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In a Moment of Difficulty for a Friend, Thinking of Lt. General Roméo Dallaire

December 5, 2013 /2 Comments/in , /by

December 15 Update: Just after publishing the post below, the fine radio program CBC Sunday Edition carried a lengthy interview with Roméo Dallaire which I linked to on the sister blog to this one, Honourary Canadian. It was a very moving conversation.
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Shake Hands with the DevilIn 2005 when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers of the Avalon Publishing Group I brought out the U.S. edition of a Canadian bestseller, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Its author was Lt. General Roméo Dallaire, a career officer in the Canadian forces, a national military that more than most in the modern world has cultivated a strong tradition of serving as peacekeepers helping to end conflicts in lands distant from their own. In 1993 Dallaire was commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda when that country was swept in to genocide and ethnic cleansing by Hutu militants. The member nations of the world body refused to resource Dallaire’s mission adequately, even after he presented them with a military plan weeks before the genocide that would likely have blocked the carnage before it ever began. Horror ensued. Dallaire and fewer than 500 soldiers (he’d asked for 4,500 more troops) sheltered and saved approximately 25,000 people, yet 800,000 Rwandans died. Dallaire returned home to Canada from the Rwandan mission a nearly broken man, suicidal and afflicted with severe PTSD.

In Canada, where the tragic failure of the mission under Dallaire’s command was well known, the book from Random House Canada struck a huge chord and it had already sold over 100,000 copies when I acquired the rights. Many US publishers, including Random House in New York, had declined to publish the book here. I knew why they had–in the States, Dallaire was hardly known at all. As an acquiring editor at publishing houses for more than twenty-five years, I had never minded a situation like that. I welcomed the challenge, and loved working to promote an author, who on the merits of his/her book and their compelling personal story, deserved to be widely read and better known, thus allowing the book, with a solid foundation, to be built up in to a big success. Going in, I knew I needed to help the book find as large an audience as possible in the US, or better yet, bring as big an audience as possible to the book. I commissioned an original Introduction by Samantha Power, who’d recently published the Pulitzer Prize winner, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. We also caught a break when publication coincided with release of the movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” in which Nick Nolte played a Hollywood version of the general. The movie portrayal, though very inaccurate, did elevate Dallaire’s notoriety, and enabled us to generate major reviews and book him on shows like Charlie Rose, and many NPR programs.

Samantha Power of course is now serving as US Ambassador to the UN. Ironically, when Shake Hands  was published, the Washington Post asked former US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright to review it. I considered this a very interesting, even a daring assignment by the Post book editors. After all, the Clinton administration’s failure in Rwanda along with other countries was still fresh in mind, raw and painful. To her credit, in her review Albright gave Dallaire and his book their due. While conceding she’d been a part of many failures in Rwanda, she also pointed to flaws in the world system that leads to failures like Rwanda. Almost a decade later, failures like this still occur–look at the current civil wars in Syria and the Central African Republic. These recurrences are the sort of thing that torture Roméo; they can tip him in to a new flare-up of post-traumatic stress.

Despite the severe illness, Dallaire has rebuilt his life and psyche and gone on to do very important work in conflict resolution. I accompanied him to several of his NYC interviews, sitting in the back of taxicabs and in green rooms with him. We became friends, and I found him a dear person. Despite everything Roméo had endured–and the treatment and therapy he’s still engaged with regularly–he has a good sense of humor with an almost merry glint in his eyes. I mentioned this to him and he said, “I’ve always tried to be like that. A commander without a sense of humor will not be respected by his troops.” He’s a soldier-humanitarian, kind and sensitive, Gandhi-like in his way. From the position he holds now as a Canadian Senator–where a major scandal has been coincidentally been raging the past few months–he has moved on in his life to advocate for the end of the practice of armies conscripting child soldiers. The Carroll & Graf edition of Shake Hands  sold well over 60,000 copies the first year after I published it, and it’s still selling well today.

