Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir

1

A Different World

I was born in 1935, into a world very different from today. The population of the United States had not yet reached 130 million, and unemployment stood at higher than 20 percent of the workforce. Two days before my birth, Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 7034, creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to help dig the country out of the Great Depression. A gallon of gasoline cost ten cents, and the New York Times cost two cents on the newsstand. The average annual wage was $1,600. There was no Internet, there were no cell phones. Television had been invented but was not yet available. Newspapers, magazines, and the comparatively new medium of radio were how people got their news and entertainment. Parker Brothers’ new game of Monopoly, introduced in 1935, was instantly popular with people still willing to dream of wealth.

Veterans of the Civil War, then considered the greatest generation, were still having their encampments and reunions. Benny Goodman’s swing was the latest dance craze, and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway.

Travel was by train or ship, and only a privileged few got to go anywhere by air. There were as yet no commercial airplane flights across either the Pacific or the North Atlantic. Pan American would open up a seaplane route to Asia the following year, taking a week of island hopping to reach the Orient. If you wanted to fly to Europe in 1935, your best bet was to make your way to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and book passage on the 776-foot-long, lighter-than-air dirigible Graf Zeppelin, with a swastika on the tail, and fly to Friedrichshafen, Germany. The trip would take you and nineteen other passengers three days in comfortable, if tiny, staterooms. The Graf Zeppelin had flown to and from Lakehurst, New Jersey, where the zeppelin Hindenburg would meet her fiery end two years later, but regular transatlantic air service to and from the United States had not begun.

I used to think that my grandfather’s generation had seen more technological changes than my father or I had. I might be flying in a more modern plane or driving a better car than my father’s, but that is not the same as seeing both the birth of aviation and going from the horse-powered era to the internal combustion engine. I have better telephones, phonographs, and more technically advanced movies than my father did, but my grandfather saw them all come into use for the first time. The advent of the computer in the 1980s, however, changed my thinking. Computers are transforming the world as airplanes, automobiles, movies, and television once did.

In 1935 the United States was a world power but trending toward isolationism. Europe was still the cockpit of world affairs. The Nuremberg laws restricting German Jews were imposed the year I was born, and the same year saw Hitler’s renouncing of the Treaty of Versailles and the beginning of German rearmament.

George V, king of England and emperor of India, was on his throne, and his imperial possessions occupied almost one-quarter of the world. My elementary school copybook, which somehow survived from the 1940s, contains an assigned essay on the British Empire. Much of the rest of Asia and Africa were part of other empires, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. Even the United States had its own mini-empire, the Philippines and scattered islands taken from Spain a little more than three decades earlier. The Soviet Union was absorbing the Muslim nations on its southern borders taken by the czars, and China was reeling from a new Japanese bid for empire. A month after I was born, China’s Chiang Kai-shek had to concede control of North China to the invading Japanese.

Indeed 1935 might be seen as the high-water mark of imperialism. The British empire was swollen from territories taken from the German and Ottoman Empires after World War I. The French, too, had added Syria and would create Lebanon. The Italian colonies of Cyrenaica and Tripoli were joined to form Libya that year, and in October Mussolini invaded Ethiopia to snuff out the last remaining independent country in Africa.

Mussolini would be deprived of his African territories by the British and Americans in World War II, and, after the war, much to Winston Churchill’s horror, the British would begin to divest themselves of empire beginning with India, always the jewel in the crown. The letting go was hard, and we are still feeling the effects of the partition’s creation of Pakistan, which split again with the birth of Bangladesh. The Palestine Mandate ended with Jews and Arabs at each other’s throats, a situation little changed today. But then the Zionist dream of Israel became a reality. The French would fight against the end of empire in Indochina and Algeria. The Dutch tried at first to keep the East Indies but saw early on that it would be impossible. The Portuguese, who had begun the whole European expansion into Africa and Asia half a millennium earlier, were the last to hold out, leaving Macau on the South China coast only in the last year of the twentieth century.

