Terry Anderson

'I see progress in the world'

  Terry Anderson became a nationally known figure after he was captured March 16, 1985, by Lebanese extremists in Beirut, Lebanon.

  Will Norton Jr., dean of journalism, met Anderson in May 1992 at the World Center of The Freedom Forum where Anderson received the first Free Spirit Award. The two later had a long conversation during Freedom Forum ceremonies honoring U.S. Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.

  Norton interviewed Anderson by telephone at Anderson’s office in Westchester County, N.Y.

  Here is that interview:

Would you briefly summarize your experiences in captivity in Lebanon in four or five sentences.

  I was working as the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent in Beirut when I was taken and was immediately hauled into what we used to refer to as the Lebanese Gulag, a series of small prisons, some of them underground basements, some of them simply apartment houses that had been taken over by militias, and a room or two turned into a prison cell with steel over the windows and the doors and chains set into the walls.

  The treatment at the beginning was rough, violent, and conditions were bad. It went up and down over the years, but in general I could say slowly improved. At least, most of the physical violence stopped, and in some of the places conditions improved.

What did you gain through that experience?

  As you can imagine, there was an awful lot of time to think, to explore one’s self and one’s feelings, to poke around in one’s head and think about what one found there, sometimes not too pleasant.

  You get to know yourself well when you spend a lot of time in very cramped conditions with other men. Most of my imprisonment was spent with other hostages, one or two or sometimes five of us in a room. You get to learn quickly how to get along with other people and what they think of you and what about you irritates them.

  My fellow hostages were a great strength for me, and I think I learned a great deal about how much people can help each other, psychologically. I learned a great deal about my faith. I was lucky enough to be given a Bible and relied on it heavily.

  Most people would think that men cramped up in those bad conditions would not get along well, would come to hate each other. There were personality conflicts. We did annoy each other. We did get on each other’s nerves, but despite these minor irritations, we got along well, and we remain close friends, most of us, to this day.

  There were other things beyond the simply personal. As a whole, I think the country learned something about how to handle hostage-taking. We tried buying off our hostages. It didn’t work. That’s a lesson to be learned. We learned eventually that you can’t pay hostage-takers, and they learned that hostage-taking doesn’t do them any good. They told me the day I was released that it had not been a useful tactic, and they weren’t going to do it any more. And they haven’t. There have been no more Americans taken for political reasons anywhere in the world. That is an important lesson.

What was there about you that irritated your fellow prisoners?

  I used to be an aggressive, argumentative type person. I was six years a Marine. I was a journalist and a foreign correspondent for many years. It’s not a profession that encourages timidity, and a certain degree of self confidence and aggression is good, but sometimes it is not appropriate. I think I learned to listen a bit more.

How long did it take you to begin to learn to listen?

  Not very quickly. (laughter)

  How did you have the inner strength to endure?

  All of us handled it in different ways — in personal ways in that we had to use whatever resources we had within ourselves, primarily. We helped each other as much as we could, but you have to find the strength in yourself. I have seen people in times of trial again and again and again, and they find the strength someplace. We do what we have to do. That is a thing of the human spirit that turns out to be stronger than anybody expects.

Did anything about being a journalist help you?

  I’ve been a reader all my life, and I have that journalistic magpie mind, you know: I know a little bit about a lot of things and a lot about nothing — wide interests and an active, speculative mind.

  We taught each other things.

  I had a university professor, Tom Sutherland, as my most constant companion. He gave me classes in French, in agriculture, in statistics, in genetics, and we discussed and speculated on all kinds of things — some of them academic or intellectual, some of them practical.

  We spent days and days and days building a cabin with all of the practical things involved, plumbing and wiring and how you put the framework together and the qualities of cement and roofing.

Can you imagine in your head, can you think how to wire a light switch so that it has a switch at either door, either of which can turn the light on or off?

  We spent hours, hours discussing that and then went on to the philosophical implications of a light switch: that is, without changing physical state either on or off, depending on which direction the other light switch is thrown. We spent a day trying to figure out the workings of the rear end of a car, the differential of a car, how the gears connected and how they worked and what principals were involved.

