On the Trail of Statesmanship

The boys, many of them barely teenagers, stared up at her in shock as she entered the Iraqi prison camp during the thick of the Iran-Iraq war. Though many of the wounded lay barely conscious on what few blankets the prison-hospital could provide, all of them covered their heads when a Western woman paid an unexpected visit to the ward. Ill as they were, they still made a feeble effort to show their offense at the woman's appalling lack of modesty. For Karen Elliott House, The Wall Street Journal's diplomatic correspondent, it was not the first time she had risked offense to do her job.

As diplomatic correspondent, House has travelled to Iran, Egypt, Israel and the Soviet Union--wherever the news, and the Secretary of State, take her. But House likes to take advantage of her extensive travelling to do in-depth, non-diplomatic reporting in each country. In addition to following the Secretary of State's progress and set-backs at the bargaining table, she likes to probe deeper into the area's culture by trying to understand its people. Visits to Iraqi prison camps, remote Saudi villages and Egyptian homes are as much a part of her job as interviews with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Jordan's King Hussein and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Preparation and a willingness to venture out of the hotel room are essential in these types of assignments, House has discovered. But she laughingly admits that she has learned this through experience. She recalls her first assignment as the Journal's diplomatic correspondent, when she was still fresh from the ranks from the ranks of the Washington Bureau.

Her first assignment in early 1978 was to cover the Jerusalem Peace Talks between Begin and the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. House spent a tiresome morning waiting outside the conference room with a cluster of other reporters, only to have an official dictate a statement announcing that the talks had adjourned for the day. That afternoon, House did some sightseeing and retired to her hotel to get ready to go out to dinner. The phone rang. Her predecessor on the diplomatic beat, at that time foreign editor in Cairo, wanted to know why Sadat had returned home so early when he was still supposed to be in Jerusalem. "The news came as a total surprise to me. But I got out of the tub in a hurry and onto the phone only to find out how big a story I nearly missed." Apparently, Begin had offended Sadat and the entire delegation had left after the first morning meeting.

After that experience, she says, she learned that a diplomatic correspondent cannot take official statements at face value and cannot be satisfied with remaining one step behind the heads of state. By reading officials' minds instead of accepting their statements, Karen Elliott House scooped the world and became the first journalist to report then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's invitation to Begin and Sadat to come to the United States for peace talks. The talks later became known as the Camp David Summit.

In early 1978, Vance left on a Middle East mission to Cairo and Jerusalem with the usual gaggle of reporters in tow. House second-guessed the Secretary of State's purpose and, on a hunch, called Washington. Speaking to a contact on then-President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council, House asked him if Vance was travelling to the Middle East to personally invite Begin and Sadat to a summit in the United States. She recalls his shocked response, saying. "I knew my hunch was correct when he refused to either confirm or deny it." Though she had no confirmed sources for the story, she was able to write a paragraph about it for the Journal's, "Washington Wire" section. The Jerusalem Post announced the news that weekend, and by Monday, all the papers and wires had picked it up.

Last semester, after six years at the Journal, she took a sabbatical and came to Harvard as an IOP fellow. In addition to teaching a seminar, she prepared for a trip to Russia later in 1983. From her journey there in 1979, House knows that since reporters are not allowed to see ministers, it is very difficult for a journalist to get information worth writing about unless he knows exactly whom to ask. House is particularly interested in learning about Soviet economic issues through Harvard's Russian Research Center. With this background knowledge, she hopes to write a five-part series on the USSR when she again makes a visit there this spring.

House has now returned to the diplomatic circuit but she says that more than anything at Harvard, she enjoyed meeting undergraduates. Her study group, which explored foreign policy decision making, brought former Administration officials and business leaders (including the president of Mobil Oil) before a group of about forty students, half of whom were undergraduates. In addition, Karen Elliott House lived, appropriately enough, in Elliott House. "This is the first time to my knowledge that an IOP fellow has had the opportunity to stay in an undergraduate House. But with my name, they had no choice about where to put me." From her contact with undergraduates, House says she sees a great gulf separating the students of the '80s from her generation of the '60s--the marked increase in job anxiety.

In journalism today, she says, there are jobs only for those who really want it and who really work hard at it. "There is not going to be room for the 1500 journalism majors at the University of Texas [House's alma mater]," she observes.

But in 1970 when House graduated from the University of Texas, she went to Europe for the summer without any plans for a job when she got back. As an undergraduate she had been the campus "stringer" for Newsweek, in addition to writing for the university daily. When she got back, she got in touch with Newsweek and was told that they didn't hire any reporters straight out of college, unless they wanted to work in the research department. They would be glad to hire her, but the editor warned that the research department was often a dead end. It was far better to gain experience on a city daily and then apply. She started working for the Dallas Morning News and eventually went to work for the paper's Washington Bureau.

Her plans to work eventually for Newsweek changed when the Wall Street Journal hired her in 1974 as a correspondent for their Washington Bureau. The editor assigned her to cover the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other regulatory agencies, an area in which, House admits, she did not want to become an expert, lest she be condemned to cover it for the rest of her career. She made the best of it by covering the human interest angle of her beat. When the FCC issued a regulation limiting the number of newspapers, television and radio stations a single family could own, she travelled to a small town in Virginia where one family owned and ran the town's only newspaper, television, and radio station. In 1975, she was "delivered" from the beat to cover the Department of Energy and in 1978 she became diplomatic correspondent.

Unlike most newspapers where the equivalent of the diplomatic correspondents stay in Washington and cover the State Department. The Wall Street Journal encourages the diplomatic correspondent to travel with the Secretary of State and often independently. Although the Journal has bureaus in every major capital in Europe and the Mideast, there is always plenty of news and particularly human interest stories for such a roving reporter to cover. The Journal's flexibility led to House's award-winning five-part series, "Saudi Arabia in Transition". House spent five weeks travelling in Saudi Arabia examining the impact that new-found wealth has had on the country, and another two weeks in a hotel room writing the articles.

"The Wall Street Journal is a reporter's newspaper." Its great strength, House says, is its "flexibility in allowing reporters to cover their beats the way they want to. They know that a reporter writes best on what she's most interested in." For example, some reporters prefer writing human interest stories to political analyses.

As diplomatic correspondent, House hopes to continue adding new countries to her area of expertise--particularly European countries since up until now she has covered almost exclusively the Middle East. A knowledge of the affairs of these countries will enable her to write with more depth about many issues. "In journalism, it's so easy to become compartmentalized. But the world we are writing about is growing more and more interdependent."

At this point in her career, House could easily "retire" to become editor of a foreign bureau, but she feels she prefers the freedom to travel and write to the responsibilities of managing a bureau. Her experience in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt and the USSR will be valuable to anyone else at the Journal writing a piece on international affairs. As a self-styled authority, House hopes to know enough about different parts of the world to raise questions not obvious from day-to-day reporting. "As a reporter, I'd like to be able to raise questions about the consequences of tomorrow from the events of today."