Lost and Found (eBook)

Coming of Age in the Washington Press Corps

Ellen Hume (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
528 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-7576-7 (ISBN)

Infos

This upbeat, funny and true story is about an American girl who found her superpowers by becoming Clark Kent. Determined to be a newspaper reporter, she discovered that the job wasn't open to girls. But she persisted, and succeeding beyond her wildest dreams, she covered some of the most tumultuous and colorful stories of her time. Even though she hated politics, Hume's insistence on holding the powerful accountable took her to Washington, where as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, she figured out how the politicians manipulated the news, and vice-versa. This tell-all memoir is, remarkably, a love story as well as a rollercoaster ride through the American news media at the height of their power. Hume's fairytale romance at Harvard ended with a devastating divorce, followed by a series of romantic misadventures. But at the age of 43 she embarked on the most impossible and rewarding assignment of her life: taking on a new husband and four children, all in one year.

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This upbeat, funny and true story is about an American girl who found her superpowers by becoming Clark Kent. Determined to be a newspaper reporter, she discovered that the job wasn't open to girls. But she persisted, and succeeding beyond her wildest dreams, she covered some of the most tumultuous and colorful stories of her time, including the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, terrorist Sara Jane Moore's attempt to kill President Ford, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson's historic presidential campaign, and the Reagan White House. Even though she hated politics, Hume's insistence on holding the powerful accountable took her to the top of the journalism heap in Washington, where as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, she figured out how the politicians manipulated the news, and vice-versa. This tell-all memoir is, remarkably, a love story as well as a rollercoaster ride through the American news media at the height of their power. No matter how bad things looked, Hume's motto was "e;Don't let the past kill the future!"e; Hume's fairytale romance at Harvard ended with a devastating divorce, followed by a series of romantic misadventures. But at the age of 43 she embarked on the most impossible and rewarding assignment of her life: taking on a new husband and four children, all in one year.

Textauszug

PROLOGUE

Some people write their life story because they want to lift themselves out of the ordinary, to settle scores, and promote their achievements. This book is different. I have hesitated to share it because it is an act of personal definition. Do I really want my children to know about my mistakes? Is some of this too shocking to share with impressionable grandchildren? If parts of this story give you hope, or make you laugh, then I have made the right decision.

My narrative ends in a more innocent time, on the eve of America’s traumatic 9/11 terrorist attack. It has taken me two decades to write it, because I was actively engaged in the present, and ambivalent about stirring up the past. This project has been an adventure in itself, reliving the serendipitous and even hilarious challenges of a life spent full speed ahead, in the passing lane. As a young woman, my motto, stolen from Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter Mariel, was “Go for the volts.”

Many people are born with an identity that is too constrained, by issues of history, money, family, geography, social expectations, or health. Their life’s work is to break out of that shell to create a more meaningful version of themselves, overcoming the efforts by everyone around them to keep them in their expected place.

This personal liberation was the obsession of white American teenagers when I grew up in the 1960s. Disdainful of their parents’ concerns, they were determined to escape the stifling conformity, materialism and safety that overwhelmed our culture after the traumas of the Great Depression and Second World War. Our counterculture rebellion, celebrated famously at the Woodstock music festival, was joined in protest by each previously excluded group —by women, Blacks, Native Americans, Chicano farmworkers, gays1 and all the others who weren’t automatically enrolled in the dominant white male world of 1960s American capitalism. Our generation’s theme song was “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and our high priests were troubadours like Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.

But while everyone else was fighting to break free, I was struggling to find my way in. Where did I belong? I yearned for some settled identity, throughout a childhood where there were too few landmarks. We were always outsiders who had just arrived in town and would be leaving soon.

From my earliest years, I learned to see the world through other peoples’ eyes. It was my way of surviving in hostile environments, as a cloak of invisibility. Shakespeare’s famous advice “To thine own self be true” was a mystery to me. For most my life, I was too busy adapting to new circumstances to recognize my own core. There were so many crazy situations, featuring powerful politicians, gangsters, lotharios, assassins, cult leaders, and celebrities. In the midst of all this, I secretly yearned for a life that was normal.

Like so many other women throughout history, I wasn’t prepared for center stage, and yet I unexpectedly found myself there.

Aside from America’s cartoonish view of women in the 1950s, I had little to rebel against. Yet something was missing. Were other American families like this? We were a loose collection of five dutiful individuals instead of a supportive connection. We ate our meals together as strangers, and performed our chores under the same roof, without listening to each other. There was no emotional glue, no binding family zeitgeist.