With the 20th anniversary of the genocide approaching next year, and four recent suicides of Canadian veterans of the Afghan War, Dallaire had a traffic accident this week due to severe insomnia and sleeplessness he’s been enduring as these events prey on him. He was uninjured but shaken by the crash. The same day he made a statement of apology to his colleagues in the Canadian Senate, ironic since so few others there have been anywhere near as forthright in admitting their own missteps. I shared my concern for Roméo in a few tweets earlier this week.

 

RIP Saul Leiter, Important NYC Photographer Appreciated in the NY Times

November 28, 2013 /0 Comments/in , /by

Thanksgiving Afternoon Update: After tweeting and posting about Saul Leiter last night, I’ve seen a few more pieces on him today, and have had quite a wide reaction to what I’d shared. The best piece today is Teju Cole’s postscript on Leiter in The New Yorker. The Brooklyn writer, born to Nigerian parents in the US, was best known to me for his 2102 novel Open City, but now I see he’s also accomplished in photography, writing about it and taking pictures. This is from the end of his fine New Yorker appreciation:

“The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter’s work is a mystery, even to their creator. As he said in “In No Great Hurry,” laughing, “If I’d only known which ones would be very good and liked, I wouldn’t have had to do all the thousands of others.”
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Foot on ElSaul Leiter was an amazing photographic artist who I am only just learning about now, because of the obituary on him by Margalit Fox; the Lens blog post about him by friend Tony Cenicola, in today’s NY Times, and a Lens blog post by Cara Buckley from November 15 about a new film on Leiter, “In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life With Saul Leiter.” Much of his work is at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in NYC. I urge you to look at his work there. This is from Cara Buckley’s post:

“There is something so poignant about Saul Leiter’s work that looking at it can feel like taking a dart to the heart. Drenched in luxuriant, saturated colors, the images instantly transport the viewer into the photographer’s shoes: peeping from beneath an awning to a snow-swept street, or through a befogged cafe window, weeping with condensation, to a man taking pause on a wintry sidewalk. Intimate and empathetic, Mr. Leiter’s photographs relay what all New Yorkers know about their roaring, daunting home: that life in the city is filled with stolen glimpses and fleeting, quietly personal and often gorgeous moments.”

Loving “Bonfire Etiquette,” Amity Beach’s New Album

November 24, 2013 /0 Comments/in , , /by

Bonfire EtiquetteAt Honourary Canadian, the sister blog to this one, I’ve written up a new  album by Amity Beach,  a young Ontario pop band that I discovered at NXNE in 2012. I really like their new songs a lot. This is my post where I’ve published a full report. And this is a link to the single, “Born in the Daylight” from their soundcloud.com page. I hope you like it, too. I recommend the whole album, which you can sample at their tumblr. Really gets better the more you listen to it. Highly recommended.

Jeff Stein Visits Lara Logan’s Husband at Home

November 24, 2013 /0 Comments/in , /by

November 26 Update:

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik just reported on their hourly news bulletin that Lara Logan and the producer of the botched “60 Minutes” segment on Benghazi have been put on a leave of absence for the many misjudgments they made in producing writing that piece for the show. More to come . . .

 

Kudos to Jeff Stein, veteran national security and intelligence reporter, for his important Newsweek story, “Lara Logan’s Mystery Man”. He explores what may have motivated Logan to so badly mis-report her “60 Minutes” story on Benghazi which was built upon the contributions of a source who claimed to be an eyewitness to events it is now understood he couldn’t have seen. Almost immediately after the October 27 airing of the segment, critics began questioning the CBS broadcast, but it took the network several days to even acknowledge any problems with the story, and then finally disown it, with a brief and unrevealing Logan apology on air two weeks later.

Most significantly, judging from Stein’s article, he managed to speak with Logan’s husband, the mystery man of Stein’s title, whose background includes a stint with the Lincoln Group, a company that the Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld, hired to supply fake positive news during the Iraq War. I relish the vision of Stein talking his way past Logan & Burkett’s front door, before, I assume, he was asked to leave. I recommend you read Stein’s whole story, but here’s the final portion as a sample:

“So why did Logan put that story on the air? Her pro-military bias is as well known, but so is her mettle – she’s worked in some of those most dangerous parts of war-ravaged Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt, where she was sexually assaulted by a mob. She won an Emmy for one of her Iraq reports. In other words, she’s a smart, tough, experienced reporter. And the producer and writers and reporters who helped her put this Benghazi story together are honored, respected professionals, many of whom have been covering the region for years. Whoever fooled them, whoever convinced them that al Qaeda orchestrated that attack on the U.S. embassy, had to be smart, incredibly persuasive and savvy about the media. And unquotable. In other words, an intelligence source. And the person closest to Logan with those credentials is her husband. But he’s not talking.”

