"Moving Violations"

by John Hockenberry, ABC News

Luncheon Lecture Series

November 7, 1995

Summary: Hockenberry talks about the Middle East in the wake of Rabin's assassination, covering war zones from a wheelchair, and his new book, MOVING VIOLATIONS.

Reporters: Be aware that this transcript has not been checked against the original tape for accuracy and appears in abbreviated form.

INTRODUCTION BY MARVIN KALB: I'm Marvin Kalb, Director of the Shorenstein Center, and it's my pleasure to introduce our guest for this brown bag luncheon. He's John Hockenberry, and he's going to talk to us about his book, "Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence." John Hockenberry has been a journalist for a long time and in looking through his biography I came upon this line, "From 1979 to 1981, he attended the University of Oregon to study music composition and harpsichord (Laughing), but apparently that did not stop him from proceeding on to various other assignments.

For 12 years he worked for National Public Radio, general assignment reporter, Middle East correspondent, boasting of a number of NPR programs including "The Talk of the Nation," which is this wonderful show in the afternoon. Then in 1992, he was seduced by money -- that's my phrase (laughing), and joined ABC television, and he's worked for news magazine programs such as "Day One."

During the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, he was back in the Middle East covering the war. He was among the first of the Western broadcast journalists to file from the refugee camps in the Turkish areas of Iraq. He has been based in Jerusalem, and I'd love to hear, in fact, what he might have to say about the current situation in Israel in the wake of Prime Minister Rabin's assassination.

We are absolutely delighted, John, that you could spend some time with us, and welcome.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Thank you very much. Not many people know that I'm the harpsichord affairs correspondent. (Laughing) It's a one-time position. I'm the first to fill it. I just got back from Hawaii after two weeks on a honeymoon. Thank you very much. (Applause) And so I was a little concerned that my thoughts would be muddled and soft and mushy, arriving here today just two days from that trip. But I think the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin has certainly caused my thoughts to move across the Mediterranean to think about the experiences I had at that time when I was based in the Middle East.

I spent three years there from '87 until '91 off and on and was there for the Gulf War and for most of what's popularly referred to as the ... Palestinian Uprising which in many ways was the culmination of a lot of processes that were well in place following the '73 and '67 wars.

And I interviewed Rabin twice. I mean, many journalists have interviewed him many, many more times. I can't at all say I have any particular insights into him as a person coming from a personal standpoint. But it always impressed me that he was Israel's sort of pre-eminent, credible, somber leader in the same way that Begin was Israel's pre-eminent, credible, hard-line leader. And that it is certainly no accident that he would be the one to move the country towards peace and that Begin, indeed, was the one to take the initial step, albeit reluctantly I think in both cases, Begin and Rabin were reluctant to move in the way that they did initially.

And so anyway, this is an opportunity for me to point to some passages in my book which I would be happy to talk about or not on this particular day. But it referred to my period in the Middle East and the insights that I learned about Israel both because I'm a journalist but also because I was an unusual journalist operating in a strange sort of Netherworld where I wasn't what was expected since I was rolling up to the news conference in a wheelchair.

In the case of Rabin, he noticed me immediately and had actually a lot of experience with people in chairs, paraplegics and war-injured of all kinds because he was the Chief of Staff, and he was very, very close to his troops. And he would always ask me about the chair.

He focused very much on the chair from the standpoint of people he knew, soldiers that he knew. And the one sort of personal comment he gave me was, and I can't remember the exact quote but extrapolating in some sense that my being in the Middle East in a chair rolling around as an American had something to do with searching out wars, searching out confrontation, challenge and adversity, something that he saw as a theme in his own life.

And the one offhand comment he gave to me, and this was when he was Defense Minister in late '88 and I interviewed him, and he said, "You know, at some point, you have to stop looking for wars." And this sort of came out of nowhere and for Rabin to make a joke, I mean, that would hit the wires in Israel. (Laughing)

And so I didn't quite know what to make of it, and it was one of those curious kind of offhanded, intense, half-humorous, but filled with wisdom kinds of statements that Rabin was known to make. And I share it with you only because I've been thinking about it this week.

And I would like to just note how much has changed in so short a period of time. And I haven't been in Israel since '92. And I'm dying to go back and just see what the post-- I used to say, "What was the post-91 Israel, which is sort of the end of the Gulf War?" I was there at the very end, but certainly things changed significantly in the six months after the Gulf War. Then it became "Well, what about the '93 era subsequent to the handshake in Washington?" And then the post-94 era when they were implementing autonomy in Gaza.

And now we will always think in terms of the post-95 era in Israel in the sense that this assassination has really chartered another strange course ahead for the peace process and for the psyche of Israel and the people of the occupied territories and the Palestinians at large.

So I'll just read a couple of passages here that no one has asked me to read (Laughing) at all during my book tour, which is a very nice change of pace. And by way of context, let me just-- I'm going to make this brief so that we don't get bogged down into academia at Harvard. (Laughing)

Let me start by saying in November of 1988, the Palestinians declared their state independent in a ceremony held in Algiers at a meeting of the Palestine National Council, which is a sort of broad committee of the PLO. And they went to Algiers to have this meeting and to declare independence. And the Israelis responded by closing the occupied territories in a way it hadn't ever been done before which is almost routine now. The border of Gaza was completely closed and the border of the West Bank was completely closed.

