From Cold War to 9/11 to ... beagles: Our senior scribe has made coverage a craft

Episode transcript

Gail Chaddock:  Peter Grier has written out of Washington for The Christian Science Monitor for 45 years and counting. It’s an astonishing record of achievement that we honor today. There’s a rumor he’s about to retire, so we pounced. 

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This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. In last week’s podcast, we talked with Peter about rebuilding trust in American elections. Today, we’re talking about becoming Peter Grier. The one who can write what needs to be done that day, no matter what. Ask Grier. Peter, thank you for joining us today.

Peter Grier: Any time, Gail.

Chaddock:  There are 87 pages of links to stories in Monitor archives with your name on it, stacked 20 a page. But the one I want to be sure we talk about is your work on 9/11. With four hours to the Monitor’s publishing deadline, you wrote this lead: “On a Tuesday like any other, with fall coming on and the kids settling into school, the United States of America was struck by a series of terror blows so searing they could change the nation’s sense of itself as profoundly as did Pearl Harbor or the worst days of the Vietnam War.” How did you get to that lead, on that deadline?

Grier: No idea. [Pauses.] As you might imagine, first of all, it was a beautiful day. And my kids were going back to school. I’d been there at the end of the Vietnam era. I remembered those days, and the other days we thought things were important, and this felt differently. So I just tried to figure out a way to say that. I will say I was very proud of that, because there used to be a place called the Newseum in Washington. And they had the very top of one of the Twin Towers in an exhibit, the twisted transmission tower that would survive the crash. And they had all the front pages of newspapers in America under plexiglass right next to that. And when I went to see that, uh, [long pause] ours was the one you could read. That was right down next to the viewers. 

Chaddock:  Peter, did something cut out there?

Grier: No, I get emotional about it.

Chaddock:  Oh, I’m sorry. No, I can certainly see that.

Grier: It’s the only thing my sons remember about my career, uh, that they saw daddy’s article end up next to the Twin Tower [display]. So. 

Chaddock:  That next day’s coverage is the stuff of legend at the Monitor. It was one story that filled the entire paper. How did you and the editors come to that strategy? 

Grier: It seemed wrong to write about other things at that time. And so, we just kept going and everybody produced their own feeds, and I stayed up all night and wrote the whole thing. What I remember about it is that my wife came down, because I was writing it at home in the middle of the night, and she said: “This is crazy. You need to go to bed.” But I didn’t. I stayed up and wrote it. So, I think it was for us as much as it was for the readers. I think everybody at that point had something they wanted to say. And we got in what everybody said.

Chaddock:  Can you talk about the process of pulling together that many disparate parts into something as graceful as that entire story and that entire issue was? 

Grier: That is a style of journalism that used to be much more common in American print journalism, and is actually becoming so again in some outlets. What you need is one person who is reasonably knowledgeable or up on what’s going on with the subject. And then lots of other people who have some aspect of it that they can contribute, but might not be able to organize their thoughts. The ability to write is actually a much rarer quality in journalism than you might think. After all these years, I say, you know, anybody can be trained to pick up a phone and make a phone call. What you can’t really do is train people to write. 

Chaddock:  There are two issues there. One is to write, and the other is what you did supremely well in your years at the Monitor: to write fast. How do you write fast?

Grier: We had a foreign editor back in the day, David Willis. He would go around and you didn’t have to work for the foreign desk for him to boss you around. And if he saw you just staring there, he’d lean over and he’d go, “Don’t think, write!” And so I’ve always said that, you know, the key to getting writing fast is to write fast. That doesn’t mean it’s the best you can do, but you have to start. And I was just unafraid to do it. I was unafraid to be bad. And you find pretty quickly that it really isn’t bad. It’s just got you off the mark and you’re going. 

Chaddock:  There was an assignment for all the art students at Bennington College, where I taught, that they had to produce 75 paintings for their first night’s homework. And at the beginning everyone would paint the way they were used to, and of course by the end they realized they were not going to get to 75. They just had to get paint on a canvas. A lot of them credit that assignment with their success later on in life as an artist.

Grier: It gets that muscle exercised. My first real job on the Monitor was, I worked for our old radio show, which used to be Monitor stories rewritten, read onto a tape, and sent out to radio stations all around the country. That required you to write things that were precisely 13 lines long. And the guy who was the boss of that, his name was Dave Dunbar. He would walk around the office while we were reading out loud our scripts for the day. And when he got bored, he would go: “Eh.” And he would punch the air with his finger. That meant you were in an old car with a push button radio and you would just change [the] channel. It was great training. 

