Foreign Correspondents : America’s Overseas Eyes, Ears

From the time he started high school in Fayetteville, N.C., David Zucchino knew he wanted to spend his adult life as a foreign correspondent.

Why?

“Travel . . . glamour . . . romance . . . wearing a trench coat and carrying a Luger.”

Zucchino is 34 now and, like most foreign correspondents, he’s never carried a Luger (or any other kind of gun). Nor does he wear a trench coat. But he has been the Philadelphia Inquirer correspondent in war-torn Beirut and, now, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Being a foreign correspondent is all Zucchino had hoped it would be--and more. He even manages to keep up with his favorite American sports teams by having the Inquirer telex him the scores of Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia 76er games.

But Zucchino has found that “romance and glamour . . . (are) only about 1% of the job.”

The other 99%, he says, is “trying . . . to get the phones to work and trying to track people down and trying to get where you want to go, usually in places that are hot and dirty and things don’t work and nobody wants to talk to you.”

Even worse, when Zucchino’s 4-month-old daughter developed an ear infection, doctors in Beirut were unable to diagnose it or treat it. She was sick for five months before the Zucchino family returned to Philadelphia, where she was given what turned out to be routine medical treatment for an ailment common among infants.

Zucchino’s experience abroad--the good and the bad, the exhilaration of working in an exotic, foreign culture and the exhaustion of trying to cope with seemingly endless communications, logistical and family problems--is typical of what foreign correspondents encounter in most parts of the world today.

Adventure. Excitement. Freedom. Challenge. Camaraderie.

Isolation. Insecurity. Frustration. Divorce. Danger.

Massive Global Village

These were the words mentioned most often when a Times reporter recently asked more than 70 foreign correspondents, past and present, about their jobs. What these correspondents (and their editors) had to say provides an illuminating portrait of the men and women who serve as America’s eyes and ears in foreign lands at a time when events abroad make America, more than ever, part of a massive global village.

Worldwide terrorism. The arms race. The overthrow of dictators in the Philippines and Haiti. The nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. Reform in China. Violence and unrest in the Mideast, South Africa and Latin America. The continuing growth of Japan as a dominant industrial giant. Dramatic fluctuations in the value of the dollar.

Who covers these stories? Who tells Americans what they mean? What kind of men and women want to be foreign correspondents anyway?

Foreign correspondents seem to spend a vastly disproportionate amount of their time struggling against infuriating Catch-22 circumstances like those described by Evelyn Waugh in “Scoop,” his classic 1937 novel about foreign correspondents. In “Scoop,” reporter William Boot arrives in Ishmaelia, a fictional country in northeast Africa, with instructions to “go to the front.”

‘Isn’t Any Front’

“That’s what we all want to do,” another correspondent tells Boot. “But in the first place there isn’t any front and in the second place we couldn’t get to it if there was. You can’t move outside the town without a permit and you can’t get a permit.”

Who wants to work where he’s not wanted, in “places hot and dirty” (or cold and sterile), on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thousands of miles from home, often separated from spouses and children for weeks at a time? Who wants a job that might require you to spend the day dodging bombs and the night sleeping on the operating table in the maternity room of a hospital (as Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times once did in Beirut)? Who wants a job that turns simple tasks like making a telephone call or taking an airplane flight into a time-consuming, emotionally draining ordeal?

James Sterba of the Wall Street Journal once wanted to fly from Peking to Kabul, Afghanistan--a distance of almost 2,600 miles, about the same as between Los Angeles and New York. He had to take nine flights, stopping in five countries, covering more than 12,000 miles and consuming four full days.

Telephones in Cairo and New Delhi are so unreliable that correspondents based there often find themselves unable to call either their sources across town or their spouses at home for days at a time.

In conducting overseas telephone interviews for this story one day, a Los Angeles Times reporter first tried to call a reporter in New Delhi (the telephone didn’t ring), then one in Peking (the telephone didn’t ring), then Nairobi (the phone was out of order), then Moscow (direct telephone service had been suspended, circuits were busy and it would be a 12-hour wait), then Cairo (the conversation was cut off three times, and there was so much static, cross-talk and other interference that the call had to be terminated and resumed six times to complete the 45-minute interview).