And this is one of these curious kinds of things that would happen in Israel all the time where aside from the extreme levels of security that existed everywhere, there was also a certain kind of complicity on both sides with the security. Israel would declare the border closed. And you would drive up, it would be open. I mean, there were checkpoints that if you drove up to it, there was no way you would get in. But, you know, there was like another place down here that you could get in.

And it seemed to me that the notion of the curfew or the notion of this lockdown in Israel had as much to do with everyone's agreement that this was how things were going to be done as it had to do with actual security, actual fears. And this was always a curiosity to me. And it was something I discovered by smuggling myself into Gaza, and I say that and perhaps you're going, "God, he smuggled himself in. What a brave ..." (Laughing), but smuggling myself into Gaza on a day that the border was absolutely closed simply involved taking an Arab taxi. (Laughing)

It simply involved going down to the taxi stand right near the Damascus Gate, the old city, and taking one of the Arab long taxis, ... and just hopping in the backseat of that and going to the Aris checkpoint at Gaza, saw the Arab driver, saw the blonde guy sleeping in the backseat-- Figure that out, but still, boom, wave me through. And the fact that the wheelchair was on the top added some sort of humanitarian dimension. (LAUGHING) So therefore, I was ushered through into Gaza. Big deal.

But I was the only journalist in Gaza who was a non-Palestinian stringer in Gaza on the day of this announcement. I thought this would be an interesting story. And I had not considered at all how I was going to get around or how I was going to function because it was going to be at curfew the entire time.

So I stayed with a Palestinian friend who was called by the name of Taha, and I will sort of begin at the point at which I decided that staying with Taha was probably not sufficiently a story for me (Laughing) to justify this entire sort of smuggling operation and staying the entire weekend and being out of touch with my NPR editors, another extreme hazard of the assignment (Laughing) for three days. Just to give you an insight into NPR, the fact that they were reading on the wires that Gaza was closed. They knew that I was in there, and they knew that I had come up with some unspecified mechanism for getting in does only enhance their sense of drama about the whole affair. (Laughing)

Well, for me, I had taken an Arab taxi and went to Gaza and was eating falafel at Taha's house. (Laughing) To them, "John burned the security code. (Laughing) This is violation potentially is rated R. My God, I hope he's okay." (Laughing) Which as a journalist can really only help you. (Laughing) ... with that sort of spirit, you're ready to go. So there's the context, and I realized that Taha's house was not going to be a sufficient setting. Maybe a good lead paragraph, and I decided I would have to move around under curfew.

"I began by sneaking along the back streets and smelly alleys avoiding the well-paved main roads where Gaza's level topography made rolling in a wheelchair a breeze. Gaza's main intersections were blocked with burning tires and debris, and boys in ski masks were busy painting graffiti on the walls.

I rolled by one intersection and no one even noticed me. An Israeli patrol suddenly turned the corner, and while the masked boys vanished, I could do nothing but sit there and watch them pass by. I got no notice from the soldiers either. With their rifles at the ready, they hauled barricades out of the road and doused burning tires and then drove on. They looked right through me.

As one patrol stopped to put out a fire, I pulled out a microphone and began recording. Still no one noticed. I felt like a ghost. Under curfew, Gaza's street life moves to its rooftops. Planks laid from roof to roof forming an alternative street map for moving around the city and refugee camps out of the sight and range of Israeli patrols.

As I rolled through the neighborhoods, the people on the rooftops watched me and called ahead to the next block to let them know I was coming. As I came around each corner, I could hear the whispering from above. "... (Speaking in Arabic)," the journalist in the wheelchair" in Arabic. (Laughing) After a few blocks, I was rolling without any fear of being stopped either by soldiers or the Palestinian boys with their masks and gasoline bombs.

Down on the streets among the combatants, I was as invisible as the old men pulling their donkey carts, part of Gaza's wallpaper. But from the roofs of Gaza, I was something new to watch. The rooftop network had notified the United Nations that I was coming long before I arrived. When I rolled up to the door of the U.N. compound at Unra (sp?), the refugee embassy in Gaza, it opened, and I was whisked in. The Palestinian workers thought it was an act of bravery to have come through the streets in broad daylight in a wheelchair. I couldn't convey how easy it had been.

Each time I tried to say that the reason I had no fear of being stopped was because no one was paying the slightest attention to me at all, the workers applauded. "You are speaking with great courage, sir," (Laughing) one of my doctors said. It was the same at Shippa (sp?) Hospital where my arrival was applauded in the halls. The young male patients in their filthy hospital wheelchairs gathered around to inspect my chair and tape recorder while the doctors asked me what I had seen out on the streets.

I arrived at the Morna (sp?) House Hotel in Gaza, and Mrs. Alia (sp?) greeted me at the gate." Alia is a member of the Showa (sp?) family, which is a Sian family of Gaza. And she's Lebanese Palestinian Gazan, and she's just a grand institution in Gaza. And if you ever go to Gaza City, by all means you should go there, and she'll tell you all sorts of-- I mean, she's just the classic matron of the hotel in the middle of Hell. So I refer to Alia here in second reference, but she's explained earlier. And it would be remiss of me not to give you a little sense of her personality.

