• Foreign correspondent for Reuters News Agency in Asia & Africa 1957-1968
• Reuters Bureau Chief, Los Angeles 1968 - 1978
• Reuters Bureau Chief, Washington 1978 - 2000
How I became involved...
(Excerpt from Chinatown County: The Sell-Out of Marina del Rey) |
| Bruce Russell as stand-in for Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, “He-of-the-Nicked-Nose” |
Most of my years with Reuters had been spent covering trouble spots in Asia and Africa. Los Angeles, although scarcely a trouble spot, was nevertheless a pioneer posting for the agency so my reputation for using my initiative in the field played into my being given this assignment. In its nearly a century-and-a-half of existence, Reuters had never had a correspondent in that southern California metropolis. It got most of its United States news in an exchange agreement with the Associated Press. In the sixties the Associated Press chose to end this agreement and Reuters had to scramble to cover the United States from its own resources.
My journalistic career had started back in my native Australia working for the Adelaide Advertiser and Melbourne Herald, both owned by Sir Keith Murdoch, father of the internationally much better known, Rupert Murdoch. But Australians inevitably yearn for seeing the world beyond their tight big island and in 1953 I set off for Canada aboard a freighter to explore the Americas. From Vancouver in British Columbia there was only one way to go — South. So I went south and I kept going south. I thumbed my way three times back and forth across the United States taking in virtually every state, down through Mexico and Central America, into Colombia aboard an extraordinary Indian wooden craft, through the jungles of a Colombia which was being torn by a brutal civil war, and thence to Peru and across the jungles of the Brazilian interior to end up in Carnival in Rio in 1954.
Landing in London in 1954 I used my journalist’s credentials and references from the Murdoch organization to get a summer relief job at Reuters. The following year I was hired permanently by Reuters and set off on my first assignment in Asia, which, after several diversions mid-course, turned out to be Thailand. That country had been under the thumb of a dapper little dictator called Pibulsonggram since the days of Japanese occupation in the Second World War but his authority was being increasingly contested by the Army. One night, sensing that something was afoot, I jumped in my car and headed for the center of Bangkok to find tanks sitting athwart many of the city intersections. I headed for the post office to send off a brief flash: “TANKS APPEARED IN CENTRAL BANGKOK LATE TONIGHT AS THE ARMY MOVED IN TO TAKE OVER.” It was a considerable scoop over the opposition and through it I acquired my reputation of being the go-to guy for covering trouble spots.
I have always adhered to the firm rule that a foreign correspondent is no better than his local tipsters and in Bangkok I had the local help of a burly Thai of Chinese ancestry called The. While the opposition agencies floundered in the confusion of the aftermath of the Army coup, through my local help I got it all right. I named the Army nominee who was to head the new government and on the fate of the deposed Pibulsonggram I was right on the button. Opposition agencies had him fleeing to neighboring Burma and Malaya, but I reported: “Pibulsonggram is headed for Cambodia in a white Ford Thunderbird.”
After Thailand I reported on the revolt of the colonels against the dictatorial rule of President Sukarno, sending dispatches on interviews with the rebel colonels in the three regions of Sumatra which were probably as closely read by authorities in Djakarta as by Reuters subscribers. I covered the mainland Chinese shelling of the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu, scrambling ashore from a navy craft as the shells poured in. I travelled with Presidents Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and Marshall Tito on their tours of the Indonesian islands. I covered the 1960 coup attempt against President Ngo Dinh Diem. My exclusive dispatch saying Diem had refused to yield to the rebels surrounding his palace as they were claiming, actually played a role in the outcome of the attempted coup, as army forces loyal to the President in the delta region of the south-west heard the dispatch broadcast over Radio Manila and moved in with tanks to crush the rebellion. (Once again this scoop was owed to a first-rate local tipster or stringer as they are called in the profession. Name of Pham Xuan An. He later turned out to be a colonel in the employ of the Vietcong secret service but I still maintain he was a bloody good legman.) I covered the overthrow of the United States-backed government in Laos by a little Army captain called Kong Le. After all this Reuters sent me to Tokyo for three months for what I think they regarded as well-deserved rest and recreation for the years spent in remote outposts. But inevitably the coups d’etat followed me. I had scarcely got myself installed in Tokyo when South Korea’ strongman Syngman Rhee was overthrown and I spent long hours backstopping the reporting of our correspondents in Seoul.
Africa followed Asia. And once again the turmoil in the Congo and other upsets in the newly minted republics of former British and French Africa.
I could scarcely expect Los Angeles and California to provide the coups and revolts of Asia and Africa. But what happened during my ten years there probably got much more worldwide attention than anything I had reported on from those two continents. Foremost among these events was the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. But just as big was the arrest and trial of self-appointed hippie guru Charles Manson and his acolytes for the murder of film actress Sharon Tate and her friends.
