Jun 19th 2013

Bradsher the Intrepid:  ‘My times were good’

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

Journalists who left their native countries to report on the outside world find few things more distressing than the death throes of their profession. As today’s newspapers shrink, fold and “go digital”, television turns to entertainers and opinionators. The information gap widens by the day.

The public, of course, is the loser in this hollowing out of the information business. 

The life of the “foreign correspondent”, that dream we had as youngsters, is becoming almost a relic of the distant past, like a B-movie with some actor pretending to be one of us.

As Henry S. Bradsher says with typical understatement in his new book The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures (Louisiana State University Press), “Times have changed. My times were good.”

Bradsher, the epitome of the intrepid correspondent, has nailed it in two sentences. Those times were good for everyone. 

He decided to become a foreign correspondent at age 12 or 13 and he never looked back. I was a late bloomer. I decided at 18. We met and worked together in Moscow in the 1960s, and we reveled in our important role of reporting and analysis of Cold War issues and their social context. He was my bureau chief for a year or two until he left to study at Harvard in the Nieman Fellowship program.

A Swiss colleague who knew him in New Delhi recalls trying to surprise him with a nugget of news that might interest The Associated Press.  “I filed that three hours ago,” he enjoyed saying. Bradsher was always one step ahead of the competition. 

Yes, times were good for the foreign correspondent and for the newspaper reader.

Bradsher’s new book is a collection of 26 self-standing vignettes describing some of the highlights of his long career, mainly in The AP and at the now-defunct Washington Star. He has created a unique format in the shape of non-fiction short stories that makes the book easy to read. 

Chapter titles such as these will draw you in. “Stumbling Over a Policeman’s Severed Head”,  “Tiger Hunting with Queen Elizabeth”,  “Stabbed in the Back”,  “Bombed in Moscow”, and “China’s Most Despicable”. He says he wrote these pieces over several years, deciding only recently to compile them in book form.

I found his memoir enlightening for the fact-packed accounts of major events in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a tribute to a cohort of brave and adventurous individuals who placed themselves in personal danger – and continue to do so -- to get a story. He cites the Committee to Protect Journalists as the authority for tracking reporters’ deaths in action. As his book was printed, 926 journalists had died since 1992. The updated figure is 975 and climbing. 

Bradsher in his low-key prose lets slip that he was pushed around shot at, but he was lucky. He escaped Cambodia and Vietnam without a scratch.

We forget how dangerous it was. Bradsher remembers. “Learning the hard way, journalists had developed some criteria for judging road dangers (in Cambodia). People working in the fields and looking relaxed in villages were good signs, as was oncoming traffic. But empty fields, tense or empty villages, and no approaching vehicles indicated danger …” From 1970 to 1975, 34 foreign journalists were killed or disappeared and were presumed dead. “Most were lost on Cambodia’s dangerous highways,” he writes. 

On one of those roads, Bradsher’s friend and colleague Welles Hangen and his NBC camera crew were seized by Khmer Rouge and led away. Bradsher recalls: “Villagers later said Hangen and his crew were beaten to death three days after their capture.”

There is not much scope for humor in Bradsher’s telling. He always was a serious and intense writer-reporter. But he tells one story of traveling in Vietnam with Secretary of State William P. Rogers and assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Collins.  Just a year earlier, Collins had been the astronaut who piloted Apollo 11 around the moon while his crew descended to the surface. Bradsher interrogated some farmers who had gathered and asked, through a translator, what they thought of Collins and his moon travel. Paraphrasing, Bradsher quotes a farmer, “About that man having been to the moon, well, we may just be ignorant farmers but we’re smart enough not to be fooled by that!” 

The title story of the book relates to Bradsher’s  reporting the secret treasure spirited out of Tibet by the Dalai Lama’s entourage while Bradsher was based in New Delhi for The AP. It was a sensitive secret and Bradsher’s story was greeted with skepticism. In the end, it was proven correct.

Later in his career, he was based in Hong Kong for the Star and earned a reputation for astute China-watching. With careful reading of documents from Beijing, Bradsher wrote early on about the fall of Lin Biao. He later reported Zhou en-Lai’s fading from the scene. The “China-watcher watchers” in Beijing at this point denounced as a “most despicable” correspondent. It was a label he wore with pride as he turned out to be right about the power struggles. 

He resists boasting that his elder son has become an award-winning correspondent for the New York Times, also based in Hong Kong. Journalism is clearly in the genes.

The most moving chapter, for this reader, is “Hazards of Journalism”, which includes revisiting incidents many years later to see what happened to translators, editors and reporters he had known in difficult times. These were “men who suffered for being faithful reporters of things that powerful or unscrupulous men did not want reported”. One Afghan ended up driving a taxi in Washington, D.C. A Czech editor was banished to managing the heating system of an apartment complex. Others disappeared or were imprisoned. 

