Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible

First published 2011 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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Geyer, Georgie Anne, 1935- Predicting the unthinkable, anticipating the impossible : from the fall of the Berlin Wall to America in the new century / Georgie Anne Geyer, with a new preface by the author. pages cm “New material this edition copyright (c) 2013 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Originally published in 2011 by Transaction Publishers.” ISBN 978-1-4128-5278-4 1. World politics--1989- 2. United States--Foreign relations--1989- I. Title. D860.G524 2013 909.82’9--dc23 2013009660 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5278-4 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1487-4 (hbk) Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition by Georgie Anne Geyer xi Preface by Irving Louis Horowitz xvii Acknowledgments xxiii

Part I: The Expectant Decade 1

East Germany’s Not at All like Its Image, Ron 3 Berlin Wall is Just One Example of How the World is Split in Two 4 Soviet Empire Begins to Crack 6 Groping toward Pluralism 8 Iranian Children Herded to Death 11 We Still Can’t Go Home Again 13 Reagan Reforms: His View of Soviets 14

Part II: The Conceit of Innocence 19

Poland’s Winning Ways with Freedom 21 Policymakers Ignore New Trends in Terrorism 23 Yugoslavia: Pulled Back to the Past and Ahead to the Future 25 Sick with History, Kosovo Awaits Serbs’ Final Blow 27 The Conceit of Innocence II 29 Who Killed Sir Michael Rose? 31 U.N. and West Should Quit Playing “Dead Dog” in Bosnia 33 UN Secretary-General Believes in Negotiating 36 The United Nations and Neutralism 38 Russians Slowly Learning New Way 40 Unclear Indicator of the New Russia 42 After 1,000 Years of Absolute Faiths, Russia Has None 44 Russia Needed a New Identity, Not “Shock Therapy” 47 Kazakh Leader Grapples with Change 49 Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible

In Ironic Reversal, Little Finland Now Influencing Giant Neighbor Russia 52 Little Norway Goes Where Superpowers Cannot Trend 55 Holland’s “Managed Morality” 57 The Cold War is Over but the Quest for Meaning Continues 59 Should U.S. Troops Have Gone on to Baghdad? 61 Seeking to Change Society by Force? 63 End of Cold War Released Violent, Separatist Feelings 66 Many Groups Are Aiding the Breakdown of Nation-States 68 Sadat’s Vision Made a Big Difference 70 Lessons from the Death of a Cowboy 73 Post-Cold War World Requires Institution-Building 75 Foreign Policy Differences of Utopians and Realists 78 Comandante Chavez Wants to Save Venezuela from “Abyss” 80 Marine Corps Experience is Applicable Elsewhere 82 What the Listeners Might Hear in Havana 85 Democracy is Process, Not Instant Coffee 87 Shanghai: Full of Life, But Going Where? 89 Traditional Idea of Truth vs. Designer Truths 92 Our Foreign Policy toward China is Delusional 94

Part III: Terrorism an Era unto Itself 97

Gov. George W. Bush is a Reasonable Reformer 99 Bush’s Faith-Based Program is Far Superior to Welfare State 101 Putin Arrives 104 Gulf War Did Not Change Saddam Hussein’s Priorities 107 Religious-Secular Tensions Divide Israel 109 Clinton Foreign Policy is Devoid of Principle 111 U.S. Must Preserve What is Left of Our Civic Ideals 114 Internet Globalizers Can’t Erase Cultural Diﬀerences 116 In India the South Points the Way for the North 119 Information without Context or Knowledge is Meaningless 121 Afghani Radicals Foment Terror in Far-Flung Places 123 America is Losing Its Sense of Self 126 Haiti: Political Terrorism Hangs over Elections 129