"Alia greeted me at the gate, and I had known her from before. "We knew that you would come. The boys called from the roofs to say that you were defying the curfew." She turned to one of her guests, an academic type working on a project who had been stranded in Gaza by the Israeli restrictions. "He's one of our bravest journalists," Alia said, as if describing one of her own sons.

Now the fact that I was out in the open at all was its own marvel to the Palestinians that weekend. Although there were many Gazans in wheelchairs from auto accidents and the daily confrontations with Israeli bullets, the crips from Gaza did not show themselves except to occasionally bag in the market. It was an unwritten marker. A line everyone agreed not to cross, a barrier of shame that was as invisible to me as I was to the Intifada, combatants on Gaza's deserted streets.

The curfew itself was a kind of invisible wall in the mind tended by Israelis and Palestinians in a bizarre ritual of agreement. If everyone in Gaza refused to stay home, if even a fraction refused, there would be no curfew and no way for the Israelis to really enforce it. Guns were not needed to enforce a curfew if people believed it to be in effect. Years of Israeli occupation and a considerable violence that came along with it had built these walls.

The stateless limbo of the people of Gaza had turned them into a demoralized society of the politically disabled surrounded by what they believed to be insurmountable barriers. Just as there was no need to lock the crips up or confine them to their houses, if they believed there was no point in going outside, Palestinians of Gaza only needed to be told they couldn't go out. The Intifada was itself about the breakdown of such barriers and the rewriting of all those rules. Because I didn't see the walls and the combatants didn't see me, I moved about freely.

From their rooftops, the Gazans under curfew saw this freedom and called it bravery for lack of a better name."

So that's a sense of what it was like that weekend rolling around on the streets. I mean, indeed, nobody noticed me, and everywhere I went I was handed these like little neighborhood Nobel Prizes, and I had to basically get the subject off of me so that I could ask questions and find out what was going on and get some sense of what life was like.

After about two days of this curfew, the announcement at the Palestine National Conference came out of Algiers, and it was monitored on televisions all over the Gaza Strip and all over Israel for that matter. And the Gazans, it should be noted, preferred to watch Israeli TV because the Israeli media would air the most inflammatory and kind of rhetorical flourishes with kind of passionate Hebrew translation. It would indicate, "See, see, see, see, see. Nothing's changing here." But this was exactly what the Palestinians wanted to see. They didn't want to watch Jordanian television, which would basically have lots of b-roll of Arab leaders sitting around on couches and the sort of solemn boring tones of the Arabic announcers saying that, "There were some meetings, and people were talking." (Laughing)

And so the style of the two-- I mean, the Palestinians were obsessed with Israeli television. This is what they really wanted to watch, and they also assumed that they were getting the story from the Israeli media because the Israelis have much more of a stake in the outcome and therefore, were much more inclined to cover it at least as a real event.

Whereas the Arab leaders had a very uncertain stake in the outcome. Yes, they wanted to support Palestinian nationalism because that was sort of their whole ... in the Cold War. I mean, your position in the Arab world on the Palestinians was sort of determined by whether you were in the American or the Soviet camp. But it was also the case that to support the Palestinians, if you had a large Palestinian population in your country, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, figuratively, it was stabilizing to people like King Hussein certainly back in the mid-eighties. So the Arabic television was a snore, and the Israeli television was like Inside Edition or something at least for the people in Gaza.

So the announcement was finally made late after television had gone off the air, of course, because Arafat always waits four hours after things are scheduled to actually make an announcement. And this is true. I mean, this is true today. It's always true. And the announcement came out, and there were fireworks, and it was a tremendous celebration for five minutes because after five minutes of the balloons and the fireworks, all the people ran up to the top of the roof at the same moment and shot off their fireworks. And then the Israelis moved in and shut everything down. And so for five minutes it looked like the Fourth of July, and then it went back to looking like Berlin.

And to have seen that was definitely worth the whole smuggling exercise and dealing with the sort of roaming around and trying to make sense of this whole thing because really that was a metaphor for what was going on at the time. Because there was no land, there was no real peace process. The symbols were so important. The symbols were the whole grammar and language of how the Palestinians communicated. Now what Rabin has accomplished and what the Israelis and Palestinians together have accomplished here for all of the uncertainties of the peace process ahead is an actual non-symbolic language of peace and of living together. And that just did not exist back in 1988.

Anyway, when it was all over, I had to get out of town and smuggling myself out was much more difficult than smuggling myself in because under curfew, taxis don't leave Gaza. And the only thing that are rolling are army patrols, which it's probably unproductive to ask for a ride for a journalist from an Israeli patrol. And the other vehicles are red crescent ambulances and the U.N. vehicles. And they are under strict orders not to-- I mean, basically the Israelis have told them, "You take journalist, you out of here. Okay, don't do it." (Laughing) So they don't. I mean, that's exactly how it works.

So I would go up to these red crescent ambulances and say, "Can you just give me a ride. It's seven miles to the Aris checkpoint." As long as I was the guy in a wheelchair, sure we'll give you a ride. But if I indicated I was a journalist, "No, my God." So shifting categories was very much of a hazard in Gaza on that particular day.

So I ended up rolling out which actually was a wonderful way to see outside of Gaza City. You went by Givali (sp?) refugee camp. You just went through all the different levels of Palestinian society, and you were at one of the main Israeli military installations on the day of the declaration of Palestinian independence, which was also an extraordinary part of the story which I hadn't really anticipated.