  And we played lots of less rigorous games, of course. We played a lot of chess. I built chess sets before they finally allowed us to have a regular one. We played cards with bootleg cards I made out of little scraps of paper.

Did you ever think they were going to kill you?

  Not really. None of us are ever convinced that we’re going to die, and there didn’t seem to be much practical use for that. I mean, why kill a hostage? You lose an important piece of an important counter, and there isn’t much you can do with a dead body.

  There were dangers that were real and sometimes scary. There was no medical treatment available for much of the time, so if you got sick, you quite likely could die. Several hostages died of illness while I was in there; some that I shared prisons with. There was always a danger of a mad guard waving a loaded gun.

  Several times guns just went off accidentally, one of them inches from my body. One guard shot another guard in the leg through stupidity. So when they would get angry, which they did from time to time, and wave their guns around and stick them in your ear and threaten you, you always wondered when a finger would slip.

  Of course, we were in the middle of a war. A number of times we were in the middle of battles, with shrapnel pinging off the outside of the steel windows.

  The presence of death was never that far away, but it was never, for me at least, a constant worry that they would take me out and shoot me in the back of the head. That just didn’t seem to have much point to it.

Do you think you could find where you stayed?

  Within a block or two, perhaps even a building or two, if I had any interest in that. We knew where we were most of the time. There are others, other reporters, who think they have identified some of the prisons, and I know from some of the files that I’ve gone through, that government intelligence agencies think they had identified some of the prisons that we were in.

What happened to Sutherland?

  Tom is now out in Colorado. He is doing well, doing some speaking, writing a book, enjoying himself verily.

  Briefly tell us about your early life and how you gained an interest journalism.

  By accident, as so many people did. I was reared in upstate New York, and I graduated from high school in l965 and immediately joined the Marine Corps. I went overseas and served most of my time in the Marine Corps in Japan and Vietnam. In Japan I began working for Armed Forces Radio Television, mostly because I didn’t like being a grunt, you know, a man carrying a rifle, and by the time I got to Vietnam I was assigned as combat correspondent. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to Iowa State University, taking a broadcast journalism sequence as well as political science as a major, and worked at a radio and TV station there until I joined the AP.

How did you pick Iowa State?

  That’s where I was assigned my last year in the Marines Corps. I was on recruiting duty in Des Moines, and because I was offered a job at the local CBS affiliate there at KCCI, I decided I would work and go to the school at the same time, which is what I did.

And what were your years in school?

  1971 through 1974.

What were the good qualities of your education at Iowa State?

  It was a fine school. Excellent. The director of the broadcast journalism school there was a guy named Jack Shelley, who had been a television newsman for 30 or 40 years — very well grounded both in the principles and in the practical aspects of journalism. When you came out of his sequence you were ready to go to work, and the political science department was fine. When I came out of the Marine Corps as a staff sergeant, I was a conservative guy. They’d taken me at 17, kept me for six years and turned out your basic patriotic, unthinking military man. Several years at a good liberal-thinking school like Iowa State opened my mind considerably.

This may seem redundant, but did anything in your education prepare you for captivity?

  That’s hard. I don’t know how you prepare for anything like that. In some sense, everything I did gave me things that I could use. Six years in the Marine Corps gave me some self-discipline and some ability to withstand hardship. Being a journalist, having witnessed violence in many different places and having a good appreciation of what was going on in the Middle East certainly gave me a context. Having worked in Asia and Africa and the Middle East gave me the flexibility to deal with people from an entirely different mindset. But you know, each of us used what we had in our lives to do that. I mean, I had a certain preparation, and there were others who had a completely different preparation — sometimes appropriate, sometimes not.

Was that experience relevant to young people today? In other words, when students are in school they do not think about being a captive.

  It is a great deal more dangerous world out there now for young journalists than it ever used to be. That period in Lebanon was a bit of a watershed.

  At the beginning of my time there, I could go anywhere. We were virtually immune. Even the worst of the groups out there — and there were some bad ones — did not offer us direct violence.