Part IV: Between Neutralism and Justice 133

“Cultural Intelligence” was Sacriﬁced on the Economic Altar 135 vi Contents

Long-Term U.S. Goal: Collapse of Terrorist Network 138 Winds of Change Keep Blowing over Bush White House 140 Rootless Young Men May Become Civilization’s Nemesis 143 Palestinians Despair as Hope for Peace and Land Disappear 145 Afghan Leader Abdul Haq was Rare Voice of Reason in Mayhem 148 Renewed Influence of Nation-States Marks Geopolitical Analysis 151 Journalism for the Sheer Joy of It 153 Pearl’s Death Marks Cold New Reality for Foreign Correspondents 156 Hawks’ Eyes Look Longingly at War against Hussein 159 With Queen Mother’s Passing, Mothering Loses Great Exemplar 162 U.S. No Longer Plays by the Rules It Helped to Invent 164 Bush Sr. Sends Not-So-Subtle Message with Award to Kennedy 167 Weapons of Mass Deception were Saddam’s Greatest Defense 169 Kuwait’s Historical Example Holds Lessons about Iraq 171 New Chapters Open in the Mystery behind the War 174 Earlier Examination Identified Disintegrating Nation-States 176 Remembering Yitzhak Rabin: A Legacy of Peace Derailed 179 “Mr. Rockefeller’s Roads” Reveal Nature, Not Despoil It 181 America’s Abbreviated Experiment with Empire-Building 184 “I Thought We Were Different” 187 Oman’s Development an Instructive Model for Middle East 189 Military Explores Traditional Power Centers in Chaotic Iraq 192 European Union Continues toward Role as World Player 195 Unity, Authority Were Missing Links in New Orleans Disaster 198 The Dark Heart of Dick Cheney 200 Peace is Not Fostered by Lip Service but by Patient Labor 203 Referendum in Uganda Offers Lesson for Emerging Democracies 205 China’s Star is Rising as a World Superpower 209 Cohesive Future Depends on Comprehensive Newspaper Reporting 211 Deconstructing Don Rumsfeld 214 vii Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible

Baker on Cleanup Crew after “Sonny’s” Big Adventure 217 Without Newspapers, Americans Can’t Understand the World 219 Egyptian Cat Scholarship was Purely a Labor of Love 222 In Wake of Iraq Miscalculations, Talk Turns to Iran 225 Private Security Contractors Create Very Public Problems 227 Boris Yeltsin Leaves Legacy of Contradiction 230 Son Solves Mystery of Father’s Death in Soviet Gulag 233 Political, Not Religious, Issues are Motivating Terrorists 235 War Costs Endanger Our Future Security 238 Questions Remain in the Fall of Emperor Spitzer 240 Zbigniew Brzezinski: Master of Foreign Policy 243 Questions of War 246 Market “Magic” Relied on Greed 248 U.S. Can’t Aﬀord More Mistakes 250 America Has Lost Sight of Its Original Work Ethic 253

Part V: The Present as Future 257

The Original Community Organizer 259 Counterinsurgency Doesn’t Come Naturally to U.S. Forces 262 Crisis Mode Dominates International Conference 264 One Woman’s Journey through the Health Care Jungle 267 Obama Strategy to End War by Making War 269 Next Stop: Yemen 272 Is There a New Revolution Under Way in Iran? 274 Afghan Morass 277 Twentieth Anniversary of the Berlin Wall 280 The Fault is in Ourselves 283 Iraq War Still a Mistake 285 Price of Peace in Europe 288 Google in China 290 How did We Ever Get to be So Incivil and Vulgar? Without Even Trying? 292 Radical Young Terrorists aren’t So Mysterious After All 295

Part VI: Out of Time but in Space 299

Chicago: Life is a Matter of “Becoming” 301 viii Contents

Vietnam. Then Haiti Today 303 Paciﬁst Policies, Appeasing Terrorism 305 “Axis of Annoyance” Prevails in Latin America 308 War on the Southern Border 311 Spreading the Developmental “Gospel” 313 African Illusions and Realities 316 Germany’s Isolation Collapsed with The Wall 318 A Trip to Polish Roots 321 Mothers: The Swing Generation for Women’s Rights 325 New South Africa Shines at the World Cup 328 America’s Little Wars are Draining Us in a Big Way 331 Summer Home: The Past is No More 333 Lessons from the Chicago South Side 335 A Graduate Comes Full Circle 338