Dealing With Governments

Dealing with foreign governments--many of which have no concept of a free press--can be as frustrating as dealing with telephones and airplane schedules. Within a 10-day period this year, one New York Times reporter was refused admission to Libya and another was expelled from Indonesia; a CBS News cameraman, the Newsweek correspondent in Johannesburg and an Israeli free-lance journalist have all been ordered to leave South Africa since June 12, when the South African government--for the second time in seven months--imposed rigid controls on foreign and domestic journalists trying to cover racial unrest there.

Foreign correspondents often face fates more frightening than expulsion and censorship, though.

Robert J. Rosenthal of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charles T. Powers of the Los Angeles Times were arrested, thrown in prison, robbed and beaten with whips by the Uganda National Liberation Army in 1982.

Terry Anderson of the Associated Press was kidnaped in Beirut in March, 1985, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

Six American journalists--including Dial Torgerson of the Los Angeles Times--have been killed in Latin America since 1979.

Are these risks and sacrifices worth the benefits of being a foreign correspondent--the opportunity to be an eye-witness to history-in-the-making and the freedom to work independently (and, often, live quite handsomely) in exotic locations?

The vast majority of foreign correspondents, past and present, answer that question with a resounding “Yes!”

“Working alone . . . in charge of (covering) a country, or several countries . . . it’s a challenge and a responsibility that very few kinds of jobs . . . (provide) . . .,” says William Tuohy, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has reported from abroad since 1965 and is now the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Bonn.

Tuohy and other foreign correspondents speak unanimously and rhapsodically of the opportunity to cover truly important subjects while largely setting their own schedules and selecting their own stories, generally free of the “political machinations” many say they abhor in the home office.

Being a foreign correspondent is “the last great romantic profession on Earth,” Powers said recently, several weeks before completing six years as the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Nairobi.

“No matter how much you’re fighting with bad phones and bad telexes,” Powers said, “you think, Jesus Christ, someone’s paying me to do this. It’s like the miracle of being paid to play center field for the Dodgers.”

Increasingly Important Role

There is little doubt, moreover, that foreign correspondents play an increasingly important role in an increasingly complex world.

When U.S. warplanes bombed Tripoli, Libya, in April, reporters on the scene provided the most accurate account of the attack. (Had the French Embassy been damaged? “That would be, I think, virtually impossible,” said Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. But correspondents in Tripoli reported that the embassy had, indeed, been damaged.)

Further, while senior American officials were busy spreading the word that the bombing raid “seemed to have unleashed rebellious elements in Libya” and that there was “considerable dissidence,” even “a mutiny” in the Libyan armed forces, American reporters in Tripoli wrote that the possible overthrow of Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi was little more than wishful thinking on the part of the Reagan Administration; Kadafi, they said, was still in firm control of his country.

“Foreign correspondents provide a crucial channel of relatively unbiased information . . . an on-the-scene view of the world, which very often is directly opposed to what the U.S. government is trying to convince the American public is the situation,” says David Ottaway of the Washington Post, who worked overseas from 1962 to 1985, with a few years out in between to write three books and get two advanced degrees.

Ottaway says foreign correspondents “play an important role in . . . the checks-and-balance process of foreign policy making.”

But how are foreign correspondents chosen in the first place? What training do they get? What qualifies them to “play an important role in . . . foreign policy making?” How does a reporter born in a small town in the American Midwest adapt to life in the Arab world? Or amid the Russian bureaucracy? How does the experience abroad change the correspondent’s outlook on life--and his (or her) family life?

No Simple Answers

There are no simple answers to any of these questions because there is no consistent pattern to the motivation, education and selection of foreign correspondents.

Take motivation:

A few reporters, like Jay Mathews of the Washington Post and Stanley Meisler of the Los Angeles Times, go abroad because they’re fascinated with one country or region--Mathews with China, Meisler with Africa--and they see journalism as the best means of indulging and furthering their fascination.

Other reporters, like Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times, grew up reading the (now-defunct) Chicago Daily News, with its large stable of superb foreign correspondents and decided at an early age that becoming a foreign correspondent “seemed . . . very exciting . . . a helluva lot better than becoming a killer or a priest.”

But some reporters, like Sam Dillon of the Miami Herald and Steve Twomey of the Philadelphia Inquirer, say they never even thought of going abroad for their papers until their editors asked them to. And Max Frankel, now editorial page editor of the New York Times, says it was “dumb luck” that gave him his first overseas assignment in 1956, during the Hungarian revolution.

