local supermarket begging for a crust to feed your starving children.’
Maybe I didn’t put it quite as strongly as that – editors are powerful people – but after a few minutes of heated discussion, he agreed and pretty soon I was sitting in front of a camera informing the British people that President Nixon was on the point of resigning. Twenty-four hours later, standing on the lawn of the White House, I understood the meaning of that old cliché so often applied to journalists: the privilege of a ringside seat at history.
A White House press pass entitles the holder to strictly limited access to the briefing room, and if you are ever foolish enough to try to stray off-limits without an official invitation the secret-service agents make sure you don’t get far. But on that historic morning, as we waited for Nixon to make his last appearance as president of the United States and board the helicopter waiting to fly him to political exile, the rules broke down. I remember wandering into the Blue Room and spotting one of Nixon’s two daughters sitting in a corner by herself looking out at the gardens of the great house. Five extraordinary years with all those memories: the triumphs and the humiliations and finally the most spectacular fall from grace any president had ever suffered. The journalist in me wanted to try to coax her into doing an interview – but the soppy father in me won. She clearly wanted to be alone with her thoughts.
Watergate and the downfall of the most powerful man in the world was – and remains – the biggest story of my career. Even as I write that sentence I question it. Bigger than the earthquake in Nicaragua which I reported in 1972? More than 10,000 people lost their lives, 20,000 were badly injured, 300,000 lost their homes. Bigger than mass famine in sub-Saharan Africa or revolutions in Latin America or wars on the Indian subcontinent? I reported on them all and neither I nor anyone else could even begin to put a figure on the number who died. Nobody died in Watergate.
And yet none of those massive human tragedies had even a fraction of the coverage given to the story of one flawed human being who tried to subvert an election by authorising a handful of shabby characters to break into the offices of his opponent and try to dig some dirt that might gain him a few extra votes in an election which, as it turned out, he won by one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. What a supreme irony.
If Nixon had played by the rules he would have stayed in power for another four years instead of being thrown out in disgrace and quite possibly earned himself a place in the history books in the top rank of American presidents. Instead his name is synonymous with lying and deceit. And the name of an unremarkable office building in Washington has become the prefix for every serious scandal in the Western world ever since. It is the yardstick by which stories of political skulduggery are measured.
I stayed on in the United States to see Gerald Ford become president and then lose the White House to a relatively unknown peanut farmer from the Deep South: Jimmy Carter. Washington winters can be pretty miserable and Gerald Ford was about as boring as an American president can be. The most interesting thing about him was the claim that he was so dumb he couldn’t chew gum and walk at the same time. True or not I was keen to get out of Washington and, ideally, spend a few days in the sun. It so happened that Carter had just begun campaigning in Florida. I persuaded my boss in London that he was an intriguing character and just about a dead cert to win the Democratic nomination. He fell for it. I got my few days in the sun to do the interview as well as the chance to boast about spotting Carter’s potential before most of my British colleagues. Thus are reputations cemented.
But by then my family was getting restive. Or, at least, my wife was. My children were, to all intents and purposes, native Americans. They spoke with an American accent, knew every word of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and thought it perfectly normal that our delightful, friendly neighbours kept his ’n’ hers pistols in their bedside tables. All they knew about the United Kingdom was that every time they went there for a holiday it rained. But I had promised their mother that we would return home before they went to secondary school and she was keeping me to that promise. A date was set. And then the big story (for the BBC at any rate) switched from the United States to another country on another continent. Two countries in fact: Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) and its powerful neighbour, South Africa.
BBC Television News had a problem reporting from South Africa. We were not allowed to open a news bureau there. The apartheid regime tolerated radio, but drew the line at letting in a television correspondent. Then, in 1976, they changed their mind. Nobody knew why. Maybe they calculated that if only the rest of the world could see what problems the country was facing they would change their hostile attitude to apartheid and remove the iniquitous sanctions. Whatever their reasoning the BBC leaped at the offer and I got a call from my boss Alan Protheroe.
‘Hi John … looking forward to leaving Washington?’
‘You bet! My wife is counting the days … packing the suitcases already.’
There was a slight pause and then …
‘Umm … that’s good. Just one slight snag …’
‘Stop right there Alan! I’ve told her we’re leaving the States and that’s that.’
‘Of course … of course … no question about leaving the States … it’s just that I’d like you to make a bit of a diversion en route to London.’
The diversion was 8,000 miles.
5
There were two huge and simultaneous stories on the African continent closely connected to Britain. One was the growing threat to the apartheid regime in South Africa and the fear that the country would collapse into lawlessness. The other was the bush war in Rhodesia, which would end with the sun finally setting on Britain’s last colonial outpost on the African continent. I had first been to South Africa in the 1960s when the world was beginning to take apartheid seriously and opposition to it was gathering pace. The police and military kept an iron grip on the growing discontent of the black population – and a beady eye on foreign reporters like me who were trying to tell the world about the inhumanity of the system. When I returned in the 1970s the country was under siege.
My wife hated living there – partly out of fear of the knock on the door from the South African police. We were allowing a husband and wife to live together in our house in Johannesburg. That meant we were breaking the law and so were they. Their crime was that they were black and the shameful apartheid laws did not allow black couples to live together in ‘white’ neighbourhoods, let alone allow them to have their children living with them. If they wanted to live together legally as a family, they would have had to find a home in one of the so-called townships. The nearest to us was a squalid slum called Alexandria, or ‘Alex’ as everyone called it.
It was a hell on earth – an affront to the richest nation in sub-Saharan Africa. Raw sewage ran in the gutters and most of the shacks had no electricity or running water. The children looked as if they were permanently hungry or sick, or both. Most of the men had no work and their wives fought a hopeless battle to give their children a decent meal every day and, even more difficult, some chance of an education.
On the other side of the main road out of Johannesburg was a different universe: the white suburb of Sandton, known to everyone as the ‘mink and manure’ belt (the mink to cover the elegant shoulders of the women in the cold high-veld winters, the manure deposited by their children’s ponies). I suspect they spent more in a month on their ponies than a family in Alex spent in a year – on everything.
Our own house closer to the city centre was typical of the homes in the smart northern suburbs of the vast city.