So let me just give you a little sense of leaving. "On the way out of town, I had the pavement to myself. Gaza City looked deserted. Each street had an echo. Each building a muffled hum from the sound of the people inside. The utility poles were draped with the remains of Palestine Independence Day celebrations. Colored streamers flapped in the light afternoon breeze along with pictures of Yasser Arafat, PLO flags, and balloons in the national colors of Palestine, green, red, white, and black.

Black balloons were particularly hard to get in any quantity. And Taha had mentioned his source in careful whispers the night before as though he were describing the underground arms trade. "We get the black ones from a party shop in Jerusalem from the religious people," (Laughing) he said, referring to the Orthodox Mea She'arim neighborhood with its long standing reputation for conducting commerce out of the reach of the heavy-handed Israeli government.

I passed under the balloons and flags and alongside shuttered iron gates in front of the houses and shops lining Nassar Street, the main road out of the city. Faces could be seen peering through apartment windows and the cracks in metal doors. The word was out that I was rolling to Aris. From the rooftops in Gaza City, boys waved to me and then passed my location along to the people on the next block who knew to expect me as I came around each corner.

Just beyond the big rusted archway that said, "Welcome to Gaza," in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, a man had emerged from his house with a little table and a chair. ... (Speaking in Arabic). "Are you a--" he said, and then he asked, "You are the journalist at the wheelchair, yes?" in English. I was getting used to this title, so I said, "yes." (Laughing)

He sat the chair down. He motioned for me to sit with him for a moment. He gestured to the crowd of children looking down at us from the roof of his, and they jumped into action. A young boy appeared with a pot of tea and two small glasses. "You can drink something," said the man whose name I learned was Fiaz (sp?).

I looked around and the houses were all crowned with their own contingence of spectators and lookouts. Fiaz proudly pointed out the decorations on his house as a plate of small cookies arrived. A boy called down from above, and Fiaz reported to me in halting English that an Israeli patrol had been spotted only three blocks away, but that we had a few minutes to have tea. "The soldiers are all busy with the balloons," he said. We sat calmly as though there was no curfew, no occupation, and no Israeli patrol just down the street.

The morning air was a rancid melange of bread oven smells and burned rubber from the hundreds of tires sacrificed to Palestine the night before. The colorful paper litter from used fireworks was scattered over Gaza's many garbage piles on the first day of Palestine's era of independence, the citizens of Gaza were confined to their homes while Israeli troops spent the day collecting party decorations.

I left Fiaz and turned to the left and rode right in front of two Israeli soldiers slowly going from house to house tearing down streamers and balloons. They looked bored and slightly at a loss to explain their mission that day. Each of them had two colored balloons tied to their M-16 rifles. (Laughing) "Where did you come from?" one of the young soldiers addressed me in Hebrew.

I answered in the halting Alan Alda accent in Hebrew that I had acquired hoping it would identify me as an American Jew on a school field trip. "I'm going to the Aris checkpoint." "It is closed here," the soldier immediately switched to English. "Where did you come from?" he asked. "Detroit," I said with a big smile. (Laughing) "Actually right outside Detroit. We live in the suburbs." The soldiers shook their heads, and the one who had not yet spoken added, "But where did you come from? This is Gaza. It is a closed district today." Still smiling, I pointed back down the road. "It's a closed area all around here. That's why I'm going to the checkpoint. It's a closed military area. I can't stay here." (Laughing) "We know it's a military area. We are the army. Where did you come from?"

They began speaking in Hebrew to each other speculating about who I might actually be. They concluded that I was another meshugenneh nut from the Jewish settlement a few miles down the road beyond Gaza City. "I was visiting people back down there, and now I'm going to the checkpoint. I'd better get moving," I said and started to roll away. The soldiers smiled and shrugged. "It's a long way to Detroit. Here have a balloon." (Laughing) "Haven't you heard this is an independent country today." The soldiers sarcasm was half-hearted as if he wished it were true and not such a joke. Only about an hour's drive from downtown Tel Aviv, he seemed much farther from home than I."

One last little bit here, I mean, "figuring out what the story was on that weekend was tougher than I had imagined because of the symbolic nature of this independence declaration and the fact that the Israelis gave it absolutely no credence whatsoever, and the fact that it was hard to find any evidence of independence on the ground, evidence that you would see all over the place in Gaza today.

Perhaps in hindsight, the real story on that day was that by 1988, the Israelis and Palestinians were already simply going through the motions of their long conflict. The military checkpoints had become props in a show. The Palestinians were using balloons they had bought from Jews as weapons against Israel. Israeli patrols were ordered to capture the balloons and neutralize them. (Laughing) There was much violence to come, and many Israelis and Palestinians were to die before Gaza would be independent or very tentatively autonomous as it became in 1994.

But looking back as a ghost with a microphone rolling brazenly in defiance of a curfew in what both sides called a war zone, it was clear that the war for the Gaza Strip had ended long before. All that remained was for someone to say it." And this week we understand that Rabin who was the man who did. And it's sad to note that, but this story and this moment for me was something that was on my mind this week. And it was a powerful experience for all the humor being there on that day.

