CAREER
“Witnessing History:
The Life of a Foreign Correspondent”
By Karl Ho
Ronald E. Yates has seen dictatorships crumble, chatted with a Japanese
emperor, listened to the woes of South East Asian refugees and hid in paddy
fields from machine gun fire. And he has never regretted a moment of it.
"I just thought that being a foreign correspondent would be the greatest
of all jobs," said Yates, who was an award-winning foreign and national
correspondent with the Chicago Tribune for 27 years. "It turned out that
I was right."
Yates' stint as a foreign correspondent sent him to Japan and other countries
in Southeast Asia and Latin America, where he lived and worked. Yates was
at Tiananmen Square when the tanks rolled in to quell student protesters,
and he covered the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. He was there
when revolutions erupted in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. He was
also one of the few American journalists to report on the fall of both
Cambodia and Vietnam in April 1975 and was among the last to be evacuated
from Saigon.
"It seems like every story I covered was in some way history making," Yates
said. "Whether it was the Falklands/Malvinas war between Argentina and Great
Britain or cocaine trafficking in Columbia, or Tiananmen Square in China. It
was all history.
"I had a ringside seat for some major world events," he said.
"There were times when I actually felt that I was being paid to have witness
history in the making — I felt guilty taking a paycheck sometimes, because
the work was so satisfying, so much fun."
Yates gained recognition for the "fun" he was having. His work
resulted in four Pulitzer Prize nominations and numerous awards, including
the Peter Lisagor Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the
Inter-American Press Association Award and three Edward Scott Beck awards
for foreign reporting. He also wrote books on the Japanese business ethic
and on his stay as a reporter in Japan.
The Early Years
Yates knew early in his life that writing was something he loved to do.
"When (my classmates) had themes to write in elementary school, English
classes or in high school, many would cringe and freeze up," he said. "I
didn't. I relished the assignments."
In the 1960s, Yates spent three-and-a-half years in the Army as an intelligence
analyst. At that point, he still considered himself more of a writer than
a journalist.
"Living in Europe and going to all the places Hemingway went, I thought,
'That's what I want to do.' "
But working in the secretive world of military intelligence gave him a
thirst to speak out.
"Journalism was like a natural reaction to the years of not being able to
talk about what I did," he said. "I wanted to be in a position to tell
people things."
Yates studied journalism at the University of Kansas, where he was editor
of The University Daily Kansan. Under his leadership the paper won an All-American
Pacemaker Award.
"It was a real hot time on campuses," he said. The paper investigated
slumlord professors and covered the social and political upheaval of the times,
including campus protests against the war in Vietnam and civil rights issues.
"It really made me realize I was heading toward the right business," he
said. "It was a great training ground."
But not as great a training ground as The Chicago Tribune would
be.
Yates turned down job offers from The Wall Street Journal and Gannett,
choosing the Tribune because it offered the opportunity for an
overseas posting. The experience of living abroad had given Yates a taste
for the life of a foreign correspondent.
"I realized I was really fascinated with other people, other cultures and
other systems of government," he said. "The other reason was probably
just the romantic notion of being a foreign correspondent."
But Yates' romantic notions had to wait. He started out at the Tribune
in Neighborhood News, a department that no longer exists at the paper.
"I started way at the bottom," he said. "Your job there was to
turn out lots of copy." Yates was pounding out 20 to 25 stories each week.
From Neighborhood News, Yates went to the city room, where he covered all
types of stories at all hours in all types of weather. He also worked on
the rewrite desk and even served a tour with a consumer advocacy column
called "Action Express."
"I paid a lot of dues," he said. "I spent four years paying dues."
But those dues-paying years were teaching Yates a lot. Working in a tough
newspaper town like Chicago taught Yates how to survive and thrive in a
competitive environment. In addition to the Tribune, there were
three other dailies in Chicago in the early 1970s.
"It was the best journalism laboratory I could have had," he said.
Yates' reputation as a writer began to grow. He was one of three writers
chosen to write in-depth front-page stories for a slot called "Column
One." A three-part series on black capitalism that he reported caught
the eye of the future foreign editor when it was picked up by Tass, the
Soviet news agency, and in 1974 Yates received his first foreign posting — Japan.