Much good can be said about empires. At their best they brought modernization, the rule of law, and a bureaucratic impartiality and fairness that some former colonies have been lacking ever since. But there were also the downsides of exploitation, brutality, and subjugation. President Wilson had given false hope to colonial peoples everywhere after World War I; his ideas for self-determination seemed to apply more to European minorities, newly freed from Austrian and Russian rule, than they did to darker-skinned peoples in empires overseas.

Imperialism was acceptable, often abetted by colonized elites, until suddenly it wasn’t. And when Europe emerged weakened from World War II, it became increasingly clear that peoples under foreign domination wanted their freedom.

An early memory of my childhood is of an aunt running down the hill from the house where I now live outside Boston on the banks of the Charles River. She hurried to tell my father that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. I was six, but I already knew about the Japanese because my father had maps on the walls of our house showing the advances of Japan in China and the sway of war in Europe and Africa.

Another childhood memory is of an airplane, engine sputtering and losing altitude fast, coming straight at me. It was a two-seater training plane with an open cockpit. Clearly the pilot was trying to land in an open field in front of my house. Equally clearly he was going to overshoot the field. One of the airmen, in the forward cockpit, was waving frantically at the small boy to get out of harm’s way, but I stood frozen. At the very last minute the dying engine caught for a moment and the plane rose up over me and over the house, straight up in the sky, only to fall into a copse of trees across the road in an explosion of fire and smoke.

They were two British naval airmen who were killed instantly while training for war in the Pacific. The newspapers didn’t make much of it the next day. There were too many other deaths to be told. It was June 6, 1944. The invasion of Normandy had begun.

War was very much a part of my generation’s childhood. Fathers were away in those years, and we lived with worried mothers. My father was in the Pacific. I remember vividly my mother in tears, and my grandparents in shock, when the news came through that my uncle had been killed in North Africa. It was December 7, 1942, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

We all had little ration books for food, and my mother served as an air raid warden, lest the Germans should ever bomb the East Coast of the United States. It may seem far-fetched now, but we all took it seriously in the early forties.

My forebears came mostly from the British Isles, with a smattering of New Amsterdam Dutch. Many had come in the seventeenth century and had fought in all the wars on American soil. Some fought for the North in the Civil War, some for the South. Others were part of expeditionary forces in Mexico and Cuba. One was killed by hostile Indians. Another died a captive in Vera-cruz, Mexico, shot by General Santa Anna’s men in a massacre of prisoners who had been fighting for Texas. A cousin died a prisoner of the Japanese.

There were a couple who signed the Declaration of Independence and one who was ambassador to the czar of all the Russians. Some were farmers, doctors, and engineers. Some were industrious and others too fond of drink.

My grandmother, in whose house I now live, was a Philadelphian whose mother and army-officer father died of diphtheria at an army post in the Dakota Territory before statehood.

I grew up in comfortable circumstances in the western suburbs of Boston. My mother’s great-grandfather, Thomas Scott, had been president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. My father’s grandfather, George Lauder, was a first cousin to Andrew Carnegie and a partner in his steel business. Ironically, Scott gave Carnegie his first important job on the railroad and helped him get started on his own. These two beneficiaries of the great nineteenth century industrial boom that followed the Civil War provided the resources that have sheltered the two families from the worst of financial vicissitudes ever since.

•  •  •

For my parents’ generation, and mine in the 1950s, certain assumptions could be taken for granted. I have a studio photograph of my paternal grandfather, Andover, Yale class of 1900, standing ramrod stiff along with fourteen others in front of a skull and femur representing his Yale secret society, Skull and Bones. Next to it is my other grandfather, Groton, Harvard class of 1898, seated in front of a bronze boar’s head symbolizing the jollier and older Porcellian Club.

My father was an ornithologist connected to Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which even today, with its stuffed specimens in dark display cases, looks like a place where Darwin might have just stepped out for lunch. My father worked in the vanished age of the gentleman amateurs who went around the world collecting animals and birds for museums. If they could afford it, they often mounted expeditions at their own expense. I have a photograph of some French forerunner of a Land Rover being transported on a raft in the Mekong River in what was then French Indochina during one of my father’s expeditions.