So I share that with you. I'm obviously open to any other discussions you might want to engage in about the psyche of NPR, the psyche of ABC. This allegation that I was seduced by money, I don't know where that come from. On anything, I'd be happy to talk to about it.

QUESTION: What about the psyches of the two, NPR and ABC? I mean, beside the money because we-- (Laughing)

JH: My wife gets it all really. There are two ways of looking at NPR. On the one hand, it's a kind of an educational broadcasting sort of virtuous, non-profit organization doing God's work on earth in the form of Journalism. It's a very sort of editorially driven, virtuous institution that is very, very focused on the story. And it's changed a lot in the period of time that I was there. I was there for 12 years. I started at NPR as a freelancer in 1980 and left in 1992, late 1992, as the anchor of Talk of the Nation.

And in that period of time, I worked on every show and anchored every show and had been based in Chicago and the Pacific Northwest and New York and Washington. And so I had a very broad experience. And editorially the institution had changed a lot. I think it was very much more an alternative, a vigorously alternative broadcast in the early eighties and the late seventies. And Susan Stamberg tells this story much better than I do. I'm sort of mid-generation at NPR.

But by 1992, NPR's distinctness had very little to do with its alternative programming. I think in many ways it was doing a lot of the same kinds of stories in the same kinds of ways as Nightline and World News Tonight and certainly the general interest news broadcasts. NPR did a lot of the same kinds of stories, a little longer perhaps, but a lot of the same.

What separated NPR in the early nineties and continues to separate it today is that through no fault of its own, NPR had stumbled into niche audience marketing. It had found a segment, an audience segment, and it was basically being supported by that segment of its own audience in the same way that television is coming to this as though they invented it. NBC says, "CNBC, look at this." I mean, what a great idea. NPR gets a significantly larger audience than CNBC. It doesn't have the advantage of having bills sent to people's houses like the cable systems do to get their revenue. People actually volunteer and call in. Maybe you've heard some of these. (Laughing) Maybe not. They're kind of hard to catch. (Laughing)

But I think NPR's strength today is in it being a model for something that the entire business I think is shifting towards where for so long the commercial media have made money off of the mass audience. The Nielsen notion that, "The box says there's some warm creature in the room, and the television is on." Click, you know, that means something. That becomes like a half quarter or 10,000th of a cent in advertising revenue.

Whereas NPR's audience is not mass, but it is attentive. The people who turn into NPR do so out of a choice, and they are presumed to be much more focused on the actual story. In the same way that people choose to read the newspaper and they choose to turn the page, and they choose what story they're doing. Television, pretty much, if there's warm bodies in the room because it's time to watch television. And it's the mass audience that's perceived to be the revenue source.

As the whole media shifts from vertical to horizontal, these kind of awake, choice-based audiences are going to be much, much more importance. So oddly, NPR I think is distinguished today as a real model of taking an awake and attentive audience and turning it into a self-sustaining news operation.

The difference for someone like me is when I worked at NPR you could say things like, "Emile Zola" for instance, and you didn't have to have a paragraph of explanation. You could refer to "plate tectonics". It wouldn't need a modifier. (Laughing) What some people call platitonic. When you get to television, and you're writing very much for the people who are asleep, and you really know it. (Laughing) You really do actually have to write things like "Connecticut, a state on the East Coast," (Laughing) "North America in the Western Hemisphere on the planet Earth."

And that's not because they're dumb or they're making you do something thing. They're making you do something that needs to be done because the audience based on how television is configured is presumed generally speaking not to be paying attention. And so that changes the writing, totally changes the notion of the writing. It's not thinking one bad, one good. Who wants to listen to people talking about Emile Zola all the time. You don't necessarily want to do that, but that was the difference I noticed.

As far as institutions are concerned and to get to the end of this question, NPR's just a tiny place compared to ABC. I mean, ABC is just gigantic. Basically, if you wanted to talk with the management at NPR, you like walked down the hall, and you go into Bill's office and that was it. Then you were there. You're in the tunnel. I mean, you were on Mt. Olympus. (Laughing)

I was in Roone Arledge's office once. I've been near it twice. (Laughing) And you talk to people, and they can tell you, "I was there, yeah." (Laughing) I mean, you're not going to talk to Roone. When my contract's up, I'm not even going to talk to Roone. But of course, everyone talks about Roone all the time. (Laughing) This guy, Bill Gates, who's seen him? (Laughing)

But institutionally that's very, very different. I think there's a massively larger management scheme at ABC than there is at NPR, and that totally changes the way things operate.

MARVIN KALB: Okay, questions.

QUESTION: I had the impression when you had the conversation with Bob Simon, you were denied entrance into Iraq, and Carol wouldn't support you going in. That sort of may have been the straw on the camel's back or something that was an impetus for your leaving. And I was wondering if that was the case because that was the impression I got.

JH: Well, she's in a story that's in my book at the end of the Gulf War. I mean, the story is used in the book I think to make a point about war reporting, and that there is this frightening psychic sort of trade-off that you go through in your mind. You want to cover the story for the story's sake. You also want to be at ground zero. There is this kind of crazy notion of doing it for the story and then doing it for your own personal reasons, embellishing your own personal biography.

