One day in February 2015, as I was clicking away the final hours of the day, I saw someone on Twitter refer to an “amazing de Borchgrave obit” he had just read. My stomach dipped slightly, taking my heart with it. I opened the link to learn that Arnaud de Borchgrave had succumbed to cancer at age 88. “Who?” many people will doubtless ask, reaching for the nearest search engine. My heart dips a bit more. But those familiar with the history of Cold War journalism will know de Borchgrave (pronounced duh-BORE-grahv) as one of the 20th century’s most accomplished foreign correspondents.
He was also a gentleman, from whom the degraded masses of our social-media hordes could learn plenty. In the summer of 2013, I decided to write de Borchgrave an email. It was the usual clumsy fan message, saying I admired his career and had learned from his writing. I expected nothing more than a perfunctory form letter in return, perhaps a week later. He responded within an hour, expressing genuine gratitude at my interest and inviting me to chat with him the next time I was in Washington, DC. He signed it “Arnaud.” The warmth he extended to me, then a young nobody (and now a slightly older one), means that I can’t help but use his Christian name, though I risk giving the false impression that I knew him well.
It so happened that I had been planning to go to Washington that September to visit a friend. As the date drew near, I considered contacting Arnaud again and taking him up on his offer. But would I come across as a pesky fan? Had the suggestion been a mere pleasantry, offered only because of the remote likelihood of its ever happening? Cautiously I sent him another message, reminding him of our brief exchange and saying I would like to accept his invitation. He responded immediately with an enthusiastic “yes,” instructing his assistant to set up a meeting.
And so on a beautiful early autumn afternoon I visited the gleaming new office building of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the think tank where Arnaud had worked for over two decades after leaving full-time journalism. After an anxious wait in the vast, empty lobby, I was collected by his charming assistant and ushered to an office on a higher floor. Seated at his computer in a swivel chair, Arnaud turned around to view me like some cinematic villain confronting his prey for the first time. But I was eased by the generous and cordial reception that he soon offered—and by the slight, mischievous grin that overtook the corners of his mouth when he talked.
We chatted about politics, history, the job market, and the state of journalism, such as it is. Talking to Arnaud, one easily thought oneself the worst of failures. His life seemed to have been sketched from some leftover Ian Fleming manuscript. Born into an aristocratic Belgian family, he escaped the Nazi takeover of Europe, renounced his title, joined the British Royal Navy (lying about his age to do so), and landed at Juno Beach on D-Day. After his wartime service he quickly made his name in journalism, leading European bureaus for the United Press wire service before joining Newsweek as a foreign correspondent. That kind of career is impossible nowadays, as any young journalist looking for glamorous full-time work quickly realizes.
Before me is an original-run copy of The Spike, the 1980 thriller novel Arnaud co-wrote with Robert Moss. On the jacket is this assessment of his life’s work from a Newsweek higher-up: “De Borchgrave has played a role in world affairs known to no other journalist. He has been able to tap the thinking of numerous world leaders…despite his intimacy with major policymakers, he has never aligned himself with either side of a dispute.”
The last part of that statement is misleading. Arnaud was a dedicated anti-communist. But he was also a charming anti-communist: a quality that endeared him even to otherwise hostile sources. He interviewed every major leader of the postwar era. This meant sit-downs with Golda Meir, Saddam Hussein, Benazir Bhutto, the Shah of Iran, and Muammar Qaddafi. In June 2001, well into his seventh decade, he crossed unforgiving Afghan terrain to meet Mullah Omar, dispatching a story for UPI the next day that is the only interview of the late Taliban leader on record. He had separate address books for separate countries, full of such desirable sources as the chiefs of foreign intelligence agencies. He owned a Swiss pied-à-terre, in which he maintained a closet full of starched military uniforms in case he needed to dash to the front lines of a conflict.
All this experience was written on his face. When he talked, he peered at you, his head cocked down slightly so that his eyes, set behind wire-rimmed spectacles, seemed fixed behind rather than on you. It was not a creepy or uncomfortable stare; it was simply the confident gaze of a man born and cultivated in a very different era. I suspect Arnaud was always aware, and always proud, that he was becoming more of an anachronism as the years wore on.
One sign of this was his attention to sartorial detail. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he had emerged from the womb in a full Windsor knot. Even during our informal meeting, he very gently chided me for not wearing a tie. (I will never make that mistake again. Thanks, Arnaud.) Appearance and image were not tangential to his career, but essential to it. There was Arnaud de Borchgrave the American—he had become a U.S. citizen in 1957—but there were always shades of a past identity, namely Count Arnaud de Borchgrave d’Altena. He used his Europeanness to great effect in several decades writing for Newsweek, then as editor-in-chief of The Washington Times. Most journalists, after all, are a slovenly lot, roaming around with their notebooks in t-shirts and jeans. The novel contrast Arnaud offered was that of a more distinguished envoy: a kind of self-appointed diplomat with a perennial George Hamilton tan. As a colleague of his said, “Arnaud once told me that all he needed to bring when he traveled on assignment was a tuxedo and a safari suit.”
