The Story (15 page)

I realized gradually that I was wrong for the job I was honored to have been offered and confessed my misery to
Times
columnist Bill Safire, whom I trusted as a friend and adviser. I had often worked with Bill when I was a reporter in the bureau. Though a conservative, Bill broke news about scandals affecting liberals and conservatives alike. He was a generous colleague, sharing tips of potentially good news stories with me and other reporters, a rarity among columnists. He had encouraged me to accept the editing job in Washington. So over lunch one day, I told him that the idea
of helping run the bureau had been far more exhilarating than actually running it. Surely I was not the only reporter to have discovered that I disliked editing and managing reporters. Bill sympathized, to a point. But he reminded me that failing as an editor at the
Times
meant the end of a potentially rewarding career. The
Times
was an editor's paper. Did I want to betray my generation of reporters, especially younger women, by giving up so easily? Keep trying, he told me.

There was another issue: sexism. Both Howell and Bill Kovach, Howell's predecessor as bureau chief, had impressive tempers. And while both were inspiring editors, reporters had told me about instances in which they had scolded reporters in front of their colleagues. Several recalled that Howell had once chewed out Stephen Engelberg, one of the paper's best reporters and later its investigations editor, for having missed a hearing that had ended before his arrival. “Either you get me the story, or I will find someone who will!” he had shouted in the newsroom.
³
Male editors were quickly forgiven for such tantrums. But my own frustrated outbursts quickly became an issue. Reporters who would cower before Craig Whitney, our soft-spoken bureau chief, and even avuncular Johnny Apple, showed me little deference. If I made an assignment they disliked, or sent back their copy with questions, reporters would often complain. Sensitive to the gender bias against me, Craig usually supported my call, even when he doubted it. Not so Mr. Apple, a huge talent but a true diva, who barely hid his displeasure at having to share the deputy bureau chief's title.

The bureau needed a broad shake-up, Max Frankel decided, and Craig, Johnny, and I agreed. At his request, we had drawn up a list of recommended shifts. A few reporters were to be reassigned to New York; others would trade beats within the bureau; a couple of outsiders would be brought in from New York or other domestic or foreign bureaus to help us in areas where our reporters were lagging. Max and Joe Lelyveld, his deputy, pushed us to add more names to the list. After approving the staff changes, they came down to Washington to congratulate us for having taken difficult but essential steps to enhance the bureau's competitiveness.
Despite their praise, I was unhappy. I sensed that the staff changes would be bitterly resented and resisted. And they were.

By the summer of 1987, I was more miserable. Not only did I dislike managing reporters, I surprisingly found little joy in being responsible for decisions about the priority of news stories. Despite Bill Safire's hopes for me, I realized that I didn't want to run the
Times.
I just wanted to write for it again.

After finishing the first of several drafts of my Holocaust book, I needed a break. Craig urged me to take a vacation that I had long planned in the South of France. En route home to Washington, I was scheduled to stop in London for a black-tie dinner to mark the opening of an exhibit at the Tate art gallery that Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, the publisher, was also attending.

In Paris the night before my flight to London, Jeff Gerth called from Washington. What did I think about the news? he asked me. Was I all right? I had no idea what he was talking about. Craig was being transferred to London, he told me; Howell Raines was returning to DC to become bureau chief, the job he had always wanted. Johnny would retain the deputy bureau chief's title but return more or less full-time to reporting. Craig was being exiled in a palace putsch. Howell had won. There was no mention of my fate.

I barely remember the rest of the trip to London. I was sad for Craig, who had worked so hard to improve the bureau. I also fretted about my own prospects. Although I yearned to return to writing, I did not want to be demoted. The shifts in the bureau were an unexpected blow. Craig later assured me that he had known nothing about them when he had urged me to take my vacation.

As I entered the museum, still in semishock, I saw Punch and his wife, Carol. Both greeted me warmly. It was a lovely party, wasn't it? The exhibit was superb. London's weather was uncharacteristically clear and warm. Why did I look so upset? Punch asked, wrapping his arm around me protectively. The transfers were for the best, he told me. And they didn't affect me. “You still have your job in Washington.”

