The Dalai Lama's Secret and Other Reporting Adventures

Stories from a Cold War Correspondent

Henry S. Bradsher

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780807150528
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

For over a quarter of a century, award-winning journalist Henry Bradsher reported stories from around the world. In this lively and engaging account, Bradsher recounts episodes from a distinguished career that took him to the Himalayas, the jungles of Bhutan, Kremlin caviar receptions, China's Forbidden City, and the battlefields of Vietnam. Throughout, Bradsher emphasizes the unpredictability of a correspondent's life and the strains, perils, and privileges of standing witness to momentous world events.
In South Asia, Bradsher reported the Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet in 1959 and the last five years that Jawaharlal Nehru led India -- with a side trip to hunt tigers in Nepal with Queen Elizabeth. In Moscow he covered the downfall of Nikita Khrushchev, and he later suffered the KGB bombing of his car in response to his tenacious reporting. His incisive coverage from Hong Kong led Chinese officials to label Bradsher as "the most despicable" journalist. But after a power shift, they welcomed him as the first American journalist allowed to work in China in over a year. Bradsher predicted and reported Bangladesh's independence struggle, and he worked in the Middle East, covering Egyptian-Israeli peace arrangements.
Access to the events that shaped the Cold War also led to Bradsher's meeting many world leaders, including Nehru, Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Zhou Enlai, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin. Although Bradsher's reporting riled officials in Moscow, Beijing, and even the United States -- prompting Henry Kissinger's attempts to thwart the publication of his reports -- history has proven its accuracy. Bradsher's relentlessness in his own work accompanied a profound respect for fellow journalists worldwide who endanger themselves to keep the public informed.

1
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A GUBERNATORIAL PUSH

A BOYHOOD FASCINATION WITH WORLD WAR II STARTED MY INTEREST in world affairs that turned into a desire to become a foreign correspondent. It seemed to be an exciting world out there. So it proved to be. Before I became a foreign correspondent, however, my journalism got a push from a governor of Louisiana—an angry, not a friendly, push.

In third grade in the Louisiana State University “lab school,” those youngsters who were doing well in various subjects were sometimes allowed to read quietly in a corner by open windows—this was before air conditioning. I was reading one morning when newsboys came by outside shouting, “Extra!” It was May 10, 1940, and Nazi Germany had invaded the Low Countries. That is my first recollection of the war, one day before my ninth birthday.

By the time the United States entered the war following the Pearl Harbor attack a year and a half later, I was working after school four times a week down the street at my grandfather’s plant nursery. I was supposed to learn something about horticulture from the elderly German émigré who ran the nursery. With money thus earned, I subscribed to Life magazine for its graphic war coverage.

In the sixth grade at Highland School, Miss Lillian Kennedy used the war as part of her social studies and geography material. Students were asked to report every morning on the latest news. I gradually became the main reporter, recounting to the class the American troop landings in North Africa in November 1942 and other developments. I was hooked on reporting the news.

In a junior high school class that tried to focus students on what careers they might want to follow and how to prepare for them, I did my report on reporting. Work on my high school newspaper and yearbook seemed a logical part of becoming a journalist, although hardly useful preparation. The question was where to go to college. LSU had a good journalism school. Attending it would be the cheapest possibility, but the father of a friend urged me to go to his alma mater, the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, founded in 1908 as the world’s first journalism school and still one of the most respected in the United States. He was C. P. Liter, the top editor for both of the locally owned morning and evening newspapers. This was endorsed by a close friend of my mother since childhood, Margaret Dixon, although she was an LSU graduate. She had become the top reporter for one of these papers, the Morning Advocate.

So, after a freshman year at LSU and spending the summer of 1949 bicycling and hitchhiking around Western Europe, I went in September to the University of Missouri, where my father had graduated. One of the courses that I took that sophomore year was “Recent U.S. History,” taught by Dr. Irvin G. Wyllie. Covering the half-century from the Spanish-American War through World War II, it was a requirement for all journalism students and widely popular with other students. After I had earned an “E” in the course, Missouri’s equivalent of an “A,” and let it be known that I was looking for student employment, Wyllie asked me to grade the class papers. Throughout my junior and senior years, I spent most Friday and Saturday evenings reading the longhand answers to tests that Wyllie gave every Friday to the 150 or so students who took his course each semester. Grading the papers made me well-known to my fellow journalism students, many of whom did not seem to appreciate that I was just doing a job to help pay for my education.

Journalism school started off slowly. I soon realized that earning a Bachelor of Journalism required too many trade-type courses and not enough general education. I wanted a broad perspective with more history, economics, and other subjects. Early in that junior year, I decided to try to earn a Bachelor of Arts in history parallel with the BJ. This would require the equivalent of five years of college credits.