Chaddock:  What was striking about your deadline coverage of Donald Trump’s unexpected win in 2016 was that your hair was not on fire when you wrote it. The tone of most of the election night coverage was shock and awe. You had already moved beyond that. You were writing about the pressing policy issues that the new president would be facing. How did you manage that?

Grier: A lot of journalists prepare for what’s gonna happen, and that’s of course a dirty secret of journalism. And when their ideas are flipped on their head ... it’s very difficult to let go of what you originally had. And so you end up kind of writing a story about what you thought should have happened didn’t happen. And that’s not very interesting. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was exactly the same kind of dynamic. A lot of people had pre written Hillary stories. And I had to step in and go. Well, I’ve got a couple of minutes here to pick up the pieces. So what fresh ideas can I bring to something that’s just appeared. I then saw and I still see that his victory was basically an accident of history. That all of our efforts to explain it later have missed the fact that it was really just contingent on a couple of butterfly wings and a couple of swing states. A few votes could have shifted and he could have lost. A few votes could have shifted in 2020 and he could have won. It’s the same thing.

And of course, that’s part of the journalistic problem. You know, the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams at the end of their lives, was their two visions of American history. Jefferson’s was that it was a natural narrative of events that sprung from the nature of human life would cause something like the American Republic to come into being. And Adams remembered it much more chaotically partly because his role in it, of course, was much more chaotic. And he called it a contingency, that it was a near run thing. And lots of stuff could have gone wrong, and frankly, I still don’t know how it went right. So, in that sense, reporters are always trying to put a narrative on things, and sometimes it’s just, stuff happens. 

Chaddock:  You did a wonderful profile of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In fact, I find your profiles wonderful reading. How did you approach that profile? 

Grier: Whenever I do what we would call an appreciation, and other people might call an obituary, I’m most interested in finding something I can use that I didn’t really know about them before, but that is highly indicative of their character. So I will typically go and look for the oral history archives. And I ran across a thing from when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a young law professor, if I remember correctly, and she had a young child who had just entered school. And the school always called her when they had a problem about the child. Well, you know, he’s acting up, you need to come get him, like happens in preschool. And finally, she got one, and she just looked in the phone and she said: “He has a father, call him.” And slammed down the phone. And they never called her again. 

Chaddock:  I love that story. 

Grier: That’s her right there. Actually the one I liked the most in that sense was the one I did for Ronald Reagan. I found a thing in an oral history which I had never seen before, which was when he was leaving office, they were taking all the stuff out of the Oval Office and he was there for pictures and things like that. And they had footage of him leaving the office for the last time. Then he’s getting in the car and they go: “Mr. President, I’m sorry. The camera didn’t work. Can you do it again?” He went back and he completely reenacted his leaving office again, knocked on the doors and said goodbye. And it was perfect. He was the best portrayer of a president we’ve had in my lifetime. 

Chaddock:  There was a wonderful passage in that review. You said: “Reagan radically changed the presidency and presidential politics. He was the nation’s symbol in chief, not its chief legislator. He made many American voters feel their nation was both virtuous and governable at a time when that was in doubt.” Here’s the sentence I love: “He believed in the old verities. Communism was not just mistaken. It was evil. Taxes were not just a burden. They were evil, too. Opponents saw an aging actor who thought that oil slicks made air healthy and wrote him off. They underestimated the power of sincere belief delivered simply, with a smile.” 

Grier: Wow. That’s not bad. 

Chaddock:  I think I’ve mentioned to you once that when I came to the Monitor, they told me, write like Peter Grier. Thanks. Climb Mount Everest.

Grier: Thank you. I don’t know about that. You know, Scott Armstrong, he would just roar with laughter about the leads I would write. So we would compete to see who could make each other laugh. And my favorite was, I did a story on the anchovy industry for the business page. So I had a one line lead and it was: “Anchovies, they’re much more than a pizza topping you never order.” I don’t know why, I just, I love that lead. 

Chaddock:  You know, you can write a sentence that’s got clauses hanging on to clauses hanging on to clauses, because that’s the best you could do at the time. But then you go back and you start throwing periods all over it. And you create very short sentences. Four words. With a comma in between the four words. That is the power of your writing, often. It just is so simple and clear. 

