Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, I began to brood a bit, thinking wrongly that there would be little excitement left in foreign reporting. In fact, at the end of 1992, I sent a memo to the foreign staff:
“What has spurred this memo, of course, has been the breakup of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s resignation last Christmas which followed so closely upon the collapse of the Communist system in Eastern Europe two years earlier. Not only have these developments drastically altered the world’s political map, but they have had an inevitable impact on how we are reporters and editors do our job. As most of you know from firsthand experience, this has forced us to think in somewhat different terms about our reporting and to diversify our coverage considerably.”
I was, of course, very premature. It would have been fun if Russia and the United States became close allies after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and for a while, while Boris Yeltsin was in charge, there was something of a friendship started. On New Year’s Eve of 1999, Yeltsin, however, resigned the presidency, on the eve of the new century, and appointed his then prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin to replace him. Putin has been the real and de-facto leader of Russia ever since. He has been accused of ordering a campaign from Russia to boost the election chances of Donald Trump in the U.S. Presidential elections of 2016.
But returning to the 1990s, there was no shortage of solid news. On May 22, 1991, Barbara Crossette was reporting from Madras, India, an eye-witness account of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi at a campaign stop 25 miles southwest of Madras. She as riding in his car and at one point in her interview with him, asked if he was afraid of this style of campaigning. He said he had done it before he had been elected prime minister on his own in December 1984. Rajiv had first become prime minister upon the assassination of his mother, Indira by her bodyguards.
Crossette, in her account published in the Times, says that after he had said he was unafraid, “A minute or two later, Rajiv Gandhi was dead, killed by a bomb explosion about 10 yards from this reporter.” Another superb female reporter on the foreign desk team was and still is Jane Perlez, who in 1992 was based in Nairobi, but when she got wind of a famine in Somalia, she flew in a tiny International Committee of the Red Cross plane to Mogadishu and started doing reporting. Her gripping articles caught the attention of President George W, Bush who was running for re-election. Bush ordered food aid sent in, and then around Christmas time, he sent in U.S. troops to help in the aid effort. Unfortunately, on October 3, 1993, some 18 American soldiers were killed and more than 70 wounded in 15 hours of of ferocious fighting. More than 500 Somalis were killed and more than 70 wounded.
We had another female reporter in Africa at that time. She was Donatella Lorch, who I first hired as a free-lance reporter in Pakistan, who traveled to Afghanistan incognito as a Pakistani woman, and did great reporting for us in 1989. But in April 1994, there was a terrible story developing in Rwanda when Hutu troops went on a terrible rampage slaughtering Tutsis. She and a few colleagues chartered a small plane in Nairobi, where she was based, and flew to Rwanda. The small group eventually made its way to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and were holed up in the Mille Collines Hotel, where they became terrified of being overrun by mobs. They had good phone connections with us in New York, and pleaded with us for help. I was on the phone with the U.N. authorities and finally, some U.S. forces, under U.N.command, got to the hotel and rescued them. One of the officers told Donatella that she had “high-level” backing. I guess that meant me.
I still have emails relating to her experience on that hair-raising day. On April 14, 1994, I sent her a note: “Donatella, we have been through so many of these episodes, starting when you were our inveterate Afghan strnger, posing as a mujadeen’s wie, that I should learn never to worry, but needless to say, I never learn. I always worry . And happily, we had a wonderful, happy ending to the latest chapter in the Perils of Donatella. Thanks for some very professional stories written with great self-restraint and compassion which told the story very well.”
She returned my message from Nairobi:
“Bernie: Your note made my day. For all of us stranded in Kigali, our real savior was not the U.N. or the Belgians but the NYT Foreign Desk…As we all sat on the floor of the hotel lobby yesterday listening to the mortars getting closer and closer, I was the great envy if my colleagues for having a boss like you.”
Of course, the Russian story did not go away. In June 1992, Yeltsin came to the United States, addressed Congress, signed a surprise arms control treaty with President George W. Bush. made a surprise statement that American Vietnam POWs were in Soviet prison camps, something that turned out to be untrue, and then went home to face increasing dissension. Over the summer of 1993, a competition between the presidency and the Supreme Soviet developed. On August 13, 1993, Izvestia wrote: “The President issues decrees as if there were no Supreme Soviet and the Supreme Soviet suspends decrees as if there were no President.”