Frankel says the Times “desperately needed” someone who spoke German to serve as “a listening post” in Vienna for a few weeks, and he--then 26--had been born in Germany and was fluent in the language. Moreover, the paper was looking for a single man, and although Frankel was newly married, he says his editors didn’t know it yet.

Frankel went to Vienna, stayed six months, then went to Moscow and Havana.

For all this variety, though, if there was one common experience that introduced many of today’s most experienced foreign correspondents to reporting from abroad, it was the Vietnam War.

Phillip Knightley, in his book “The First Casualty,” quotes an American correspondent as saying, “I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods,” and there is no doubt that Vietnam provided the same rite de passage for many of this generation of foreign correspondents that World War II provided for the last generation.

Danger’s Allure

Danger has always been one of the big allures of foreign correspondence, a primary reason many journalists--primarily men--eagerly volunteer for hazardous posts. The most macho figure in American literature, Ernest Hemingway, was a war correspondent as well as a novelist, and generations of young men have grown up wanting to test themselves under similar fire in the trenches of Europe, on the islands of the Pacific, in the jungles of Vietnam and in the shell-ridden streets of Beirut.

“War is never very far from any correspondent ,” says Malcolm Browne, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam coverage for the Associated Press and spent 20 years abroad for the wire services and the New York Times before becoming a science writer for the Times last year.

“Foreign correspondents . . . pump a lot of adrenaline,” Browne says. “This is a large part of their lives. One would not want to be a foreign correspondent purely to cover Burke’s Peerage in the British Isles. One assumes you’re going to be sent into conflict. . . . Almost by definition, a foreign correspondent is a war correspondent.”

Being a war correspondent is often especially appealing to young journalists, not yet burdened with either family obligations or a prudent sense of their own mortality, and this was certainly true in Vietnam.

“The Vietnam War gave everybody the opportunity (to go abroad) years ahead of when they would have . . . gone . . . ,” says Thomas Lippman, now editor of the Washington Post’s national weekly edition.

Lippman was 31 when he went to Saigon for two years, and despite all the suffering and death he saw, he was also enchanted by what he encountered throughout Southeast Asia--”culture, cuisine, people, places . . . beyond anything I’d imagined.”

Lippman subsequently spent three years in Cairo, and although he found that city “unspeakably filthy,” with communications problems that “drove you absolutely nuts,” he says he would “leave tomorrow” on another foreign assignment if it weren’t for the “practical” considerations of a wife and three children.

Fewer Overseas Correspondents

Lippman’s attitude is characteristic of foreign correspondents, past and present, no matter where they’re based and no matter how difficult or dangerous their overseas work has been. Despite all this enthusiasm, there are far fewer full-time American correspondents overseas today than there were 40 years ago.

From a post-World War II high of 2,500, the number of American foreign correspondents dropped to 565 by 1969 and to 429 by 1975, according to the latest statistics compiled by Ralph Kliesch and John Wilhelm of Ohio University. (Kliesch and Wilhelm are working on a new survey now, but it probably won’t be ready before fall.)

In both actual and symbolic terms, the late 1970s can be seen as the nadir of foreign correspondence in American newspapers. In 1977, for the first time since the Pulitzer Prizes began to honor foreign correspondents in 1948, no foreign reporting was deemed worthy of a Pulitzer. That same year, the failing Chicago Daily News called home its last correspondents; a year later, the paper went out of business altogether.

What caused the decline in foreign correspondence? One explanation is that many newspapers (like the Chicago Daily News) folded, and their foreign staffs folded with them. Another explanation is that many surviving newspapers, increasingly owned by large media conglomerates with bottom-line priorities, became more cost-conscious than ever; it’s much cheaper to fill a newspaper with wire service copy than it is to staff a bureau overseas--especially when the dollar is weak, as it was during much of the 1970s.

It now costs a newspaper about $150,000 to $200,000 a year to maintain most one-reporter bureaus abroad; faced with such expenditures, most newspapers became more provincial, more parochial in their journalistic concerns through the late 1960s and ‘70s--an attitude parodied in the National Lampoon’s 1978 newspaper satire featuring a lead story that began:

“Possible tragedy has marred the vacation plans of Miss Frances Bundle and her mother Olive as volcanoes destroyed Japan early today.”

Most Americans have always been somewhat less interested in foreign news than are readers in, say, Europe, for reasons that involve history, culture and geography.

