American journalist Barbara Newman says Bashir Gemayel, assassinated three weeks after becoming president of Lebanon, was her lover in the months before his 1982 election. From this liaison, Newman has fashioned a slender book, the plot of which sounds something like Brenda Starr meets Christ figure. Only, says Newman, "Bashir was better looking than Jesus." Newman, formerly with National Public Radio and ABC's "20/20," who now runs her own television production company in Washington, talks like that. At one point in an interview, after describing her antiseptic first marriage, she remarks with not a hint of a smile that her second husband was "wildly, passionately desirous of me." "Life," she also says, "is a scar." And Bashir Gemayel "had values that I think are very Western. He walked to his own drumbeat. A typical American hero, despite the costs." Sitting in her Barnaby Woods home in upper Northwest, Newman looks nothing like the glamorous photo of herself on the book jacket, head resting pensively on her hands, blond mane flowing, with an inset of Gemayel holding a machine gun. On her living room mantel -- next to a photo of Gemayel -- is another picture of Newman, wearing what look like Army fatigues and boots, one lace artfully dangling. This stylized pose accompanied a Washingtonian article entitled "Secret Love," which led to her book contract. In person, Newman's five-foot frame is encased in tight beige slacks and white shirt. Large tinted glasses shield her eyes and it is impossible to determine their color or expression. The hair is still blond -- a hair colorist's experiment that she decided to keep. Newman constantly fingers a few long strands as she talks. When she was seeing Gemayel, Newman was a brunet, a Jewish divorce'e from the Bronx in love with a married Lebanese Christian warlord. Some of Newman's friends are distressed with the book's jacket, which they feel gives the wrong impression of the serious journalist they say she is. Some find the book, written with novelist Barbara Rogan, an embarrassment. One defends it by saying that "if Carl Bernstein had written about his marriage and divorce, that wouldn't have sounded like 'All the President's Men,' either." Newman says she wanted more politics in the book, grandiosely titled "The Covenant," but no publisher cared about Gemayel and the fate of Lebanon unless she told it through the love story. The subtitle is "Love and Death in Beirut." Although some passages convey the intensity of war-torn Lebanon, the book is an unabashed valentine to the controversial Gemayel ("a great beacon to his country"). Absorbing accounts of her reporting on terrorism are interspersed with descriptions of their sexual encounters, such as this one, when Gemayel came to her Washington home while on an official visit: "... the pent up force was explosive. It seemed so good and so right that our bodies were at last doing what our spirits had done long ago." And "... we kissed with our eyes open, not to lose a moment's sight of one another." And, meeting in his car in Beirut, " 'I missed you so much,' I said, as I kicked aside a machine gun that lay on the floor." When told that much of this sounds like a Harlequin novel, Newman says, "There was more. I told Barbara Rogan, 'I'm telling it like it happened and it has to be within the basis of fact. You can't control it.' " Actually, says Newman, "I never was thinking of a book. I wanted the movie. It's harder to write a book. I just wanted to develop the concept. I had some Los Angeles friends and I pitched them the concept" -- laugh -- "as we say." Her pitch was that "this is a great, interesting person who was assassinated. An interesting subject and a country that is reaching out and touching us -- no question about it." "Hollywood people say there is not enough" romance in the book, says Newman, but they have shown some interest. "I think," she says, "it could be a fine movie." The Maverick Barbara Newman, 49, nothing if not controversial, garners both loyal friends and loyal enemies. Depending on who is talking about her, Newman is: fascinating, vibrant, fiercely loyal, smart, aggressive, driven, obnoxious, blunt, abrasive and brash. Newman sees herself as a sort of Joan of Arc maverick amid a world of toadying establishment journalists. "My friends are people outside the business, often people I interviewed, who advocated things for workers, who did things I admire. There's a certain gangbang mentality in journalism I am not comfortable being a part of." In the book she writes, "My corporate skills have stunk. In the business I am regarded as special, but also as a special pain in the ass -- talented but no team player." And that's certainly the way she is remembered at NPR, where Newman began her Washington journalism career in the early '70s. In those fledgling days of the network, one editor recalls her angrily hurling a tape reel across the room at him. Newman demurs. "I was very docile there. I was named chief reporter, or editor, and they didn't want me to have that, and one of the reporters threw a tape at me." Newman says she was a victim of "horrendous jealousy." Newman bills herself as the reporter who "broke the Silkwood story." "In terms of initially breaking the story, that's not quite true," says Peter Stockton of the House Commerce subcommittee on investigations, who worked with Newman on Silkwood. The first story of Karen Silkwood's death, and who she was, ran in The New York Times, written by David Burnham, whom Silkwood was on the way to see when her car crashed. "But she was on it like a terrier and did a helluva job," Stockton adds, "and, after Silkwood's death, was miles ahead of The New York Times. I hold her work in the highest regard." Jim Russell, for whom Newman worked at NPR, says, with a laugh, "NPR was so invisible in those days that if she had broken it, nobody would have known. But she did put on the air numerous stories on Silkwood when nobody had heard of it before. Barbara did an awful lot of enterprise reporting that made many over here nervous as hell. Nobody else seemed to have it." After receiving an Ohio State journalism award for the Silkwood