  You could get killed because there was a war, but you weren’t a target, and now you are. That kind of thing changed while we were there. That atmosphere of fanaticism that refuses to allow outside observers or neutrals or innocents of any kind, developed during those years. It is a dangerous world for journalists.

  Most of the people I knew as correspondents had some military experience then, and that’s not true any more at all, and that is a significant point for young journalists who are thinking of covering the world.

Does being in the military give you more maturity?

  Not just more maturity; it gives you an experience of war and of the tactics and strategies and the personal applications of it.

  How many people do you have in your class who would know what to do in observing a battle of any kind? Would they be able to identify weapons? Would they be able to go into a battle and know where the point was that they needed to go to get the information they needed without exposing themselves too greatly? After all, it does no good to get killed trying to cover a battle. Your editor doesn’t get his story.

  It is a field that I’m afraid young people don’t know much about any more. Look at how many journalists have been killed in the former Yugoslavia. One hundred fifty?

  It is a terribly dangerous world out there, and there are no longer “set piece” battles. They are places that are terribly confusing with all kinds of fluid movement and various factions and militias and terrorist groups, and it’s not an easy thing to cover without experience.

What was lacking in your education that might have helped you?

  I wish I’d spent more time on the language appropriate to the area, Arabic in my case.

  When I went to Japan I learned Japanese. I thought it was a great help. It’s difficult, but I learned it. When I went to the Middle East I began to learn Arabic but in the circumstances had not made anywhere near enough progress.

  Had I spoken Arabic I might have had a better appreciation for what was going on. Certainly my stories might have been improved.

  We went on the principle that you learned a foreign language to go overseas and that proved your competence in accepting another culture and in dealing with another culture and that it didn’t matter what language that was.

  I don’t think that’s a terribly good approach.

What advice would you give students who are starting school?

  Work hard at it. There’s an awful lot to learn — not in the realm of facts and figures but in understanding. The best areas for preparation for journalism are history and political science.

  If you like Asia, then fine: study things Asian and try to appreciate the various cultures there. If you’re interested in eastern Europe, spend a lot of time on it. There’s a great deal of history to learn there. History is probably the most useful thing.

If students would happen to want to be foreign correspondents, would you discourage them?

  I think it’s a fascinating career. I think it’s important. It’s endlessly interesting. If you’re willing to put up with hardship. There’s no place in the world you’re going to go where you’re going to be as comfortable as you are in the United States.

  I would encourage them, but I would say above all if your ambition is to go overseas as a correspondent, you have to become a good journalist. That means learning journalism thoroughly here in the United States, working for a newspaper. I would always prefer print journalism as a background although working as a good reporter — general reporter — for a television or radio station is useful.

  For me, the essence of being a good journalist is simply getting it right in all senses — not just the facts, but understanding the story and conveying it accurately.

What suggestions do you have for those starting in journalism education? What about those who are beginning a career? What advice would you give?

  For me, the most important thing in the young journalist has always been reliability. I want to be able to turn to a reporter in my newsroom and say, “Go do this. Go cover that story,” and know that the story will be covered. I want to know that he’ll come back with the facts, that he’ll come back with a story that is as complete as he or she can make it in the time and present it in a workman-like way.

  It is important not to have to be constantly supervised. Have the initiative to cover the story and the basic abilities to do it right, to get it right. There is nothing more disconcerting to an editor than to take a story from a reporter and then find out that it has some important fact wrong or left out.

  Reliability. Just to get the story you’re assigned and do it every time and without necessity for supervision.

With all the things that are going on technologically — e-mail, on-line newspapering etc. — what can you say to a student who asks, “What’s going to happen to what I thought was journalism?”

  It will always be there. There will always be journalism. Its forms may change, but it’s not going to go away. There is a necessity for that person who is going to go out into a complicated world and understand it and be able to present it to those of us who don’t have the time to understand it.

  I have to say I am discouraged about the birth of tabloid television. The influence it has had on what I used to consider straight television journalism is entirely iniquitous to the cause of journalism.

  I agree with my friend Dan Rather, who a couple of years ago told radio and television news directors at a convention that it’s not a matter of news competing with news any more. It’s a matter of news competing with entertainment and news becoming entertainment. That’s a mistake. That’s not good, particularly in an age when so many people get the majority of their news from television.