"I had never been to Japan in my life. I didn't know the language, the culture,
the people," Yates recalled. "But I didn't care. It was a foreign posting
and I was going to take it."
Yates said he seemed to have a knack for being in the right place when
news broke, including arriving in Vietnam shortly before the fall of Saigon.
'War is war': Danger on the frontlines
Yates' tour of duty as a foreign correspondent was often fraught with danger.
While covering wars and revolutions in countries like Vietnam, he was threatened
by gun-toting guerrillas at road blocks, came under mortar and artillery
barrages and was pinned down in a dry paddy field for almost an hour by machine
gun and mortar fire.
"War is war," Yates said. "There were probably 20 times when things
got really dangerous ... when I thought, 'This is it.'"
Yates well remembers one of his closest brushes with death. It was 3 a.m., and
the foreign correspondent was in his room at the Monoram hotel in Phnom Penh.
There was artillery shelling and rocket fire outside.
"It was about 110 degrees in my room," Yates said. "There was
no electricity, no air-conditioning. I was lying on the bed sweating in the middle
of the night, watching geckos chasing mosquitoes on the ceiling."
In a semi-awake and semi-dazed state, Yates heard a light "pop" and
recognized it as a sound of a rocket being fired. When he heard a "phwhew" after
that — the sound of the rocket flying toward the hotel — he rolled into
a small space between his bed and one of the walls.
"If you do (reporting in war zones) long enough," Yates said, "you
pick up sounds and you know what these sounds mean. When you start hearing these
things, that's when you start thinking about taking cover."
Moments after he fell onto the floor, the window and outside wall shattered.
Yates got up and saw a piece of shrapnel stuck into the wall where his head
would have been if he had remained on the bed. He has kept the six-inch-long
fragment ever since. It sits on a shelf in his office.
"If I hadn't rolled off the bed," Yates said, "it would probably
have taken off my head. I keep this piece of shrapnel to remind me of my own
mortality and how lucky I was to walk away that night."
Helping others is the reward
Even though Yates won several awards covering war stories, they were not
necessarily his favorite stories. The former foreign correspondent preferred
the more personal stories he did about people overcoming adversity, like
the ones on Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees.
"What was really satisfying," Yates said, "was when you would
go to these refugee camps, or places where Vietnamese boat people were landing,
and you talked to them on these islands. Nobody knew they were there. Often I
would report them to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
so that they could get food, water and medical help."
Yates remembered doing a story on an orphanage in Phnom Penh run by three
Canadian nurses. The children were malnourished and barely alive. The nurses
were taking care of them without any funding or support.
"I wrote a story about it," Yates said, "and even though Phnom
Penh was under attack by the Khmer Rouge, people who read the stories began asking
the Tribune how to get money and medical help to these nurses. As a result, they
received several thousand dollars and were able to keep these children alive.
Many were later evacuated."
Another story Yates treasured was a story on Iva Toguri — a woman the world
came to know as "Tokyo Rose." Toguri was a Japanese-American woman
who was stuck in Japan during WWII and who did radio broadcasts heard by
hundreds of thousands of GIs. Authorities accused Toguri of taking part in
broadcasts meant to demoralize American troops and she was convicted of treason.
However, her conviction was based on perjured testimony. Yates tracked down
the two men who had lied at her 1949 San Francisco trial. After several meetings,
they confessed to Yates that they had lied. Yates wrote a series of stories
in 1976 that resulted in a 1977 presidential pardon for Toguri, who actually
was part of a plot with several allied POWs to undermine the Japanese propaganda
effort.
"As a journalist, you realize you can have an impact on people’s lives," Yates
said. "Writing about politics and economics in terms of numbers, speeches
or events is not the best kind of foreign correspondence," he said. "Where
you can do really well is telling people’s stories; telling stories of boat people
in Southeast Asia, of Indonesian peasants, or how somebody survives in Mexico
or Peru, to American readers who don't have any idea how these people live and
what they have to do to survive. Such reporting helps readers understand that
people are interconnected.
"It's a mission of education," Yates said. "You’re helping people
to understand one another, to appreciate the differences in cultures and lifestyle,
and, one hopes, to bring the world a little closer together."
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