sanitation workers. Sixteen thousand American military men were dying in Vietnam. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago was riotous inside and outsidethe hall. The racist governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, declared for president, joining Hubert Humphrey for the Democrats and Richard M. Nixon for the Republicans in the contest. At the end of the year the astronauts of
Apollo 8
became the first men to orbit the moon.
Standing at the Brandenburg Gate, I reminded our audience of 1968, saying I had never expected to experience such a newsworthy year again. However, in 1989 a new world was being formed. With Mikhail Gorbachev as the reform-minded general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful position in Russia, the Soviet satellites were moving toward independence. I was in Prague the night the Velvet Revolution separated Czechoslovakia from Moscow’s rule and spent time in Poland with the charismatic Lech Walesa, who led Solidarity.
Nineteen eighty-nine was that kind of year. Earlier, in June, I finished a commencement address at Tulane University School of Medicine on a Saturday morning and got a call from our news desk: Chinese troops had moved on young urban protesters who had taken over Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital, demanding more political and personal freedom after a state visit from Gorbachev, who was reforming Soviet political oppression.
By Sunday, June 4, we knew that many of the demonstrators had been killed by the army troops trucked intoBeijing from the countryside. The capital was effectively under military rule.
I decided to go. It wasn’t easy. In Tokyo a helpful Pan Am agent explained that commercial flights were out of the question but that some governments were flying in supplies to their embassies. I made a middle-of-the-night appeal to Secretary of State James Baker to let me on an American supply flight. His aide called back. “Sorry. No.”
My new friend from Pan Am pulled some strings and I hopped aboard a British charter filled with food and medical supplies for the United Kingdom embassy.
Arriving in Beijing was an eerie experience. One of the world’s largest and most energetic cities was as quiet as a small town in Iowa on a summer day. Military guards were at every intersection and the normal, very heavy bicycle traffic was greatly reduced. For the first two days we relied on material from state television and what little we could record on backstreets in Beijing to describe the crackdown and the shake-up of the Chinese government, orchestrated by the diminutive but tough Deng Xiaoping. Deng knew that to survive China had to reform economically but he insisted the changes had to come from the top down, not from the streets.
On the third day one of my favorite cameramen, Tony Wasserman, who had flown in from South Africa, was fiddling with a cardboard box on the back rack of a FlyingPigeon bicycle, the ubiquitous form of transportation used by the average Chinese.
“What’s up?” I asked. My bearded friend in his African bush shorts grinned, held up a small video camera, and said, “Mate, I think we can make some pictures.”
We secreted the camera in the box with a small hole for the lens and took off for Tiananmen, me following behind on my own Flying Pigeon, which, as I remember, we got for twenty bucks from a used Flying Pigeon lot.
It worked. We rode past parked tanks in the square, armed guards everywhere and Mao’s outsize portrait on display as I described the scenes and the new climate of fear and military omnipresence. Just one Chinese cyclist caught on, pedaling up to the back of Tony’s bike and tickling the lens through the peephole.
We expanded our territory to some of the backstreets and markets on our second day, prompting a memorable encounter. A student rode up to my parked bike, looked around cautiously, and whispered, “Changing China—we need more and more of the Voice of America.”
He was referring to
Apollo 8
became the first men to orbit the moon.
Standing at the Brandenburg Gate, I reminded our audience of 1968, saying I had never expected to experience such a newsworthy year again. However, in 1989 a new world was being formed. With Mikhail Gorbachev as the reform-minded general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful position in Russia, the Soviet satellites were moving toward independence. I was in Prague the night the Velvet Revolution separated Czechoslovakia from Moscow’s rule and spent time in Poland with the charismatic Lech Walesa, who led Solidarity.
Nineteen eighty-nine was that kind of year. Earlier, in June, I finished a commencement address at Tulane University School of Medicine on a Saturday morning and got a call from our news desk: Chinese troops had moved on young urban protesters who had taken over Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital, demanding more political and personal freedom after a state visit from Gorbachev, who was reforming Soviet political oppression.
By Sunday, June 4, we knew that many of the demonstrators had been killed by the army troops trucked intoBeijing from the countryside. The capital was effectively under military rule.
I decided to go. It wasn’t easy. In Tokyo a helpful Pan Am agent explained that commercial flights were out of the question but that some governments were flying in supplies to their embassies. I made a middle-of-the-night appeal to Secretary of State James Baker to let me on an American supply flight. His aide called back. “Sorry. No.”
My new friend from Pan Am pulled some strings and I hopped aboard a British charter filled with food and medical supplies for the United Kingdom embassy.
Arriving in Beijing was an eerie experience. One of the world’s largest and most energetic cities was as quiet as a small town in Iowa on a summer day. Military guards were at every intersection and the normal, very heavy bicycle traffic was greatly reduced. For the first two days we relied on material from state television and what little we could record on backstreets in Beijing to describe the crackdown and the shake-up of the Chinese government, orchestrated by the diminutive but tough Deng Xiaoping. Deng knew that to survive China had to reform economically but he insisted the changes had to come from the top down, not from the streets.
On the third day one of my favorite cameramen, Tony Wasserman, who had flown in from South Africa, was fiddling with a cardboard box on the back rack of a FlyingPigeon bicycle, the ubiquitous form of transportation used by the average Chinese.
“What’s up?” I asked. My bearded friend in his African bush shorts grinned, held up a small video camera, and said, “Mate, I think we can make some pictures.”
We secreted the camera in the box with a small hole for the lens and took off for Tiananmen, me following behind on my own Flying Pigeon, which, as I remember, we got for twenty bucks from a used Flying Pigeon lot.
It worked. We rode past parked tanks in the square, armed guards everywhere and Mao’s outsize portrait on display as I described the scenes and the new climate of fear and military omnipresence. Just one Chinese cyclist caught on, pedaling up to the back of Tony’s bike and tickling the lens through the peephole.
We expanded our territory to some of the backstreets and markets on our second day, prompting a memorable encounter. A student rode up to my parked bike, looked around cautiously, and whispered, “Changing China—we need more and more of the Voice of America.”
He was referring to
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