I
. Soma Golden became national editor, the first
Times
woman to head a major department; Carolyn Lee was assistant managing editor, another female first; and Angela Dodson was named Style editor, making her the first African American woman to head a major
Times
department. Sulzberger became assistant publisher at roughly the same time.

I owed my liberation from editing to Saddam Hussein.

I had left Washington in 1988 for another editing job in New York. Though I had wanted to return to writing, editors had more status and were paid better than even veteran reporters. While Joe Lelyveld was trying to create a career path for reporters that would ensure them comparable status and pay, he had not succeeded yet.

By 1990, I had spent two years in New York as deputy editor of a new Media section that covered publishing, journalism, and other sectors of the news business. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait.

I learned of the invasion from Jason Epstein, the man I would eventually marry. I had slept late that morning at his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, on Friday, August 3, 1990. He had already read the papers.

“Does it matter that Iraq has invaded Kuwait?” he asked me.

He had to be mistaken, I told him, pouring myself some coffee. I hadn't heard anything about trouble on the Iraq-Kuwait border when I left my office earlier that week.

No, he corrected me, barely glancing up from the crossword puzzle. Iraq had definitely invaded and occupied the tiny oil-rich emirate.

It mattered hugely, I told him as I reached for the phone. If the Iraqi dictator annexed Kuwait, he would control a fifth of the world's oil reserves. If Saddam could not be persuaded to withdraw, America would probably be drawn into a war.

“How soon?” he asked, still absorbed in his puzzle.

The White House would need at least six months to mobilize and deploy forces, I estimated.

Jason despises war, but Alberto Vitale, who was then the head of Random House, sensed a publishing opportunity for an “instant” book on the Iraq crisis. Jason, who had been the company's editorial director, proposed me as the writer. I knew Iraq and the Middle East well, he told Alberto, and was accustomed to working on deadline. Vitale asked me to produce a seventy-five-thousand-word book in six weeks for Steve Wasserman, the editor of Times Books, then a Random House imprint.

Wasserman showed me an article that Laurie Mylroie, the Iraq specialist, had written for the
Wall Street Journal
, arguing that Saddam's motive for invading Kuwait was primarily financial. His eight-year war against Iran had bankrupted his regime. Iraq was $90 billion in debt and needed Kuwaiti oil. Laurie agreed to write the book with me.

With a month's leave of absence and my year's vacation time, I cloistered myself in my New York apartment and threw myself into the project.

Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf
was published on time in October 1990 to favorable reviews. The paperback sold respectably—about thirty thousand copies a month—until December, when President George H. W. Bush doubled the number of American troops to be deployed in the Gulf. By the time American soldiers invaded Kuwait in January, our paperback had become a number one bestseller.

I was not around to enjoy the publishing triumph. When the
Times
began ramping up its prewar coverage in earnest, Joe Lelyveld, who had succeeded Max Frankel as executive editor, freed me from editing and sent me to the Middle East. He had named me a senior writer, one of those supercorrespondent jobs he had finally created, and called me the special Gulf correspondent, a vague enough title to let me roam and report freely on the Arab reaction to the impending war against Iraq. I wanted to
explore why so many Arabs opposed, or were ambivalent about, a war to liberate Kuwait. Polls and interviews showed that poorer Arabs detested and envied the Kuwaitis' wealth, indolence, and arrogance, and admired Saddam's pugnacity.

As America edged toward war, I had exclusive interviews with many of the key Middle Eastern players in the conflict—starting in Jordan with King Hussein, who opposed the war and, like me, was chain-smoking again. Jordan imported roughly 90 percent of its energy requirements from Baghdad at heavily subsidized rates. And for reasons that only a psychiatrist could fathom, the king had a strong personal attachment to Saddam. Interviews with Yemen's president, Morocco's king, and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt followed.