When the Star finally went under in 1981, he considered offers to return to Asia but found that he and his family were ready to settle down in Washington. He was taken on by a branch of the CIA and again undertook “extensive travel on six continents”. His final touch: “My journalism career had ended. It had been a fascinating and enjoyable career.




Facts & Arts is a platform for owners of high quality content to distribute their content to a worldwide audience.

Facts & Arts' objective is to enhance the distribution of individual owners' content by combining various types of high quality content that can be assumed to interest the same audience. The thinking is that in this manner the individual pieces of content on Facts & Arts support the distribution of one another.

If you have fitting written material, classical music or videos; or if you would like to become one of our regular columnists, a book reviewer or music reviewer; or if you wish to market or broadcast a live event through Facts & Arts, please contact us at info@factsandarts.com.



  

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Essays

Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "With hindsight, 2022 will be seen as the year when artificial intelligence gained street credibility. The release of ChatGPT by the San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI garnered great attention and raised even greater questions.  In just its first week, ChatGPT attracted more than a million users and was used to write computer programs, compose music, play games, and take the bar exam. Students discovered that it could write serviceable essays worthy of a B grade – as did teachers, albeit more slowly and to their considerable dismay."
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "The thought of her, as always, gave me a jolt of hope, and a burst of energy. And a stab of sorrow."
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: ".....if academic discourse and campus debate are shut down every time a person feels offended, how can universities possibly examine controversial topics? Without intellectual freedom – one of the great achievements of American civilization – they can’t."
Jan 5th 2023
EXTRACTS: "London's Tate Britain and Paris' Petit Palais have collaborated to produce a wonderful retrospective exhibition of the art of Walter Sickert (1860-1942).  The show is both beautiful and fascinating. ----- Virginia Woolf loved Sickert's art, and it is not difficult to see why, because his painting, like her writing, was always about intimate views of incidents, or casual portraits in which individual sitters momentarily revealed their personalities.  ------ Sickert's art never gained the status of that of Whistler or Degas, perhaps because it was too derivative of those masters.  But he was an important link between those great experimental painters and the art of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, ...."
Dec 5th 2022
EXTRACT: "One of the great paradoxes of human endeavour is why so much time and effort is spent on creating things and indulging in behaviour with no obvious survival value – behaviour otherwise known as art. Attempting to shed light on this issue is problematic because first we must define precisely what art is. We can start by looking at how art, or the arts, were practised by early humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, and immediately thereafter."
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACTS: "As a portrait artist, I am an amateur at this compared to the technology gurus and psychologists who study facial recognition seriously. Their aplications range from law enforcement to immigration control to ethnic groupings to the search through a crowd to find someone we know. ---- In my amateur artistic way, I prefer to count on intuition to find facial clues to a subject’s personality before sitting down at the drawing board. I never use the latest software to grapple with this dizzying variety.
Dec 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "In the exhibition catalog Lisane Basquiat writes: 'What is important for everyone to understand… is that he was a son, and a brother, and a grandson, and a nephew, and a cousin, and a friend. He was all of that in addition to being a groundbreaking artist.' "
Nov 24th 2022
"The art of kintsugi is inextricably linked to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi: a worldview centred on the acceptance of transience, imperfection and the beauty found in simplicity.....nothing stays the same forever." --- "The philosophy of kintsugi, as an approach to life, can help encourage us when we face failure. We can try to pick up the pieces, and if we manage to do that we can put them back together. The result might not seem beautiful straight away but as wabi-sabi teaches, as time passes, we may be able to appreciate the beauty of those imperfections."
Oct 25th 2022
EXTRACT: "The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, was quick to congratulate Sunak, referring to him as “the ‘living bridge’ of UK Indians”. In the difficult waters of British and indeed international politics, all eyes will be watching to see how well the bridge stands."
Oct 5th 2022
EXTRACTS: "In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw eulogized Jean-Luc Godard as 'a genius who tore up the rule book without troubling to read it.' This is a fundamental misunderstanding." ----- " As had been true for Picasso - and Eliot, Joyce, Dylan, and Lennon - it was Godard's mastery of the rules of his discipline that made his violation of those rules so exciting to young artists, and his work so influential.  But perhaps these innovators' mastery of the rules can only be seen by those who themselves understand the rules."
Sep 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "For many of us, some personality traits stay the same throughout our lives while others change only gradually. However, evidence shows that significant events in our personal lives which induce severe stress or trauma can be associated with more rapid changes in our personalities." ----- "Over time, our personalities usually change in a way that helps us adapt to ageing and cope more effectively with life events." ----- " ....participants in this study recorded changes in the opposite direction to the usual trajectory of personality change." --- "....you might like to take the time to reflect on your experiences over the past few years, and how these personality changes may have affected you."