He received two very grand-sounding and beautiful medals during his Indochina days: the Order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol from the Kingdom of Luang Prabang, now Laos, and L’Ordre Impérial du Dragon d’Annam, Annam being what the French called central Vietnam, with the royal capital at Hue. I once asked him what he had done to deserve such decorations, and he replied that any outsider who even got to those places got a medal in those days. I never did get a straight answer, but I assume it was for his collecting work. Years later, during the Vietnam War, I, too, would come to Hue and receive a medal for it, a lot less beautiful than my father’s, but that is a story for later.

Nor did my father ever tell me that, as a navy lieutenant, he had gone behind Japanese lines with a radio and a Solomon Islander during the Battle of Guadalcanal to report on enemy troop movements. In fact he told me very little about the war, which was typical of many fathers in those days.

We did get letters and odd souvenirs from the Pacific War, a couple of Japanese helmets and a bayonet. I found out years later that my father got in trouble for trying to send a Japanese skull back to Harvard. God only knows what Harvard would have done with it. The package was opened by military authorities before it got to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the navy had a fit. Washington wanted an example made of him, but his punishment got less and less severe as the orders came down the line and closer to the war, first to headquarters in Hawaii and finally to Guadalcanal. His boss called him in and said: Jim, just leave the old skulls alone, okay? and that was the end of it.

He was never the same person after the war. When I would meet people who knew him before the war, I couldn’t recognize the gay and amusing man of their stories. I knew him as ever more morose and remote, descending farther and farther into alcohol in my teenage years. He was often rude to his few remaining friends.

Was it what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder? Or was it because the war had been the most exciting and interesting time of his life, and civilian life was ever after boring? He would divorce my mother and marry his neighbor’s wife, but that turned out to be a stormy marriage. After her death, when he was confined to a wheelchair with an amputated leg and more and more worn down by the indignities of old age, he took his shotgun and killed himself when he was alone in his house. He chose a narrow hallway, and years later when I visited Ernest Hemingway’s house in Idaho, I noticed that he, too, had chosen a confined space in which to end his life.

But divorce and death happened long after I had grown up and was long gone from home. Childhood for me was an extremely happy time. I went to a small private school that my grandmother had helped found in her own house, where I now live. The school had moved to another town when I was a student there.

I and many others from the school went on to Milton Academy, founded in the late eighteenth century south of Boston. I wasn’t much of an athlete, but I could run faster than most. That served me well in football and track, and I always got good parts in the school plays.

I was having my tonsils out in the summer of 1950 when the Korean War began. The Communist North Koreans, egged on by Stalin, invaded the south and took the world by surprise. Their armies took Seoul, the South Korean capital, and swept down the peninsula, only to be halted at last by some desperate American forces at the very tip. General Douglas MacArthur, in one of the most brilliant tactical maneuvers in twentieth-century warfare, put an amphibious force ashore halfway up the peninsula and sent the North Koreans reeling back. MacArthur did not stop at the former border but went right on chasing the North Koreans up to the Chinese frontier, when China intervened. The Americans were pushed back almost to where the war between the two Koreas began, and there it stalemated.

I was barely fifteen at the time, but many older brothers of my friends went off to fight and some never came back. I am convinced, however, that President Truman did the right thing to intervene in Korea and not let the Soviets alter the status quo. Unfortunately, the United States took the lesson of Korea with them when they went to war in Vietnam, and it turned out to be the wrong lesson.

In the summer of 1953, my older brother, my younger sister, my mother, and I sailed for Europe on an old Greek steamer from Hoboken, New Jersey, bound for Lisbon, Naples, and Piraeus. We would be getting off in Naples, bound for the grand tour of Europe that my mother had enjoyed between the two wars. We were in Rome when church bells told us that the Korean War was over.

