Front Seat to History

By Tom Fenton

Embark on a riveting journey through five decades of global history with Tom Fenton, a distinguished figure in foreign correspondence. With 35 years at the forefront of CBS News, Fenton bore witness to pivotal events in Europe, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Africa. His accounts expose not just the failures of American military interventions abroad but also media lapses.

In this fascinating memoir and exposé, Fenton reveals critical moments where American news media stumbled, leaving the public uninformed and vulnerable to imminent perils. Drawing from his vast experience, he illuminates the decline of reporting and its perilous collision with the business of news. Bad News: The Decline of Reporting and Junk News: The Failure of the Media provide stark insights into media shortcomings in the 21st century.

Now living in California, Fenton remains a vigilant observer of global conflicts, including the state of democracy in our own nation. This book is more than a wake-up call; it's a clarion call to face the unsettling reality that ignorance is no sanctuary—it's a treacherous path to the unimaginable, even genocide.

Delve into Fenton's unflinching narrative and emerge with renewed urgency. In a world where knowledge is power, this book serves as your guide through the turbulent waters of misinformation, unveiling the stark truths that demand our attention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fenton Publishing
• Release date: Nov 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218307578

Book preview

PREFACE

A Letter to My Grandchildren

Dear grandchildren,

This is the story of my life. It has been a long road, with unexpected events and more than a few surprises. Extreme old age does have its disadvantages—it’s not for sissies, as the old saying goes—but it also gives you wisdom. I would like to share some of that with you: what I did, why I did it, and above all what I learned along the way. Many of these lessons are still important today.

This brief memoir may also interest older generations who might have heard or seen my reports from abroad and may be interested in the story behind the story. I saw and learned a lot of things, and not all of them were aired. Network evening news reports had to be brief, and my bosses in New York decided how much of the twenty-one minutes of news in the evening news broadcasts would be devoted to events overseas. It was not a lot: typically, one minute and forty-five seconds for a correspondent’s report.

But first I will give you my background, which shaped my life and partly explains why I ended up as one of America’s most experienced foreign correspondents, covering almost an entire alphabet of countries from Afghanistan to Yemen. I never covered a place that begins with Z, although I almost made it to Zululand once. I was pulled off that story to go to Albania. From Z back to A.

I will begin with my early years in Baltimore, where I was born in 1930 and grew up in the Great Depression, a time when Americans faced mass unemployment and the world was headed into another World War.

I was a kid full of curiosity and the urge to make this a better world. That may explain why I was an altar boy at my home church of St. David’s in Baltimore, and why the parish rector urged me to apply to an Episcopal seminary. But I took one look and decided that was not the life for me. A quiet life in a small town was not my thing. I have always been eager to see what lies beyond the horizon. It must be in my genes. As a child on vacation, I would sit on the sand at Rehoboth Beach and scan the horizon, trying to imagine the destinations of distant ships sailing out from the Delaware River into the Atlantic. They may have been shabby freighters bound for humdrum ports, but in my schoolboy dreams they were headed for exotic adventures. I yearned to be on board.

When I did this watercolor of a boy on the beach in Le Touquet, France, I must have been thinking of myself sixty years earlier.

The road that eventually led from there to journalism was paved with nine years as an officer in the US Navy, the good luck of meeting and marrying your extraordinary, smart, and beautiful French grandmother on the Riviera in 1958, and a thought-provoking visit to my new home in Paris by my former prep school English teacher Roy Barker, who believed I was one of his best pupils. So, after turning down both law school and a European business school, I settled on journalism as a way of earning a living with pen and ink, and eventually with the paraphernalia of broadcast news.

I began my new career in 1960 on the bottom rung at the Baltimore Sun. (I used to joke that my first assignment taught me all I needed to become a journalist by learning to read a police blotter upside down while talking to the desk sergeant.) I learned the power of journalism in my six years as a local reporter during the assassination of President Kennedy and the civil rights movement. And then the Sun sent me to Rome as a foreign correspondent.

For the rest of my professional life—initially for the Sun and then for CBS News—I covered major events in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa: natural disasters, royalty, assassinations, the overthrow of governments, and endless wars. My four decades as a foreign correspondent gave me a vantage point to see the realities of America’s role in the post–World War II world.

History should have taught us that wars are endemic and mostly unavoidable. That there are no good wars. No matter whether they are called a war to end all wars or a War on Terror, they are wars against people, and the price in lives lost is ghastly. We will always have wars in this dog-eat-dog world. The Pax Romana was imposed by a constant series of wars. So was the British Empire. Can American hegemony be prolonged indefinitely by fighting costly wars? The answer should be obvious.

So, it was not surprising that my life turned out as it did. I saw a lot, learned a bit about the world, and gained some firsthand insights that you can’t get from books alone. I used to say that being a foreign correspondent beats working. Despite the long days and nights in places on the State Department Travel Warning List, I still wonder why anyone actually paid me for having such an interesting life.

This book is more than a memoir about my life: what I did with it, why I did it, and the firsthand insights it gave me. It’s a letter to a generation too young to have known my world. It may also be of interest to older generations who watched television news but were rarely given more than snippets and headlines of events beyond our borders.

Indeed, in these days of aggregated, rehashed, and regurgitated news, I am sadly aware that the public no longer believes much of the drivel in the media. Don’t trust secondhand news. Take it from your grandfather—and as you know from your own experience of living abroad—there is nothing like being there to understand what is happening in the rest of the world.

So, my dear grandchildren, you might ask whether I regret how I spent my life. The answer is no.

CHAPTER 1

Early Years (1930–1951)

I was born in 1930 and grew up in Baltimore, so I remember the Great Depression. My father had bought a house in an upscale suburban area, but we had to give it up and move into a shabby house in a much cheaper neighborhood. He kept his job, but it didn’t pay much. One of our neighbors who was a prosperous banker lost both his house and his job and ended up peddling insurance door-to-door.

My mother was a typical suburban wife. She ran the home, raised the children, and played canasta with her friends. Even after the Depression sharply reduced our standard of living, my parents still tried to help others. For Christmas and Thanksgiving, for example, they would give a basket of holiday food to a family in a low-income neighborhood.

As a schoolboy, I wasn’t very good at athletics. I had more of an artistic bent. I liked painting and drawing. I also had a small 8mm camera, which I used to record family events and mini silent movies. Later, when a high school classmate opened a summer puppet theater in Ocean City, Maryland, I did the scenery for the show.

My father was a salesman for a local printing company that made labels for things like cans of corned beef. He was also in the National Guard, and in 1936 took me to the last grand reunion of Civil War veterans of the armies of both the North and South. They met in a temporary campsite on the former battleground of Gettysburg. The experience of seeing old soldiers now sharing memories with their former mortal enemies, both black and white, was a lesson I never forgot.

My father could also be very strict. At dinnertime, children were to be seen but not heard and keep their thumbs on the table.