Shooting History by Jon Snow

Author:Jon Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Potomac Fever

‘CONGRATULATIONS STOP PROCEED WASHINGTON IMMEDIATELY STOP PHONE EDITOR STOP’. It was August 1983, and Madeleine, our daughter Leila and I were on holiday in the French cottage that we and a group of friends had bought for £1000 ten years earlier. The mere delivery of the telegram to this remote spot in the Dordogne was shock enough; the postman never called. The four-hundred-year-old tumbledown house and barn were a mile up an unmade track through the woods, and few locals bothered to come along it. The place, set on the side of a valley of stunning beauty, was one of the factors that had kept Madeleine and me in the same ambit down the years.

The content of the cable threatened this delicate equilibrium. As a roving reporter with ITN, I had only put in for the job as the company’s Washington correspondent at the last moment, provoked by another reporter who told me he’d already got it, and who I regarded as next to useless. Madeleine had agreed that I should apply, on the basis that I wouldn’t get it, but in the end it had been a run-off between Trevor McDonald and me. Trevor was regarded as ‘a safe pair of hands’. I was regarded as a very unsafe pair of hands, but likely to file more stories. So unsafe was I seen as being that a new job was created for a ‘producer’ who would keep his or her eye on my ‘content’. My assignment was to be for two years renewable. Now Madeleine, as successful a lawyer as I was a journalist, Leila and I would have to move home across the Atlantic.

America, which had propped up so many indifferent or bad regimes across the world; America, overthrower of Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile – now quite suddenly I was to live in its capital. The post-Second World War picture of America abroad was not a pretty one, and for me that was a picture that barely included Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. You had to go back to the reconstruction of Japan or the Marshall Plan for European recovery in the late 1940s to find comfort in the idea of America abroad. As the plane touched down at Dulles Airport in the Virginia wastes beyond Washington, my thoughts were of mistrust for what America had done, of the death squads that flourished under the protection of US-backed military forces, of the dictators like Pinochet whom the Cold War had rendered ‘best friends’. I would expose it all!

But within twenty-four hours of landing my mistrust began turning into an improbable and lifelong love affair with ‘can-do’ America. For me, the capital of can-do was my American-staffed office. Nestling in the ABC News bureau behind the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, four minutes’ walk from the White House, it was at the very heart of everything. Our studios in London felt like something out of the dark ages by comparison. Here there were live pictures streaming in from Congress, from the Oval Office, from right across the US and beyond.

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