Producer (11 page)

Not so fast! I was chatting with Charles about something insignificant, thinking about going to bed soon, when someone said,
“Hey, did you see that? Where’s the president?”

We all stared at the monitor. There was the table, there were the prime minister and his guests, but the president was nowhere
to be seen. It seemed that he had vomited on the prime minister and then fainted, slumping to the floor beneath the table.
Barbara, his wife, had rushed over and gotten on the floor beside him, trying to revive him. We had no idea what had just
happened and we all picked up our phones to find out. That was when a call came in from Atlanta. One of the network’s health
correspondents said, “We just heard that the president died. And that they’re flying his body back home. Is it true?”

“No. I don’t think so,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything. But I’ll find out.” I called around to anyone who might have the
information. If it was a rumor, we needed to nip it in the bud before it got reported. If it was true—well, I didn’t even
want to think about that.

I got in touch with a reporter standing outside the prime minister’s home. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Is the motorcade moving?”

“Yes. But we’re not sure where they’re going or who’s in the car.”

As we continued to make calls and tried to verify what was happening, we all received a computer file saying,
READ ME
! I froze for a second. This was our message alert system, letting us all know that there was an important message that we
needed to read right away. When we opened it, it said something to the effect that although we had no confirmation as yet,
there were rumors circulating that the president had died.

At CNN Atlanta, anchor Don Miller, who has since passed away, had been on the air. The network was on a commercial break when
he got the
READ ME
! message. Looking troubled, he asked his producer, “Are you sure you want me to report this?”

“Yes,” his producer said. “But we don’t have much information. Can you ad-lib the story when we’re back on the air?”

While this was going on, I called Dorrance Smith. Remember him? I had met him at Ethel’s and wanted to
be
him? Well, now I had his job and he worked for the White House as part of President Bush’s team and was with us in Japan.
“Dorrance,” I said, “we’re getting reports in Atlanta that the president is dead.”

“He isn’t,” Dorrance said with assurance. He had just seen the president. “He’s alive and he has a nasty flu.”

Don Miller was getting ready to report the unwelcome and disturbing piece of news as he somberly looked at the camera and
said, “This tragic news just in from Tokyo.”

But I had gotten a call through in time. At that point, his producer interrupted him and literally shouted into his earpiece,
“No. Stop. Don’t read it.”

Thank God Don knew how to think on his feet. He managed to stop himself in midsentence and say, “Well, we’ll get back to that
story.” And he went on to something else. We all exhaled. If that report had gone on the air, it would have been
catastrophic. So, in effect, we nearly killed off the president that night, but we rescued him and ourselves in the nick of
time. Good going, Don!

Perhaps this false rumor had spread like wildfire because it came on the heels of President Bush’s diagnoses of atrial fibrillation
and Graves’ disease during the preceding twelve months. But this was typical of how the news worked. I can’t tell you how
many times something like a simple dinner with little to no import in the larger scheme of things suddenly became an international
story. And we had managed to avoid spreading rumors and causing America and the rest of the world to panic. Who took the credit
for that? None of us and all of us.

In 1989, I produced coverage for a US-Soviet summit in Malta, an archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Summits
were always an exercise in controlled chaos and this one was no exception as we quickly realized the limitations of Malta’s
technology. We were all pushed to our limits, it was freezing cold outside, and John Towriss and I were in the work space
well past midnight, arranging everything for the talks that would begin at 6 a.m. the next morning. “Wendy,” John said, looking
at me through bloodshot eyes, “I’m going up to my room and try to knock out a few hours of sleep.”

Anxious to grab whatever sleep was possible, I went to my room, too. But sleep didn’t last very long for me or for John.

“I lay down on the bed in my clothes,” says John, “and I dropped off immediately without even turning off the lights, only
to hear the phone ringing. It seemed like I just fell asleep five minutes before when I reached out to grab the telephone.
I sat up with a start and said, ‘What’s going on?’ ”

CNN anchor, Bernard Shaw was calling John. A quick glance at the clock confirmed to John that it was not his imagination.
He truly had just lain down.