Index 341

Preface to the Paperback Edition

So many acute observers of the press have told me recently that I lived in the “golden age” of foreign correspondence that I have now come to believe it. In fact, it was roughly the entire twentieth century that constituted that gilded era, although my years working overseas from 1964 to 2006 were surely a golden age within the golden age. In the 1920s, foreign correspondents were such rare and sexy birds that some of them spoke at Carnegie Hall on their experiences in the strange corners of the world—after all, in that age, very, very few people had the capacity to travel around the world, meet international leaders, and pry into the psyches of countries at war and at peace. Throughout this period, the very mention of the term “foreign correspondent” was enough to evoke oohs and aahs from homebound and ocean-bound Americans. And, why not? We were such a small group of crazy para-juveniles, romantic and fearless, dreaming modestly only of eternal praise and recognition! But what always amazed me was that this small group of apparently normal people, say, maybe twenty or thirty on one big story, were bringing home virtually all the information that our fellow citizens received. Their information passed through to the diplomats, the businessmen, and the military oﬃcers and actually helped create diplomatic, economic, and military policy across the world. They were interpreting the world for the world. Perhaps the great Ernie Pyle of World War II fame, beloved of every Army grunt in World War II, described the inner creed of the war correspondent best. “We correspondents could go anywhere we pleased,” he wrote, “being gifted and chosen characters.” Yes, whether one worked for a wire service like the Associated Press (AP), or for a major newspaper like the New York Times or my own beloved Chicago Daily News, or for a television network, you tended to feel you were indeed “chosen.” After all, you were out there, almost always totally on your own, passing closed borders in the dead of night, closing in on tyrants in their dens, or describing a fellahin in Egypt

xi Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible standing out in his field as if silently watching the horizon. This life was all, all yours. You made all the decisions and then told the world what you had decided the truth was—and you’d better be right! Your editor was there at home, pretending to keep track of the independent, cunning, and ego-active personalities that he or she called his or her “correspondents,” but knowing at heart that they were really the only ones in charge of themselves. In short, we were privileged onlookers and witnesses to that first page of history, without which there would be no others. Literally, “the news” went through us—or it didn’t go at all. And there were many satisfactions, none of them financial. (I cost the Chicago Daily News $250,000 a year, but I only received a salary of $23,000 for eight months work.) I recall as if it were yesterday how, after covering the Dominican Revolution for months in 1965, I would come back occasionally to the place I loved so much and people I never knew would stop us correspondents on the sidewalk, pat our backs, and sometimes burst into tears. At first, I was bewildered. Then one grizzled little Dominican man hugged me and said, “We’ll never forget you journalists. You stopped the killing.” I admit that I look at our profession very romantically. I see the foreign correspondents out there like the great French writer Antoine de St. Exupery’s lone aviators, flying from place to place, crossing over great rivers and oceans, navigating through the air, the world being theirs, always so happy to see their precious compatriots again—until there are simply too many conflicts, too many civil disturbances, too many guerrilla wars, too many child soldiers, too many sad stories! One flies into one of many “homes,” places with names like Cyprus, Hong Kong, or Panama, places where the world’s intelligence officers are watching but not working, and realize that a friend once sought is now yet another never to be seen again—one of St. Exupery’s bad “accidents of journeying.” Another friend dead in a war or bizarre conflict in which our world excels! One more cost of this consuming life! Yet this book, while based obviously on the work of one foreign correspondent and the day-to-day product, attempts gamely to illu- minate another part of the work besides the, hopefully, accurate and correctly analyzed events of the world. When the undauntable late Irving Louis Horowitz, the distin- guished professor and sociologist, talked to me about this book, he xii Preface to the Paperback Edition pointedly posed the question to me: “Now tell me what you think the book is about?” As, sometimes, when someone asks you your brother’s name and you find yourself stammering, “Joe… Malcolm… Lester,” I could not think of one single thing to describe what we were doing. Finally, I got out, “Well, it’s predicting the unthinkable.” I contemplated once more. “And anticipating the impossible.” “That’s it!” Irving came back at me. “That’s it!” I pondered over my two ideas. “Which one?” I asked. “Both,” he said. And so it was. Irving was usually right, and with me he was kinder than any editor or publisher I had ever had. I was unreservedly saddened and at a loss when he died in the spring of 2012. What I was trying to do in and with this book were several things: one, I wanted the reader, whether journalism student or elder citizen, to see the kind of work, and the variety of themes and styles, that an experienced foreign correspondent could produce and use in her work overseas—how she chose and used sources, kept her own passions at bay, and attempted to educate her own people (and, first, herself); two, I wanted the citizens of my beloved country to see that an honest journalist, who knows history and languages and cultural quirks, can understand another country very well, even rather easily if she has an open mind and can deal with levels of psyche and society; three, above all, I wanted Americans to understand that nothing is inevitable. Nothing is irreversible. If we attend to the world and to its leaderships, and if we have correctly analyzed a nation’s or an empire’s or a corpo- ration’s system and structure, knowledge will reveal its essence every time. If we build our relations with other countries, upon these solid rocks of history and not upon the sands of the moment, then we can stop things from happening before the savages overrun us. To point to only a couple of parts of the book in which the intention of predicting and anticipating was written into many of my missives, think about Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia in the 1980s. So many American politicians and others have repeated that they never dreamed that the Soviet Union could collapse the way it did, dissolving formally in 1991, but this naïveté is truly bewildering to me. I watched Berlin crumble in the 1980s. Already West German television was all over the Eastern bloc, with Western reporters coming in, filming in the East and then broadcasting their critical observations back to the East. Exchanges with West German institutes had become a norm for Eastern intellectuals. xiii Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible

