Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: Okay. Thanks again for being with us here today. And just say a word so we can test this.

Hunter-Gault: Well, it's good to be getting this on, including—

Clark: In your very busy schedule. We do appreciate it a lot. I just wanted to follow up a little bit on some of the discussion of your period at the New York Times last time, which was pretty complete but there were a couple of kind of hanging questions, for me at least, having interviewed Eileen Shanahan and Betsy Wade, about the lawsuit. I wanted to ask you—

Hunter-Gault: I don't know much about the lawsuit.

Clark: Okay. Well, that's good to know.

Hunter-Gault: Because I was very involved in the black lawsuit.

Clark: Yes.

Hunter-Gault: And the women's lawsuit sort of proceeded and, you know, I signed on to it but I wasn't intimately involved in it. I don't even remember what year it was. What year was it that they—

Clark: They concluded in '78.

Hunter-Gault: Yes, because I was also starting to leave then.

Clark: And the Benilda Rosario suit began in '74.

Well, that's really—honestly, I just want to discuss the suits. So I'd like to hear about your activities with that suit.

Hunter-Gault: I don't remember doing very much.

Clark: Well, I mean with the Benilda Rosario suit.*

Hunter-Gault: I just went for a deposition, and told my story. I mean, there were people at the critical center of that who were involved in the organization and keeping us all abreast of what was happening. So I just was deposed when my time came. I wasn't one of the organizers, you know, so I can't really give you anything that would be illuminating on that.

______________________ * Benilda Rosario was the chief named plaintiff in a discrimination suit brought against the New York Times by minority employees in 1974.

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My son was born in '72. So I could have, probably at that point, moved on a little bit after that to the national staff. But that was it. And by that time I was not single. But it wasn't my marital status. It was the fact that the kids were young.

Clark: In terms of young women coming along now and making decisions about career and family and that sort of thing, would you say that it's possible to raise young kids and have a demanding career?

Hunter-Gault: Well, you see, I don't generalize about things like that because I think that every situation is different and every individual is different. And so I wouldn't feel any more comfortable saying to young people, "You can have it all," because I don't know what they're made of. I mean, they may not be made of the same stuff that I'm made of, their dynamics and their environment may not be the same as mine. In my own personal situation, I was able to have, first of all a child. There was a period when I was separated from my first husband [Walter Stovall] and it was just me and this small child. And I've always relied—I mean, maybe it's a part of the way I was brought up. But I was brought up in an environment and in a community where the notion of support and extended families and everything was very much alive and well.

Now, my mother was always there for me, along with my grandmother. But that's a form of extended family because my father was away, and the people in the community and the neighborhood. And again, you make choices. Now, in order to make the life that I had chosen for myself professionally, to make that work, there were things I had to do. Like when I started working at the New Yorker. Of course, I was married then to my first husband. And most of the money I earned went for a babysitter. But I had a baby and I had a job and I wanted a career. And so those were the choices that I made, the priorities for me.

Then when I was alone for a while again, you know, I made sure that I had money to get good quality child care. That was the trade-off. You give up some of your material earnings for the comfort of knowing that you have somebody to take care of your child. And you know, it's just always been for me a matter of balancing. I never felt particularly deprived because I was growing in my job and I was comforted by having my children. So there's no question that probably within that kind of a situation, you make some compromises.

We always laugh at my house about—I mean, I grew up in a household where I had chores to do and every Saturday I had to get—I hated it—I had to get out the vacuum cleaner. I hated all those parts that I had to adjust. And it was my job to clean the house from front to back, not just my room. So I know about how to clean a house and all of that. But I said if I ever got into the position where I didn't have to do it, I wouldn't do it.

And in those early days when so much of my income was going to child care, while I wanted to have a nice, neat house—clean was an absolute essential—neat was negotiable because I would tell the babysitter all the time, the child comes first. And when the child was taken care of and fed and maybe relaxing, clean the house. But if it came down to, if the child was sick and needed constant attention or if there was someplace my child had to go that only the housekeeper could get her there, that was much more important to me than the house being clean.