Americans are “not interested in what we’re not immediately involved in or what doesn’t represent either pain or pleasure in the next five minutes,” says John Vinocur, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and now metropolitan editor of the paper.

Dwindling News Space

Thus, in 1940--amid the pain of World War II--the average American newspaper devoted 14 columns of space a day to foreign news; by 1983, that figure had dwindled to four columns a day. A 1982 study by the Newspaper Advertising Bureau showed that only 6% of the total number of news items in the average newspaper involved foreign news in 1982, a drop from the 10.2% recorded in 1971.

“It was an inward-looking time in America,” says Jonathan Randall, a foreign correspondent for the past 29 years--the last 17 with the Washington Post. “People weren’t interested in what was happening abroad, and the press just reflected the . . . people’s feelings, the government’s feelings.”

True enough. Once the Vietnam War was in its final stages--and then over--all the big stories seemed to be right here in the United States, starting with the anti-war movement itself and including the campus protest movement, the new sexual freedom, feminism, environmentalism and, finally--the ultimate domestic story--Watergate.

Editors, reporters and readers alike were preoccupied with what was happening in (and to) America in the late 1960s, ‘70s and even into the early ‘80s, with the rise of the evangelical right and the election of Ronald Reagan. For several years, even editors who wanted to send reporters abroad often had a difficult time finding qualified reporters who were willing to go.

For a generation, young reporters had been captivated by the image of trench-coated Joel McCrea, who smashed an enemy spy ring, survived a plane crash at sea and won Laraine Day’s heart in the 1940 movie “Foreign Correspondent”; suddenly, it seemed, no one wanted to be Joel McCrea anymore.

Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post, says he can recall posting a notice that the paper’s New Delhi bureau was available, and only one reporter applied for it.

That, in itself, should not have been surprising; even many reporters who want to go abroad aren’t necessarily eager to go to New Delhi. That’s why many first-time foreign correspondents draw that assignment; if they want to become foreign correspondents, “they often have no choice,” in the words of William F. Thomas, editor of the Los Angeles Times.

‘I Could Taste It’

But Bradlee has seen a similar lack of enthusiasm for other, more desirable overseas posts, and he was shaking his head over that attitude recently while speaking of how, as a young reporter himself, he “wanted to go abroad so badly I could taste it.”

Bradlee did go abroad, for seven years in the 1950s, and he found the experience “hopelessly romantic . . . terribly glamorous;” no wonder he thought it “absolutely amazing” that so few Post reporters wanted to embark on similar experiences.

“Maybe I’ve got a false impression of myself, but if I’m laboring on the metro staff here for a couple of years and somebody posts (a bureau opening in) India, I’ll break the leg of the guy who gets there in front of me,” Bradlee said.

But the prospect of a big story at home--and, who knows, maybe a Pulitzer and a book and even a movie, a la Woodward and Bernstein--wasn’t the only reason reporters at the Post (and elsewhere) weren’t breaking anyone’s legs in a race to go abroad in the 1970s.

Some of the very changes that reporters were covering in American society--new life styles, new priorities, new kinds of personal relationships--helped dictate their own career decisions.

Like others in their age group, some young reporters became yuppified--their reporter’s sense of adventure “firmly mired in (a preference for) accouterments and comforts and . . . the idea of having a child. . . ,” Bradlee says.

Many young journalists were suddenly making far more money than their predecessors ever dreamed of. They weren’t interested in giving up their condos, Volvos, VCRs and weekly visits to La Maison de Kiwi and Blackened Redfish Over Mesquite in exchange for the typical foreign correspondent’s first assignment in beautiful, downtown New Delhi or ever-charming West Africa.

More important, the phenomenon of the two-career couple had begun to make many career decisions more difficult than once they were, in journalism as elsewhere.

Circumstances have changed considerably since the 1950s, when then-foreign correspondents like Max Frankel of the New York Times and Robert Gibson of United Press (and now of the Los Angeles Times) told their about-to-be wives, during courtship, that “one of the criteria of our happiness . . . was that she be portable” (Frankel’s phrase) and that going abroad, “anywhere I might wish to go . . . was a condition” (Gibson’s phrase) of their continuing relationship.

