A life lived as a tall tale

A beloved friend of mine died this week, but not any kind of ordinary friend. Arnaud de Borchgrave just happened to be, to my mind and to many other discriminating ones, the greatest foreign correspondent of our times.

Given the sad way the American media are going, you might well ask not WHO was Arnaud de Borchgrave, but "What is a foreign correspondent?" Such are the intellectual shadows that are falling over American life today. So, let me tell you, through Arnaud and through his amazing life.

To look at Arnaud you'd think, if not say, "Ummm, handsome!" He was only medium height, but he had an utterly charming face, always sun-tanned. He was balding, but with a smile at once engaging, imperious and devilish that would charm a Marilyn Monroe or a Mafia hitman. So much class in one guy that you'd wish you could bring some home to dinner.

By the time he died of cancer at 88, it was pure wonder, in fact a measure of real stupefaction on the part of his friends, that he was here at all. He fought in the British Navy as a boy in World War II, was head of the United Press bureau in Belgium at 21; turned up for 25 years as Newsweek's wonder foreign correspondent, seeming to woo and know every leader in the world, male or female; was the first editor of The Washington Times; and, even into his 80s, worked full-time at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But it was his life in between that was interesting.

The polished gentleman from Brussels, who was 13th in line for the Belgian throne, unassumedly became that bane of the Western world, a journalist! He never used his royal position, but he always dressed elegantly, using his fine bearing to walk into meetings closed to the press with all the "other" European ambassadors (while most of the "modern" journalists sat around waiting, in blue jeans and hoodies).

No one ever called him "count," but when word got around during his seven tours in Vietnam, from the lost French battle at Dien Bien Phu to the lost war in 1975, the other correspondents started calling him "the short count," due to his stature.

He loved to tell ridiculous, absurd, wonderful - and probably true - stories. In one, he was on a battleship in the Baltic Sea in winter. Everything was frozen tight for days, and there was no way to leave the motionless ship. Arnaud got the idea of phoning a taxi from the ship. The taxi came out across the frozen ice and he was, in his own words, "the only journalist to leave a battleship at sea in a taxi."

There was a deep streak of the stage in Arnaud and he often combined theatrics with foreign correspondence. He had, he said, hanging in his closet a dozen or so uniforms from various states (Egyptian, Jordanian, American and British, of course), which he would employ to ease his way around the 18 wars he covered. His colleagues were often simply amazed at his daring.

Although many in the press came to accuse him of being a "rank conservative" or "fervent rightist," he was, rather, a journalist who dealt with the realities of the time, whose ideas were based on human nature and who was outspoken to see his adopted country, the United States, embark upon such foolish and costly "adventures" as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, he interviewed virtually all of the known leaders of the time - from Golda Meir to King Juan Carlos of Spain to Hafez Assad of Syria. And after 9/11, he alone was taken on a wild journey to the Afghan-Pakistani border to interview the mysterious Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban.

Why all this fuss, you may ask, about a foreign correspondent? It sounds like great fun, but do these folks actually DO anything?

Speaking as a foreign correspondent all my adult life, forgive me too much hyperbole. The foreign correspondent is essentially a reporter sent out by a newspaper, television or radio network to cover the world outside the United States. Historically, most live in the area for a year or more. Being part historian and often talented linguists, and the best of them become our best analysts of where the world is going. Arnaud was at the top of this pyramid.

The amazing thing to me - and I have been a correspondent since 1964, when I went to Latin America for the Chicago Daily News - is that virtually all of our news about the world comes through this little gang of free spirits, swashbuckling swains and historians living "out there."

During most of the many years I was overseas, there were hundreds of correspondents. Today, because of the cost (I cost the paper $250,000 in the '60s), because of the collapse of the print news business and because of the fatal danger of covering today's brutish wars, there are fewer than 100. This is why you see so many freelancers in these unspeakable ISIS wars, and why so many are killed, having no big media company behind them to support and protect them.

Organizations such as the Pulitzer Center have stepped in to fill the void, and they do excellent work, but they tend to send reporters out for only one big story at a time. This does not take the place of regular correspondents providing daily in-depth coverage.

If we Americans really do not care about getting accurate, untainted, often amazing news coverage on a daily basis, then fine, stop reading the papers and the foreign news. But think what will happen when the gutsy, crazy, brilliant Arnaud de Borchgaves are no more. I cannot bear to.

gigi_geyer©juno.com.

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