In fact Los Angeles in the later sixties and the seventies turned out to be a bubbling cauldron of news events. On one morning I threaded my way through supertight security at the Los Angeles courthouse to cover the arraignment of Sirhan Sirhan for the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy after spending much of the night before reporting on the drug overdose death of rocker Janice Joplin. I raced to the courthouse one day to get there just in time to hear Susan Atkins confess to the murder of Sharon Tate after having been shaken out of my bed that very morning by a major earthquake in the Los Angeles basin. I covered the endless months of the Manson trial, the Ellsberg trial (for leaking confidential Vietnam War documents), the Angela Davis trial (for providing the guns used in a bloody courtroom takeover) and the Patty Hearst trial (for participating in an armed bank raid while kidnap victim of a radical underground group). And on one memorable day I stood outside a courtroom in the Santa Monica courthouse as reporters were told that Roman Polanski had fled the country rather than continue to attend his trial for sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. The director famed for movies with a bizarre touch such as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” had in fact created a “Chinatown” of his own, of socially proscribed sex, bringing to a halt a brilliant Hollywood career.
Celebrity news was, of course, a major part of the assignment. I stood alongside Marlon Brando on a grassy knoll atop the Santa Monica Mountains as he gave his land back to the Indians. I covered the return of Charlie Chaplin to Hollywood after his long years in exile. I spent a good hour at Los Angeles airport chewing the fat with legendary singer Louis Armstrong as he waited for friends to pick him up. And — one more trial — I reported on the Aspen, Colorado trial of French singer Claudine Longet (Mrs Andy Williams) for the shooting death of her ski star lover Spider Sabich. I raced gingerly across an ice-covered road to report on the verdict on a phone which I had installed in the basement of a church. But there was no time for hanging around after filing this report. I had to dash for a plane to Utah to cover the execution of Gary Gilmore for the murder of gas station attendants. This was a major event because it represented a return to the death penalty in the United States after fifteen years in legal abeyance. Gilmore’s story was chronicled in the Norman Mailer book “The Executioner’s Song.” Prison authorities had arranged for the installation of phones for my competitors of AP and UPI but had failed to provide for my request for a Reuters phone. The prison governor very graciously allowed me to use his office and phone and from there I reported that Gilmore in his last hours was dancing the tango with his aunt in his cell and also his ultimate dispatch at the hands of a firing squad.
In my ten years of reporting on Los Angeles I struck up friendships with some pretty remarkable colleagues. Among them was the doyenne of celebrity trial reporting, Theo Wilson, and her successor to that title, Linda Deutsch of Associated Press. Also Ivor Davis, correspondent for the British Daily Express, who had come to the United States reporting on a Beatles tour, and had decided that Los Angeles was the spot for him. But perhaps the most remarkable of all was Mary Neiswender, reporter for a Los Angeles area newspaper, who had a penchant for going off quietly to arrange exclusive access to major criminals, while the rest of us were tied down on press conferences with prosecution and defence attorneys. Incredibly, Mary pulled this off with the most notorious criminal of them all. She became the exclusive channel for statements from Charles Manson. The only downside of this, she tells me, was when her newspaper patched Manson’s calls through to her home and her blood would run cold as her teenage daughter shouted “Mom, it’s Charlie” or “Mom, it’s Charlie again.” But she says Manson was a long way from being the most evil of the killers who confided in her. Anyone who chooses to read her book with the lengthy title “Assassins…Serial Killers… Corrupt Cops…Chasing the News in a Skirt and High Heels” must be prepared for some pretty gut-churning accounts of serial killers who tortured to death young girls and young boys.
The Los Angeles assignment came to an end in 1978 with my appointment as Reuters bureau chief in Washington. I spent 13 years there but this world of congressional debate, diplomacy and government regulation was never as much fun as the glitzy scene of Los Angeles.
And at the end of the 13 years in Washington, RETIREMENT. But where? That was the question.
I went back to my birthplace of Adelaide, Australia, a peaceful and very livable city well away from the hectic metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne. “We would love to have you back,” my relatives told me. “But you’d have to learn to play bridge.”
No way.
A second choice was my wife’s native land of France. But it eventually proved to be unsuitably remote from our affairs in the United States.
So it was back to the United States itself. Not Washington. Thirteen years there was quite enough. We looked at Florida but that seemed to me to have a mortuary touch compared to the lively world of Los Angeles.
So Los Angeles it was. We moved into a condominium in the Pacific Ocean neighborhood of Marina del Rey.
And that was how it all started.
Almost every day my constitutional walks would take me past the picnic tables and sandy children’s playground of Mother’s Beach. At weekends and on public holidays the picnic tables were full with family parties from all over the Los Angeles basin. The area was a babel of the languages of the various migrant families. The air was scented with the smells of ethnic cooking coming from the barbecues. On the north side of the beach colorful rowing boats, outriggers and kayaks were drawn up on the sand and children set out from this safe launch pad in their rubber dinghies. It was a colorful sight which would have delighted the French impressionist painters. Mother’s Beach was the living center of the Marina, a Marina which was being rapidly overrun by strip apartment blocks.
And then I heard the astonishing news. Los Angeles County was planning to shut down the picnic tables of Mother’s Beach and push picnic families over to the other side of the Marina where there was no sand for their children to play. It also planned to transfer the non-powered boat launch to an unsafe deep-water launch on the other side of the Marina.
I was horrified. I was also prodded into action.
The one eventuality I had never thought of when I took my retirement was that I might become involved in civic activism. But closing down Mother’s Beach. That was too much.
I got involved.