Now, since they're adults, I'm real cantankerous about the house and I want it clean. But, you know, those are the kind of trade-offs you make. I wanted to have food for them, you know, warm meals coming home from school and stuff like that. Well, I'd rather she spend the time on doing that than dusting or moving around the furniture or vacuuming or whatever.

So I never had any psychic problems. It was mostly all practical problems, you know, juggling the practical parts of it with what I could afford and so forth. And then, you know, weekends—times when I was with my children were great which is one of the reasons I'm glad that I made the choices that I made, to have my children early when I had a lot of energy because I could do all my work and still have energy to do the

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And I was able to do that. And now I'm just at a point in my life. My kids are home for Christmas and it's really great. But they're almost like little visitors now, and they're going to be gone. You know, you can only have so many adults in a house. And now my house is kind of the way I want it. I still want them to be comfortable, I'm still getting things for my son's room although he's—psychologically I'm sure he's gone.

But you see, I'm always nervous about generalizing because everybody's different. What worked for me may not work for somebody else. And a lot depends on your background and how you were brought up. I wasn't brought up being put on guilt trips. So I'm not a big guilt-trip person.

The other thing is I do all that I can. And I accept that, when I've done the best I can. Now, obviously, every now and then you ask, should I have? You're always constantly wondering, "Well, should I have done this or should I have done that?" But you would do that, anyway. You would do that if you sat home all day as a housewife. Not that housewives sit home all day. I mean, that's the hardest job of all, in a way. If you're into it, it may not be so hard. But when I was on maternity leave, I could never get the bed made up and the front of the house—I just could not get it together. If I got the bedroom clean, I couldn't get the front clean. Or if I got the front clean, I couldn't get the back clean.

This is why I'm a professional because I don't like this. I don't enjoy this at all. I don't enjoy making up beds and I don't enjoy drying dishes. So why should I have to do that if I've worked hard and earned enough to pay somebody else to do it who doesn't mind doing it. I have a man working for me now, my housekeeper—he doesn't mind doing it. He'd work all night if I would let him. Well, that's fine. I'm happy to honor him and pay him to do it and respect what he does. But we had a frank talk at the beginning. I always do this with my housekeeper. This is who I am and this is what I am and this is what I do. And this is how I feel about the house and this is how I feel about your job. Now, we need to agree now so we don't have a problem down the line.

Of course, I learned that over time because if you don't spell out things for people, they kind of go their own way and that may not be the way you want them to go. But if they've gotten used to doing that—well, anyway.

Clark: Are the things that you think you've been able to do, thinking about problems and issues that you're able to do better because you parented?

Hunter-Gault: Well, I'm very single-minded about my work. And yet children have a way of intervening that keeps that in balance. I think that I have probably, now that my children are out of the house, become more of a workaholic. When I came back from Somalia the first time, I had been dehydrated in Somalia, sick, been gone—that's the first time I ever missed Christmas and I really worked hard, you know, eighteen hours a day sometimes.

And I came back and I didn't even take any time off. I just kept working. My producer wanted me to take time off. And then I suddenly realized, this is stupid. We all should be taking time off. And I began to focus on the fact that I'm not happy unless I'm working, either on some project, whether it's a personal or professional project, I can't not work.

So I think that having kids, when they were younger and had more demands, was good because it took my mind off of my work. I don't think it's healthy even though that's my inclination because I think you burn your mind out, you burn out your creativity. And you need to step back from things, even if it's only for a week from time to time, especially if you work in an intense business like this. Every business, I guess, is intense. But it's really intense if you work in the media where thirty seconds to air doesn't mean thirty-two. It means thirty. And the moment when that light goes on the camera, you have to speak. I think that's a pressure that not a lot of people can do. And so it's stressful.

