December 2004
Thoughts on the Suicides of Iris Chang and Gary Webb
Robert L. Terrell
This is a time of somber reflection for those of us engaged in serious journalism here in the United States because two of the most gifted practitioners of the craft recently committed suicide.
The first was Iris Chang, the immensely gifted Chinese American writer. She took her life with a gun while sitting alone in an automobile parked on a remote private road in California's Santa Cruz mountains.
Her death has engendered much public commentary, including numerous accolades regarding her courage, talent and relentless determination to expose largely ignored episodes of oppression and nearly unspeakable horror.
She was best known for her book, "The Rape of Nanking," a highly acclaimed account of Japanese military atrocities committed in China during the late 1930s.
During the months preceding her suicide, Iris Chang was working on a book that focused in part on atrocities committed in the Philippines during World War II.
Friends, relatives and business associates say she suffered from severe depression in response the despicable tales of horrendous brutality she encountered while interviewing survivors of the atrocities addressed by the book she was attempting to write.
This led to a nervous breakdown, hospitalization and finally suicide. Iris Chang's untimely death was still being discussed and lamented when the news broke about Gary Webb's suicide.
Webb was the brilliant journalist who broke the story about the role that CIA-sponsored groups and individuals played in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged this nation's inner city neighborhoods during the 1980s era Iran-Contra scandal. His riveting, three part expose, which was featured in August 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, confirmed the ominous suspicions of those who had been convinced all along that the U.S. government was a participant in the cocaine business. More ominously, it presented a view of power run amok that proved deeply unsettling to the nation's rarely publicly challenged ruling elite.
Although much of the most important information presented in Webb's series was obtained from court records, he was savaged by the elite mainstream media.
Although initially supportive of Gary Webb's extraordinary expose, the people in charge of the best interests of the San Jose Mercury News gradually capitulated. Upon their declaration of total surrender to the withering relentless assault on them, Gary Webb and the newspaper, they cravenly disavowed the most distinguished series ever printed in the generally undistinguished San Jose Mercury News. Gary Webb was demoted, and subsequently left the paper. He was never able to obtain another decent job in mainstream journalism.
Most important, he never managed to fully emerge from the emotional, financial and professional dungeon engendered by his groundbreaking effort to expose the criminality of those who generally live above and beyond the law here in the United States. He was facing eviction from his home for financial reasons at the moment that he put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger twice.
The death of these two extraordinary gifted journalists has touched me deeply, even though I did not know them personally. I am upset that they were unable to conquer their personal demons, and my heart goes out to their family and friends. But mostly, I am reminded by their deaths of the danger inherent in trying to be the kind of journalist who accepts the heavy, complicated challenge inherent in any attempt to seriously address the dark, vicious, and frequently genocidal, dimensions of the human experience.
I have cohabited with that danger for many years. As a result, I am more familiar with its corrosive impact on the human spirit than I would like to be. Moreover, I am excruciatingly aware of its potentially catastrophic influence on one's capacity to carry on. My intimacy with the danger associated with serious journalism began nearly four decades ago when I was a young, eager reporter in New York City for the New York Post.
My specialty at the time was riots and rebellions associated with efforts of inner city people fighting to escape the economic, political and cultural shackles that enforce their squalid subjugation in this nation's major cities. . My leisurely Manhattan lunch was interrupted one Sunday afternoon by a call from the City Desk Editor. "There's been a shooting in Brooklyn, the Ocean Hill Brownsville section. "People are rioting. Get out there, and see what you can. "We want to lead with this story on the front page of tomorrow's paper. "Call the desk after you size up the situation."
Blood, Brains and Blow Flies
Less than five minutes after I reached the scene, I was confronted with a large pool of blood filled with a horde of buzzing flies. At the center of the gory mess was a mass of viscous, oyster-like portions of a human brain. It was splattered there on the grimy sidewalk before me.
Someone had tried to dignify the scene with a small, dirty rag, but there was too much blood and gore. Covered with blood and portions of brain, the filthy rag lay discarded in a crumpled heap against a nearby wall.
I am sometimes reminded of that afternoon when I witness battle scenes on television from places such as the Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Gaza and Iraq.
On that particular day in Brooklyn, a local teen-aged, black male, who attempted to run away when he should have stopped, had been shot at point blank range in the back of the head by an undercover police officer who suspected him of engaging in a petty theft.
The people in the neighborhood were wild with anguish and anger. Huge crowds were gathered in the streets in every direction radiating out from the scene of the stressed execution.
Buildings and businesses were being burned and looted. The police and firemen called to the scene were being attacked with bricks, bottles, shoes and whatever else people could get their hands on. In such a charged situation, everyone's life is in extreme danger.