A fellow passenger on the ship over was a young Portuguese singer who had just made her American debut in New York. When the mood struck her she would sing for the passengers, accompanied by her two guitar players. It was my first introduction to fado, the mournful folk music of Portugal, and it was unforgettable during that long passage in a slow steamer to Lisbon. Amalia Rodrigues would, in time, become the most famous person in the Portuguese-speaking world; her records, and later tapes, could be found on sale from Macau, on the Chinese coast, to Mozambique and Angola. When she died she received a state funeral.

•  •  •

My mother had been at a finishing school in Florence when Mussolini came to power, and she told us that for a while under fascism sidewalks were one-way. It meant that if you saw something you wanted to buy in a shop window you couldn’t just stop and double back to the entrance. You might have to walk all the way around the block and come back to the store rather than violate the one-way-walking rules. I never believed this story until years later when I found out it was true.

Milton Academy in the fifties sent many of its graduates on to Harvard. I applied, and was accepted, but decided to follow my father’s family to New Haven. Yale in those days had no women and resembled my father’s college, or even my grandfather’s, more than it did the Yale of my daughter in 1985. The days when someone like myself, a legacy and having gone to a private school, would automatically be accepted to Harvard and Yale are long over. Neither would take me today.

Sophomore year I returned to Europe with two roommates—not an unusual college experience. We included Morocco, which was just gaining its independence that year from France. The sultan had returned from his enforced exile and happy rebel soldiers were to be seen on the roads as French soldiers passed by the other way, bound for ships home. France was beginning to leave its North African empire.

There was trouble in Egypt in that summer of 1956 due to Egypt’s strongman, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalizing the Suez Canal. I parted company from my roommates and headed for Cairo. The streets were full of demonstrators, encouraged by Nasser, denouncing the British. That summer gave me a taste of what would become my trade.

There were blackouts every night, just in case the vengeful British should retaliate against Egypt for seizing the canal. I fell in with some Egyptian students who asked me to come to some of their meetings in dingy cafés in old Cairo. They asked me if I thought war was coming and what America would do. I said it was inconceivable that the British would try to take back the canal. After all, this was the 1950s, not the nineteenth century. What about Israel? Israel was much too busy consolidating its newborn country, then only eight years old, and wouldn’t dream of going back to war with the Arabs if it could be avoided, I said. As for America, it would not favor either a British or an Israeli attack, I said, as if I had just gotten the word straight from John Foster Dulles himself.

Of my predictions, only America’s reaction turned out to be correct. That autumn the British and French, in a last gasp of imperial overreach, joined the Israelis in attacking Egypt to take back the canal. But when President Eisenhower said no, all three sheepishly withdrew their armies and went home. I have often thought of this in recent years when countries no longer jump when an American president barks.

Back at Yale I decided to major in English literature. My favorite course was Daily Themes, in which you had to write a short piece of fiction for every class, to be critiqued by your fellow students and graded by the professor. I still have a couple of them, and reading them now, they are even worse than I remembered. But the greatest influences on my life at Yale were the history of art and architecture courses taught by the great Vincent Scully. Scully’s lectures would forever change how I viewed the world around me.

I joined the Fence Club, a jolly establishment that no longer exists in the more serious Yale of today, and followed my father into Scroll and Key, a slightly younger and more lighthearted secret society than my grandfather’s Bones. We boasted Cole Porter among our alumni, while Skull and Bones back then had President William Howard Taft as their most distinguished alumnus.

It was on a Yale ski trip in Vermont that I met a Barnard College student named Joy Brooks. She and her roommate, Polly, weren’t planning anything that evening so we asked them to join us at a dinner party at our classmate Harold Janeway’s house not far from Bromley Mountain, where we were skiing. My friend Bill Becklean and I drove over to pick the two girls up at their ski lodge. Bill was determined that JB, as Joy was called, was to be his date. She was tall and blond, while Polly was quite a bit shorter. I tried to argue with Bill, who was the coxswain of the Yale crew, that JB was more my height while Polly was closer to him in size. I should have known that you don’t get to be cox of an Olympic-winning crew by being wimpy in these matters, and Bill would have none of it. JB was his date for the evening, he said. There was no arguing. It was time for desperate measures.