story, Newman uncovered the fact that the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency, in the mid-'60s, had been able to divert enough uranium from a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to make at least a dozen nuclear bombs. Her expertise on the Mossad was her "dowry," writes Newman, when she was hired by "20/20" as an investigative producer. It was there, in the winter of 1981, producing a segment on terrorism with Geraldo Rivera, that she first met Bashir Gemayel. Although the attraction was immediate, Newman writes, she answers questions of professional ethics by saying that the affair did not begin until after the terrorism program was in the can. But her relentless drive to get her stories led to one instance when Newman faced a different kind of ethical dilemma. She was filming a piece called "Burning Mountain, Broken Dreams." "These people were living in a 'holler' in West Virginia and they were all choking and dying of bronchitis. The state -- and this was under Jay Rockefeller -- refused to tell them who owned the coal under their houses. "I had terrific evidence, documents that the state knew, but the young man who had the evidence said, 'Look, if I go on the air, I'm going to be fired.' And I said, 'No -- publicity is the best defense.' I believed it about 40 percent." "When he got fired," she recalls, "I felt like two cents. I went to ABC and said, 'Look, this person really helped us develop the piece, and the people were indemnified by the state. Indemnified! I mean, we had an impact. Let's help him.' But they didn't do anything," says Newman, although she was the one who persuaded the man to go on the air in the first place. Her departure from ABC was explosive. As she tells it, Newman lobbied her "20/20" bosses to do a story on the Chad war, where she wanted to film rebel commander Hissene Habre, who is now president of Chad. She got permission, but on the way, she "made a detour" to see Gamayel, by then her lover. As she tells it in her book, when Newman arrived in the Chad war zone, she had trouble getting crews and support from ABC. The network wanted her to interrupt her work on the rebels to do another story for "Nightline," an assignment Newman considered a nonstory. She refused to produce it, and ABC had to send another producer. Although she finally got a crew to film Habre's warriors, writes Newman, a furious Av Westin, who ran "20/20," told her ABC would not renew her contract. Av Westin tells it differently. "In outtakes, we saw her directing some infantry irregulars, ordering a group of men charging across the field to do it again. You could hear her voice. What she brought back was garbage anyway." Jeff Diamond, who was the senior producer for "20/20," recalls that he was pulled off another assignment to help shape up the segment because "Av was dead serious about getting this Chad piece of hers on the air. Only after we all looked at it did we make the decision it wasn't journalistically sound and we bagged it. The film was of poor quality, but a big factor was the staging of this maneuver." "Faked, schmaked!" explodes Newman. "This is after-the-fact character assassination. If they had any charges against me, why didn't they ever say it to me? It's complete unadulterated untruth. How do they know how I intended to use that footage, or if I was just having some fun or whatever? I never saw one take, I left the very next day ... This whole story is a face-saving thing for them ..." She says she never directed the troops. The episode perplexes people who know the players. Charlie Thompson, a producer formerly at "20/20," now at "60 Minutes," said, "She was one of the most honest reporters I've ever worked with. But so are Jeff and Av. I just think there was bad blood." Columnist Jack Anderson, for whom Newman later worked as executive producer on the critically praised but now defunct "Jack Anderson Confidential" television series, says Newman was a "very reliable professional in everything she did for me. And very aggressive. She thought of the idea of flying over a nuclear plant to show how vulnerable it was to terrorist attack. After we did it, '60 Minutes' did it." Growing Up Sheila Hershon, who worked for Newman on Anderson's show, says she is a "terrific" executive producer and warm friend whose main trouble is being an "extremely direct New Yorker in Washington, where everyone goes through this elephantine dance of courtesy." Like many a journalist, Newman grows nervous when she herself becomes the subject of an interview. Friends speak of a self-deprecating sense of humor, but nothing approximating that emerged in an afternoon of conversation. One of those friends is Roberta Cohen, who was a deputy assistant secretary for human rights during the Carter administration, and sat next to Newman in junior high at P.S. 117. "It was a class of intellectually advanced students. She was very bright and precocious but quiet. Later she could be brash; the ruffling of feathers sort of developed." Sitting in her home, Newman describes a childhood of feeling set apart. "My mother was always very critical of me and I didn't know that she loved me a lot until after she died and all her friends told me." Her well-to-do lawyer father, the son of immigrants, was demanding. "Attainment and perfection were always expected." She attended Barnard high school for girls, "a rigid school where we wore uniforms. You'd think I'd be rebellious but I liked it. I liked not having to form relationships. Not that I was against it. I really just had no training." At home, she "lived in my own little world." She wrote in her book, "I used to daydream in school about fighting with the French resistance ... (Another favorite fantasy was the Scarlet Pimpernel, who in my version, turned out to be a woman.)" After her B.A. at Mount Holyoke, Newman got a masters in social studies at Columbia Teachers College, then quickly found a job at the United Nations, working for one of its publications. "She began her investigative reporting there," says Roberta Cohen, who by happenstance was also working at the United Nations and was reunited with her junior high classmate. Then came