Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Barrie Dunsmore, a former foreign correspondent for ABC who now lives in Charlotte. The piece first appeared in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus.
I got to know and traveled extensively with eight U.S. secretaries of state, including Lawrence S. Eagleburger. Considering the normal tension between major public figures and the reporters who cover them, we were usually friendly. Journalists must never confuse proximity to power with their own importance. But that said, for many years I have been proud to call Eagleburger my friend. Larry, as his many journalist and professional friends knew him — though his wife Marlene always called him Lawrence — died June 4 at the age of 80.
I am saddened by his death. But in some respects it is amazing he lived so long. As the obit writers all noted, he had chronic asthma and always carried inhalators with him while continuing to smoke heavily. He had a knee injury and muscle disorders that forced him to use a cane. In his later years, he had heart problems and was considerably overweight. Yet, in many ways these physical ailments, and the stoic way he coped with them, endeared him even to opponents. In a sense, this vulnerability had a way of smoothing over the rough edges of the often gruff and caustic manner of one of this country’s finest and most respected diplomats.
Although Eagleburger was a Republican and a Henry Kissinger protégé, President Jimmy Carter chose him as ambassador to Belgrade during the final days of the Tito regime. Among his qualifications, he spoke Serbo-Croatian from his years at the embassy in the 1960s. After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s assistant secretary for Europe. In December 1981 a major crisis erupted when hard-line Polish communists pressed by Moscow cracked down on the Solidarity movement, imprisoned its leaders and imposed martial law. This not only created dangerous new tensions between Moscow and Washington — it also put significant strains on the NATO alliance as the new Reagan administration wanted to be much tougher in its response than most of the Europeans. Haig and Eagleburger, both having served in NATO, privately contained the hawks, so preventing a larger crisis.
During that time I began meeting fairly regularly with Eagleburger. I would go to his office, often on Saturday mornings, without a tape recorder and with my notebook in my pocket, and we would just talk. He knew I would not be quoting him, but we both knew that what he told me would inform my reporting. We would discuss the issues of the day or week, strategies and tactics for dealing with them, pending trips, personalities, and, of course, Washington gossip.
In 1982, with a relationship of mutual trust now established, Larry invited me to have Christmas dinner with him and his family. At that time they lived in a modest townhouse in Arlington, Va. This was a far cry from the 40-acre estate he would purchase in his retirement outside Charlottesville, Va., with the millions he earned between 1984 and 1988 as president of Kissinger’s high-powered foreign policy consultancy. In ’84, I went back overseas and in ’86 Larry did me a big personal favor. He spent an hour briefing my then fiancée Whitney Taylor (now my wife of 24 years) on the 1981 Polish crisis and its impact on NATO, which by happenstance was the subject of her master’s thesis at the London School of Economics.
I can see this raising alarm bells among journalism ethicists around the country, but I am deliberately going public with this information because I wish to make a larger point. There was a time in American journalism when people such as James (Scotty) Reston of The New York Times often had the kind of conversations I had with Eagleburger, with presidents of the United States. I think this process can produce very useful, nuanced reporting that is generally lacking today. But this works only if neither source nor reporter forgets the true nature of their relationship, which I believe what follows will illustrate.
After another eight years abroad, I returned to Washington in early 1992 as diplomatic correspondent. Eagleburger had left Kissinger Associates when Secretary of State James Baker persuaded him to become his deputy secretary. He then became acting secretary when Baker reluctantly resigned to run President George H.W. Bush’s sagging presidential re-election campaign. And finally after Bush’s defeat, Larry was named secretary of state, the first career Foreign Service officer ever to earn that honor. Also that year, I resumed holding Saturday conversations with him as I had in the early ’80s.
In December’92, Eagleburger went to Belgrade to try to get Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic to stop the repression of Albanians in Kosovo. I was among a few reporters who traveled with him. At a news conference in London, the British were skeptical about his mission. I suspected what they were getting at, so I asked him outright — Mr. Secretary, what would you say to those who are worried about the baggage you may be carrying on this trip? A reference to his previous relationship with Milosevic, which some thought too cozy. He looked daggers at me, and denied having any “baggage.” A short time later he called and still angry, growled, “I thought you were my friend.” I responded that I was his friend but that I was also a reporter and had to do my job. He mumbled something and hung up. The next day the new secretary of state held a failed meeting in Belgrade with Milosevic. On a stop in Brussels on our way home to Washington, he gave me an exclusive on-camera television interview in which he denounced the Serbian dictator. I had done my job. He did his.
That was probably the last story I did with Secretary Eagleburger, but he and his wife attended my retirement dinner, and we remained friends for many more years. We talked every few months, mostly about our health and families. We did discuss his membership in the Iraq Study Group, which was trying to find a way for America to get out of Iraq. With his usual candor, Eagleburger told me the Iraq War continued to be a disaster. I already knew as much, but as always, his wisdom brought clarity to my understanding of the complex issues of American foreign policy — and I believe — to my reporting of them.