In those days winter clothes were bulkier and heavier than they are today, and it was routine to store your overcoat and ski parkas in the trunk while you drove, to be retrieved when you got out. We were performing this maneuver after we reached the girls’ ski lodge when opportunity knocked. As Bill leaned into the trunk to get his coat I took him by the ankles, upended him into the trunk, and slammed the lid.

I was freezing cold when I reached the door of the lodge, and the girls asked innocently, Where’s Bill?

Oh, he’s waiting for us in the car, I said, and that was that. Bill, being a generous fellow, has long since forgiven me, and JB and I have been together now for more than half a century.

2

Going to Work for Uncle Sam and Henry Luce

When I entered Yale in the fall of 1954 the Korean War had been over for little more than a year, and many of my generation thought there would likely be more hot conflicts in what was shaping up to be the long struggle with Communism that we now call the Cold War. It meant that although the Soviet Union and the United States intervened in places militarily, they didn’t confront each other directly.

I joined the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps. Years later Yale, along with Harvard and several other schools, discontinued NROTC programs in the antimilitarism that swept Ivy League schools in the wake of Vietnam, only to reinstate them again in the new century. I always felt banning ROTC was a mistake. It was good for the military to have officers who had not gone to military academies in the mix, and the service was an invaluable experience for me and many in my generation. The all-volunteer military of today has its advantages, but creating a military class to defend the country while the general population stays at home seems to me another mistake.

NROTC obligated me to serve two years at sea following college. So, upon graduation I reported to Norfolk, Virginia, where I was assigned to the aircraft carrier Valley Forge. The ship, which had seen service in the Korean War, was the centerpiece of Task Group Alpha under the command of Admiral John Thach. The admiral had invented a fighter aircraft maneuver to overcome the superior agility of the Japanese Zero during World War II. It was called the Thach Weave.

Time magazine put out a cover story on Jimmy Thach, as he was always called, while I was aboard. In the somewhat breathless fashion that was Time’s style in those days, Thach’s job was described as no less than that of rewriting the Navy’s antisubmarine book, of finding defenses against a new submarine revolution . . . The USSR has the biggest submarine force ever known—500 boats, almost ten times the number Hitler had at the start of World War II. At least half the Soviet subs are new and big enough to have missile-launch patrols into the western Atlantic waters, Time said.

Hidden from the sun, the black bottom is an unimaginably terrifying land of ancient mountain ranges and valleys, Time reported, with somnolent volcanoes, gargantuan canyons, bottomless chasms—a land filled with hiding places for a future generation of deeper-diving submarines.

Time quoted Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev as having said: Submarines can block American ports and shoot into the American interior, while our rockets can reach any target.

Needless to say, we junior officers had little appreciation for the apparently awe-inspiring role we were playing in the nation’s defenses, nor had we focused on the unimaginably terrifying land beneath our keel. We just went about the often-boring task of running the ship, thinking only of our next shore leave.

I chose to become a communications officer, one of several entrusted with coding and decoding confidential and secret messages. We had special code machines and code books with leaded covers, just in case you needed to throw them overboard should the ship be taken and boarded. Our job was to track Russian submarines that were coming provocatively close to the East Coast. Our task force, made up of two submarines, eight destroyers, and our aircraft carrier, would roam the Atlantic sending out sonar signals into the depths, which would occasionally bounce off the hulls of submarines hidden below. We had propeller planes and helicopters that would fly off our deck and drop patterns of sonar buoys. The object of this cat-and-mouse game was to track Russian submarines just as long as we could, hopefully to force one to the surface. We never did, even though we had one top secret advantage. It was one of the deepest and darkest secrets of the Cold War, and we were told it could never be revealed to anyone. It was called SOSUS, for Sound Surveillance System, and it consisted of a string of microphones on the ocean floor that would alert us when a submarine had passed over them. The secret became common knowledge after the Cold War, and I believe traitors working for the Soviets had tipped Moscow off long ago, but in 1958 we took it very seriously indeed.