I wanted to talk about one other profile that I really liked. Colin Powell – the man who would not be president. You know, he was always ... [there was] a lot of pressure for him to run for president. He could be the first Black president. Republican. You know, and he said, quoting German General Carl von Clausewitz. “There’s a great Clausewitzian expression which says, ‘Beware the vividness of transient events,’ General Powell said. ‘There are lots of transient events out there, and I’m trying to beware of their vividness.’ Just a great line. 

Grier: He was very sharp. 

Chaddock:  How did you get your first job in journalism?

Grier: I was a paperboy at the Detroit News. I loved it. I love the ink. I love the camaraderie, the distribution room. Best job I ever had.

Chaddock:  How did you come to the Monitor? 

Grier: I applied for and got to be a summer intern. 

Chaddock:  Did any of your early colleagues, early senior colleagues, influence you? 

Grier: I used to work with a man named Dick Strout, who won a Pulitzer for his career when he finally retired. He was born in 1898. He’d been a trainee officer, at the end of the First World War. And he and I would often be the ones who stayed late at night in the Washington Bureau. he could write fluently and colorfully about anything, and so I tried to model some of the things that I did on him. Every night he would leave, and he would stick his head into my door and go: “Fight ’em.” I never knew what he wanted me to fight, but that’s what he said. Also, he never learned my name. Now that I’m older, I understand why that is. Your name bank just gets filled up. He had some stock phrases he used. I will hide them in a story once or twice a year, just as an Easter egg for the two people on the staff who know what I’m doing. So, if you ever see the phrase “summer pressed down on Washington like a wet, hot thumb,” that’s, thanks Dick, thanks Mr. Strout. 

Chaddock:  I’ll have you know I am doing this podcast sitting on the Dick Strout chair, which I salvaged from a junk heap when the Monitor moved out of its office. I’ll have to send it to you one of these days. 

Pentagon reporter driving a tank, flying a fighter. 

Grier: Uh, that’s true. When I was named to be a Pentagon reporter, this was in the era, uh, the lull post-Vietnam and pre-wars in the Middle East. So the US was not really deployed anywhere overseas, and they were arming themselves with a new generation of weapons. And I thought it would be a good idea if I just went out and learned what all these new weapons, tanks, aircraft, were about. Went to bases all over America. And I drove a tank, which they didn’t let me shoot, actually, because the shells were too expensive. I flew in a night exercise in an attack helicopter. So that was fun, but also very educational. You learn a lot about the weapons and about the young Americans who handle them. They’re astonishingly young, astonishingly dedicated. And I think it really set me in good stead then to cover the military as a whole in the later years.

Chaddock: How did you come to acquire a Soviet Army field uniform in 1986, three years before the wall fell? 

Grier: It was not a reporting trip. I took two weeks off and went on a trip to the then Soviet Union with a nonprofit group that took, uh, actually, I am ashamed to say, it was supposed to be young emerging leaders to have meetings with young emerging leaders in other countries. And so I thought it was a good opportunity to meet them and do something I wouldn’t get to do in a matter of course.

We toured around the empire. We went all the way to Kazakhstan, which is now, of course, its own separate country. And in a hotel in Kazakhstan, the KGB agent who’d been assigned to watch me, there were two and they were quite open about it, dragged me into a hotel room, and turned on all the taps, which must have been a joke because, you know, that doesn’t really work. And said: “If you get in trouble in my country, I can be of help to you.” So that was an unusual experience. There was a bottle of vodka in there as well and I just waited until the bottle of vodka was gone and he was drunk. And so I got out of the room then. But I had some stuff in my bag that I had been taking along to give as gifts. And so I thought: “OK, I’ll give him a book about the shoot-down of K.A.L. 007,” which was a Korean airliner that had actually been shot down by a Soviet fighter. So I gave him this book, which he was probably not allowed to have.

Chaddock: I was just thinking that. 

Grier: He said: “Oh!” So he went away and he came back. And just before I left, he gave me an entire Soviet camo outfit, tunic, shoes, pants, hat, And I thought he had one upped me pretty well. Eventually I traded it to a CIA agent, or most of it. I still have the tunic, but I traded the rest of it for some CIA trinkets.

Chaddock:  CIA trinkets. I would say this whole negotiation has had bad economic sense, all the way through it, but I love that.  

Chemical defense training with Gary Thatcher’s Monitor team. 