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Hunter-Gault: Yes. That's always been the way this program works. Nobody's a specialist. I mean, you develop areas that you may be more interested in than others. But this is the supreme generalist position here. You are involved in everything. And every now and then, I might go out and do some little story on something. I don't mean little in the sense that it wasn't important. But we just didn't have the resources to go and do a lot of field reports. So I had a lot of down time. That was still then the half-hour.

Then when the program expanded to the hour ["The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour"], there were more opportunities for me to do things in the down time. It's a mix, it's a balance that I've never been quite happy with because as I gain more and more sophistication and interest in issues—and the program and everything else—the outlet for that just was never equivalent to my own capacity as I saw it, you know, because there's just so much you can get down. If I designed it, I'm sure I could get it there. But I don't design it. So that's been a big frustration, not being able to. But then the flip side of that is that I've been able to do a lot more than we would have ever thought when I first came here.

Clark: When you first came here, you were just kind of a general reporter. And then in '83, was that when you were made national correspondent?

Hunter-Gault: These titles don't mean anything.

Clark: How did they say what they wanted you to do?

Hunter-Gault: They never have. [Laughter]

Clark: Okay. How did you get done what you wanted to do?

Hunter-Gault: I just follow my instincts.

Clark: Do you develop your own story ideas?

Hunter-Gault: Most of them. But there are things that come up in the general discussions. I think I'm responsible for maybe eighty-five percent—maybe even ninety percent of the things I do. They come out of my head, maybe even ninety-five [percent]. But there are other things that I do if somebody else comes up with an idea. There are things that by time that people say, "Well, that's a Charlayne piece," or "That's something Charlayne could do really well." South Africa, the Middle East, Madrid, peace talks, you know, stuff like that, are usually things I say, "This is something I'm interested in." [Tape interruption.]

Hunter-Gault: I was getting ready to say that the real positive side of the job is that I can't imagine many other places anywhere—it's a small operation—where you could just walk in and have the kind of access that I have and also the choices.

Clark: Access, you mean to sources?

Hunter-Gault: To people who make decisions.

Clark: Oh, I see.

Hunter-Gault: We complain sometimes because it takes a couple of days or maybe a few hours. But most of the time I can get a pretty quick answer to anything I want to do. And most of the time anything I want to do—I mean, I have good editorial judgment about stories. After all this time, I should have. And so I don't go in and propose something stupid. So most of the time, it's the question of resources. Do we have the resources?

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there for a few days waiting to do this interview with one of the ANC people in exile [Thabo Mbeki] whose father [Govan Mbeki]—the reason I chose him was his father was in prison with [Nelson] Mandela* at the time. And I wanted to show that continuity, you know, that the children of those who were in prison were still struggling—what had happened to some of the children. And this one had been trying to keep the movement—working with Oliver Tambo and others to keep the movement alive.

So I found out about this. And I called the office and I said, "If ever there was a time for an interconnection, this is it. We need to try to get one of the businessmen, an ANC person on, to say what happened," because this was a major breakthrough. You know, there was discussion back here. And again, with all of our resource problems, the question was should we spend the kind of money—and also coming out of a place like Lusaka is not always easy. And how big of a story was this? Was it really justified?

Well, they didn't know what was happening, because there wasn't a lot of news about it. And Robin said, I'm told, that he always deferred to the people in the field because they know what's going on. And so they set it up and it worked. It was a very good story. We've been on the point of that story every major development since I was there in '85. We always looked for ways to keep the story alive, even during the state of emergency when they had these draconian press restrictions that drove most of the media away from the story. We found ways to keep it alive. This was one of those challenges to me, you know, how do we do this? I probably made them a little sick of me. But I'm willing to risk that. I'm feeling the same way right now about Haiti. I mean, we need some light on what is going on, it's so mysterious and crazy.

At any rate, if someone like Nadine Gordimer or Helen Suzman would come to town—Nadine Gordimer being the South African writer who later won the Nobel Prize, or Helen Suzman who was for a long time the only woman in the South African parliament and a liberal—I would interview them. Or when Mbogeni Ngema and Duma Ndlovu put on "Sarafina," I interviewed them. Just every opportunity to keep the story alive.