I asked our captain what he would do if we ever did force a Russian submarine to the surface, and his answer was: Ask the Russian captain aboard for a drink. Alas, unlike other navies, there had been no alcohol allowed aboard US Navy ships since 1917, but it was not unknown for a bottle or two to be smuggled aboard. I once had to deliver an important incoming message to my captain while we were in port. It was late at night, and after knocking on his stateroom door, I was admitted to find him sitting with a good-looking woman in a glamorous dress. There was a very good bottle of brandy on the table between them.

I stood at ramrod attention with my eyes looking one inch above his head and not at all to the side. Cool as vodka, he politely introduced me to his lady and, gesturing toward the bottle, asked me if I had time for a glass of orange juice. "No, sir, thank you, sir! " I quickly said, and, performing a parade turn, I saluted and left with my glazed eyes staring straight ahead.

My tour of duty consisted of stretches of sea duty out of Norfolk into the Atlantic and back to Norfolk again with none of the exotic foreign ports that I had hoped for. My long-distance romance with JB, in those pre-Facebook, or even e-mail, days, was maintained by letters, much as romances had been in the days of Admiral Nelson. She was still at Barnard in New York, and I could tell from the tone of her letters that absence was not making her heart grow fonder. But there I was stuck at sea.

Fate intervened in the form of a kamikaze, which means divine wind in Japanese. It was not a World War II–style suicide attack but a fortunate wind for me. The Valley Forge ran into a particularly vicious storm at sea that rolled up the corner of our flight deck as if it were a can of sardines. The Valley Forge had to turn tail and run downwind to keep her stern to the wind and waves. It was a wild ride, and I was glad not to be aboard a smaller destroyer in those enormous seas.

When the storm was over the captain got on the loudspeaker and said: Now hear this. The Norfolk shipyard was too busy to take us, so we would be putting into the Brooklyn Navy Yard for repairs. In port there was no need to encode or decode messages, so my evenings were free to go uptown to pick up JB at the Barnard campus. We would go out to dinner in restaurants in Greenwich Village, listen to Mabel Mercer and Edith Piaf in what turned out to be her last engagement in America. The romance was sealed, but to this day JB has a recurring nightmare that she is flunking her Chinese exam.

My career in journalism began on the Valley Forge when I was assigned to the ship’s newspaper. We put out a little fleet journal that was distributed to other ships in our task force. We stole news items from wire services, which we could intercept, and I was tasked with choosing the news items and editing them. France’s war in Algeria was raging then, and I thought I would write a short essay of my own about what the French were up against and sneak it in the paper. Alas for me, it was noticed up on the bridge, and I still have the note that was sent down from on high.

COMMANDER J.T. STRAKER, USN

Executive Officer

USS Valley Forge (CVS-45)

Memorandum for: Comm Officer

Subject: Press News

Comment: The article in today’s press on conditions in Algeria is, or was, well-written and informative, but it reads like part of a political science text book. It is analysis but not news.

Names, scandal, political dirt, murder, rape, love-nests make news. Articles on the economic potential, ethnic groupings and industrial problems of Algeria are not news.

The editor of the New York World Telegram told his reporters that to catch the public’s eye news must involve (1) a name, preferably famous; (2) a situation which would let the reader’s evil little mind finish the story in his own way; and (3) the common touch, slang, mild profanity, etc. Then he offered a raise to the reporter who could give him the best line in the fewest words. The winner: Hell, said the duchess, let go of my leg.

He was right, of course. Only the pretensions of youth could have induced me to write such an article for the fleet newspaper. Old Straker knew how to arrest a prig in his downward slide. I certainly never told him that my mother’s grandfather Scott had once owned the New York World.

I look back upon my brief navy career as a valuable experience. Later on, when I was required to suffer the indignities of consultants whom the Boston Globe hired to teach its editors the fundamentals of leadership, I found they never went beyond what I had learned as an officer in the US Navy.

Having decided that I really should have majored in history at Yale, I decided to apply to Oxford when my tour was over. I was discharged and, despite my journalistic lapse, was pleased to be asked