Buying the Night Flight Read Free

just isn't the way it is. I have to tell them that the way you control your interviews (or any other part of your work) is to know more about the subject than the other person does. This advice, as you can well imagine, is seldom greeted with deafening applause. (In fact, most of the questioners don't like the advice at all, but in fact that is the way it is. Everything else is falsity--and that should never be a part of journalism.)
    Next, realize that nothing comes out of nowhere -- everything comes out of somewhere. All of the crises of nations, like the crises of individuals, have roots. What's more, those roots are knowable and analyzable, but you must literally dig for them and you must then have the knowledge and the courage and the honesty to correctly identify them when you discover and uncover them.
    Personal note: I always get upset when I see the word "unpredictable" applied to leaders, to political situations within countries or to cultural behavior in general. Saddam, unpredictable? Fidel, unpredictable? Ronald Reagan, unpredictable? Hardly. Their behavior is as tiresomely predictable as the sun rising and going down. But to find those so-predictable patterns of personality and psychology, you have to understand their cultural background, their personal family history and something of their own psychological responses to the world in which they grew up and grew old. (Another secret: That's the great fun of journalism!)
    Avoid at all costs the smart, know-it-all, wiseacre "get him" journalism that unfortunately typifies so many young journalists today in the "elitist press." They sit around wondering, "Who should we 'get' today?" while scoffing at any idea of patriotism, of citizenship, or of ceremony. These attitudes are incontrovertibly and disastrously destructive to the world that decent people everywhere are trying -- and too often, dying -- to build.
    Watch for trends in the world, instead of focusing on the sensationalist minutiae that so congest and contorts our newspaper columns and our television screens. Dig deeper, and then try to relate cross-cultural or cross-global patterns. As a matter of fact, this can be done -- indeed, should be done -- even here within our own country.
    In the mid-1970s I taught one fall quarter at Syracuse University. The subject was foreign correspondence, and I asked my students to find a part of the local scene that they could analyze in exactly the way an overseas correspondent would analyze a foreign country. One wrote about the local trailer camp; one covered and analyzed the local Indian reservation. They were smart and sensitive young men and women, and they understood immediately that we were trying to transpose the lessons of good foreign correspondence over the structures of this country and to learn about ourselves from the exercise.
    Finally, think of aiming at having the kind of "informed instinct" that you can employ so well in your analysis of the world and at the same time aim toward a "principled pragmatism" as one of the major values the world needs in leadership. Finally, employ in your approach to your journalistic subjects, in the words of my old friend, the great psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, an "empathic immersion." In short, immerse yourself in a subject and in a personality with as much understanding and compassion as you can, while trying always to bring to your interviews and to your analysis your own most polished and intuitive insight.
    Finally, remember always that writing, when done with intelligence, with spirit and with passion, is like a great love affair. Me? I'm still in love.
    Georgie Anne Geyer
Washington, D.C. December 2000

Acknowledgments
    Once when I asked a wise editor what exactly one should include in the acknowledgments for one's books, she responded with: "All the people who have helped you with the book." But that was a little difficult for me because legions of people all over the world, in every culture and in every language,