a biography of Castro--and Tad had received permission from Fidel to come to live in Cuba for nine long months while completing research. In my recurrent nightmares, I could just see the two of them, sitting on the beach at Veradero or Santa Marta for hours and hours, Fidel pouring out his heart ... "Tad and Fidel ... Szulc and Castro ... " or, as Fidel would immediately insist, "
FIDEL
and Tad ...
CASTRO
and Szluc." As with everything about Castro, however, that would not turn out to be so simple, either.

From October 1985, Tad and I met several times, often when he was briefly back from Cuba before returning again, and the story did not turn out at all like my fears. Tad and his wife Marianne were out at the foreigners' colony at Barlovento, and though they did see Fidel several times, Tad was obviously unhappy with the situation, particularly as the Cubans were overcharging him for almost everything. I was beginning to feel better.