It all started to come to a head on September 21, 1993 when Yeltsin announced on television that he was disbanding the two branches of the Russian legislature and would henceforth rule by decree until there was a new election. The next night, the Supreme Soviet declared Yeltsin removed from the presidency for breaching the constitution and Vice President Rutskoy was sworn in as acting president. It was a time of great chaos in Russia. But by early October, Yeltsin secured the support of Russia’s army and ministry of interior forces. Yeltsin then called on tanks to shell the Russian parliament building which Yeltsin had ironically made famous in August 1991 when he stood outside on a tank to defy the coup against Gorbachev.
The next several years were marked by chaos, economic inflation, a rise of the so-called “Oligarchs,” wealthy Russians who commanded large state enterprises. With oil prices low on the world market, an economic depression set in. On December 31, 1999, after Yeltsin, in a televised address, resigned from the presidency and turned it over to his prime minister, a little-known former KGB operative, Vladimir V. Putin, none of us at the time could have predicted how much of a dictator Putin would become over the ensuing 17 years.
The story we worried about the most in those years was the Bosnian crisis. The breakup of Yugoslavia following the death in 1990- of Marshal Tito led eventually to a war between Bosnians and Serbs in the former province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Somehow, John Burns was able to survive during most of the time in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. We equipped him with an armored car, and a satellite phone through which he was able to file his stories. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his reporting. The story of his that we gave the jurors began this way:
“Sarejevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 7—As the 155-milimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding thunersously into buildings all around, a discheveled, stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio
“There were only two people to hear him, and both fled, dodging from doorway to doorway, before the performance ended.
“Each day. at 4 p.m., the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, walks to the same spot on the pedestrian mall for a concert to honor Sarajevo’s dead.
“The spot he has chosen is outside the bakery where several high-explosive rounds struck a bread line 12 days ago, killing 22 people and wounding more than 100. If he holds to his plan, there will be 22 performances before his gesture has run its course.”
The Bosnian war, of course, continued until 1995 when, after the United States was drawn into the conflict, a peace agreement was worked out in an airbase outside Dayton, Ohio, through U.S. mediation. Richard Holbrooke, a senior State Department official, and a friend of mine, worked out the deal. Holbrooke later would be asked by President Obama to see if he could produce a deal in Afghanistan but he fell ill in a meeting with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and died in December 2010.
And of course the Middle East never went away as a story or an issue.
After the allied success in the Kuwait war of 1991, in which Saddam Hussein’s forces were defeated in three days, Secretary of State James Baker undertook an effort to bring about a Middle East peace conference but it never went anywhere. What we did not know was that the Norwegian government on its own organized starting in 1992 secret talks between the PLO led by its then chairman, Yasser Arafat and Israel, led by a team of negotiators approved by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Eventually, a major accord developed. The PLO affirmed Israel’s right to exist, and Israel recognized the PLO as a representative of the Palestinian people. Several accords were agreed upon, including the creation of a Palestinian Authority. Even though President Bill Clinton’s administration had little to do with the Oslo accords, on September 13, 1993 it was signed at the White House by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO deputy leader Mahmoud Abbas. In a famous picture Clinton is pictured looking on as Peres and Arafat shake hands.
But as of today, efforts to push beyond that accord have ended up in frustration. There still is no formal peace between Israel and Palestinians.
In early March of 1995, Soviet leader Yeltsin found himself caught up in the war in Chechnya, a Muslim province seeking to break away from Russia. He invited a group of editors from around the world, including Joe Lelyveld. Joe asked me to go in his place, and so I made my last trip to Moscow for The Times , and had my last byline published on the front page. It was about Yeltsin inviting Clinton to attend the annual May Day parade in Moscow which was to be held on May 9, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Nazi surrender during World War Two.
In late 1994, Lelyveld, by then executive editor of the paper, took me to dinner and asked what I would like to do next. I had been foreign editor at that point since 1989, and Joe mentioned bureau chief in Paris, knowing Marie-Jeanne had been a French interpreter at the State Department when I met her in 1968. But I told him my mother was in a nursing home in New Jersey and I felt I had to stay in the New York region. I proposed instead—based on conversations with my older son James—that I get involved in looking into the role of The New York Times in the internet world which was just beginning to expand. And so, in the middle of 1995 I found myself working with a small team of Kevin McKenna, Bill Stockton and Steve Luciani on the new project. Martin Nissenholtz was hired to be the publisher of the new company.