Younger journalists might learn something from this obsolete refinement. I urge everyone to putter around the C-SPAN online video archive of Arnaud’s many appearances on that network. The C-SPAN call-in shows now seem like relics, but in our culture of sub-literate blogging and drive-by Twitter slander, they are an essential education in political commentary. Callers ask questions and the guest is, well, expected to answer them. The guest, then, must know something; he cannot hide behind a hashtag or summon a gang of rowdy followers to rough up his challengers.
The typical Arnaud answer was a two- or three-minute disquisition of the purest fluency. There were no false starts, no tentative pauses—none of the um’s or uh’s of the average person’s halting speech. Paragraphs flowed fully formed, laced with statistics, historical facts, and references to the usually important friends he had feeding him inside information. A question about France might prompt Arnaud to mention an interview he once did with Charles de Gaulle, before transitioning to a recent lunch with some cabinet minister or charge d’affairs, during which he had gained some exclusive insight into the matter at hand.
I don’t know how much of this was affectation. In nearly seven decades of writing, there was bound to have been some embellishment. Modesty can kill a journalist’s career. I do remember reading stories about Arnaud, long before he died, that questioned some of his grander claims, such as of jumping with French paratroopers into Dien Bien Phu. Toward the end of his life, he was accused of plagiarizing some columns, though I have my own reasons to believe this was largely due to the effects of aging rather than any desire to steal others’ material.
In later emails to me, Arnaud referred to “Twittering half-morons,” as he called those who had the patience only for social-media blurbs and not for the discipline of long-form journalism. How could he not be dismayed by what his field had become? The traditional foreign correspondent is nearly extinct. Most newspapers get their foreign reporting from wire services, or from poorly paid stringers (often relatively inexperienced writers looking to make their names) backpacking through third-world hotspots. Only a few American broadsheets still have their own stables of reporters stationed abroad. In Arnaud’s day, even regional papers had overseas bureaus. The Baltimore Sun was renowned for its original international coverage. (The paper has closed most of its foreign bureaus.) Correspondents had generous expense accounts. It all started to change after the Soviet Union dissolved. Foreign reporting became a luxury, and as the Internet further wrecked the finances of newspapers, it became a luxury almost no one could afford.
Hearing Arnaud talk about his trade was like watching someone slowly reveal a wonderful, well-kept secret. As he once told Brian Lamb, “In the seventeen wars that I have covered, Brian, I have never once gone to any defense ministry or information ministry asking for permission.” During the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon tried to manage the reporting of the conflict by discouraging correspondents from leaving the “pools” it had organized for them, corralling journalists into dull briefing sessions far away from the action. Some of the finest reporting of that war was done by those such as the late Michael Kelly, who ventured on their own into the field.
Arnaud, too, refused to be hemmed in. It was January 1991. The deadline for Saddam Hussein to pull his forces out of Kuwait had passed. Saddam had spurned all United Nations resolutions, and final talks between Secretary of State James Baker and Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, had produced no last-minute compromise. Operation Desert Storm commenced, beginning with a huge, month-long air campaign.
By then approaching his mid-sixties, Arnaud flew to Egypt and met a conveniently high-placed friend, President Hosni Mubarak. He convinced Mubarak to arrange passage for him to Saudi Arabia aboard a C-130 military transport. Before leaving, he purchased Egyptian combat fatigues from the souks of Cairo. (There’s that attention to dress again. Arnaud advised younger foreign correspondents always to look as much like their subjects as possible.) In his pocket was a little something extra from Mubarak: an Egyptian intelligence ID card. Foreign reporting, Arnaud said, “requires a little ingenuity” and “a great deal of chutzpah.” Quite.
Having landed in Saudi Arabia, Arnaud, now dressed as an Egyptian soldier, hired a driver and an interpreter to take him through military checkpoints in a sand-colored GMC truck. He eventually arrived at the tri-border region of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait — to a place called King Khalid Military City, one of four compounds built in four vulnerable corners of the Wahhabi kingdom. There he camped with an Egyptian forward recon unit, sleeping in a tent in the biting desert night, emerging to watch the sorties light the sky.
Do you know anyone willing to do this? And if you know someone at least willing to do it, would he or she actually know how? When I left Arnaud’s office, I thought to myself, “a man like this cannot exist ever again.” This was not mere sentimentality. Like a rock formed under specific conditions of pressure, Arnaud de Borchgrave was formed by an extraordinary confluence of world affairs, culture, zeitgeist, talent, and luck. It is simply no longer possible to have a life like his. What 21st-century Belgian-born aristocrat would (or could) renounce his title, fight in a world war, eschew a university education, and manage to make a living as a globe-trotting print journalist? The gears of that world stopped moving long ago. We have lost one of its finest ambassadors, but whether we also lose his example is up to us.