dispatches
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Essay Excerpt / Of Turbans and Neckties : Why Past Defines Present /
In a profession that treasures its heroes, ask any correspondent about Kif, John Kifner of the New York Times. After editing his Williams College paper, he joined the Times as a copy boy in 1963 and badgered his bosses for reporting assignments. Soon, he was a star. With ingenuity, endless energy, and his fabled war bag always packed by the door, he moves at warp speed. An impish grin and persistence win over sources. A mastery of world realities underlies his work. Mostly, Kif is a reporter’s reporter, who knows the value of seeing the story up close. He belongs to a breed that recognizes its own. Late one night on a train from Bucharest, after covering Nicolae Ceausescu’s fall, he watched a newsmagazine correspondent pad to the washroom with slippers, pajamas, robe, and toothbrush glass. “That guy,” he remarked with a laugh to a colleague sharing the Scotch, “is going to be an editor.”
It was the winter of 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had just arrived back in Iran, overthrowing America’s most important client in the world, Shah of Shahs, Mohammed Reza Paleveh, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans and guardian of a huge chunk of the world’s oil supply. I had just arrived too, possibly the greenest freshly minted foreign correspondent ever, having never been outside America, unless you counted a small race riot in Bermuda.
I awoke one morning to the news that some big ayatollah had been whacked, gunned down from the jump seat of a motorcycle. And not just any ayatollah; it was Khomeini’s teacher. (Khomeini had a teacher? Who knew?) The immediate conventional assumption blamed disgruntled agents of the former Shah’s dreaded secret police, the SAVAK.
Okay, I thought, this is a second-day homicide story, and this I knew how to do. I had translators go through the Farsi newspapers to locate the scene of the crime. No luck. Well, what hospital pronounced him dead? Off to the hospital to find the doctor and ambulance crew that picked him up. Got a street intersection?
We find the crime scene, and what a scene.
In America / Essays / John Kifner