Oliver's Twist (17 page)

For all of us, there were occasions when our relationships as summer travellers intersected helpfully with our professional lives. Only once did I ever exploit that connection shamelessly.

The year after canoeing the Hanbury I was assigned to Washington, and in the spring of 1980 I was sent to cover the simmering civil war in El Salvador at short notice. Only then did I discover that I had allowed my passport to lapse. An admirably fussy visa officer at the Canadian embassy informed
me that I would need someone in a prominent position back home to vouch for my identity, since I did not even have my birth certificate.

In what I concede was an inappropriate answer, I gave her the name of the recently elected prime minister, returned to office after defeating Joe Clark in February. She scolded me for making light of a serious matter. Her tone apparently changed, however, when she heard Trudeau's familiar voice at the other end of the line in Ottawa. He was greatly amused that his fellow river runner needed a character reference.

If the Trudeau connection had been responsible for greasing the skids under my Ottawa tenure, it also opened doors at the Canadian embassy in Washington. America, I concluded, was going to be a great gig.

5

WASHINGTON
ASSIGNMENT

I arrived in Washington on the eve of Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981, a moment when America was on its ass. The nation's economy was in a deep slump, as was its mood. Interest rates were the highest since the Civil War and inflation ran at double digits. Perhaps worse, the country's confidence had been shaken in November 1979 by the capture of sixty-six American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran, an ordeal that lasted well over a year for fifty-two of them. Jimmy Carter, though later regarded as the nation's best-ever past president, proved a weak and indecisive chief executive. Carter's effort to rescue the Americans held prisoner in Teheran, dubbed Operation “Eagle Claw,” came apart in military incompetence and death in the desert. It seemed every tree in Washington displayed a commemorative yellow ribbon, constant reminders of a country held captive and a great power rendered impotent.

The inauguration of a first-time president is a powerful tonic for Americans, however, and hope and optimism are soon restored. The ascendancy of Ronald Reagan promised a return to a much earlier era in U.S. history. There would be no more
humiliations; it was back to Theodore Roosevelt's policy of “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Although in the last days of Carter's presidency his administration had been working mightily behind the scenes to secure the hostages' release, everyone in Washington wanted to believe another story, never confirmed, that shortly before Reagan took office he had sent an ultimatum to the Iranian mullahs: Release the hostages immediately or face the bombing of Teheran. Twenty minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the hostages were on their way home. The exhilaration was palpable among the throngs that lined Pennsylvania Avenue to see the new president pass by.

My own giddiness at kicking off my tenure as CTV's Washington correspondent with this historic event was tempered somewhat by a personal twinge of loss. I had left behind a serious relationship in Ottawa with a woman who did not want to uproot her son or her legal career to follow me south. The reporter I was replacing, Mike McCourt, had already left for his new job with ABC News, and I knew no one in the capital. I felt more than a little forlorn after Harvey Kirck and I finished our upbeat inauguration broadcast that night.

I had found an apartment in a restored late-nineteenth-century brick building on 16th Street, an elegant and leafy avenue that runs straight down to Lafayette Square and the White House. In the plan laid out by French architect Pierre L'Enfant, the street was intended to be a
grande allée
, lined with foreign embassies paying homage to the president. Nowadays, the embassies are scattered across the city, but the street still boasts many grand old buildings, including the famous Hay-Adams Hotel.

As my furniture was being moved in, my neighbour on the
floor—a black U.S. marine officer—asked me wryly if I minded the fact that I was stationed right next to “Indian country.” The capital had been desegregated for years, but there was a clear demarcation between the black and white sections of the city, and we were the dividing line. The only other tenant on the floor was a retired U.S. Air Force bomber pilot who had experienced an epiphany during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It came while he was at the controls of his bomber on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Turkey, waiting for the coded message that would have sent him to destroy a Russian city with his nuclear payload. He passed tension-filled hours with the engine running, not knowing if he would be ordered to take off or stand down, and the experience changed him forever. He left the service after his tour was finished, and when Vietnam took American soldiers into another conflict, he was one of the leaders of the veterans group that opposed the war.

A major concern in relocating to Washington was finding proper medical care for the glaucoma that I had been diagnosed with five years before. Fortunately, one of the world's outstanding glaucoma specialists and researchers, Mansour F. Armaly, practised in Washington, and he agreed to take me on as a patient. I was in good company. His other patients included then vice-president George H.W. Bush and King Hussein of Jordan. My visits to Dr. Armaly's office were always impressive. First I was seen by an assistant or two who took various tests and measurements. Then I was ushered into a spacious consulting room to wait for the great man himself, who arrived with a retinue of attentive interns in his wake. Dr. Armaly was invariably gracious, modest, and gentle, always putting me at ease with a kindly touch on the knee. He was a Palestinian and
the many hours I spent in his company over the next few years left me with a lifelong affection for his people.

In Washington's journalistic pecking order, a Canadian reporter ranks just slightly higher than Radio Zambezi. Compared with the kind of access to power we of the CTV crew had dined on at home, Washington was a starvation diet. There might be the rare moment when a Canada-U.S. issue seized the attention of the political class, but most of the time we hovered below their radar. But I had one advantage and it took no forced effort on my part to exploit it: I was a single, straight male in a typical government town full of married men and single women. These smart and ambitious women had come from all over America to be successful in politics, government, or the media, and in the competition for companions the odds were stacked in my favour. Very often the outcome was as much friendship as it was romance, but either way the women I met were far better connected with the capital's political grandees and their staffs than I could ever hope to be.