Most important, in the mid 1980s the East German communist government announced it was doing two things: it was bringing back the statue of the horse of Fredrick the Great and placing it back on Unter den Linden; and it was making the head of the Lutheran Church, already an unpalatable force in the East, the equivalent of a foreign minister. What did those two things mean? They meant that the communist regime was recognizing another great force in history besides communism, and it was recognizing the Lutheran Church, in effect a counter-Christian ideology, as legitimate. When I went to the Rotes Rathaus (the Red or Communist City Hall) in East Germany two months before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and heard the people begin to mock and make fun of the Communist leaders standing there in a frightened line, I said to myself, “It’s all over. It’s over.” And it was. In Poland, in that same heady decade so little understood in Amer- ica, the head of the Communist Politburo told me they were going to become “Social Democrats.” The Solidarity Free Trade Unions had es- tablished a real competitor to the Communist Party. In Russia, reform was growing under Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan told four of us in the Oval Office that he and Gorbachev were now “good friends” and that there was no conflict between the Soviet Union and America. As I walked out with three of my journalistic compatriots, I said breathlessly to one, “He just told us the Cold War was over. He just told us.” In 1989, I flew from Berlin to Belgrade because my instinct, knowledge of history, and Chicago street sense told me that Yugoslavia, still staggering from the death of Marshall Tito a decade before, was going to split up. With Yugoslavia having six major ethnic groups, that meant war. Not only were my fears confirmed, but several of the leading figures in the country carefully outlined for me exactly how and why the Serbs were going to unleash a barrage of horrors against the Croats, Bosnians, and Slovenians. Yet, hundreds of thousands had to die in the Serbs’ “ethnic cleansing” before the Americans and the Europeans acted. That column is included in this book as a prime example of how leaders could know, if they would know what is inevitably going to happen—and how we foreign correspondents can fulfill a warning function. xiv Preface to the Paperback Edition

But the world is different today, you will say to me now. You will inevitably point out to me the effects of all the new technology and of the changes in the press: how correspondents can file through their own phones; how the numbers of foreign correspondents have been so badly cut back; how “parachutists” are taking the place of the dogged old foreign correspondents; how the camaraderie that we all treasured is largely gone today; how we really don’t know how we will now get our information, at the time we need it most. Fine! Surely, you are right. But this is a different story. This is my story, but it is also the story of hundreds of journalists of my generation and the people around the world for whom we, at one time or another, think we are speaking for. Strangely enough, for me it is a very positive story, because it says that things don’t have to be as they are, that something always can be done if—actually, as always—it is really all in our hands.

