I had barely watched or listened to the news as we drove crosscountry. If I had, I would have known that the CIA was accusing China, France, and Syria of selling chemicals, probably intended for long-range missile fuel, to the Iraqis. I would also have known that in response to this accusation, Saddam Hussein had suggested talks with a suave, seventy-four-year-old Swede, Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector. The UN had turned down the request, asking instead that Blix be allowed to send his inspection team back into the country. The news headlines would also have informed me that President Bush had dared the UN to confront the “grave and gathering” threat of Iraq, or step aside, and let the U.S. Marines take care of business. In other words, I would have known that war was inevitable.
But Iraq was the last thing on my mind as we motored west. As far as I was concerned, we were fleeing the terror of anthrax and ground zero, and heading back in time to the rich and safe country I had visited on my business trips to Silicon Valley. In fact, I felt slightly guilty for leaving New York: as though I should have stuck it out and showed solidarity with the Big Apple. I was, after all, running away. No other city on earth, perhaps, could evoke such a reaction—not even London. We learn from an early age that New York is the Best City In The World, and that to be a New Yorker is something noble and proud. Alana, no more of a New Yorker than I was, felt particularly bad. Leaving was tantamount to desertion.
The guilt was overwhelmed, however, by worry. How would I fare in my new job? And what would Martin Fletcher, The Times’s foreign news editor, think of me? I had, in effect, been thrust upon him by Robert Thomson, for reasons I had yet to fathom.
Since writing my first nib for Barrow, I had covered nothing but business for The Times, largely because I found it comfortable, safe, and civilized. No matter how violent or bloody the world became, everything in finance could be expressed in easily quantifiable terms: A beheading in Pakistan became a three-point dip in the Karachi stock exchange; a coup d’état in Colombia, a devaluation in coffee bean futures. The language of business achieved the same result as military jargon: emotional distance and, by extension, anxiety reduction. When Warren Buffett, the “sage of Omaha,” gave a speech after September 11, he described a possible nuclear terror attack on New York City as a “trillion-dollar event.” By putting a dollar figure on it, Buffett made it less scary; Armageddon became an insurance claim.
To me, the swells and riptides of the money markets were a logical expression of the illogical human condition, like abstract art. And I preferred the bold colors and straight lines of the suprematist to the random strokes of the real. Of all the newswires at The Times, my favorite was the Bloomberg: It showed the chaos of the world through a prism of numbers, ratios, and equations. When working late shifts in London, I used to stare at the data feeding into the Bloomberg from news bureaus across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and feel steadied, calmed.
There was no doubt about it: Business journalists cruised the information superhighway in the back of a stretched, leather-upholstered Jag. In Los Angeles, I would be huffing down the hard shoulder on a rusty bicycle. There would be no more comfort or safety in abstract numbers. I would be permanently “off diary,” as my old City tutor Linda Christmas used to say. I would also have an eight-hour time difference to deal with. For the first time in my five years at The Times, I would be leaving behind Patience, Barrow, and the comfy armchair of the business desk. But how difficult could the West Coast be? Hollywood was, in a way, just a different kind of stock market, with Variety box office figures instead of share prices, celebrity marriages instead of mergers. And the parties, at least, would be a bit livelier. Perhaps I could also try out Cole’s lunch tutorial at The Ivy or Morton’s, the infamous celebrity troughs on Robertson Boulevard. Not that I knew anyone, apart from Alana, to lunch with.
Fletcher, meanwhile, had other things to process in his billion-gigabyte brain. Most urgent: how to cover a war in the Gulf, if or when it started. Fletcher was already aware that the Pentagon was talking about “embedding” reporters with military units during a possible preemptive strike against Iraq. He was skeptical, however, of claims that journalists, including foreigners, would be placed directly with troops on the battlefield for the first time since World War II. The military had demonstrated such trust in the press only once before, when Ernie Pyle and thirty or so other “conflict correspondents” landed in Normandy on June 7, 1944. Even in Vietnam, war reporters were not permanently assigned to frontline units.
None of The Times’s “real” war correspondents, Fletcher reasoned, would believe the Pentagon’s claims or run the risk of becoming glorified PRs for the United States Marines. He also assumed, based on the behavior of the military during the first Gulf War, that even if war correspondents were embedded, they would be stuck with units deliberately kept far away from the fighting. There would be nothing worse, in Fletcher’s mind, than having Saddam throw mustard gas at the front lines while Anthony Loyd was writing about Porta-John logistics from the rear.
The Pentagon’s behavior in 1991, of course, was a reaction to Vietnam. In that war reporters were given a high level of access to battlefield operations, largely because of the precedent set by World War II. But journalists used it against the U.S. military, portraying the war as “a quagmire” with no realistic victory or exit plan. The main culprit was CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite—or “Uncle Walter” as he was known—who wrapped up a report about the Tet Offensive in 1968 with an editorial stating that the Americans were “mired in a stalemate.” Improvements in technology, meanwhile, made it easier for television news crews to bring horrific images of war back home. After Vietnam, therefore, military commanders tended to regard journalists as hippie sympathizers, cowards, and traitors. As a result, reporters were kept as far away as possible from later conflicts in Grenada and Panama. The gung-ho coverage of 1991, however, which saw Cronkite replaced with the likes of NBC’s Arthur Kent (aka “the Scud stud”), changed all that. News networks treated the expulsion of the Iraqis from Kuwait City like a cross between a video game and a football match, complete with hyperbolic commentators, 3D graphics, and player statistics. The tone was partly a result of awe at the advances in U.S. weaponry: John Simpson, for example, filed an infamous report for the BBC saying that a Tomahawk missile had just streaked past his hotel window and “turned left at the traffic lights.”
Fletcher didn’t know it, but by 2002 the U.S. military had forgiven the media for Vietnam. Fletcher’s solution to the embedding dilemma, therefore, was to put young, inexperienced reporters in the American scheme, just in case they were needed. It would, he thought, serve as a gentle introduction to the world of war reporting: a bit like doing it as an intern. As I sat behind the wheel of the jeep, whistling along to Mick Jagger and congratulating myself on getting the hell out of Manhattan, I had no idea that Fletcher was thinking about embedding me.
If I had, I might have headed straight back to New York.