(HOST) The deaths this week of Boris Yeltsin and David Halberstam set off a stream of memories for commentator Barrie Dunsmore who during his career was acquainted with them both. This morning, he has some personal reflections.
(DUNSMORE) When David Halberstam arrived in Paris for the New York Times in 1967, he was as cool and famous as any foreign correspondent could be. He had been among the first reporters to challenge the American government’s rosy descriptions of the situation in Vietnam. This provoked the anger of the Kennedy White House which tried unsuccessfully to have him fired. Ultimately it also earned him a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1967, I was an eager young correspondent in Paris – very much in awe of the new New York Times man. On those occasions when we were both covering the same story he was always amiable. I don’t recall any memorable utterances – on his part and certainly not mine. But his very presence there in Paris, was a validation for me that I had chosen the right career and that France, then led by the haughty and often anti American Charles de Gaulle, was a very good place for a reporter to be.
In 1972 Halberstam published his best known book, The Best and the Brightest. This account of the folly and tragedy of the Vietnam War, told of how the advisors of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, ostensibly the ablest group ever to serve in the American Government, led the country into what Halberstam called, “the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War.” The book helped to crystallize the anti-war movement of the day. And in substance, I find its parallels to the current war in Iraq, quite remarkable.
Two decades after Paris, I was working regularly in the Soviet Union. As Boris Yeltsin appeared likely to become the first democratically elected president of Russia, I spent about three weeks in Yeltsin’s home region in the Ural Mountains, trying to get a sense of the man. In his early years, Yeltsin had grown up dirt poor and barefoot in western Siberia. I found lots of friends who praised him and some enemies who didn’t. And one day I even had tea with his mother. She was a woman in her eighties who lived alone in a tiny and very modest two room apartment. Her chipped tea cups were kept in a small china cabinet, which displayed a colored photo of her famous son. It was actually, an unframed cover of Newsweek Magazine. In a country where Communist leaders and their families inevitably lived like the Czars they had overthrown, this told me that Yeltsin was not your average Communist. That would later be demonstrated as he presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist party.
Yeltsin was no saint but without him and his former colleague and rival Mikhael Gorbachev the Cold War might still be with us.
Yeltsin and Halberstam had little or nothing in common. Yet to me, they demonstrate that regardless of one’s economic or political circumstances, strong individuals willing to break with the pack and challenge conventional wisdom, can truly make a difference even to the point of changing the world.
Barrie Dunsmore is a veteran diplomatic and foreign correspondent for ABC News, now living in Charlotte.