Did Burkett have an uncredited role in producing Logan’s story? Stein’s story makes me wonder. That would be a big deal.

The contrast between CBS’s veritable stonewalling on Logan’s flawed report, and their total repudiation of Dan Rather’s “60 Minutes II” story on George W. Bush’s National Guard records–which despite errors, actually had many accurate elements–is striking. In 2004, the network appointed a blue-ribbon panel to study what went awry and fired producer Mary Mapes. In the current instance, there’s been no public airing of what wrong, and no one, least of all Logan, has been dismissed or publicly criticized. There’s also been no public admission that “60 Minutes” has a corporate sibling relationship with Threshold Editions, the conservative book imprint at fellow Viacom company Simon & Schuster, that published (and then withdrew) the fraudulent “witness’s” book. Did Logan allow her personal agenda, or that of her husband John Burkett, to color her reporting? We may never know, unless and until CBS becomes more transparent on this troubling incident.

A bit of humor to close . . .

On a lighter note, I also have to give props to Jeff Stein for a keen cinematic reference in his story, likening John Burkett as a “puffer” to Steve McQueen’s character in “Solider in the Rain” (1963), with Jackie Gleason, based on the fine novel by William Goldman.

Fifty Years Ago Today–Where I Was & What I Remember

November 22, 2013 /2 Comments/in /by

Fifty years ago today–also a Friday–the principal at Mercer School in Shaker Hts. Ohio, Mrs Van Dusen, came in to my third grade classroom in the early afternoon and had a whispered and worried-looking conversation with my teacher, Mrs. Vaughan. A few minutes later Mrs Vaughan told us we were being excused early. Parents who normally picked us up at 3:15 would be coming for us soon. Elation I might’ve felt at getting out early was tempered by uncertainty at the earlier whispering and an unspoken urgency. I went out to the school oval and saw my mom in our car waiting to pick me up. I got in and before I could ask what was going on, she said, “The president’s been shot.” I think she didn’t want to tell me just yet that he was dead.

Thus beginning at age 9 was triggered in me a tragic period of my childhood, with violence and political killings that followed in the wake of JFK’s assassination, including events two days later, when, taking a break from a dolorous family meal, I got up from the table and walked in to the TV room. Within seconds I found myself watching a black&white TV picture as CBS broadcast the moment Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. What a weird sad time.

In the years that followed I observed the urban riots that afflicted many cities, including my hometown of Cleveland; deaths in Vietnam that numbered in the tens of thousands; the political murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; and the shootings at Kent State. In some ways, I feel like I’ve never really gotten over the shock of the weekend JFK was killed.

Ewan Munro Live on Jesse Krakow’s WFMU Show “Minor Music”

November 19, 2013 /0 Comments/in , /by

WFMU posterTonight, November 18, my son Ewan Munro performed his music live and was interviewed by musician, music teacher, and host Jesse Krakow on his program “Minor Music,” which is devoted entirely to showcasing musicians 18 years of age and younger. It was broadcast on the great indie radio station, WFMU. If you want to listen to the show, which has already been archived on the Internet, please follow this link. If you want to hear Ewan’s recorded songs you will find them at this web page of his on the music-sharing site soundcloud.com.

Krakow has done the program for four years and he will soon learn if he’s going to be renewed by the station for another year. His program is the only outlet of its kind in the New York metropolitan area, and I hope his worthy efforts will be rewarded with an extension. If you agree with me, you can let station manager Ken Freedman know via this contact page on the WFMU site. Here are some pictures from our night at WFMU 91.1/90.1 FM in downtown Jersey City, NJ. Please click here to see all photos.