The Reporter’s Notebook by Dennis Bloodworth

Author:Dennis Bloodworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814677332
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish

18 FACE TO FACE

If he cannot get to a typewriter at once, he must seize the first seat he can find and scribble into his notebook.

THERE was, of course, more to lose if one made the fatuous mistake of thinking that the man one was interviewing did not want to be quoted when he did. After General Nguyen Khanh shaved off his beard at the end of 1964 and announced he would take orders from someone else in future, all eyes turned expectantly — but blindly — towards the elderly Buddhist civilian who then took up quarters in the presidential palace in Saigon. For Pham Khac Suu was an equivocal choice. He had been arrested as a pro-communist subversive by the secret police of President Diem, brutally tortured, and beaten about the head so badly that ‘after two weeks he was mad’, a fellow-prisoner had told me. He now indicated that he wanted a new provisional National Assembly that could throw up a truly nationalist government capable of confronting Hanoi. This sounded singularly like the Janus-faced formula for victory put forward by Thao (for the South) and Burchett (for the North), but he said little and saw no journalists, and no one knew precisely what he meant to do.

When a left-wing intellectual in touch with both the Buddhists and the Vietcong offered to get me an interview with the new chief of state, therefore, I found myself metaphorically bowing and scraping like a top at the French court in my eagerness to see him. Suu was old and sick, I was told sternly, and he did not want to talk to the press. Just so, just so, entirely understandable, I babbled. I would be allowed only fifteen minutes with him. Of course, precisely, not a minute more. And the conversation would be strictly off the record — I could not even say that I had seen him. Not even say…? But naturally (gulp), whatever he wished. Just one week after he took office Suu, frail and scarcely audible, duly gave me fifteen minutes during which he spoke with almost childlike candour, and I left the palace biting my lips with frustration. How was I to handle this bomb of a story, when the mere fact of our meeting was not only confidential, but secret?

For Fortune to be fickle, she must sometimes be kind. Hardly had I reached the Hotel Continental and scribbled a few notes when I was summoned to its coffin of a call box in the foyer. The caller was the presidential press officer. He apologised for disturbing me, but he had a question: the Chief of State was a little worried; he wanted to know how I intended to use our interview, and in particular what I proposed to quote him as having said.

It sank in slowly, delicious as the first guilty drink after Lent. The President himself had said nothing about classifying our interview, for the simple reason that he knew nothing of such things. I took a deep breath, heaved my notebook out of my pocket, and spelled out what I would like to quote.

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