Few husbands would be so presumptuous in 1986. Indeed, with more wives working today--in journalism as elsewhere--it is sometimes the wife who is offered the foreign correspondent’s job, and the husband’s career (and feelings) that must be considered in any proposed family move. (The New York Times now has seven women among its 34 foreign correspondents.)

Not Automatically Snapped Up

Either way, the offer of a foreign correspondent’s job is no longer automatically snapped up the minute it’s offered.

Twice in the last three years, for example, the Washington Post has asked Dale Russakoff, 33, to go abroad--first to Nairobi, then to Warsaw. Both times she said no.

Part of the reason she refused was that she’d “really gotten interested in Washington reporting, and . . . I’d like to stick with it awhile.”

But Russakoff’s primary reason for turning down the Warsaw job was that she was romantically involved with (and is now engaged to) someone who lived in Philadelphia (and has since moved to Washington).

“In the time I’ve been a reporter, my priorities have shifted somewhat,” Russakoff says. “I feel I’ve given up a lot of my personal life, sometimes too much, and this was a time when I wanted to savor my personal life over my career.”

Russakoff notwithstanding, there is some indication that in the last two or three years, more reporters are becoming interested in foreign assignments again and more editors are becoming interested in foreign news again. Recent studies even show readers more interested in foreign news--60% are “very interested,” according to one survey, and 84% say they “usually read . . . international or world news,” according to another survey (by the Newspaper Advertising Bureau).

The seeds of this revival of interest may well have been planted with the Arab oil embargoes and the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, both of which were utterly unexpected in America but which had immediate and convulsive domestic ramifications.

There is no definitive new study of the number of American correspondents abroad, but Times inquiries suggest the decline of the 1960s and ‘70s has been reversed.

Since 1978, the Washington Post has increased its number of foreign correspondents from 13 to 19, the Los Angeles Times has increased from 17 to 23, the Christian Science Monitor from 8 to 13 and the Associated Press from 81 to 100.

In 1979, Knight-Ridder Newspapers opened its first foreign bureaus, financing two for each of its four major papers; those papers also have opened some bureaus of their own--four in the case of the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example.

The Boston Globe has also opened four foreign bureaus in recent years, and the Chicago Tribune--whose once-large foreign staff had shrunk to four bureaus by 1981--now has 10.

Latin America, Africa

The expansion of foreign bureaus is especially noticeable in Africa and Latin America--areas long largely ignored by most of the American press--according to a survey by the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. magazine, presstime.

Even some smaller papers now have a foreign bureau or two, and other papers have reporters based in their hometowns who spend much of the year traveling abroad as roving correspondents. Many newspapers with no full-time correspondents--as well as those with large foreign staffs--have part-timers (known as “stringers”) who live abroad and report for them when stories break.

With few exceptions, most American newspapers still devote relatively little space to foreign news. Foreign news fills about 40% of the general news space in the Washington Post and New York Times and about 30% in the Los Angeles Times, according to a 1985 study by UNESCO, but that number drops to 15% or 20% for the average American newspaper, says Donald Shaw, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina who helped compile the UNESCO study.

Perhaps that will change with a new generation of editors--and a new generation of foreign correspondents.

Keith Richburg of the Washington Post seems typical of that new generation.

Richburg, 28, decided he’d like to be a foreign correspondent after spending a year in England, getting a master’s degree at the London School of Economics, and traveling in Western Europe, Asia and North Africa. On the morning of what turned out to be a premature announcement that Jean-Claude Duvalier had fled Haiti early this year, Richburg says he deliberately came to work early and positioned himself so that if editors began discussing sending someone to Haiti, he could hear them and they might see him.

Sure enough, the discussion took place. Richburg says that when he heard someone ask if there was anyone available who spoke French, he said, “I’m ready.”

Richburg went to Haiti. Duvalier ultimately fled to France. It was a good story, and Richburg did a good job.

In October, Richburg will become the Post’s correspondent in Manila.

FOREIGN COVERAGE Foreign news fills 15%-20% of general news space in U.S. daily newspapers, according to Donald L. Shaw of the University of North Carolina. A UNESCO study compared the biggest papers:

The Washington Post 41% The New York Times 39% The Los Angeles Times 30%

Foreign news coverage has been dropping, according to several measures. Among them: News Items

1971 1982 10% 6%

Average Nes Space

1940 1983 14 columns 4 columns

U.S. Foreign Correspondents

1945 1969 1975 2,500 565 429

Susanna Shuster of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for these articles.