I considered myself lucky to become a friend of Margaret Carlson, deputy Washington bureau chief for
Time
magazine, and then as now a regular on the network political talk shows. I confess that when I escorted someone as influential as Margaret, I had to park my ego at the door and accept my role as part of the scenery. On one occasion, seated across from one of the nation's most celebrated television news anchors, I dared a conversational sally concerning Canadian premier Richard Hatfield and how he'd been caught carrying marijuana while on tour with the Queen. The acerbic David Brinkley replied, “Does that mean Canada has finally become interesting?”

One of my closest pals was Patricia Ellis, the foreign editor
for the
McNeil/Lehrer News Hour
, the PBS program that was a standard-bearer for political reporters and a must-watch for all political junkies. I found Robert McNeil, a native Montrealer raised in the Maritimes, somewhat stiff and formal in his manner, but Jim Lehrer, an easygoing Texan, was his opposite. No doubt this formula accounted for their success as a news anchor team for twenty years.

Pat's own story was the classic American immigrant tale. Her grandfather had arrived in the United States as a penniless Jewish refugee. The immigration officer at Ellis Island gave up on his hard-to-spell Polish name and arbitrarily gave him a new one, Ellis, after the famous reception centre. Eventually he established himself as a successful businessman and formed a close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, then New York's commissioner of police. Pat's father was a lawyer who set up his first practice with the future agent to the stars, Swifty Lazar. Pat knew everyone and her unaffected warmth and thoughtfulness gave her easy entree to the Washington whirl. I might find myself at a birthday party for the chairman of the Democratic Party one evening and at a dinner with a senior Republican senator the next.

There were other chance connections that I worked to advantage. My Washington producer had once dated Marlin Fitzwater, a press aide to Vice-President Bush and then to Reagan. Fitzwater was a farm boy from Kansas, and we found we shared a small-town-in-the-West kind of kinship. When the U.S.-Canada free trade negotiations became heated, Fitzwater was a valued source, and I suspect he also arranged more Reagan sit-downs for me than a strict rotation between networks would normally have allowed.

Many years before, I had shared the hardship of a climb over the Chilkoot Pass with a California state senator and his wife. They knew Fitzwater's predecessor, James Brady, an immensely popular press secretary to the president. Brady was not one of Nancy Reagan's favourites, arousing her ire with small jokes at her husband's expense. During a presidential campaign stop a few months previous, Reagan had made a bizarre statement about old forests and the threat to human health posed by forest fires. Later, gazing out his window as the candidate's aircraft took off over a national forest, Brady pointed out the sight below to the surrounding reporters and declared in mock horror, “Killer trees!” I connected with Brady soon after my arrival, but we never had the more leisurely get-together we'd promised ourselves.

On March 30, 1981, I was in Toronto for that day's broadcast of
Canada
AM
, sitting in for an ailing regular host. After the day's early start, I returned to my hotel room for an afternoon nap, only to be awakened by a telephone call from the newsroom telling me that Reagan had been shot.

It hardly seemed credible. Reagan had been in office less than three months and it was inconceivable that the United States might once again suffer the agony of an assassinated president. The networks were already broadcasting the story that having delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton, a few blocks from the White House, Reagan was about to step into his limousine when a gunman who had inserted himself behind a line of reporters started shooting. I was supposed to be there, covering his address to the Construction Trade Unions. Soon I was on a Learjet booked by the network and headed for George Washington Hospital.

The White House line was that Reagan was fine, that his condition was not life-threatening. But the chaos and sense of crisis at the hospital, where ashen-faced staff and relatives hurried past the media scrum, belied the official assurances. Only later did we learn he had nearly died from loss of blood due to a pierced lung. But the old thespian had a memorable line ready. “I forgot to duck, honey,” he reportedly told Nancy. He also told his surgeons that he hoped they were all Republicans.

I sprinted the nine or so blocks to the White House, where the press briefing room was packed. Some correspondents were in tears after hearing that Jim Brady had been shot and killed. This was untrue, though he had been critically wounded and suffered lasting brain damage. Here, too, all discipline and order seemed to have collapsed. Normally the vice-president would have taken over in such a crisis, but George Bush Sr. was in the air, flying home from a foreign tour. So who was in charge? The lack of clarity was frightening, and Secretary of State Al Haig soon made it worse. Dashing up to the microphone at the head of the small room, Haig looked frantic and sweaty, not at all the calm-underfire commander one would expect of a former general. He spoke as if briefing the troops. “As you know,” he intoned, “the president took a round in the chest. I am in control here at the White House.” In fact he was far down the list of those constitutionally able to replace an incapacitated president. Haig, who later threw his helmet into the ring for the presidential nomination, seemed just a mite too eager.

After the shooting, the security surrounding the president would never be the same again. Gone were the days of simply flashing a pass and being buzzed through a White House gate. The pass now restricted reporters to the two-storey press room
and the lawn in front. All other areas of the sprawling executive offices were off limits without an escort. The Secret Service used the incident to win an arrangement they'd always wanted: They closed off the streets in front of and beside the White House, distancing it from street traffic and pedestrians. Perhaps such measures were necessary to protect presidents, but they somehow diminished the lustre of this advertisement for America's open democracy and the notion of government by the people, for the people.