Our academic father did offer an occasional flash of humor about his own background. When he joined the Merchant Marine after college, the Scandinavian seamen he met asked him, “Vere did you come from?” He proudly replied “Yale.” Their eyes bugged out at this disclosure! “Vat did you DO?” they demanded, showing new respect for the criminal in their midst.

It was easy to get lost in translation. When I was 7, and we were driving to upstate New York to launch yet another new life, the laughter was at my expense when I asked innocently, from the back seat of the car, “Daddy, what language will we speak in Rochester?” We had started the year in Spanish-speaking Mexico City, after spending the previous year in Portuguese Brazil. Being an American was another new identity I would have to figure out, fast.

Instead of drawing our family closer together, this constant pressure to reinvent ourselves in puzzling new environments left me completely isolated. I missed the ballast of lasting friendships during my childhood years. My two brothers had each other to conspire and fight with, and everyone had great expectations for them. No one cared what their little sister was thinking, or considered what she might become. This meant my self-esteem depended on my ability to decode what was cool in each new place, and work like mad to fit in. As soon as I figured it out, we were moving again.

My parents worried that the past might kill the future, and shared the American preference for what is new and could be created on the spot. Hoping to give us a better world than the one they had inherited, they abandoned the emotional landscapes and familial boundaries that had constrained them. My father rejected his parents’ Christian missionary heritage, embracing only their belief in duty and thrift. My ambitious mother, at 21, actually celebrated the heart-attack death of her Norwegian father, which she witnessed at his bedside. He was a seafaring man who sang Lutheran hymns out the window of their Long Island house, but he couldn’t keep a job.

My parents didn’t realize they were abandoning one religion only to take up another, adopting an uncritical faith in critical detachment. The hyper-rational Enlightenment was their blueprint for life. Every emotion was untrustworthy. We never talked about love.

Today during the reckoning of this Covid pandemic 50 years later, my brothers and I have found a family bond at last, proving that it is never too late. While we live far apart, we meet regularly on Zoom and in biennial sibling reunions. It finally feels as if we have each other’s backs, just in time, before we reach the finish line.

If our peripatetic childhood wasn’t full of family fun, it was absolutely perfect training to be a newspaper reporter. We were encouraged to shrug off emotional entanglements and take an unbiased, scientific approach. We kept heading out to new places, which meant staying off balance, leaving everything behind as soon as it became comfortable. Journalism is all about this too: leaving yesterday’s stories behind, to plunge into the unknown today. I learned how to parachute into new situations and adopt the local accent, dress and protective coloration that would make people comfortable with my presence.

Being a young woman made it easier for me to persuade strangers to trust me with their secrets. That female advantage turned into a disability soon enough, when I trespassed too far into the male world of journalism and politics.

By sheer luck, I came of age in the Washington press corps at the height of its power, amid the unfolding drama of the women’s rights movement. It is hard to imagine today how different things were for women and journalists back then. The impact of what I wrote —or didn’t write when I might have—was astonishing. If I had some brief moments of fame, they sent me running for cover. This was difficult for some colleagues to understand, including especially the Boston Globe reporter who profiled me in 1988 when I quit journalism for good. She simply couldn’t grasp that I had left Washington on purpose, to rethink journalism and democracy before they destroyed each other. She thought that I had been run out of town! No, I left entirely on my own, at the top of my game, determined to reform my profession.

I wrote most of this book while living in Budapest from 2009-16, when I had few distractions except navigating another foreign country with an impenetrable language, working to develop safety and social standing for Roma people, and conspiring with local journalists. I scaffolded this narrative from my private journals, which had been my companions during the lonely times, and from the photographs, letters, videos, conversations with my family, friends, and of course, the public interviews, TV shows and thousands of articles I generated as a newspaper reporter.

Just as cooking changes the flavor of foods when they stew in their combined juices, memories act creatively on our raw experiences. If some specifics turn out to be wrong—the wrong date, the wrong name, the wrong address—this is nevertheless an honest attempt. It would have been impossible for me to make up these stories. I have discovered that some people deliberately lied to me, and I may never sort out their truth. They will remain lost, choosing never to be appreciated as they really are.

My greatest achievement is that this is, above all, a love story.

There were moments when I thought I was finished, when my life seemed ruined. The pendulum would swing back and forth, between failure and success, despair and happiness. What I learned is that everything changes, whether you want it to or not....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.7.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-7576-0 / 1667875760
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-7576-7 / 9781667875767