I took in the scene, ran with the mob for a while, interviewed police officers, filed my story by telephone and returned to the subway station from whence I came.
Approximately five hours after the initial phone call, I was back home in my Manhattan apartment eating dinner and watching the evening news on television.
It featured shots of the rioters and the looting mob, but not the puddle of blood, brains and flies...
During subsequent decades, I have witnessed scenes far more horrid. I have also spent more than my share of late night sessions with survivors of atrocities, who frequently have a deep-seated need to download and share what they have seen and experienced. Some of those who have opened up to me in such settings with cool, precise words, while sipping whiskey and chain-smoking cigarettes, are dedicated revolutionaries. But more often than not, they have been regular citizens, or government officials. Frequently, they have been journalists who did not dare print everything they knew lest they be summarily assassinated.
Racism, sexism, economic oppression, ritualistic torture and methodically brutal murder are common motifs addressed and exposed during such settings. On more occasions that I wish to recall, I have been treated to tales of cannibalism.
Silenced, Embarrassed Diplomats
I am reminded as I write of the frustrated, embarrassed and exasperated western diplomats I met in Liberia during the 1980s, who described widespread atrocities committed by power mad troops associated with Sergeant Doe, the country's illiterate dictator. During the height of that particular crisis, the streets of Monrovia, the nation's capitol, were filled each night with caravans of trucks filled beyond capacity with the dead bodies of people thought to be opponents of the regime.
The city's streets were littered each morning with decomposing corpses that had fallen from the trucks. They diplomats said that when they violated protocol by sending cables to headquarters describing the horror being exacted against the civilian populace by the Liberian military's killing spree, they were told that the official position of their government was that there were no atrocities being committed in Liberia.
They also said they were bluntly informed that if they valued their careers they would not send any more cables to headquarters contradicting the official policy of their government. When I asked why they were sharing such information with me, they said they hoped I could somehow manage to get a story printed that would expose the horrors they witnessed to the world.
Their fervent hope was that this would make a difference.
My strong suspicion is that the courageous individuals who are currently leaking information about prisoner abuse by agents of the U.S. government in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and numerous undisclosed locations around the world, are similarly motivated. I have been privy to similarly gruesome tales of horror in virtually every section of the world I have visited.
Sometimes I have managed to pass such information via news stories, essays or lectures. Sometimes I have written letters to a rare politician who seemed to possess commitment to justice.
But far too often for my tastes, I have have failed to identify a safe or viable method of sharing information received from witnesses and victims without exposing my sources to swift, deadly retaliation.
Solemn, Heavy Responsibility
I have no doubt that Gary Webb and Iris Change were intimately familiar with the weight of responsibility assumed by those who agree to hear, and hopefully pass on, deeply troubling information about the darkest sides of human behavior.
On some rare and marvelous occasions, individuals who accept the yoke of that responsibility receive awards and high public acclaim. Better yet, on some rare occasions they information provided by journalists such as Gary Webb and Iris Chang change the course of human history.
Truth be told, that weight is a primary source of much of the alcoholism, divorce, social dysfunction and suicide that haunts the ranks of the world's premier journalists. Professional success lightens the load somewhat, but not nearly enough. I find it interesting and instructive that journalists are rarely asked how they might be negatively affected as human beings by their intense, ongoing exposure to the darkest aspects of human behavior.
This includes the organizations that employ journalists. For example, most news organizations are engaged in something close to willful denial regarding the possibility that the same sort of delayed shock syndrome problems that haunt war veterans, and many kinds of care givers, might also be shared by journalists.
Stories have begun to appear with regularity in the U.S. press regarding an expected flood of veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of whom will be haunted by deeply traumatizing memories of what they saw and experienced. Plans are afoot to provide them the care they need.
But I am unaware of any plans underway to provide similar options for the flood of journalists who are returning from Afghanistan and Iraq who saw and experienced those wars in much the same manner as the soldiers with whom they were/are embedded. In any event, the tales of horror that I am privy to most often these days involve the devastating deprivation and conspicuous, unnecessary suffering of the ominously expanding legions of ragged begging, homeless people who live and die on the streets of this nation's major cities.
Their desperate descriptions of lost opportunity, cruel fate, bad choices and street side, suffering are soul withering.
From this point forward, each time I photograph one of them, or record one of their tales of anguish and woe, I will do so inspired in part by the brave and courageous assault waged against such unnecessary suffering by Gary Webb and Irish Chang.
They did what they could to help, for as long as they could.
Each was an exemplary role model.
May they rest in peace.
For the rest of us, there is more work to be done.