—Georgie Anne Geyer Washington, D.C. March 6, 2013

Preface

I unabashedly love the author of this collection of opinion pieces, interview materials, and just plain reportage. Georgie Anne Geyer would in all likelihood say that this is precisely the sort of remark not to make in public. It is the essential codebook of people of ideas (including reporters) not to speak about the personal in print. But having violated this sentiment in my opening sentence, it is too late to take it back! The existence of affection is however, subject to explanation. And in these brief pages I intend to do exactly that—for those who do not know or perhaps even forgotten the stream of articles over the past near forty years that they have read bearing Georgie Anne Geyer’s name. Last year, in 2010, I was asked to support an award nomination of some substance on behalf of Georgie Anne. Let me start with the final paragraph of that encomium—and follow that with something more in keeping with the present occasion: an introduction to the world and work of Georgie Anne Geyer. Given the nature of the person, no less than the world at large, we do not always agree on every specific “hot spot” issue in the world, or for that matter, what to do about reducing the temperature. But in all of these dialogues and deliberations, one thing is clear: Georgie Anne’s steady sense of democratic horizons and totalitarian limitations. To read her work, whoever be the leader scru- tinized or the regime being critiqued, it is evident that she is driven by higher moral principles—and without bombast or tendentious finger pointing, but always with a realization that the world of politics like that of the world of ordinary people has as its rock bottom, something beyond profits and losses, what we still distinguish as good and evil. First and foremost, while Geyer may have written words of praise and criticism on more than one hundred nations in her work (before this volume easier to critique than to remember), the point of my remarks is not to simply single out the times that she has been right (often) or wrong (rarely) in summarizing such diverse cultures around the world. To do so is to repeat or summarize what Georgie Anne is better able to do than commentators. Rather, the grand key to her

xvii Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible journalism is the unitary character of her empirical concerns and her moral probity. They come from the same place: the unitary character of human imagination, of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, and good and evil. This is not a function of her perfection in vision, it is a matter that once having made up her mind on the big issues that define the human being, she sets for herself the journalistic task of using such personal judgments as a yardstick in the measurement of other peoples, nations, and the fateful decisions made. Decisions are important. They implement and inform policies. For that is what journalists must do to be effective: describe the decisions made by others that have consequences for ourselves. That is what Georgie Anne does with such glorious aplomb: when she details the horrible abuses of totalitarian dictators, she is always clear that whether it is Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini—or more recently Gaddafi, Castro, or Khomeini—the same characteristic sort of social psychology is on display, whether from a dedicated theocratic or atheistic ruler. For Georgie Anne, the world is constantly faced with a crisis created by those who believe themselves to be in possession of absolute truth, and with the power to enforce such absolutism. Doubt becomes a form of criminality. “These truths are not the truths we value—openness and liberty in place of state control; human rights in place of the inexorably humiliating control of the charismatic leader or ideology over the person.” At times, the behemoth comes in the guise of totems and icons. But the great beast who rules always reveal itself in the form of punishment of the innocent and harassment of the person who even inquires. By the same token, Georgie Anne provides simple and compelling guides to the perplexed. Her columns urge us to be careful of gran- deur and gesture especially in the guise of big speeches, thundering historic statements about the future perfection of the state, and those who conflate social science and state systems. The answer for her is again, plain: it is the same as the Reagan response to Gorbachev: “I have always believed that the greatest revolution in this country begins with three words: We the People.” It is these simple words that assure equity, or at least protection. In the dangerous world of present day journalism—where deaths are all too frequent and silence all too common, Georgie Anne points out that “in country after country, borders are not holding, structures are not holding, and institutions are not holding.” So foreign correspondents, who in the eyes of America’s xviii Preface enemies take on the coloration of the place of the military personnel, become representatives of all the country’s policies. As Georgie Anne notes, that is the true meaning of the assassination of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, which is what makes living commentators “stand more and more starkly against bare destiny.” What then of the moral status of our own country? How does one confront weakness, foolishness, and a continuing cycle of policy error and diplomatic obtuseness? What are the prospects for the democratic culture as such? Like every serious American, Geyer had to confront issues of war and peace, violence and pacifism, in contexts that were morally ambiguous, or at least far from transparent. Her approach is essentially to link the act of war with the risks to national legitimacy of such undertakings. Her animosity to the war in Iraq did not derive from any great regard for its fierce dictator Saddam Hussein or his decadent family of secular monarchs. Rather the absence of uncover- ing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or at least the incapacity to locate the cachet that provided the rationale for an invasion effort, damaged the moral standards America set for itself—however evil the regime in Baghdad may have been. Indeed, in Disarming Iraq, the mild mannered executive director of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission supervising international inspection, Hans Blix, pointed out the obvious to a government that had already made up its mind to use force: “The military intervention of Iraq was all but announced and here we were at the UN sketching a peaceful way to try to ensure the country’s (Iraq) disarmament!” Georgie Anne put matters more bluntly: “This entire generation of Americans threw away cultural knowledge in the name of the fashion- able assurance that ‘the economy’ would solve all human problems (‘Win win’ another economic utopian creed!) After all, the Cold War was over. Who would attack us now?” These were not the words of a pacifist or dedicated left ideologist. Far from it. Geyer is not and never was anything but an advocate of legitimate American interests and proponent of American values. Her position was taken precisely in the name of the national interest. The issue of intervention was not an abstract ideological game with pacifism. “This was serious stuff, and the men who wreak such havoc whether Osama bin Laden or some other coalition of terrorist forces are terrible enemies. It is also a dangerous moment. For if our leaders simply ‘act’ without knowing the world they are acting in, this real