And I think that's a hard thing for a lot of journalists to keep straight, and I think some do it very, very well. I think Peter Arnett is someone whose biography is so sort of redundant with ground zeroes that he has no particular need now aside from maybe an addiction (Laughing) to go to these places. So I think he becomes in a sense, and I know Peter, he becomes in a sense a very objective arbiter of events, also his tremendous range of-- I mean, he knows where the meter is in the red in terms of danger and stuff in a way that very, very few people nowadays know.

And if you watched the Gulf War and saw, "Oh, my God I think it's got"-- No, that was nothing. (Laughing) That was on CNN. I mean, that happened a lot on CNN. Arnett's not going to do that. There's not enough of a distinction made between that kind of expertise. It's like going to a ballgame. It's like, "It's a foul ball." You know he's another person that's like screaming for the foul-- And they have special seats for you. They're not covering the game. You've noticed.

So for me, I wanted to go to Baghdad. I mean, originally I wanted to go to Baghdad because my colleague Deborah Amos was in Saudi, and anyone listened to NPR, Deborah files ten stories per minute. (Laughing) So my sense was, and Deborah's a very dear friend, my sense was we needed someone in Baghdad to balance out-- And Deborah's so good with the American military. That's not my thing. I'm more on the Arabic world side of it. So I thought it would be good to have someone in Baghdad to simply balance the deployment.

So I originally went in with that idea, but as I got there I really wanted to get to the Rashid Hotel. And there was this argument between myself and NPR about whether it was a good idea. "Maybe John was kind of going crazy or something." And in the end, NPR, which had never really expressed a concern about my alleged recklessness or whether it was a good idea to be sending people in wheelchairs to places like this, the management went to ABC and CNN and NBC and said, "We're going to send John into"-- And they knew me, and I know everyone in the Middle East press corps. I mean, this is not news to any of them. They went. They were legitimately concerned for my safety, and I don't hold that against them in any way.

But they went to ABC and CNN and NBC in Washington and said, "We're going to send John into Iraq, and we've heard that the elevators don't work at the Rashid," something which I understand immediately was going to be the case. I mean, you don't spend 19 years in a wheelchair without having the intimate understanding of the infrastructure and how you're going to deal with it. And I'd already figured out how I was going to deal with that. But they'd seen on the wires that the Rashid, the elevators didn't work. And they went around trying to figure out is this a good idea, is this not?

And they went to ABC and NBC and asked them, "We're going to send John in. Will your people help him?" And they, of course, looked at Bill and said, "What are you crazy? You're sending someone in a wheelchair into Baghdad. Are you out of your mind?" And these were the management types in Washington. These weren't the people in the press corps that I knew. And they said what probably many of you would say and maybe I would have said, "What? What? There's a war going on, and you're bothering me with this like-- You want to send some guy-- What? Hello." (Laughing)

They went back home, and they called me up and they said, "John, we've decided you can't go into Baghdad." And we had this argument. I said, "What do you mean I can't go into Baghdad?" "You can't go into Baghdad. We asked them if they would help, and they said 'no.' And, John, the elevators don't work at the Rashid Hotel." (Laughing)

I mean, this was a very sad moment for me personally. I'm not saying this is some sort of-- This didn't anger me about NPR at all because what I learned was not anything about NPR. I learned something about myself. What I understood was that my reasons for going had a lot to do with the chair and didn't have a whole lot to do with the story, and there were plenty of people in Baghdad at that time.

And this notion that I was going to miss the war. I was going to miss it by not being in Baghdad or somehow it was like intrinsically cool to be there in a chair on top of the Rashid Hotel was a bad motive for me as a journalist. It was also they were preventing me from going there for the wrong reasons too. I'm not giving them any awards because they have never before asked in any of the places I've ever been if the elevators had ever worked. (Laughing) And they never worked. I mean, Istanbul, in all the places that I've been. Elevators not working, this was not news to me.

So that was a very deep moment there. And it was only when I got to Kurdistan that I realized that the notion of missing war or having anything to do with your own personal biography is really offensive and gets in the way of our coverage. And what you saw in Kurdistan if you were there was the real faces of the war. No gun cameras, no gray kind of digital imagery of bunkers blowing up. You saw the real human beings were displaced by that war and who had counted on the Americans to liberate them in some sense and were feeling an extraordinary disillusionment at that time.

And the idea that I would have thought for any reason that I would have missed the war really became something of an embarrassment and it really launched me off on the whole process of doing this book. But it had nothing to do with leaving NPR. I went back to NPR and did Talk of the Nation, was happy to do it. ABC came to me and held a gun to my head and said, "John, you have to go to ABC now," and that's the way it is. (Laughing)

QUESTION: I'd like to ask you a little bit about the passage that you just read. Could you talk a little bit about what the story that you did for NPR that came out of your having gone in there was like, and then also maybe if you could speculate on how what you might have done with that experience were you working for ABC at that time. I'm trying to get this notion of the difference between the two.

JH: Well, there would be no story. What I edited out for brevity was the fact that one of the other reasons I was there was Bob Simon, the CBS correspondent, couldn't go into Gaza. And the reason he couldn't go in is because he had to take a whole crew with him, and the international symbol for a journalist present is a guy with a camera (Laughing). You're not going to get anywhere with the Israeli patrols trying to take-- So what they had done was given me the high-eight to give to Taha, who also happened to be the CBS stringer in addition to being a friend of me.

