Between You and Me (13 page)

“He’s never admitted this before publicly until now. He’s never ca-

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ressed my father’s children. I thank him for acknowledging his culpability, and I wish him peace.”

That was not Farrakhan’s first appearance on 60 Minutes: I had done a story on him four years earlier. That 1996 profile aired just a few months after his most ambitious undertaking, the much bally-hooed Million Man March. The purpose of that event was to induce black men from all across America to assemble in Washington for a day of atonement and a shared pledge to embrace family values and commitments. Although Farrakhan scored some moral points for himself and his cause, he proceeded to squander them on a subsequent trip to the Middle East and Africa. During his visits to the capitals of three Islamic countries—Libya, Iran, and Iraq—

he met with leaders who were sworn enemies of the United States, and he was severely criticized for making statements that indicated he shared their corrosive hatred of America. When I interviewed him in the spring of ’96, I asked him about those remarks and about his visit to Nigeria, which also had sparked some controversy.

While in Nigeria, he voiced support for a regime that I contended might well be the most corrupt government in the entire world.

That assertion struck a nerve, and Farrakhan lit into me with a fusillade of righteous fury:

“You’re not in any moral position to tell anybody how corrupt they are,” he declared. “America should keep her mouth shut wherever there’s a corrupt regime, as much hell as America has raised on the earth. No, I will not allow America or you, Mr. Wallace, to condemn them as the most corrupt nation on earth when you have spilled the blood of human beings.”

He paused for a moment, but only to reload: “Has Nigeria dropped an atomic bomb and killed people in Hiroshima and Na-gasaki? Have they killed off millions of Native Americans? How dare

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you put yourself in that position as a moral judge? I think you should keep quiet, because with that much blood on America’s hands, you have no right to speak.”

Farrakhan eventually calmed down and even offered an apology of sorts for getting “so fired up.”

“Oh, no,” I assured him. “That’s good. That’s good.”

“That’s my passion,” he explained.

That passion had been on display in his frequent denunciations of white people in general and Jews in particular. I decided to broach the subject of his pet antagonisms in personal terms.

W A L L A C E : You don’t trust the media—you’ve said so. You don’t trust whites—you’ve said so. You don’t trust Jews—

you’ve said so. Well, here I am: white, Jewish, and a reporter.

So why in the world did you trust me enough to sit down to talk to me in this way, Mr. Farrakhan?

F A R R A K H A N : Well, let— Let me say this: I would not say that all whites and all Jews and all media are untrustworthy. That is not a fair characterization of my thinking.

W A L L A C E : That’s the perception of a lot of people in America.

F A R R A K H A N : Perception is not necessarily reality.

I asked him to look at some footage from one of his speeches that was directed at Jews. As the following excerpt makes clear, the message and tone of his remarks could only be construed as virulent anti-Semitism:

“You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. . . . You are the synagogue of Satan. And you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you’re deceiving and sending this nation to hell. But I warn you in the name of

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Allah, you would be wise to leave me alone. But if you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you.”

Even in the face of such incriminating evidence, Farrakhan insisted that his ultimate goal was to bring about a reconciliation between the Black Muslims and American Jews. If that was his objective, then he pursued it in a strange way. In the years since our interview, he continued to rail against Jews in his vituperative fashion, and all the major Jewish organizations continued to denounce him as a contemptible bigot. Who could blame them, for with his highly charged rhetoric, Louis Farrakhan continued to live up to his reputation as an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser.

Having said that, I also know from personal experience that one does not have to be a raving anti-Semite to be rebuked by the powerful Jewish lobby. Some of the reporting I did in the Middle East back inthe 1970s aroused the ire of the AmericanJewish Congress and similar pressure groups, and they unleashed their attack dogs inanin-tensive campaign to discredit my work and my character. That was whenI learned that if you dare to deviate from their doctrinaire positions on Israel and other critical Jewish issues, you will surely become a target of their wrath—evenif you happento be one of their own.

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S y r i a n J e w s

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT WAS a big national story, a social and political drama that unfolded on American soil. On the international stage, the story I was most deeply involved in over the years was the long and frustrating struggle to achieve peace in the Middle East. Both of those subjects had the kind of historical weight and resonance that gratify a reporter’s desire to cover events that are apt to have serious, long-range consequences. Unlike the battle for civil rights, which had its share of triumphs and clear signs of progress, the efforts to bring an enduring peace to the Middle East have been largely a failure, a melancholy pattern of false starts, B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

dashed hopes, and broken promises. In the course of my career at CBS News, I had more assignments in that troubled region than all other foreign countries combined, and I was given the opportunity to report on the bitter conflict from every possible angle.

My first assignment was in 1967, at the time of the Six-Day War.

Charles Collingwood and I had coanchored the CBS coverage of Israel’s swift and crushing victory over its Arab neighbors from the network’s “war room” in New York. As soon as the fighting stopped, I was sent to Tel Aviv to put together an overview report on the war—an

“instant special,” as it’s known in the trade. I returned to Israel in 1969 and again two years later to do 60 Minutes stories on how the victors were adjusting to their expanded borders. In the immediate aftermath of the ’67 war, Israeli officials insisted that they did not want to maintain permanent possession of the territories they had captured from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Their avowed plan was to use the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Arabs toward a firm and formal peace agreement. Arab resistance to that approach led to a hardening of the Israeli position, as I learned on my 1969 visit when I interviewed Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the great hero of the Six-Day War. He told me that his government did not intend to relinquish the occupied territories, which prompted me to ask him if Israel would agree to return to its pre-1967 borders in exchange for “a real peace.”