At the end of my sophomore year in the spring of 1950—a month before the Korean War started—I had “pre-enrolled” to enter in the autumn the advanced program of the Reserve Officers Training Corps, following the example of three uncles who served in World War II. Advanced ROTC students were normally required to spend the summer between their junior and senior years in military camp training. Fortunately for me, however, the crush of training active duty personnel for the Korean War caused the summer ROTC program to be cancelled in 1951. This enabled me to go to summer school and complete the BJ by February 1952 and the BA in May.

It required a heavy course load. I stayed very busy with classes, grading papers, and such extracurricular activities as debate, oratory, heading a World Student Services fund drive to help foreign students, and other things. The journalism school setup helped. Missouri’s J-School was unusual in publishing a full-scale town newspaper, not a student newspaper. The Columbia Missourian included community news reported by students under faculty supervision, news agency reports, and the whole range of typical newspaper contents. Those such as myself in the reporting curriculum—other curricula included news photography, radio, and advertising—had to do two semesters of covering reporting beats. Beat coverage took a lot of daily time that I could not spare while doing so many other things during regular semesters. The answer was “intersessions.” To keep the paper publishing during university vacations, the J-School ran reporting and editing courses during these gaps. By six weeks of full-time reporting during the August 1951 break between summer school and the fall semester plus reporting over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, I was able to fulfill the requirement.

More than just busy, I got overextended. While doing a massive research project to earn an BA with “distinction in history”¹ and writing press releases for Missouri contractors, I was offered another job. The graduate student who was the Columbia stringer (part-time reporter) for the United Press news agency’s bureau in Kansas City was going off to Korean War military service. I probably should not have taken the job because I really did not have the time to do it properly. But I needed the extra money to hire a student’s wife to type up the final version of the 311-page distinction paper. (The money ran out before the paper was fully typed, and I finished the typing myself.)

The UP job led to a major embarrassment. In the spring of 1952 a fad swept many college campuses of “panty raids”—shouting mobs of male students breaking into women’s housing, or sometimes let in by squealing girls, to grab feminine underwear. At Missouri, it started one April evening on sorority row, at the other side of the campus from where I was in my room studying. Alerted but lacking a car or even a bicycle, I finally caught up with many hundreds of young men as they moved on to two private women’s colleges near my side of the university. These college girls used mops and other things to try to repel the invaders. I phoned disjointed information to UP Kansas City, including second- and third-hand reports from sorority row.

The panty raids ended too late at night for comprehensive coverage in the next morning’s papers. But the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an afternoon paper that circulated in Columbia, published a graphic account—from UP. UP had always been noted for writing that sometimes was more flashy than accurate. Its afternoon version of the story, under my byline, had been rewritten in Chicago to make the raids sound more exciting than I had tried to describe. Some sorority girls whom I knew from J-School and elsewhere got mad at me over the UP story’s saying the sororities had encouraged the raiders, rather than fighting back the way the girls at the women’s colleges did. I was never sure how much truth there was in the encouragement report, although the situation probably varied from one sorority house to the next.

With the Korean War on, upon graduation I was ordered to report for active duty in mid-August. The J-School hired me between May and August at the lowest faculty rung, assistant instructor, to help supervise students in putting out the Missourian. Then I became an Air Force intelligence officer.

When I got out in May 1955, I intended to apply to the Associated Press for a job. After all, as editor of my 1948 high school yearbook I had written my own class prediction for 1960: “Henry S. Bradsher, foreign correspondent for Associated Press, has just returned from an extended assignment in India.” While waiting for the AP to hire me, which came four months later, I applied for a job at the Advocate, where Maggie Dixon had by then become managing editor. She and Liter were willing to hire me at minimum wage on the understanding that I would leave as soon as I got an AP job.

In addition to getting the good experience of a wide variety of general assignment reporting jobs, I had some interesting stories. Shortly before I started at the Advocate, Dr. Jonas Salk had announced the first effective vaccine for polio. A public vaccination campaign was launched a week or two after I started at the paper. With the hope of a way to prevent the feared disease, the question arose nationwide of whether doctors would participate in mass vaccinations for little or no pay, or would give vaccinations as part of their regular office practices. Hearing that Baton Rouge’s doctors were divided on this, I began inquiring around. I learned that doctors accredited at the main hospital in town planned to meet there to discuss what to do. So I phoned the head of the local medical association to ask him if the meeting was open. He said it was not advertised as a public meeting but was not closed.

I went to the hospital and, after lingering in a hall until everyone seemed to be inside a meeting room, went in and stood in the back. No one questioned me. An argument developed between those doctors who saw free public inoculations as a civic duty and those who felt their training and office expenses entitled them to give polio shots at their regular fees. Avoiding pulling out a pad to take notes for fear of having someone ask who I was, I listened intently. Then I went back to the newsroom to write about the debate, which was not resolved.