So Taha was going to do high-eight stuff and all that, and I was going to smuggle the videotape out. And indeed as I went to the checkpoint, I had CBS videotape in addition to my own--

KALB: Do you all know what high-eight is?

JH: High-eight is high quality, high resolution. 8 mm video cameras. Any cable...You have a local cable.

KALB: Yes there is. New England Cable, but I don't know what they use.

JH: I think actually New England Cable does have high-eight because they go out with just single person crews. The correspondent is the producer. And they're using high-eight cameras to set up. They're little.

KALB: You know, from your own experience, I'd like you to go back and complete the answer. I'm just kind of curious of the origin here.

When CBS uses footage shot by a Palestinian hotel operator in Gaza, does it indicate that it's being shot by a non-CBS person?

JH: In this particular-- Let me remember that story. Now, I didn't see the piece as Simon aired it. It was my impression watching Taha use the camera, very little. (Laughing) If it's going to be of any value. (Laughing) And this is just my impression, an impression that was confirmed in the edit room at the CBS bureau in Tel Aviv where I delivered the film, and we were looking at some of it. There were a couple of little things in there that were interesting.

Clearly what was discovered at that moment was that the camera as being sent in was you really needed to train the people to use them also. Now I have a feeling that they would have used that footage. But they would have had to because the quality would have been significantly different. It would have told the viewer that something was different. So I think it would have demanded some kind of .... I mean, now the amateur video is like a ... you see all the time, but it would have been more of a big deal back then. I have a feeling that Simon's piece did not air with it, but it was a news story, a big news story that to get around routine restrictions.

I don't know if any of you were news consumers in 1988, the notorious pictures that an Israeli CBS cameraman took of the breaking of the bones of the Arab in the West Bank that lead to an extraordinary crackdown on television camera access into any military zone of any kind.

And so CBS countered by saying, "We're going to send high-eights into the West Bank into Gaza," and I think NBC did the same thing. And I think ABC had some program of doing that although ABC I think it was less so because they actually had a better infrastructure of people on the ground. They had more staff people on the ground in the territories whereas Simon was using pretty much stringers, print people who were good with information, but weren't able to get actual footage out.

So the story I did was sort of that story. It's a strange Fourth of July, the kind of Apocalypse Now Fourth of July, where for five minutes there was a party. ...

Actually what happened was the Algiers thing took place and Arafat went to Geneva, and it was that thing where they forced him to say the words that he sort of gave a speech. And then Jim Baker said, "Look, would you like get your act together," and they stood him up and said, "dah, dah, dah, dah," and he said it, and they opened a dialogue.

But this was within about a three-week period of each other. So that the next story was the White House. And then I think Dan Schorr did a commentary and then me. And so there was this five-minute kind of, smooshy, touchy-feely piece although that piece was constructed to be very much a news piece. I did a half-hour documentary on that weekend, which began with me playing backgammon with Taha's relatives and ended with the Elvis Costello song, "Indoor Fireworks," from the "King of America" album, the idea being this is a crazy kind of Fourth of July for people who desperately want a Fourth of July so much that they're going to have the party before they get the nation.

And in a sense the passions and the sort of obsolescence of these people's needs to resolve something from '67 was so great that putting the cart before the horse was like the way we do things now. And it had the soldiers in there with the balloons. One of the great reliefs about doing this book scene that none of the audio from those soldiers was usable because they were up high, and I couldn't whip out the microphone.

And I had sort of an ambient microphone going inside my jacket, but you couldn't get any voices from that. In radio, if you don't have it on audio, you know what I'm saying, "And one person told me," (Laughing) so that's where it gets cut out. So it was a great, great piece. It was a decent radio piece, and it was a non-existent television piece. There were no pictures inside Gaza that day aside from Taha's. If I was doing television, the answer to your question would have been I would have been totally shutdown.

QUESTION: But the issue of being able to bring the cameras inside. When you were talking about NPR's niche and how some of that's changed--

JH: In other words, would ABC have allowed me to do that, Elvis Costello-- No. (Laughing)

I think there are certain people at ABC who get cache to do these kinds of things. Jim Wooten is someone who does. I mean, I think it's conceivable that I might be allowed, say, if that took place on a Tuesday, and Nightline had a half hour free on that Friday, you could do a long-form Nightline piece, and things like that have been done. And I think you would have to pitch it through ABC's editorial gauntlet the same way you would pitch-- To say it's like Ted Koppel's 48 hours with Clinton the day of the Inauguration. It's that sort of feel. You would not mention Elvis Costello at all. (Laughing) That would be something you would really keep to yourself.

QUESTION: Do you do things differently for TV because you're in a wheelchair? Or is this just your interests that guide you? You've done some kind of fun, off-beat stuff.

JH: When I was doing my book tour, a lot of friends of mine, chairs or people in chairs who came to ask me questions were dying to know, "We noticed in the beginning that they had your shot was wide and it included the chair. But later on they were doing the face only a lot of the time. And we wonder if there was like anything special about where they were going to have the wheelchair on the TV or not."