“No,” Dayan replied, “not even for a real peace.”

Thus were the battle lines drawn for the protracted struggle that would persist over the next several decades.

I was also determined to present the opposite side of the dispute on 60 Minutes. Toward that end, I made trips in the early 1970s to four Arab countries: Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, and Jordan. Nor did I ignore other aspects of the Middle East conflict. In early 1974, not

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long after the region’s leading producers of petroleum engineered an oil embargo that sent shock waves of inflation through the U.S. economy, I traveled to Saudi Arabia to do a profile of that country’s powerful oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani. From there, I flew across the Persian Gulf to interview the shah of Iran.

I mention these assignments to underscore the point that I was well acquainted with the turmoil and volatile politics of the Middle East when I went to Syria in 1975 to work on the story that caused all the furor within the Jewish lobby. The main focus of that report was on Syria’s autocratic ruler, Hafez al Assad, and his well-trained military apparatus. In both the 1967 war and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Syrians fought with more skill and valor than any of their Arab allies, which was why we decided to call our story “Israel’s Toughest Enemy.”

During our stay in Damascus, my producer, Bill McClure, asked for permission to take our cameras into the city’s Jewish community.

I was quite surprised when that request was granted, because I had heard depressing stories from Jewish friends in America about how miserable life was for Jews in Syria. I had been told that they were confined to ghettos and were constant victims of persecution. Among other indignities, they could not worship in synagogues or study in Hebrew, their traditional language. My overall impression was that Syrian Jews were compelled to live as prisoners in their own country.

It did not take us long to discover how untrue most of that was.

Yes, there was a Jewish quarter, but Jews also lived outside of it, side by side with Muslims and Christians. We learned that there were no fewer than fourteen synagogues in Damascus, and we visited one of them. We looked in on students at two schools in the Jewish quarter and observed that at least some of their lessons were in Hebrew.

When I asked one of the Jewish teachers if she had any explanation for all the stories I had heard, she replied in a caustic tone, “I think

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that it’s Zionist propaganda.” I could hardly believe that a Jewish teacher was making such an accusation; I remember thinking, Wait till the folks back home hear this!

I also interviewed a Jewish pharmacist. When I asked him if he had felt a divided loyalty during the wars between Syria and Israel, he declared without hesitation that he fully supported Syria. Perhaps sensing that I also was Jewish, he added a rhetorical question:

“Wouldn’t you feel the same if war came between the United States and Israel?”

At the same time, we reported the drawbacks for Jews who lived in Syria. They were prohibited from serving in the Syrian army, and it was rare for a Jew to hold any kind of government job. They also needed special permission to leave the country and even to travel within Syria’s borders. What was more, they were required to carry cards identifying them as Jews and were generally kept under close surveillance. Yet we also noted that when it came to travel and security measures, similar restrictions were imposed on all Syrians—

regardless of religion—because Assad’s government was, without question, a police state, one of the most oppressive regimes in a region where dictatorship was the rule rather than the exception.

We took care to keep the story in proper perspective. In preparing the report for broadcast, we began with observations about Assad’s obsessive desire to regain control of the Golan Heights, the rich Syrian farmland that had been occupied by Israel since 1967, and his regime’s cozy relationship with the Soviet Union. It wasn’t until we were six or seven minutes into the piece that we turned our attention to Syria’s Jewish community. Even though our story was balanced and fair, I fully expected that our portrayal of Jewish life in Syria would upset some viewers who had been conditioned to believe that no Jew would ever give his allegiance to a nation that had fought wars

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against Israel. Nevertheless, I did not anticipate the firestorm that erupted when we aired “Israel’s Toughest Enemy” on 60 Minutes in February 1975.

I was accustomed to controversy and had even courted it from time to time, but never before had I been the target of such intense hostility. In the deluge of critical letters and telegrams that flooded into the offices of CBS News, I was vilified for having betrayed my ethnic heritage, and some of the attacks in that vein were quite personal. (One of the more polite epithets hurled at me was “self-hating Jew.”) It soon became evident that an orchestrated mail campaign had been mounted against me and our broadcast. It’s fairly easy to spot that sort of thing. Postcards and letters arrive in clusters with identical postmarks and even the same vituperative phrases. Nor did it take an expert in special-interest groups to figure out what the main impetus was behind all this malicious mail.

Of all the powerful pressure groups in America, none had more influence in those days than the so-called Jewish lobby. The people who ran it had the finances to marshal their forces and the savvy to use them to maximum effect. This was especially true when it came to the media. According to The Power Peddlers, a 1977 book about lobbying activities in America, “The Israeli lobby is unique among lobby groups with its ‘clout’ with the press. [No other group] has ever succeeded in making reporters look over their shoulders as much as the Israeli lobby.”

One of the more militant voices within that lobby was the American Jewish Congress. In recent years, the AJC had intimidated other news organizations into retracting or revising stories that did not con-form to its dogmatic views, and its zealous watchdogs now zeroed in on 60 Minutes. The assault formally began a few days after the broadcast, when Hewitt and I met with four top officials from the AJC in

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Hewitt’s office. The visiting delegation was led by its president, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who castigated us for having been “duped” by the Syrians. Hewitt also happens to be Jewish, and when the rabbi and his associates weren’t denouncing our journalistic integrity, they were making snide remarks about our moral defects as Jews. Rabbi Hertzberg all but demanded that we do a follow-up piece, a revision based on interviews with Syrian Jews now living in the United States, all of whom would naturally be furnished to us by the American Jewish Congress. After brushing off that proposal, Hewitt and I stood our ground, stoutly defending the story on Syria in all its particulars.