xix Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible threat will only worsen. This newest binge is over. The question is whether we can intellectually sober up.” Georgie Anne’s dearest heroes were not only “seasoned middle aged men,” but military men, spe- cifically “Eisenhower, Marshall, and MacArthur.” They were generals capable of “creating sound policies based on a balanced political military and moral view of the world.” One element in her reporting that comes through repeatedly is that she is a sharp-eyed interviewer as well as sound observer on the ground. It was her job to determine who was telling the truth and who was falsifying—even from the best of intentions. But it is proper to note that the closer she comes to the present, the more resistant she becomes to the idea of intervention as a first option solution to international problems. She is not so much responding to the dangers of military struggle, but to how fuzzy the outcome seems to be. In part, this is the final legacy of the painful Vietnam War. More recently, President Clinton’s forays in Haiti are cited as a recent example of a declared success that proved to be an unmitigated failure. In contrast, I suspect that her respect and appreciation of Barack Obama, qualified though it is, derives from the President’s caution in the face of global decision-making. “The White House does not use the word win any more, it doesn’t even use the word ‘prevail’, an infinitely better word.” Her positions made her less than popular among hard conservatives and ballistic radicals alike. And in a writing career that depends heavily on constant public approbation for support—which is the lot of writers of op-ed pieces—the costs in personal career ratings were and continue to remain high. In back of these carefully nuanced positions taken by Georgie Anne, often cloaked behind the bombast of interview materials of all sorts, is a simple concern for the importance of human life, especially the life of the young who must bear the burden of wars that they do not declare, and often do not quite understand. The bitterness of her rhetoric becomes ever blunter. The United States “lost the modesty of its founding fathers, who vowed not to meddle aboard and began to dream of nation-building.” But, she adds “in the end, it only de-energized and impoverished its own country.” The entire new process not of one world but of one infinitely powerful nation, led to large numbers of casualties, many dead innocent souls, many brave Americans not coming home. The conundrum in this is the idea that the United States as a special exceptional nation is real. But that xx Preface includes the special legitimacy of what Seymour Martin Lipset termed “the first new nation.” For embodied in so many of these columns is this belief that law must trump sheer power if morality is ever to conquer simple force. The leitmotif in Geyer is a firm belief that the common good is com- promised, as is the idea of citizenship itself, in the teeth of battle. The text in her Northwestern University commencement address shows an America starting to confront its own tradition and legacy. Whether it demonstrates growth will be for the future to determine. Georgie Anne is a “foreign correspondent” but not a war correspondent. Her strength rests on talking with all sorts of political and economic leaders—from the nice to the nasty. Hers is a world at peace that is a better climate for jet travel and face to face exchanges with tyrants than injured civilians and dead soldiers. I daresay this is a view held by many if not most ordinary folks. Whether the actual behavior of leadership can be molded or at least modified by such exchanges and interactions has yet to be demonstrated. But the modification of behavior is certainly an implicit prospect if not uniformly fulfilled goal in the world of a foreign correspondent. This utopian element does indeed trouble Georgie Anne, but of all the sins of fatuous belief in Reason and Enlightenment, it is probably the most understandable. Whether reason of a Kantian sort can even work its wonders in a world of disparities in power and privilege is another matter. The conclusion I derive from this panoply of outstanding columns on the prejudices and prides of extraordinary leaders and pettifog- ging tyrants is not the need for an endorsement of particular public figures, but an appreciation of their ordinariness—how subject they are to the foibles of their decisions and the fables of their culture. It is the effort at rationality more than its accomplishments that require our respect and admiration. I do not wish to end with a profound statement—either on something that Georgie Anne wrote nor for that matter one that I essayed. Rather I choose to conclude with Crane Brinton, that marvelous, near forgotten giant in the history of ideas, who ended his great work on A History of Western Morals (1959 for those interested in dates) with an appreciation of the sophistication rooted in the Western tradition: “There are signs that even the more ardently faithful of the Enlightenment are learning lessons the Greeks themselves final learned, though at an unhappy cost: ‘man is the measure of all things’ does not mean ‘man is the master of all things’