“I tried to wake myself up fully,” says John, “while Bernie droned in a slow, narrative kind of reporter-speak, ‘Hi, John.
This is Bernie.’ ”

“What’s up?” John asked him, still groggy.

Bernie went on, “Well… I’m looking outside the window.”

It couldn’t have sounded more bizarre as Bernie continued speaking, using his words slowly and clearly, as if he were doing
an on-the-air report. “A storm of terrific ferocity is blowing here. Our satellite dish is moving. Yes, now it’s flipped over.
It’s broken. The satellite dish is broken. And our set seems to be taking a lot of water. Yes, water is now washing over our
set.”

While Bernie was talking, John ran over to the window and looked out. A monsoon of massive proportions was crashing down from
the heavens, and he gazed with horror at our beautiful set on a ledge out over the water as the downpour lashed up over the
TV cameras.

I got the same call from Bernie, maybe in not such a formal manner. I dragged myself out of bed, threw on some clothes, and
ran down to see what was going on. As soon as I saw the problems, I quickly called various crew members and woke them up.
“Get down here right away. We have to get all the lights down and the cameras need to come inside.”

We all got pelted by the storm while a crew member climbed a ladder. With three guys holding the ladder against the wind,
this agile man meticulously detached the lights and pulled them down. He made it back down the ladder and we all stared with
horror at the mess in front of us. We were in a storm to end all storms, we were physically wiped out and drenched and so
were our cameras, and the gales had flipped over our satellite dish that now lay on the ground, smashed to pieces. And we
were scheduled to be on the air in five hours.

We called Atlanta to report our problem and find out what help they could give us. They called all around Malta, waking everyone
up, to see if anyone had any spare satellite dishes. No one did. Then we began to call our colleagues at the other networks
to see if they had unused time on their satellites. We wanted to know if we could connect to theirs until we found a way to
broadcast. We came up blank again. Everyone was using every minute of available time they had.

Finally, John called the owner of our hotel. A lovely and cooperative man, he offered to call his brother who was a local
sheet metal worker. When this angel in rain gear arrived in the middle of the night with advanced electronic knowledge and
some used parts, he began picking up pieces of our broken satellite dish. He took the struts, banged them against soggy trees
to straighten them out, and used a rivet gun to cobble together a makeshift dish with pieces of sheet metal he brought with
him. He formed them into the rough shape of a satellite dish, our technicians connected the electronics, and amazingly, the
thing worked! John and I were a little worse for the wear, but we got the job done. In fact, we always did, by hook or by
crook, as they say. And we did it because that was the job we had been hired to do.

In line with what Charles Bierbauer had articulated to me in Beijing, getting this job done took every one of us putting our
heads together and making it work. No one owed anyone a thing except for our shared obligation to CNN, which had hired us
and paid our salaries. We did our jobs, and with the help of a few angels along the way, we were up and running when the time
came.

Along with John and Charles, I have to add Gary Foster, head of the White House press corps, and CNN reporter Frank Sesno,
to my list of colleagues whom I think of as brothers.
When we landed in Geneva for the very first Soviet-US summit in 1985, possibly the end of the Cold War, Gary stood at the
bottom of the stairway, sending each of the network crews and producers to various camera setups that had been prearranged.
As I recall, the energy in the air was palpable since no one knew what was about to happen and most everyone had their doubts
and confusions.

The truth was that in the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, his opponents saw him as a cowboy, an anti-Soviet crusader
who was dangerous, ill informed, and just might precipitously start a war. A large part of his platform throughout his presidency
was his stance that America was seen as weak among other international powers. A great many Americans were fearful that this
“cowboy” leader might decide to build and employ new generations of nuclear weapons.