a few years as legislative assistant for Rep. James Scheuer and on the staff of New York Mayor John Lindsay. Newman worked on the federal Kerner Commission on civil disorders, from 1967 to 1969. "She was creative and lively and I liked her immediately," says Hannah Kaiser, a coworker there who remains a friend 20 years later. "She had a lot of energy and drive and bluntness; people were made nervous by her." After that came NPR, "20/20," Jack Anderson's show. Along the way, Newman met several Mr. Wrongs. "I guess I should say here that I wasn't allowed to go out on dates until I went to college. Some of the experimentation that people do when they are younger and, therefore, are free from that, I didn't do. And I think that really stood in my way in terms of relationships with men." She married Jason Newman, the father of her 18-year-old daughter Penelope, while working on the Kerner Commission. "It was not emotional -- sort of the relationship people have when they get older. A friendship." Husband No. 2 was "the opposite. Total passion. But perverse." Newman says that his "intense jealousy -- I had to make lists of where I had been and with whom" -- ended that marriage. Bashir Newman remembers her interview with fiery Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci very well. Fallaci had written her book, "A Man," about her lover in the resistance. "I said, 'Oriana, I don't believe you loved this man. I believe you only really loved him because you knew your relationship was finite, that he was dying of cancer. How could you go around on this lecture circuit and talk about him like a piece of bread and butter, over and over and over again?' " Now, Newman is being asked the same thing. She is aware that some see her as exploitative, sensationalizing, trying to cash in with a book and movie. Newman says, "Let them. I know what's inside of me." Seizures of the heart are almost impossible to capture effectively and elegantly on the printed page, and "The Covenant" poses no threat to, say, "Anna Karenina" or "Madame Bovary," or, even, "Love Story." But Newman says she was compelled to tell Gemayel's story, to convince people that he was not a ruthless warlord but the only chance to save a country now being destroyed. Her premise is debatable. As a Christian, belonging to only a small sect of Christians, a man viewed by many at the time as Israel's puppet, Gemayel probably could not have united the fractured Lebanon. Newman makes excuses for Gemayel, whose troops took part in the bloodshed in Lebanon's fierce civil war, arguing that by the time she had met him, he was a "new man" who was "trying to stop the savagery in his country." The oldest line in the world about a married man is used to defend their liaison; the 32-year-old leader was "lonely" and had a Lebanese wife who didn't understand him or his "vision" as did Newman, eight years older than Gemayel. Newman says Gemayel calmed her "underlying nervousness." Much of the book's dialogue comes from "20/20" outtakes and later film interviews Newman did with Gemayel and family, including Solange, the wife. "Hiding behind my job, I launched into a series of questions, trying to act as if this interview were no different from any other," wrote Newman of their meeting. Today Newman says, "He used to put me with her a lot. I hated it. If he had dinner plans, he would have some of his friends bring me. Marriage is very different in the Middle East. Bashir had a lot of women and she knew it. But it was a horrible situation. I really liked her." So smitten was Newman that she returned to Lebanon on her own to do this "feature film" about Bashir with no particular outlet nailed down. In part it was to get "closer to Bashir. Perhaps it seems a strange way to get close to someone," she wrote, "surveying his life through a camera lens, interviewing friends and family, selling Bashir in treatments and proposals." Gemayel comes off wooden in these filmed quotes aimed at public consumption. But Newman says "he could be very boyish," then repeats an anecdote from her book. Once, at dinner with others, "he took his shoe off and put his foot in my lap and kept rubbing it around, expecting me to eat, and then asking me serious questions, forcing me to respond, teasing me." Newman again defends her professionalism; although romantically involved with Gemayel when she went with Jack Anderson to Lebanon, she set up the meeting but "Jack did the whole interview. I didn't have any input. I wouldn't have done that." When Gemayel was assassinated, blown up by a hand-detonated mine, Newman was in the United States, working for Anderson. Her friends saw a completely devastated woman. For five years she did not date. She surrounded herself with Lebanese friends, to the extent of inviting them all to Penelope's bat mitzvah. At that time, Penelope has said, "I basically felt Lebanese. I was with Lebanese people every night when I came home from school." Newman has deep guilt that she neglected Penelope for her work and her obsession with Gemayel. Today, the two of them are working through past resentments; Penelope, now a senior in high school, seems close to her mother. The Future Newman says she can afford to pick and choose her assignments and does not have to work. "My father," she says in blunt explanation, "is 86." Her well-to-do father played a major part in shaping Newman. "He taught me that work is happiness, and gave me to understand the corollary: Anything that interferes with work is bad. Especially love." Her childhood had not adequately prepared her, she says, for "getting along in the world." Newman feels she is mellower and "gets along a lot better with people now." Her friend Peter Stockton says Newman is "very frank about her foibles, her life." He finds her one of the most fascinating people he knows, with a wealth of anecdotes about the people she has met around the world through her work. For the moment, it is a view that Newman -- who another friend calls "the toughest person I ever met" -- does not seem to share. "Except for my accomplishments," says Newman, "I missed so much."
italian movie download Brenda Starr, Reporter
2ff7e9595c
Komentarze