xxi Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible not even potentially, not even if suﬃciently Enlightened. Mastery of the universe would seem, so far, somewhat beyond us all, scientists, moralists, soldiers, statesmen, priests. But in the end, man is help- less but invincible, chastened but never abject.” I take this to also be the indelible lesson of the title no less than content of Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible.

—Irving Louis Horowitz Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey March 29, 2011

xxii Acknowledgments

The originator of this book is Professor Irving Louis Horowitz, one of the greatest and most original scholars in America today. To him and his immense good will and good spirits and to the staff of Transaction Publishers which he heads, I owe an immense measure of gratitude and thanks. They have given me the satisfaction and pleasure, after fifty years of work as a foreign correspondent and author, to have a representative sampling of my work together in one place. As much as one can personally thank Professor Horowitz for this professional feast to note half a century of work—and especially because he, against all his publishing rules, put his personal hand to the choosing and editing of the columns—I want also to thank the most unusual Transaction team. In an age in journalism and publishing in which ego and conflict dominate the interactions between people, the Transaction people are extraordinary; they are, in the true sense of the word, “colleagues,” working together for a combined end; they are sup- portive, friendly and well-informed professionals. I want especially to thank Mary Curtis, president of Transaction and Professor Horowitz’s wife, for her many unusually creative ideas and inputs, Jeffrey Stetz for his brilliance in web technology for bringing together into a book a heap of wrinkled, printed old newspaper columns, electronic articles and new introductions; and Mindy Waizer and Aileen Bryant-Allen for their remarkable marketing skills. There would, of course, be no book at all without the syndication genius of my own company of thirty years, Universal Press Syndicate, where I have written most of my approximately 10,000 syndicated editorial columns, after being for many years a local reporter and then foreign correspondent for the old Chicago Daily News. At UPS, in 2009 renamed Universal Uclick to match us all up to the electronic age, I have had the joy of working closely with the company’s legend- ary founder, John McMeel, with our capable syndicate president Lee Salem and my erudite editors Sue Roush and Alan McDermott. As I write this, the entire world of syndication and journalism is changing before our eyes, with newspapers failing left and right or dropping

xxiii Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible back into miserably inferior levels. I can only hope that this little book will remind us of why syndication, a brilliant invention of traditional journalism which offered papers across the country and overseas at minimal cost the talents of major journalists, has been historically such a crucially important part of American journalism. A note here: The fact that there are so many different individual papers noted here as immediate sources for the columns in the book only means that this particular column was taken from that particular paper; it could as well have appeared in the many papers that took the column and paid based on their circulation. Finally, there is no amount of personal praise that can possibly sufficiently underline the role played by my irreplaceable executive assistant of twenty-one years, Rita Tiwari. She worked hand-in-hand with me in seeking out the original columns, some from twenty or twenty-five years ago, in finding those now in electronic files and in devising a heroically berserk, but quite workable, system of organiz- ing them and marking them so we wouldn’t get lost in the maze we had created. Rita somehow was always able to anticipate the next step—thus, she even anticipates the title of the book! In my own heart, I want also to thank the thousands of people all over the world who opened up their lives and their thoughts to me for these and all the other columns and articles I have written. I always felt I was blessed to be able somehow to speak for them.

