Buying the Night Flight (13 page)

This was long before Jonestown and Beirut and Iran--but it anticipated brilliantly and frighteningly the new pathologies of politics that were arising in the world.

Those of our "democrats group" were doing some deep and often angry psychological soul-searching, for it was all too clear to us that it was decades of American policy -- plus the present policy -- that had brought these decent and idealistic and courageous young men to this intense appointment with history. Washington had shamelessly supported Trujillo until the end when the
CIA
wisely helped the Dominican patriots who assassinated him. But now, again, we were behind the old Trujilloite killers, and for many of us this was simply more than we could bear.

One of the most disturbing things that had happened -- and that unquestionably contributed to the later stages of the revolution -- came in the behavior of the American ambassador, W. Tapley Bennett, Jr., a tall, cordial man of the American South. At the crucial moment of the revolution, the leaders--four of them--came to Bennett in the big, white American embassy building to ask him to intervene and stop the carnage. These were not any ragtag revolutionaries; they were leading people of the country, including the respected leader of the Senate.

Ambassador Bennett told me the story, as he told it to other correspondents, apparently not even aware of what he had done. He told me he received them in his office only after they had agreed to leave their guns outside. He told me that they disgusted him because they were physically so "dirty," although the Trujilloites he was backing were morally the filthiest people in the world.

Their message to him was a crucial one: They were appalled at the killing; they remained convinced that they would win, but they were ready to accept a truce; they wanted him to negotiate for them with the Trujilloites. In effect the revolution could be ended honorably for everyone.

Even today, as I write this, I can feel the rage rising in me. Here an American envoy had an incredible opportunity, in a little country friendly to us, which had suffered for scores of years from our policies, to do something good and decent and workable. And what he did was to turn them away! He told them he would do nothing for them. He seemed quite ready to give the country back to the old killers.

The Dominicans left his office in the darkest despair. They felt, they told me later, that the only thing left was to go back to the bridge over the river, where they had been fighting, and die there, if necessary, fighting to assuage the shame he had felled on them. That is what they did; and, in one of those drama-filled and paradoxical moments of history, now they began winning. Bennett's errant dismissal fueled their historic rage at the United States and gave them the fanatic, libidinous energy to win. By noon the next day they were clearly winning. It was then that Bennett, from under his desk while bullets ricocheted through the embassy building, telephoned Lyndon Johnson asking him to send the marines. In short, none of the ensuing months of agony and the hundreds of deaths would have needed to happen.

It was stories like this that the press, and the press alone, could tell to the world. At least we of the press there were able to show what had really happened--because we were "there." We were not only a corrective on the American side, we also served the function of relieving the trauma on the rebel side. We were a defusing element, for, as Americans and as the press, we gave the "good guys" hope. Journalists were becoming a power in their own right, but we were not thinking about that at all. Santo Domingo preceded Vietnam in this development; this beautiful and tormented tropical city was actually the first place where the new powers of the press were worked out.

***

Despite the seriousness of the situation, there were many opportunities for light stories. One morning early on, our "democratic group" was taxiing down the road to the Old City when I noticed the zoo. "The zoo," I murmured, "the zoo ... my God, is anybody feeding the animals?"

Our entire car burst into hilarious laughter. "Here we are in a revolution," Dick Reston (James's son) said, between hearty guffaws, "and you're thinking about the animals."

Indeed I was. But I didn't
say
another word. The next day I just strolled by myself to the zoo, and what should I find but the marines in there feeding the animals C rations and other appropriate foods! What's more, I soon discovered that Mrs. Barton Connett, wife of the American charge, had thought about the animals and had found them alone and forgotten, the ape dragging his empty paws out between the bars. It was she who had organized the feed-in.

It made a great story, and the next week I got the most wonderful revenge. Dick Reston, then with the
Los Angeles Times,
received a copy of his paper. My zoo story had the top of the front page-- his political story, serious and important beyond question, was on the bottom of page six.

***

Juan Bosch, the white-haired, moody, writer-politician who had been ushered in with such Kennedyesque hope in 1961, the very symbol of the democratic revolution in Latin America, now was the leader of this revolution to return the country to constitutionalism -- and of the PRD or Dominican Revolutionary Party. But he was not here. He was somewhere, hiding out it was said, in Puerto Rico. One Thursday, without any clues but filled with hope, I boarded a plane for Puerto Rico, with the return trip for Sunday. I had no idea whatsoever about how to find him. As it happened, on the short flight I began talking with a husky, bright German correspondent who thought he had Bosch's phone number. I could come along. When we called, we found that not only was the number right, but that Bosch would see us. That night.

There he was, hiding out in a small suburban house outside of San Juan, and we were the first journalists to see him. It was hardly a dramatic redoubt, but then at heart he was always a consummately bourgeois man. The house was busy even in its supposed secrecy. A number of dark-haired men were always hanging around (in Latin political circles, people polish and perfect the fine art of hanging around), and Bosch was charm and cordiality itself.

Somewhere in the conversation this man with the craggy face and the grizzled white hair argued passionately that his side of the story was not being adequately told -- he was particularly incensed about a
Life
magazine article by former ambassador John Bartlow Martin.

"Dr. Bosch," I said suddenly, "why don't you write your side of the story and I'll get it published in our wire service?"

His eyes lit up. "Of course," he said. "Of course, I'll do it."

He had it for me the next day. Still trembling with a sense of the drama and the luck of it all, I rushed back to my hotel, where I meticulously translated his elegant Spanish into English. Then I took it to Western Union ... to be transmitted by telegraph to my office. When I returned to Santo Domingo the next day, I had seldom felt so happy. At that moment -- when the "scoop" came to be known by the other correspondents--I no longer felt like a kid: I was accepted along with the older "pros."