Grier: This was the time when there was worry about Saddam Hussein and his so-called weapons of mass destruction. And as it turned out, he didn’t really have a nuclear program. But he did have a chemical weapons program, and so we investigated that. Gary took the Iraq end of things and I did the American end. America still had its own chemical weapons at that time. North Alabama was where most of the training for that was based. And I went to Alabama. They stuck me in a giant room and put you in a gas mask. And they pump in a tiny bit of something. I’m not sure what it was, but it was not pleasant. And then they tell you to take off the mask and you learn how bad it is. And so that’s to keep you from ever doing that ever again. It was a quite interesting and unusual series. And we won the National Reporting Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for that. We were pretty proud of it at the time. 

Chaddock:  I especially appreciated your work on The Jill Carroll story. Jill had been kidnapped in Iraq in 2006 on her way to meet a Sunni political leader for the Monitor. Her translator was killed. She was held in captivity for 82 days. Her case captured worldwide attention, and it took a monumental effort to win her release. How did you come to write that story? 

Grier: As you know, the Monitor was involved in a very strenuous effort to get Jill freed. And then of course Jill, thankfully, was freed. I met with her every day, and Dave Scott, who was the foreign editor at the time, and we talked to her about what had happened. And our role was, if she wanted to write about it or talk about it, we wanted that to be published in the Monitor. And eventually, we taped her. You know, that was the beginning of the internet. And it got millions of viewers. And Jill went on, had another career than journalism that involves some of the same skills. I had Hollywood producers call me all the time. And they would have paid very large sums of money for her story. And she declined and has lived her life the way she wanted to. Which is admirable, if you ask me. 

Chaddock:  It was a remarkable read. I still remember the description of, she was moved into a new room. And she spent so much time in rooms just looking at walls, that she forced herself to only look at a piece of the room at the time. And then, gradually, there would be some excitement in a day to see a little bit more of the room. You don’t forget that when you read it.

Grier: When she was first captured, and she was in a car, and they were all excited about having pulled off basically a terrorist attack. And they took her to the house, which was going to be a safe house for a period of time. And it was a family’s home. So they gave her over to the women for handling. And they all sat on a sofa and watched like an American situation comedy. And she just found the juxtaposition there to be terrifying in its own way.

Chaddock:  There were banners with her picture hanging in Rome. You know, there was tremendous international support for her release. Looking back on it, what do you attribute that to? 

Grier: Two things. One, it was the beginning of the world’s experience with America’s long wars in the Middle East. So it was a novelty. And the other is that she was a young white woman in trouble. And that’s catnip for the cable news. Always has been.

Chaddock:  You think of all the journalists who are in perilous situations around the world and wish that there was a way that the mobilization of heart for her could somehow be extended to the others as well. Peter, we’ve talked about a lot of significant events in your long and storied career, but there’s one that I’m afraid might get left out, which is your opus on Beagles. April 22nd is Earth Day. You wrote a piece saying that it’s also National Beagle Day. What do you get from writing about beagles? 

Grier: So, I have had 12 beagles, more or less, come through my house as an adult. My wife is on the board of Beagle Rescue of Maryland. So, I know quite a bit about beagles. And, they are a humorous subject, which is respite from staring the problems of the world in the eye every day. Also, it means my wife will read my stories.

Chaddock:  Always an advantage. My personal favorite was Henry, who you described as looking like a labrador in a beagle suit.

Grier: Henry, well, he was a foster and we were trying to give away to somebody else. He’s a big beagle. You know, that makes him look like a giant foxhound. And people who want beagles just want little cute things. So no one would adopt him. So we just kept him. And he’s the sweetest dog.

Chaddock:  I don’t know if it was this story that you ended with this line: “Dog breeds aren’t defined by their looks, they’re defined by their hearts.”

Grier: There you go. You can say the same thing about a lot of us in life.

Chaddock:  Well, that’s what I thought might be a leitmotif in your long legacy. So as people years from now go back over the Grier years. They probably will look at the profiles and look at the incredible work that was done on deadline. But I hope they don’t leave out the beagle opus because that is where a lot of the heart is right up front.

Peter, thank you for joining us for this podcast.

Grier: Thanks very much, Gail. It’s been a pleasure.

Chaddock:  I’ve heard a lot of people say, what do we do with Peter not here? 

Grier: They will find they are just as well off. It’s better to retire than going: “What are we going to do with Peter?”

Chaddock:  An excellent point. I haven’t asked you what you’re going to do next. 

Grier: You know, the back yard’s a mess. Henry got out at Christmas. I got to rebuild the fence and he was gone for 10 hours. I have a lot to do.

Chaddock:  Well, listen, keep writing. 

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Chaddock: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with links to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins, Jingnan Peng, and Mackenzie Farkus. Sound engineer, Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.