The next morning I got a call at home from an angry doctor. Even though I had not identified any doctors by name, many were embarrassed to have argued for regular fees at a time of heightened public anxiety over getting polio shots. The caller contended that I had improperly reported a private meeting. I told him I had asked ahead of time and was told it was not closed, and I had not misrepresented myself to anyone. Some doctors later volunteered their services for mass inoculations, but many did not.

In the early summer, the Pentagon announced plans for Exercise Sagebrush, maneuvers by eighty-five thousand army troops, to be staged from Camp Polk in impoverished, rural west-central Louisiana. The camp had been built in 1941 for the army’s World War II buildup, closed after the war, reopened in 1950 to train troops for the Korean War, and closed again in June 1954. Sagebrush would reactivate it a year later for soldiers and their armored vehicles to fight mock battles in the surrounding pine forests and fields. The forestry industry became concerned that mechanized military equipment would interfere with logging and damage trees in the area. It opposed state government efforts to obtain permission from landowners for the army to use property that was contracted for tree farms and other forestry use.

Led by Governor Robert F. Kennon, the state government argued that Louisiana needed the money that the maneuvers would bring into the state and that the forestry damage would not be significant. In particular, officials contended that letting the maneuvers go ahead could mean the Pentagon would turn Camp Polk into a permanent installation, Fort Polk, with long-term economic benefits for the state.

Hearing the forestry side of this from the father of a friend, I began looking into it. I managed to talk Mrs. Dixon and Liter into assigning me to spend several days in the maneuver area talking to landowners, military people, forestry men, and others. Many of the landowners were skeptical about possible damage but eager to earn the small amount that the army would pay for crossing their property. My articles heated up the debate.

After my articles appeared, Kennon’s spokesmen claimed that he had a promise from the Eisenhower administration to make Polk permanent after the maneuvers. Skeptical, I arranged for the Advocate’s Washington correspondent to check with the Pentagon on this. He was told flatly that the Defense Department had not made any commitment to make Polk a fort in return for being able to hold the maneuvers.

The day that the Pentagon’s disavowal appeared in the Advocate, I went to the governor’s suite in the Huey Long-built state capitol to seek comment. Waiting for a press spokesman, I was standing by a secretary’s desk in an outer office when Kennon came out of his private office on some other business. I had not expected to talk to him personally, but, taking advantage of the opportunity, I introduced myself and began to ask him a question. Before I could finish, he became angry, obviously recognizing my name from the newspaper stories. “I’m not going to talk to you,” he said. Sticking his face up close to mine, he added more loudly, “You’re just causing trouble.” Then he grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me backward. Stumbling a little, I managed to turn, and he then pushed me again toward the door. I left.

Maggie Dixon, who dealt with the governor on a regular basis as Louisiana’s most-respected political reporter in addition to her editing role, was leery of my reporting this incident. Finally, she agreed to a cursory mention down in my story about new developments on the maneuvers.

The maneuvers were held. In the autumn, when I had begun working for the AP in Atlanta, someone in Baton Rouge sent me an unsigned postcard to which had been pasted a small newspaper item saying Polk had been converted into a permanent fort. This taunting turned out to be inaccurate, however. Polk was closed again in June 1959. With the Vietnam War heating up, it was opened yet again in September 1961—and stayed open. Not until October 1968 did the Defense Department declare it permanent. Fort Polk became a major infantry training center for the U.S. Army, where troops were prepared for fighting in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world.

The Advocate was an enjoyable introduction to full-time journalism. After almost four months there, I left for the AP. I was off to Atlanta, Montgomery, New York, and fulfilling my sixth-grade ambition of becoming a foreign correspondent.

2
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RIDING THE BUSES IN MONTGOMERY

THE PHONE IN MY LITTLE GARAGE APARTMENT WOKE ME UP ABOUT 4:30 on Sunday morning. I recognized the voice of an acquaintance who sold insurance in Montgomery, Alabama, but was somewhat of a local character because of his insomniac habit of cruising around town in the wee hours listening to the police radio. He also liked to hang around with reporters and had been nice to me the few times we had met. All he said was, “There’s a bomb at King’s house.”

It was January 28, 1957. A month earlier a boycott of Montgomery city buses had been ended by those residents who at the time identified themselves as Negroes. The boycott to protest racial segregation practices on the buses had been led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A federal court order had forced the city to abandon bus segregation. A lot of white people were still angry.

As soon as the acquaintance hung up, I phoned Rex Thomas, my boss in the Associated Press bureau in Montgomery. His line was busy. By the time I had finished hurriedly dressing, the line was free. Rex had received a call from a friend in the police department about the bomb. It had not exploded. But other bombs had just exploded at a home and a service station owned by African Americans. We agreed that I should go to King’s house while Rex went to the office. I would phone information for him to use along with police reports and other material in writing stories to file on the AP’s Teletype wire.