This was a logical conclusion since during his first term, President Reagan, “Mr. Tough Guy,” never met with a Soviet leader.
Instead, he sent George H. W. Bush, his vice president, in his place. When he was taken to task for this, he famously said,
“They keep dying on me.” That was true. A number of Soviet leaders died in office, and Reagan was criticized for not attending
the funerals and not making an effort to meet the successors.

Judging from his rhetoric, his attitudes, and his desire to build a nuclear shield in Europe, a pet project he called Star
Wars, it appeared that there was no way this president would ever talk to the Soviets, much less try to negotiate a peace
agreement. But the president’s rigid stance eased when he had a talk with his close friend and ally British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher and Reagan, both hard-core conservatives, had been close before Reagan came to power. Some even
went so far as to call them soul mates. Now that the prime minister had declared that Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader,
was not “doddering,” like others may have been, but rather someone the West could do business with, Reagan was ready to meet
with him. A new era was dawning, and a summit was planned in Geneva that would see these Cold War foes searching for a way
to communicate.

There were worries about how well Ronald Reagan had been briefed for this all-important summit. Frank Sesno, our anchor that
day, recalls the summit in Geneva vividly. “I was standing in clear view of the meeting place from my stakeout position,”
he says. “The building was a mission called Martha’s Château. Gorbachev had already arrived, he was inside, and there was
Ronald Reagan, walking deliberately into the mission, followed by his military aide who carried the nuclear codes in a briefcase,
which we referred to as the ‘football.’ How incredibly dramatic to see the president who had labeled the Soviet Union an ‘evil
empire’ walking into the lion’s den with the nuclear codes in tow that could launch missiles capable of destroying the planet.”

Each leader had his own agenda, but the story reported that day was a simple and life-changing one. It was about establishing
whether these two previous enemies could see their way clear to working with each other. They seemed to be making progress
as they left the château and took their famous hour-long “walk in the woods” through the Geneva heartland behind the US Embassy.
That was followed by a bilateral talk in front of a roaring fireplace. We all could see that these men had established a rapport.

When they finally showed up for a joint business conference on a huge stage with flags from both countries raised overhead,
they met in the middle and shook hands to thundering applause. Suddenly, they were on a first-name basis,
Ronald and Mikhail, and the sound of clicking camera shutters was deafening.

“As the leaders signed documents together,” Frank Sesno says, “I realized that we were coming out of a deep freeze, into a
warming trend, with a good chance of clearing.”

On January 1, 1990, many years later, President Reagan came on
Larry King Live
and spoke about his legendary relationship with Soviet President Gorbachev:

KING:
The liking of Gorbachev. Was that a real sense of affection? Did you, like, like him?

REAGAN:
Yes. As you know… he was the fourth. There were three leaders before him, of the Soviet Union, and I didn’t have much to do
with them. They kept dying on me, but he was totally different than any Russian leader that I had met before, and I think
that there was a kind of a chemistry there that set up. Now, on the other hand, I knew too much about communism to believe
in words. I said that I would make my decision as to whether we were getting along on the basis of deeds. Every meeting that
we ever had, I presented him with a handwritten—my handwriting—list of people that had been brought to my attention who wanted
to emigrate and for [other] reasons to get out, and I would give it to him, and…

KING:
He came through?

REAGAN:
Yes… He is a likable person. You find yourself liking him. But again, knowing the difference between our two systems… I’m
not a linguist, but I learned one little Russian phrase and I used it so often that he used to clap his hands over his ears,
and that was
doveryai, no proveryai
, which means “trust, but verify.”

We all were well aware of how fond Reagan was of saying, “
Doveryai, no proveryai.
”

To which Gorbachev would say, “
Vi vceda eto gavorite.
” “You always say that.”

Then Reagan would come back with, “Well… I like the sound of it.”

This kind of bantering among world leaders indicated a comfort level between them that would support continuing negotiations.
The Cold War thaw officially had begun. Now, with each summit, there was progress being made between the two superpowers that
previously had been enemies.