Buying the Night Flight (54 page)

More important than my own feelings, however, was the series of very real issues that it revealed regarding the "new media" and its propensity for imagery above ideals; and so, that summer of 1993,1 made one more stab at bringing the case to court before the September deadline. Despite my respect for my Chicago lawyers, everybody told me, "If you go to court in this kind of case, you must have the best lawyer in the country for this kind of law -- or else, don't do it." And the best lawyer in the country was Gary Bostwick.

It was a hot July day in 1993 when I stopped in Santa Monica to meet the famous Bostwick, who had won a number of important cases involving this type of law. He was a compact, determined man who looked a little like a handsome intellectual bulldog, he was clear, direct, and honest -- and, happily for me, interested in my case. We settled in with a lawyer-colleague of his in a pleasant open-air restaurant overlooking the Pacific.

"I think litigation is a stupid way to solve problems," he began, "but it is often the only way to solve something against evil people. But litigation is no fun, and it is not something one ought to do without understanding it's a pain and a struggle'. A litigator is like a prizefighter, some people love to fight and others just hate it. 'False light invasion of privacy,'" he mused. "You fit perfectly. It would allow you even to stop them from using things that were true about you. Then there's 'misappropriation of your persona' and your 'right to publicity.' They'll do everything they can to destroy you. They'll bring up everything bad they can about you. They'll have people paid to prove you are a jerk."

When I said, surely foolishly, that I could not think of anything really bad that I had done, he laughed. "Don't worry," Bostwick said. "They'll make it up." Two weeks later Bostwick and his partner called me: they would take the case, on contingency, which was a hell of a lot of work and a hell of a lot of risk. It would cost me in expenses about two thousand dollars a month. I agreed.

I should have been happy, but in fact, it was then that I really began to worry, to grow persistently agitated, and to lie awake at night.

Among the people I had spoken with during those first months was the great humor columnist Art Buchwald. He had won his case against Paramount Pictures for stealing his ideas and using them in a script. "Georgie Anne," Art told me on the phone, "call me anytime of the night or day, any place in the world, and I will beg you not to sue." Buchwald had won his case -- the court awarded him one million dollars. But at that time he had never received a cent because Paramount immediately and expectedly put the decision on appeal.

"You get strange," he warned me. "you're walking down the street and someone says, 'Hello,' and all you can do is ask him obsessively if he knows about your 'case.' Meanwhile I am out $200,000 ... "

"In legal fees," I summed up.

"No," he said sadly, "in expenses."

And so, when the moment came that September of 1993, a year after the show had started, I couldn't do it. That night, I even started to tell Gary to go ahead, but in the middle of the sentence, I choked up. "I can't do it, Gary, I can't..."

I guess I feared that essentially a lawsuit would drain the next years of any peace or productivity from my life; I feared the costs involved; and I began to see, in the cold light of this odd dawn, what I would be confronting.

Soon, too, Harry Thomason, who had been going in and out of the White House at will with his own personal pass, got into even more serious problems with the White House "Travelgate" scandal. The newspapers were filled, day after day and, eventually, month after month, with the story of how he moved, with a couple of other friends or relatives of the Clintons, to take over the White House travel office to get business for himself, for his friends and for his own airline. His special precious White House pass was rescinded, he retreated to the more amenable California and, although he and Linda kept up surreptitious contact with the Clintons, the Thomasons were never again seen around the White House.

But why had the entire situation occurred? I think one day I will know every detail of this strange case, but now the informed speculation centers around several theories. First, it seems clear that the Thomasons just like to "get even" with people they do not like by portraying them as they wish on their shows. With me, the "getting even" could well have been because by then they considered me very "conservative," believing that I had changed from my guerrillas-in-the-mountains youth. (Actually, I have not, but no matter.) To their special "politically correct" Hollywood type, my being a moderate realist and essentially an analyst is even more abhorrent than had I been a really hard-line conservative. Then they seem to hate "Washington," which I could have in part symbolized to them. Finally, never underestimate the possibility that such people, isolated in the Hollywood world of imagery, simply have not the faintest idea of what a woman foreign correspondent is, so merely lifted a life to fill up air time and image space.

I do know that I was the target of a classic case of
those who
cannot
trying to use the image of
those who can and do.
Unwittingly and surely unwillingly, I had become the clay of the image-maker, and when you think about it, this was not at all surprising. If noting else, I was always "real," and I always tried to live according to "ideals." These people live through their sitcoms, in thrall to their pseudo-events, somewhere out there beyond their virtual realities.

On the broader scale, perhaps the last words come from former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin, the brilliant writer who wrote as early as the 1960s in his famous book on
The Image:

"The star system has reached far beyond the movies. Wherever it reaches, it confuses traditional forms of achievement. It focuses on the personality rather than on the world. It puts a premium on well-known-ness for its own sake. It is a generalized process for transforming hero into celebrity. It leads institutions to employ pseudo-events to 'build up' big names ... It is expressed in a universal shift in our American way of speaking: from talk about 'ideals' to talk about 'images.'"

One indisputable fact that emerged from this "affair" was that this new syndrome of our times -- taking real, living, breathing people and turning them into imitations for the stews of the amoral image doctors of our time--is far from over. Actually, it is only beginning.