Exhilarated but exhausted, I returned home for Thanksgiving to meet Jason. I looked forward to seeing him after two months on the road. I consoled myself when the weekend ended without a marriage proposal: perhaps Jason's reticence was for the best. I was hardly marriage material. The “story” would always come first, as my constant travel for the
Times
suggested. I went back to the Middle East, but not before I had persuaded him to join me at Christmas for a farewell cruise up the Nile planned by Frank Wisner, our ambassador in Cairo, who was assuming a new post in Manila, the Philippines.

Wisner's cruise from Luxor to Aswan was magical. Jason was enthralled by Upper Egypt's beauty, the gentleness of our guides, and their vast knowledge of the Pharaonic sites we visited. Frank and Jason also liked each other, a great relief, since Frank was still among Les Aspin's closest friends.

After Egypt, we went to Jordan to visit Petra, the ancient trading city that the Nabateans had built three hundred years before Jesus was born. Set deep within a mountainous fold at the edge of the Great Rift Valley, the terrain resembles Arizona at the approaches to the Grand Canyon. The young Arab director of antiquities at Petra drove us in his jeep later that night through the narrow, winding mountain passageway into the famed ancient “rose-red city half as old as time.” With war so imminent, there were few tourists. We were virtually alone in one of the world's most
breathtaking ruins. Around a small campfire near the entrance to the cave in which he was born, the young Jordanian archeologist recounted how his government had sent him on scholarship to study archeology at the University of Michigan. Homesick for Jordan and his family, he returned early and began working in Petra's antiquities ministry. He owed everything to King Hussein, he confided.

I did not cover the war. Johnny Apple, who was coordinating the paper's war coverage from Dhahran, did not invite me to join his team. So I worked alone, concentrating on how the war was affecting Saudi Arabia.

The thousands of American forces on sacred Islamic soil had turned this puritanical society topsy-turvy. Though I had reported from the kingdom many times, I had never really gotten to know the Saudis. Visas were rare, one's time in the kingdom limited, and a reporter's contacts intensely monitored. The Saudis were suspicious of foreigners—especially journalists. But war had forced King Fahd to open up. More than 1,500 reporters were covering the war that involved 700,000 troops from thirty-seven countries.

Fearing Saddam's revenge, prosperous Saudi men had sent their wives, mothers, and children to Mecca and other safe places they thought Iraq would not target. With their families away and business at a virtual standstill, Saudi men could now spend hours visiting one another, particularly at night, debating the war and the kingdom's future in the Bedouin-style tents that so many had pitched next to their houses in the Riyadh suburbs. Goat herders would have been stunned by these modern-day Bedouin fantasies lit by crystal chandeliers and decorated with Oriental carpets, outdoor stoves for brewing hot, sweet tea, and tiny refrigerators to chill ice for such
haram
refreshments as vodka and the unofficial Saudi favorite, Chivas Regal.

To avoid insulting foreign soldiers, journalists, and other infidel “guests,” the king had temporarily grounded the dreaded
mutawa
—the religious police—old, salaried conservatives and young, fanatical volunteers who patrolled the streets, hotels, and shopping malls, telling women to
cover their faces and young men to pray. Now young Saudis could suddenly entertain women, even reporters, and speak freely as never before. The war provided an exhilarating window into one of the Arab world's most insular societies, temporarily on holiday.

Throughout the war, Saudis, for the first time, passionately, publicly debated their future without fear of being stigmatized as
kafir
, nonbeliever, or worse, as heretic. Many Westernized Saudis were demanding more freedom and participation in decision-making, and greater accountability, if not Western-style democracy. They were also asking to hear more from their reclusive king and for an end to the widespread corruption he tolerated.

They faced powerful opposition from the religious establishment. The conservative, xenophobic Wahhabists were demanding a return to the old order; they wanted their suspended powers back. In their view, the war, foreign troops, and even worse, Western journalists, had defiled sacred Islamic soil. Though I was homesick, I regretted leaving Arabia that spring of 1991 after three months in the kingdom, knowing that an intense political battle would surely erupt
baad al azimah
, or “after the crisis”—the words I heard so often. Determined to write what I had seen and heard, including complaints about the corruption among members of the royal family that so infuriated the middle class, I knew that getting another visa would be unlikely once Saudi gratitude to America had dissipated.