The assumption being that every time they went tight on my face, the only reason for that was that someone at a high level at ABC had said, "Get that wheelchair out of there for Christ's sake." (Laughing) And I've had discussions in advance of going to ABC, you know, just to get it on the table. "There's going to be wheelchairs on the TV ... ." "I mean, if I'm rolling around, you're not going to pretend I'm walking are you?" (Laughter)

And I remember the Executive Producer I was dealing with at the time and the anchor I was dealing with at the time listened to me say, "We know this. We should talk to the person who can say 'yes' to this so that we're absolutely clear that this is how it's going to go because if it's not clear and it changes after I'm hired, I'll be very noisy about it. This will be a mess, a big mess if we don't do it this way."

That was the one time I did meet with Roone. That next week I was in Roone's office saying-- And Roone was great. He was very interesting about, "Now here's the point which the ABC guy talks about Roone." He goes, "Roone was great." (Laughing) "Well, we sat around. We thought for a while, six, eight hours I think." (Laughing)

Roone said that it would be really interesting to see how people respond to someone who is on a different eye level than them. And he elaborated on the idea that so many of the correspondents in television sort of come in with a suit and are very expected, and that the sort of unexpectness of my sort of visual makeup will be very interesting. He was intrigued by that idea. And I could see the Executive Producer going, "Sigh." It's like "Go, go for chair." (Laughing)

I know it was very interesting. Everyone was kind of tiptoeing around the issue, but Roone was really focused on what I thought was interesting too, the idea, and what I had always discovered was interesting in my career. And that is when you come to a situation when you're not what people expect, they're curious about you, their curiosity about you plays into your curiosity about them. You do a much better interview when there's two people curious rather than when there's just one curious person and the other is like going, "What? No comment," when someone's very defensive. So that was interesting.

Now I will say that my answer to the question to the people who wanted to know what the deal was with the shot. There was never any discussion aside from that one meeting with Roone about the chair itself. However, when I went to the basement of the Mayflower Hotel one day and before interviewing Al Gore, and just quickly got a haircut down there, a dreadful haircut. (Laughing) This was a memo. A memo came. There was nothing I could do. I did this ridiculous-- I had this stupid haircut, and I didn't think about it. And that was like big meetings. (Laughing) So the wheelchair's nothing, uninteresting, don't care. Hair, big deal.

It's like put the bowl on your head. It was really short, and I was looking in the mirror and I was going, "Oh, God." And I remember I went over. Leslie Cockburn was my Producer, a freelancer now, works for Vanity Fair, but worked for CBS for a long time and ABC. I go up and we're like on our way to the Vice President's office, and she looks at me and she goes, "Oh, my God." This is the early days for me.

KALB: We've got time for one more question.

QUESTION: Are there any particular areas of the Middle East that are important but aren't getting the right coverage in the U.S.?

JH: Areas of the peace process?

QUESTION: And of the political situation in Israel and the Middle East. Are we into kind of a rut of repetitious re-emphasis on the same themes? Are there things that are being left out, forces, groups?

JH: Well, I think certainly in this post-assassination period, over and over again, and I think the correspondents in the region continually tell editors this, that the peace process should not drive the story. In a sense, the peace process as a headline, as the peg, always the meeting focuses your attention away from the things that are going on on the ground.

Now I don't know what happened in Tel Aviv, and I don't know-- But I was thinking back to my experience, and it's a very, very different era now, that's why I say this with a little bit of intrepidation. But I'm willing to bet that there was no major correspondent at that Tel Aviv Rally. And it's just not the kind of thing that a correspondent would go to.

QUESTION: Why?

JH: Because first of all, there are lots of rallies going on. During election campaigns, there would be lots of rallies. I mean, I would go to some of them, and then there were others that I wouldn't go to. So in a sense, the internal or political divisions in Israel are very hard to gauge, partly because of the very thing that's being condemned now by Israelis themselves, this rhetoric.

I mean, the impulse of an Israeli politician to describe one of his other colleagues as a "maniacal person who's the implications of what they just said," is another holocaust. That was something very easily said, very, very easily said. And I think that if you made that, and if you were sort of a green journalist coming in and saying, "He just said that they're going to make a new holocaust," everyone would go, "Oh, come on."

So unquestionably, the political divisions with Israel are continually undercovered, but they're also a very extraordinarily moving target. I think for a long time the far right wing in Israel had almost exclusively a nationalist convention not particularly religious. With the changes in the Mafdow (sp?), the national religious party, it becoming a sort of quasi-religious nationalist organization, it's completely changed the character of how the Orthodox interact. Lubavitcher, for example, was very influential in the territorial issues in Israel. And it had never taken place before in the nineties. And that was not covered very well. So I think those kinds of things, I mean, the religious dimension of all kinds of stories in America and around the world is continually undercovered by the media.

QUESTION: Why so much minimization? Is it fear or uncertainty?

JH: It's a book answer, but I would say you start with the fact that the institution is a secular institution. A secular institution needs to approach value space, stories on the basis of A versus B as opposed to let's explore A.

KALB: There really has been a lot of coverage of the religious right coming in Israel as well as in the United States. There's a lot of that stuff that goes on. I don't think that that is an oversight. It may not be with the right emphasis at this point, but it certainly is a story that has been covered so many times.

John Hockenberry, thank you so very much. (Applause)

THE JOAN SHORENSTEIN CENTER ON THE PRESS, POLITICS AND PUBLIC POLICY, KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT. This is a working document. Your comments and suggestions are welcomed by Nancy Palmer and Jennifer Quinlan. Last modified: 12-13-95.