Like a number of old newsies, I’ve covered at close hand a lot of very important personages in my time: seven U.S. presidents, Queen Elizabeth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Mikhail Gorbachev, Sylvester Stallone, former Gov. Jim Thompson. Sometimes, though not always, they’ve been surrounded by large entourages and armed security guards-often with good reason.
I’ve endured some pretty rigorous security procedures too: at the White House, crossing military checkpoints in Belfast, getting grabbed by the KGB at Leningrad Airport, entering maximum-security areas of prisons.
Once, when I tried to flee a particularly horrid Margaret Thatcher news conference, devoted entirely to her haranguing her intellectual inferiors and held here in non-British Washington, I was told we were forbidden to leave.
But never, ever have I encountered an apparat or security measures anywhere near as humiliatingly formidable as those I encountered last week when, as part of a vast horde of capital newsies, I obediently trooped to Washington’s luxurious Vista Hotel (Liz Taylor’s favorite) for the epochal news conference held by Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.
First, we were made to line up before long tables and a row of his polite but deadly serious followers who copiously recorded our names and other particulars and examined our press credentials as minutely as if they had come fresh from the counterfeiters.
Then we were moved on to another area where steely-eyed but polite men in bow ties separated our men from our women. The men were then counted off in smaller groups and ordered to stand against a wall. Then, one by one, we were admitted to a smaller chamber where other steely-eyed men in bow ties performed body frisks-back to front, armpit to crotch to ankle, every bulge and pocket squeezed. (I inquired of a female colleague and she said her search was just as embarrassingly thorough, if not more so.)
A good newsie will do most anything for “the story,” but all this reminded me of a scene in “Schindler’s List.”
When finally admitted to the news conference chamber, we were surrounded by phalanxes of more steely-eyed bow-tied men, who glared hard whenever we coughed, twitched or dropped a pen. And, let me tell you, there were few coughs, twitches or dropped pens, let alone attempts to flee.
There were seemingly as many bow-tied security men as there were newsies, and there were so many newsies the microphones on the podium left Farrakhan no room for his notes.
And what was the news, “the story” that subsequently made the network news and front pages all over the country? Farrakhan’s assistant Khallid Abdul Muhammad had made a speech calling Jews “bloodsuckers” and the pope “a no good . . . cracker,” and calling upon blacks in South Africa to kill all the white men, women and children after giving a humane 24 hours’ notice. Farrakhan announced that he found Muhammad’s “manner” of saying this “vile” and “repugnant” and so was dismissing Muhammad as a Nation of Islam minister and assistant, but only until such time as he improved his “manner.”
Farrakhan then proceeded to defend the “truth” of what Muhammad had said, and throw in some wowsers of his own-i.e., that 75 percent of the slave owners in the South were Jewish (surely you’ve heard of Gen. Robert E. Leebowitz).
Farrakhan concluded by calling the penitent Muhammad “a beautiful black stallion only God can ride” and shared with us a charming anecdote about how Muhammad used to carry around a cut-out Bible with a pistol hidden inside.
Guys like this can be found all over the world. I don’t doubt some turn up on the street corners of Israel ranting about Palestinians. The American news media, also last week, honored just such a fanatic from Northern Ireland named Gerry Adams with far more news coverage than real Catholic leaders, such as John Hume, working for peace and risking their lives over there for 25 years, have received in all that time.
Maybe they ought to start packin’ a piece in their Bibles-and holding news conferences that require strip searches to enter.