The Cold War Ends: And the World "Just Keeps Going"

"The solution to what ails us, I have become increasingly convinced ... lies with a change of the heart. St. Augustine wrote about the
ordo amoris,
the 'order of the loves.' I think that most of our problems, in the end, can be reduced to what the 'order of loves' are. What do you love the most?"
--William Bennett, speech on December 7, 1993, at the twentieth anniversary celebration of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

During the rather extraordinary second week of December 1987, President Reagan was meeting in Washington with the reformist Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in an unprecedented atmosphere of bonhomie between two nations and two international ideologies whose enmities and conflicts had spanned and defined the entire twentieth century. Washington was alive with hopes, with rumors, and (even worse to many) with journalists! In fact, there were roughly five thousand of our scruffy and persistent lot from every corner of the globe -- all assembled to record, analyze and critique this unprecedented moment in history.

The record will clearly show that I was sitting calmly and inoffensively preparing for the day in my little apartment across the street from the Watergate, when the phone rang. It was a voice from the White House, asking, "Can you come for an interview on Wednesday, two o'clock?"

"Fine," I said (one always tries to be agreeable when the White House calls), before I thought to ask, "Oh, and with whom will it be?"

"With president Reagan," the detached voice said. "He'll be meeting with four columnists."

So it was that, at exactly 1:30 that Wednesday afternoon, I was there, waiting with three male colleagues, each one of us obviously chosen for a "slot" of supposed ideological or political representation in the American press. "Why do you think we were chosen?" one of the men immediately asked me, obviously amazed at our good luck. And, indeed, even today when I meet any one of the three on the street in Washington, he will soon pause, shake his head in apparently never-ending bewilderment and ask, "Why do you think we were chosen?"

Now I must inject here, in stubborn contradiction to the general "wisdom," that in many ways we women have fewer problems than men. I am never compelled to ask, for instance,
why
I was chosen, to have it hanging over me for long years spanning into the distant future, or to have it awaken me suddenly in the dark of night. I always
know why I
have been "chosen."

At exactly two o'clock, we were ushered into the Oval Office and our "elderly" president, then only seventy-seven, came bounding in upon us like some eager young puppy who was just having himself one whale of a time chasing squirrels on the White House lawn. Despite his age, even then he looked wonderful. Silk suit, silk tie, shoes polished to a looking-glass sheen, youthful reddish brown hair--all were perfectly in place. (I immediately looked closely at his hair roots -- my hair was dyed; his was not.)

A few minutes into the interview, one of the men asked Reagan the obvious question of the week: "What happens now in the cold war?"

But the same president who had coined the "evil empire" as America's most popular catch-phrase of moral derision for Soviet communism, now only shook his head dismissively. "We have no problem with the Russians now," he averred, an odd glow to his eyes.

"We're friends now." Then he wagged his finger at us, but in a most friendly manner, and said in a confidential tone, "You know, they no longer believe in one-world Marxian domination."

I believe that initially all four of us thought that the president was simply thinking aloud (with all due respect, he often made, shall we say kindly, rather "unconsidered" remarks). But when we repeated essentially the same question again, and then again -- and when each time he persisted in saying that the "evil empire" was now a thing of the past, I began to have the
strangest feeling
that we had just witnessed something terribly important.

As we left the White House that day, I turned to one of my colleagues, the aristocratic Philip Geyelin, and murmured, "I think ... that we just heard the announcement of the end of the cold war!"

Now, the precise end of such a complex conflict cannot, of course, ever be exactly charted. The Soviet Union did not itself officially die until 1992; yet, that moment -- that December -- that interview truly does mark the first public announcement of its timely demise.

As for myself and my admitted romantic sense of history, I excitedly thought to myself, "This is enough to have lived for!" For, from that day that I went overseas to Latin America in 1964, nearly every story that I had covered everywhere in the world was underlaid by the complex conflict being waged between those two great ideologies of modernization. Whether writing in Guatemala about the Marxist guerrillas, in Angola or Vietnam on the "liberation fronts," or in Russia on the central vagaries of communism itself, the conflict that defined almost every day and week was that of the Soviet totalitarian/Marxist ideology versus the American democratic/capitalist system and story for the development and future of mankind.

Then suddenly this odd "war" had ended and we had "won," although truthfully we were not at all certain about how to respond to such an ambiguous triumph. For this victory, waged little at the battlefield, was rather a mélange of the military, the economic, the political, the ideological, and the psychological. The "evil empire" had imploded, not exploded, and was "defeated"
with its borders intact and its armies undefeated
, which had never before happened in modern human history. As did many of the older correspondents who had covered World War II, I felt myself a particularly privileged observer -- and I was surely no relativist when it came to moral judgements on foreign policy--of these tides of history.

In terms of my own work, I felt modestly proud that for so many years I had tried honorably and doggedly to chart the Soviet Union's disintegration. At the end of my 1975 book on Soviet youth,
The Young Russians,
for instance, I had clearly predicted the slow but sure death of Soviet communism -- a prediction that was unthinkable at the time. How did I
know
this was happening?
Because I truly learned then and there to
listen
to the young Soviets, not only to what they were saying but to what they meant, to what they wanted you to think they meant, and to how what they said, and perhaps meant, today differed from what they had said, or maybe even meant, yesterday. By "working the indicators," I mean watching for informed "tips" as to what would happen, gleaned from historic currents and my own personal instinct.

Then, when I traveled to Finland enroute again to Russia in the fall of 1988, before I left Washington, I had been tipped off by a Radio Free Europe analyst that the Baltic States would soon declare "independence" from Russia. Any such weakening of Moscow's "center" would so seriously threaten the communist empire that, before this, such an act surely seemed impossible. Yet, from Helsinki that December, I telephoned some of the leaders of the new "popular" movement that was already expanding inside Estonia--and that would soon arise in parallel fashion from the Baltics to Central Asia--and all confirmed my information.