Fragments of Grace and Beyond

A lot of this is captured in the book, [which] has different chapters on the different places with the same depth of understanding and complexity, but also telling stories that are quite fascinating. But interspersed with that is a personal journal about your own life and how you find meaning in the context of these experiences. It's very well written and it strikes me as being very courageous to try to do something like that, and then wonderful to succeed in doing it.

I wonder if you could talk a little about that, because there seems to be an interplay between these experiences and the meaning that you would find drawing on these experiences, but returning home and reconciling yourself to the choices that you've made. That's a very poor summary but it's an effort on my part to open up a little discussion about it. It was hard to write, wasn't it?

It was very hard to write. When the book started coming out and people had read various chapters of it and were commenting, people told me that it was a brave book to write, and I realized that they were not talking about the Taliban, they were not talking about civil wars. The hardest parts of the book to write were the personal parts. There were sentences that took me a week to write.

The book was very cathartic, it was very therapeutic, and it was really an effort by me to come to grips with my life. I had just turned fifty and I thought, "Well, I'd better decide: has it all been worth it?" I wanted to pause and, as I said before, a number of my friends and colleagues had been killed.

The immediate impetus for the book was the fact that I was with a group of journalists in Afghanistan, four of them were killed, and I decided I wanted to take some time off and write about the thrill and the cost of what I do, the risk you take and whether it's worth it. I try to do that by writing about these returns back to the States, and every time I came back to the States, which is usually roughly once a year or twice a year, I was shocked. I was always shocked at the luxury, at the opulence, at the size of people's homes, the size of people's cars, the choices they had to make, the luxuriousness. The lights always seemed so bright, and the roads always seemed so smooth, and my hair always felt much better.

All those things were so different, and I always wished every time that I could just take the entire country with me, back to Afghanistan, especially people under about the age of sixteen, so that they would see what it's like to live in many other parts of the world. But as time passed and I came back again and again, I also saw the United States was changing, and I also saw that each time I came back, especially after 9/11, and then especially after the occupation of Iraq, that the country had changed very dramatically while I'd been gone. I didn't have a television in Afghanistan and I wasn't reading newspapers. So, I was very much immersed in a conflicted but very isolated part of the world, while back home the whole ethos of the era was changing.

The United States is much more conservative than it was when I left six years ago, it's much more frightened, it's much more intolerant. It doesn't like the press, it doesn't trust the press as much. I represent an institution and a profession of which I'm very proud, but if you took a survey today, you'd find the number of people that feel that way about even the mainstream [press] is far less than it was when I left. There have been many shocks, actually, now that I'm back full-time. I've only been back three months but it is a very different country than when I left.

And now you have this role, you're wearing a new hat, you're deputy foreign editor of the Washington Post and before, you were a foreign correspondent. You must have gotten a lot of experience editing your own book as you were trying to grapple with the places you've covered and the personal stuff, but now you're in the position of editing the stories from Kabul, from New Delhi, from Karachi, but presumably as a person of empathy you see things based on the fact that you were out there. What does it take to be an editor and to do it well, drawing on this body of experience being out there and having been edited?

I have a lot of empathy. I'm constantly having to wake people up at three o'clock in the morning, and I remember what it's like to be awakened at three o'clock in the morning when you've been working very hard. I'm constantly being in the position of reviewing material that is written from the heart, it's very dramatic, it's very colorful, it's very exciting, it's very compelling, and it's my job to take out the adjectives that are either too opinionated or too over-the-top, it's my job to wrestle a very dramatic piece of work into something that is more manageable, more organized, more logical, more carefully written. [Something] that's more -- what's the word I'm looking for? -- more careful in the allegations that it makes, doesn't accuse people of things, has good sources, has good attributions, has caveats built into it.

My job now is to take the exciting material that I used to send and make it presentable and make it publishable. And that, as my editor never tires of telling me, is an entirely selfless task, because my name is not on anything anymore, so you have to be pretty mature to do it, and you have to not care so much about your name being on it. When you're out in the middle of nowhere year after year after year, all you have is your name on the story, because nobody knows what you've been through. But now I know. I know what it takes. And I'm happy to be helping these younger correspondents get through it. I have a lot more empathy than I would have. Maybe that's the bottom line.

How has journalism changed? You touched on this a minute ago, but what are the pressures that you see on American journalism as it covers the world? It's probably a lot easier to get foreign stories on the front page of the Post now, but are there a new set of pressures? Because you are in a war capital, presumably, in the sense we are a country at war.

Yes, it's a very big topic. You're right that the upside is that foreign news is now very dominant and there's lots of interest in it, which for long periods of time has not been the case. Everything I wrote from Afghanistan or from Iraq, there was great hunger for, I never had to fight to get my stories in the paper, there's always great interest in these foreign stories, but I would say that the pressures we face now are completely [different].

There are two of them, one of which is that there's now much more competition within the media, the media has now exploded into multimedia. Very, very much fewer people read newspapers now than they used to, or read at all, I'm afraid, than they used to. I can't produce something that's better and faster now than anyone else because it's already out there. By the time you put your pen to your paper, it's already been all over the internet.

We have much more competition now than we ever did before, and it's not necessarily positive competition. Some of it's very destructive competition. We now are under incredible scrutiny, more than ever before, because we're living at a time in which there's more government suspicion of the press and more government pressure for the press to be conformist than in most recent times. So, we've got pressure from above in which we have to be extra careful.

We've had a number of scandals in the press, even in the mainstream press, of plagiarism and these sorts of problems, so we have to be more careful than ever to make sure that what we write is true, or if we can't be sure, we'd better say so. We have to have a lot more caveats now in what we're producing. At the same time, we have to be more entertaining, more compelling, more dramatic, to get people to read. So, there's this constant tug-of-war now between these two, in many ways, competing pressures, and it's a really difficult time for the press.

One final question. If students listen to this account of your odyssey and they say, "Yeah, I think I want to do that," how would you advise them to prepare for a future as a foreign correspondent?

I certainly wouldn't necessarily say they should go to journalism school. I usually tell young people, "If you think it's something you might like to do, drop everything, get a little savings and go live in Upper Volta for a year. Just live. If you can get a job as a radio stringer, or a wire stringer, or some hometown newspaper stringer, don't think about the money. If you can take a year and go live in a very difficult place and learn new things, learn a new language, learn a new culture, see if you like the excitement and the hardship of doing it, that's a much better education and preparation than anything you could learn in any sort of graduate school. If you know how to write, if you like to write, if you think you want to be a foreign correspondent, just go try it. Just go try living in a place where there's no hair conditioner or air conditioner, where you may not have access to the internet, where you may not have a choice about what you eat, where you may have to eat with your hands, where there may be no electricity on a very, very, very hot night. See how you like it. If you still want to do the job because you're so excited to be in the middle of a conflict, or a war, or a life-and-death struggle, or a place where people are suffering or dying of AIDS or cholera, if that's what makes you feel that you're a witness to history and what you've been doing is compelling enough that you don't care about your personal -- not safety, but health and appearance -- then that's the best preparation you can get."

Well, on that note of advice, Pamela, I want to thank you very much for taking the time for visiting the campus and appearing on our program. And thank you for writing Fragments of Grace.

Well, it's been my pleasure.

Thank you, and thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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