Which is more important, attitude or ability?

  Ability is a basic. Attitude is what is going to translate that ability into something that is useful. It does no good if you’re a good writer and a decent reporter if you do not have the sense of curiosity and aggressiveness that gets you out there and demands that you understand the story.

  I don’t think that’s something that can be taught. I think it’s something that you find in most journalists and certainly in all the good ones. There is a spirit, an intellectual quality to journalism, that is either in you or it is not.

You have seen western cultures dominate other cultures. You have the fullness of fundamentalist conviction. How has all of this changed your views about America and the future?

  Going overseas at the age of 18, spending a great deal of my life overseas, has certainly given me a more balanced view of the world than had I stayed solely in the United States.

  Americans look at the Middle East, and we think of all the things that are associated in our mind with Islam and Arab, and most of them are negative.

  Having lived there, having some understanding for the culture of the people, I know that fundamentalism — that particular version of it that promotes and that perpetrates violence — is not representative of the Middle East, is not representative of Arab culture or Islamic culture or the religion of Islam. It is much more complicated than that and, in many ways, admirable.

  I can no longer look at things simplistically. I know they are always much more complicated than we think they are.

Will all this conflict ever settle down?

  Is there going to be peace in the world? I’m a Christian. I believe eventually there will be, at the second coming. I think we are moving into an era of greater, or if not peace, at least of greater prosperity.

  Think about it: In the last 10 to 15 years there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are living in a greater degree of individual responsibility and freedom and perhaps dignity than there were 15 years ago. That’s true in eastern Europe, in Latin America, even in Asia.

  That great process of history, of thousands of years of an increase in a dignity of the individual, seems to have been halted for a good period of time by the growth of totalitarian societies, and those are breaking up now.

  Certainly the totalitarian instinct has not gone away. There are a great many wars going on and struggles by peoples, but that ice jam, that blockage that was representative of the domination of a third of the world by communism, is gone. I think that’s reason for great optimism.

  Even the Middle East, with all of its continued difficulty and continued problems, has made enormous progress. Who would have thought that King Hussein would have signed a peace treaty with Israel, that Yasser Arafat would be resident on the West Bank?

  I’m not a Pollyanna. I’m not a person who expects the millennium tomorrow, but I am an optimist. I do see progress in the world. How has the media played a part in this?

  This is a vital building block for any free society. A free society cannot exist without freedom of expression and freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It just doesn’t happen.

  Anybody who followed what happened in the breakup of eastern Europe will see that journalists were vitally involved in rebuilding those societies, in providing information, in ferreting out the information, in destroying long-held sacred cows that were necessarily destroyed before you could begin to build a new society.

  Our function may change somewhat. An individual now has access to a great deal more information than he ever had before without the intervention of journalism. However, it’s still necessary for someone to make sense out of huge amounts of information, the so rapidly changing events and structures and relationships, and that’s where journalism comes in.

Will freedom of expression increase worldwide?

  I think it has to. I think it’s an inevitable progression. So many societies have already discovered, as the Chinese are discovering, you cannot run a modern society without an educated population, and you cannot educate a population in bits and pieces or in restricted areas. When you educate them to run a technological society, when you teach somebody to run a computer, when you make them literate enough to work in a modern economy, then all the rest of it goes with it. All the rest of it, including a demand for political expression, a demand for individual dignity, a demand for a fair share of what society is producing. It cannot be separated.

You’re still practicing journalism?

  I still write articles, and I’m working on a book. I don’t do daily journalism any more. I’m getting a little too old for that — not that you have to be young to be a journalist, but it helps — if you do the kind of journalism that I used to enjoy so much. I have other interests now. I would find it difficult to turn in a daily story any more.

What is the future for you?

  I don’t know.

  I’m still enjoying myself, I’m still involved in a variety of projects that satisfy me, and I have learned not to worry too much about the future. God has been good to us, and we have had a good life. We’re enjoying ourselves, and I hope, God willing, we will continue to do so.