Another part of that is—you asked what makes a Charlayne story. My take on things is to always try to illuminate through using the people who are involved. I think there are all kinds of ways that a story can be handled, even if it's one in which violence is a factor in the equation, it may even be a large factor in the equation. But pretty soon violence is the kind of thing that people become inured to very quickly. So I try to find ways of keeping a story—even if violence is in the foreground, I try to look at it a different way.

Or like Somalia, where what ignited people's interest was the starvation and the pictures of the people who were dying from starvation or suffering in ways that might otherwise have been unimaginable. But you know, once you see that and once that captures your attention, what else is there, because if that's all you see—like even with South Africa, that's just all you saw when I went there in '85. Most of the stories on the nightly news were of the violent confrontations between the South African security forces and black township residents. Well, we're pretty familiar with that. What else is there? Why is this happening? It's digging deeper into the soil of stories and getting that soil under your fingernails.

Clark: How much time, say in the South Africa piece, did you spend just doing advance field work? Do you get to know the person before you interview them on camera?

Hunter-Gault: Well, you don't have a whole lot of time. I mean, we have some time but you have to make decisions pretty quickly if you're going to use your time economically. So we would go and we'd talk to people. You know, one of the things you learn over time is to develop a pretty good sense of what's going to

______________________ * Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa May 2, 1994. Under apartheid rule, Mandela was imprisoned for twenty-seven years.

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So I had a little conversation with the cameraman in the beginning, because I would look around and he'd be off somewhere filming something he thought was interesting, which was. But I said, "I'm telling this story and I don't know what I'm going to see. And I don't want to have to stop somebody who's in the middle of telling me some tear-jerking, sad tale and say, 'Could you just go back a few paragraphs?' So just stay with me. And this guy's really good [Eugene McVeigh]. He's from Northern Ireland. And he began to see how I worked in this. It's not how people usually work. It's not as pristine and produced. It's cinema verité. But I wanted, in this situation I thought what is different about what we can do than what everybody else here is doing? We can actually put our viewers in our pockets and take them with us. I wanted them to feel as I was feeling it when I was feeling it, not having to recreate it. You know, "I want you to come with me to Somalia."

So when she turned around, Gene was rolling and we were both in tears, she and I. And she was pregnant, apparently before he died. And so she began to tell me what happened, things had gotten a little better, though not a lot, and dah-dee-dah-dah-dah. But today people say, "Oh, I remember the woman, both times."

Clark: Interesting.

Hunter-Gault: It's the power of people in their own circumstance, portrayed in a way that they are and not in a way that we preconceived that they are. And so the reaction that I have, that tells me that we're communicating. If somebody could come up and say, "I remember the woman with the white thing on her head," or "I remember the Irish nurse that you were with."

And I'm getting the same thing with the Gaza Strip piece because I dealt with individuals and got them to tell their stories. And I don't—it's different from—I mean, I'm getting heavy-duty criticism from a Jewish group in Boston. They've launched a whole campaign against the work that I did in the West Bank in Gaza because they see it as being biased and stuff. But it wasn't. A lot of the things that they criticized, people were allowed to say things that on the record aren't that way or maybe not true. But it's their perception and that's what's important when you're trying to help people understand a very complex situation.

Clark: I've noticed that even when you have to interview the really high people, like your piece on [Yitzhak] Shamir and [Hanan] Ashwari.

Hunter-Gault: Oh, in Madrid?

Clark: Yes. And on both of these occasions you started near the first five minutes, with a question about what was in their mind and heart, like approaching them through the feeling. And with Ashwari it worked really well. She opened right up. And with Shamir, he kept denying that he had any feeling, which is another way of seeing his cynicism.

Hunter-Gault: Yes. And I got a lot of criticism—well, some, from some predictable corners, saying that I was much more gentle with Ashwari. But it was how she responded. I try to get out the humanity in people, if I can.