The revolution went on. Day passed into day and week into week as we Americans interfered in this strange island melodrama on this bitterly hot and bitterly divided island. The American administration tried to impose leader after leader, one worse than the other. The rebels held their desperate lines in the Old City, until, in contravention of everything we were supposed to be doing there, the American marines let the Dominican military through their supposedly "neutral" lines to attack the rebels. Those of us in the press corps and embassy who believed in a different United States were sick at heart -- and bitterly angry at our country.

About this time, in May, the tension, the shootings, the long hours, the bodies, suddenly got to me. I had been in Haiti for a few days, where I saw the
Tonton Macoutes
batting schoolchildren out side the palace with baseball bats. The night I returned from Haiti to Santo Domingo I suddenly developed a strong and terrifying wrenching of muscles on the right side of my face. Soon it was out of control. Then the wrenching began in my back. It was not painful, but it was the most terrifying physical ailment I have ever had, because of the total sense of helplessness.

Then the very army we were all criticizing for being there came through. They evacuated me by helicopter to the army hospital, and the doctor gave me strong tranquilizers. In the morning I was fine, but it made me aware, and wary, of the tensions we were all constantly under.

Every day brought some new, almost always fascinating and quite often repulsing, development. One day, by chance, Jim Pringle, then of Reuter's, and I happened to hear at the same time from an American priest of mass executions out at a bridge called Villa Mella. Now, I knew what Villa Mella was: it was the sickest banner of the sick age of Trujillo. It was the area outside of Santo Domingo where the former dictator had had his palatial "summer home." Here he and his sons would personally execute their enemies in the most appalling ways. Then they would drop the bodies over the Villa Mella bridge and they would float out to sea. History apparently was repeating itself.

Jim and I decided to go out to Villa Mella, but we needed a good taxi driver, and this is where the real heroes of these pieces come in. At this period, as opposed to later, American correspondents still had a lot of protection, much of it a psychological extension of the realities of American power. Americans still ran the world, particularly this part of it. No one would "dare" touch us--or they would face the consequences. But for a Dominican cabdriver--that was another thing. He had to stay on his tormented little island long after we grandly swept off, and he had no protection at all.

Yet we found another of these very brave simple men to take us out to Villa Mella, and the three of us drove through the pastel- colored shacks of this strange island in silence. By some strange piece of luck that day there were no soldiers at the bridge. We stopped and climbed down below it. I don't know why I was not even more sickened than I was. Perhaps it was because of the danger. But there were bones burning, open graves, bodies in the river. We looked quickly. There was no need to hang about--and we drove back to Santo Domingo as quickly as possible, now in a new kind of silence.

The same night Jim and I filed our stories, and the next day we had the pleasure of going out -- again -- to Villa Mella, this time with a United Nations investigating force. At least there were no more killings at Villa Mella. Our stories had been effective.

***

Much later, the spring of 1971, I got off at the Santo Domingo airport and climbed into a taxi driven by a little brown-skinned man. Driving into the city along that sparkling azure sea, I sat thinking back to those bittersweet days of the revolution there and all they had meant to me.

Suddenly the little driver turned around and looked at me in a beseeching manner. "Aren't you," he asked, "the
señoritaperiodista
(the "Miss-Journalist") who went out to Villa Mella during the revolution?"

I looked at him, astonished and fascinated. No, I did not know the man -- how could he know that? "Yes," I finally answered, "but how in the world could you remember that?"

"Oh, señorita," he said, "we will never forget a thing like that -- you stopped the killing."

Whenever things get bad and whenever I question why I chose to live such a crazy life, I think of that little man and what he did for me and it all seems quite wonderfully worthwhile.

Yes, in many ways it was surely in Santo Domingo that I first learned, the hard way and the only way, why we had to "be there." Actually, it is what it is all about, because nothing out there is ever what you thought it was or would be before you got there! It is always, always different from what you had supposed. You have to be there because if decent people are not, the brutes of the world certainly will be. You have to be there because you want to be: because it's the most exhilarating and satisfying and doggedly difficult profession in the world. And finally you have to be there because if you are any kind of responsible human being at all, it is your moral down payment. It is your part of the risk of living.

***

I saw Juan Bosch several times after our initial clandestine meeting in Puerto Rico, and each visit gave another glimpse into the character of this very complex, brooding man who was shaping history.

In Puerto Rico, in hiding in 1965, Bosch was very much the leader: sure of himself, angry with history and in a rage over the United States, ready to go back and lead his people back to democracy. Then during the winter and spring before the elections in the spring of 1966, another Juan Bosch emerged. Many called this Bosch the "coward." He sat inside -- and I mean far, far inside -- a big, old white house on the main boulevard with his guards and party members constantly in attendance. He held PRD party meetings there and gave out orders from there. It took me a while before I was willing to admit that this man with so many fine leadership qualities, this man with the face as craggy as those on Mount Rushmore, this man who still electrified the poor Dominicans with his words every day on the radio, was indeed "afraid." The generals, who despised him, were clear enough about it: "If he takes thirty steps outside his house, we'll kill him," one told us clearly. I never understood the "thirty steps." Why not ten? Why not five? There are clearly imponderables when dealing with minds of this size.

But the fact was that Bosch never, never once went out of that house the whole time of the election campaign. Many of us were convinced that it was this isolation that cost him the election. And he lost to the little old Trujilloite, Joaquín Balaguer, who, not being very discriminating, had written of Trujillo: "Trujillo is God and God is Trujillo." The young men who had fought in the revolution for Juan Bosch were devastated. One said to me just afterward, standing in the Old City where we had all seen so much, in words approaching Greek tragedy, "Our wine is bitter. Did our comrades die for the return of this man?" This, for us, was the hardest blow.