King’s white clapboard house was only a mile or so from my garage apartment. When I arrived, a large bundle of dynamite sticks with a defective fuse was lying near the top of the front steps, about a dozen feet across the porch from the master bedroom. A few police were already there and a crowd was beginning to gather, most of them angry African Americans. Tension was building.

They had reason to be angry. Two and a half weeks earlier, on January 10, 1957, three Baptist churches with black congregations had been bombed—one of them as I was passing a block away—along with the homes of two ministers. Against the background of mounting violence directed at Montgomery’s black leaders, this attempt to bomb King’s home had created what police, journalists, and civic leaders from both sides of the racial divide would later call the angriest mood yet in the black community. Outside King’s house in the small hours of that Sunday morning, the doctrine of nonviolence that he had preached throughout the bus boycott was being put to its most critical test. The possibility of a riot hung in the heavy night air as I talked with King, his aides, police, and people muttering on the street.

The situation in Montgomery had developed out of the work not of King but of a little-known son of an African American sharecropper and a number of other members of the city’s black middle class. Edgar Daniel Nixon and the others had been planning and waiting for an opportunity to claim some of the rights inherent in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that public school segregation was unconstitutional. Nixon, known to the world as E. D. Nixon and to his friends in the black church community as Brother Nick, was an acknowledged leader of the fifty thousand African Americans of Montgomery. He had organized and now headed the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As a Pullman car porter, one of the most prestigious jobs open to African Americans when he became a porter in 1923, he had also organized and now headed the Montgomery chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The NAACP and the Brotherhood were the two most important national organizations working for African American rights in the early 1950s.

After the school decision, Nixon tried in the autumn of 1954 to enroll black children in a white elementary school near their homes. Montgomery city police turned them back. While court proceedings would be slow, Nixon realized that the economic power of the black half of the city’s population was its best weapon.

Many African Americans, especially those who kept downtown stores clean and did the cooking and cleaning and babysitting in white homes, got to work on city buses. As was common in the South, they had to sit in the back of the bus while whites sat in front. As more whites boarded, blacks had to give up seats in the middle to them and stand in the back. The system in Montgomery was particularly onerous. Blacks were required to pay their fares at the front door, then get off and reboard at the back door, rain or shine. Bus drivers, all of them white, were often abusive. Sometimes they drove off as blacks who had paid their fares were making their way to the rear door.

By the summer of 1955, Nixon and others in Montgomery’s black middle class had decided that the bus system should be targeted by a boycott to demand equal treatment. There was a precedent. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an eight-day bus boycott led by the Rev. T. J. Jemison in 1953 had won small improvements in conditions for black bus riders. All Nixon and his colleagues needed was an incident to try to build on that example. He rejected several incidents during the autumn of 1955 because the people involved had too many personal weaknesses to stand up to the media scrutiny that would result.

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, a forty-two-year-old black seamstress named Rosa L. Parks refused a bus driver’s order to get up and move back so a newly boarded white passenger could sit down. She was tired after a hard day’s work, she said later, and her feet hurt. The driver stopped the bus and summoned police. They took her off and charged her at the Montgomery jail with violating an Alabama segregation law. Nixon bailed her out.

Although her refusal to move had not been planned in advance, Mrs. Parks was not just another tired black woman. She was a member of Montgomery’s well-educated black middle class despite her seamstress job that paid only $23 a week. She had been the secretary of the NAACP’s local chapter, and at the time of her arrest she was training members of the organization’s youth group in civil disobedience. And she was working as a volunteer with twenty-fouryear-old Fred Gray, who had recently returned home with a law degree from Ohio (no Alabama school would educate African Americans to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• 1. A Gubernatorial Push
• 2. Riding the Buses in Montgomery
• 3. Killing the Long-Haired Lama
• 4. The Dalai Lama’s Treasure
• 5. Behind the Himalayas
• 6. Climbing Cho Oyu
• 7. Stumbling Over a Policeman’s Severed Head
• 8. Counting Crowds
• 9. Into Bhutan by Mule
• 10. Mail from the Nagas
• 11. Left Off the Earth
• 12. Tiger Hunting with Queen Elizabeth
• 13. Punitive Expedition
• 14. Of Royalty and Royal Weddings
• 15. One Horse, Many Horses
• 16. Denying Khrushchev
• 17. Wrecking Receiving Lines
• 18. Blocking Blackmail
• 19. Stabbed in the Back
• 20. Bombed in Moscow
• 21. China’s Most Despicable
• 22. Birth of a Nation
• 23. Reporting Vietnam
• 24. Riding the Dangerous Roads
• 25. Shoeshines at Jaffa Gate
• 26. Hazards of Journalism
• Postscript
• NOTES
• INDEX