Sep 21st 2022
EXTRACTS: "It might seem like an obscure footnote among the history-making events of 2022, but the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s death coincides with the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith’s birth." ----- "As a committed Stoic, Smith had little patience for greed. The whole point of Roman Stoic philosophy was to use personal moral discipline to support the rule of law and constitutions, and to make society a better place." ----- "When we read Smith, we are better served to think of the example of Elizabeth II than of those driven by personal greed. It might sound archaic, but, as Britons’ response to her death suggests, these values still appeal to a great many people today."
Sep 14th 2022
EXTRACT: "On the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, the former Prince of Wales was proclaimed King Charles III. Although it’s been known for decades that Charles would succeed his mother, there were rumours that he might, once king, choose the name George due to the contentious legacies of Kings Charles I and Charles II."
Aug 25th 2022
EXTRACT: "An over-emphasis on looking for the chemical equation of depression may have distracted us from its social causes and solutions. We suggest that looking for depression in the brain may be similar to opening up the back of our computer when a piece of software crashes: we are making a category error and mistaking problems of the mind for problems in the brain. It would be wise to observe caution with drugs whose effectiveness is not certain, whose mode of action is unknown, and which have many side-effects, especially for use in the long term."
Jul 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "China uses incarcerated prisoners of conscience as an organ donor pool to provide compatible transplants for patients. These prisoners or “donors” are executed and their organs harvested against their will, and used in a prolific and profitable transplant industry."
Jul 29th 2022
EXTRACT: "In the first episode of season three of The Kominsky Method (2021), there is a funeral service for Michael Douglas’ character’s lifelong friend Norman Newlander (played by Alan Arkin). By far the most inconsolable mourner to give a eulogy is Newlander’s personal assistant of 22 years who, amid a hyperbolical outpouring of grief, literally cannot bring herself to let go of the casket. It is a humorous scene, to be sure, but there is something else going on here that is characteristic of employer-employee relations in this era of neoliberal capitalism. “Making him happy made me happy,” she exclaims, “his welfare was my first thought in the morning, and my last thought before I went to sleep.” That isn’t sweet – it is pathological. ----- Employee happiness is becoming increasingly conditional on, or even equated with, the boss’ happiness. As Frédéric Lordon observes in his book, Willing Slaves of Capital (2014), “employees used to surrender to the master desire with a heavy heart…they had other things on their minds…ideally the present-day enterprise wants subjects who strive of their own accord according to its norms.” In a word, the employee is increasingly expected to internalize and identify with the desire of the master."
Jul 20th 2022
EXTRACT: "For three decades, people have been deluged with information suggesting that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain – namely an imbalance of a brain chemical called serotonin. However, our latest research review shows that the evidence does not support it."
Jul 13th 2022
"But is he “deluded”? " ---- "....we sometimes end up with deluded leaders because we ourselves can be somewhat delusional when we vote." ---- "David Collinson, a professor of leadership and organization at Lancaster University, associates this predicament with excessive positive thinking, or what he calls “Prozac leadership,” in reference to the famous antidepressant that promises to cheer people up without actually fixing what is wrong in their lives. “ ---- "In politics, Prozac leaders come to power by selling the electorate on wildly overoptimistic views of the future. When the public buys into a Prozac leader’s narrative, it is they who are already verging on the delusional." ----- "Another potential example is Vladimir Putin, who has conjured a kind of nostalgic dream world for his followers and the wider Russian public."
Jun 25th 2022
EXTRACT: "Many veterans, refugees and other people who have experienced trauma and have mental health issues spend little time thinking about the future. Instead, they are narrowly focused on the negative past. However, people who have experienced trauma and developed a healthy future perspective report being better at coping with life, having fewer negative thoughts about the past, and getting better sleep compared with those who have a negative future perspective. So, instead of dwelling on the past, people who have suffered trauma should be encouraged to think about the future and set goals that help them develop hope for a good life."
Jun 8th 2022
EXTRACT: " The devastation of war is a recurring theme in Turner’s work, and unlike his contemporaries Turner is willing to forego the occasion to bolster national pride or the patriotism of its fallen heroes. In “The Field of Waterloo” (1818), Turner’s great tragic vision of war, “The…  dead of both sides lay intertwined, nearly indistinguishable surrounded by the gloom of night.” Near the bottom center there are three women. The one farthest from us is bearing a child and in her right hand a torch which illumines the sea of mangled bodies. Beside her is another woman struggling to keep a third (also with child) from collapsing outright. Turner reflects not only on the dead and dying, but on the widows and orphans that war produces."