—Georgie Anne Geyer Washington, D. C. August 12, 2010

xxiv Part I

The Expectant Decade

i In the early 1980s, covering Eastern Europe, I soon realized that things were not at all what Washington thought they were. East Germany was still like a Communist glacier in many ways, yes, but that glacier was melting from inside, which was where you had to see it. So I hit upon an old and limitedly useful technique to tell MY story—a letter to the President. Maybe he even read it.

East Germany’s Not at All like Its Image, Ron

EAST BERLIN—Dear President Reagan: I am standing here, as you would see it, in the very mouth of the dragon. I am here in what to people with your concept of the East is the modern heart of the ideological darkness. On my left hand is the monstrously ugly wall, with its webbing of warning sirens, barbed-wire fences and armed men. Under the nearby river Spree, there is even a net that sets off alarms if someone tries to swim across. But on my right hand is a society quite different from the images of the “communist” world that you have been acting so strongly against. The Wall is here, yes, but East Germany is also a working country with one of the highest industrial outputs in the world. American diplomats are free to travel anywhere in this country of 16 million, unlike in the Soviet Union. The Evangelical Lutheran Church is thriving and has spawned an amazing Eastern peace movement. If you do not challenge the system—and you cannot—life is increasingly better. The communist—or, rather, socialist—system buys off the consumer. There are even special stores that sell Western goods for East German marks. In the ones that I visited, I found stacks of blue jeans for 65 marks, Calgon soap flakes for 5 marks and Rochas perfume for 30 marks. (The mark was 2.40 to the dollar that day.) Even more important is the fact that contact with Western thought is increasing rapidly. Like other “socialist” countries, as it has devel- oped into a more complex system, East Germany has set up myriad institutes. These bring Western thinkers across The Wall at a moment’s notice. The institutes, like the one that informs the Central Committee of the Communist Party, are in constant contact with our diplomats. Many of their members visit America. I’m sorry to say this, Mr. President, but given your hard-line anti-communist acts of the last weeks and the increasingly wild

3 Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible and hostile rhetoric, I just don’t think you understand the changes occurring in the Eastern bloc. Indeed, at the Fourth of July reception here, the Eastern diplomats were speaking of you to Western counterparts, saying, “He is send- ing us back to Stalinism.” Please think about this, Mr. President. This could be the outcome of your “hard-line” policies. This is the land—the city—of Bertolt Brecht, who wrote brilliantly of German decadence. Decadence today? Well, East Germans are more likely to see it every Thursday night when “Dallas” comes across on the West German TV that happily ignores The Wall. The question is a simple one; how best to live with inimical systems like this one; how best, in the long run, to change them, or at least stop them from expanding elsewhere? Again, I am sorry to say it, Mr. President, but I’m afraid that even here you are wrong. We should not be closing this world off, but doing everything possible to continue opening it up. Détente was beginning to do this. You see, diplomats and businessmen and journalists like me can feel and touch and see in different ways this city of shiny/shabby new skyscrapers and open lots where the winds still blow across World War II ruins. I fear, Mr. President, that your people are abstracting and demonizing a society in order to close it off once more—and this, ironically, defeats what you want to accomplish. Source: Chicago Sun-Times, July 8, 1982. i But a journalist, particularly in the foreign field, cannot assume that his or her reader knows the background of the story. So here I remi- nisced about a 1970s helicopter trip with NATO troops over the East German border. Even with my supposed journalistic knowledge, I was astonished that “The Wall” did not only circle around West Berlin but in fact ran from the Baltic Sea along the entire East German border to Czechoslovakia! Talk about “No Exits.”

Berlin Wall Is Just One Example of How the World Is Split in Two

WASHINGTON, D.C.—With all the attention focused last week on the Berlin Wall, no one has pointed out that The Wall is a phenom- enon that goes far beyond that beleaguered city. Several years ago, for 4