Embedded With the Embeds

Thirty-five years and a week after Timothy G. Carlson ’71 brought his camera into an occupied University Hall, the snapshots he took there can be found in magazine archives or a skip-filled CD-ROM. Still, no number of scratches or fading decades can obscure the behind-the-scenes images of the moment the ivory tower became a battleground.

In one mid-range photo, light streams through the elegant windows of the chamber in which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences meets periodically, though this is no normal Faculty gathering. We cannot see who presides over the forty or so radical students packing a corner of the room they have taken by force, but it is certainly not a dean. They wait eagerly and a little uneasily as several raise their hands, one standing tall, in a meeting Carlson now compares to the Paris Commune, “reinventing history from the moment.”

Another of Carlson’s shots has only two living figures, dancing awkwardly with two ghosts of Harvard’s past: one student rests a jaunty hand on the bald pate of the Faculty Room’s bust of Benjamin Franklin, while another’s skull seems in the process of being tickled by the two-dimensional knuckles of the bygone Harvard don whose portrait hangs above him.

Carlson took these pictures of his revolutionary classmates at the height of the College’s April 1969 student takeover, when he and a handful of his photographic subjects were Crimson editors, right in the middle of the chaos they were reporting on. The images are full of the uncertain immediacy of that time, that tentatively-toed border between politics and personality, youthful rebellion and major social change, and they were enough to get the young photographer noticed.

The snapshots Carlson took of not-so-civil disobedience ended up appearing first in the widely-read pages of Life Magazine, he says, and soon he was traveling to observe Palestinians in Lebanon as a freelance writer and photographer. With any luck, it seemed, Carlson stood on the brink of a successful career as an overseas photojournalist covering some of the most harrowing and important stories in the world.

“It seemed like a natural progression,” Carlson says now. “Perhaps I felt untouchable.”

And then his course veered. Prevented by an unexpected illness from covering the 1974 conflict in Cyprus, Carlson found himself freelancing and taking quieter domestic assignments over the decades—at a bureau of TV Guide or at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which went out of business while he was writing for it. Through much of the 1990s Carlson covered endurance sports for publications like Triathlete magazine.

A year ago, Carlson dropped his projects at Triathlete to go abroad again—to Baghdad, where the United States was waging its most controversial war since the 1970s. There, in the weeks before a sign reading “Mission Accomplished” was strung up behind President Bush on the USS Lincoln, Carlson conducted a series of meta-interviews on his own, speaking with journalists from a wide range of news organizations about the thrills and trials, dangers and dilemmas of reporting live on the war.

Carlson estimates that the resulting oral history—Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq—has sold more than 10,000 copies since its publication in September, winning reviews in The New York Times, the Washington Post and other high-profile venues. (The Times, generally favorable, said the book’s “accounts crackle with immediacy,” while the Post spent most of its double-bill review riffing on a BBC editor’s recently-published memoir.) Embedded has not been a blockbusting bestseller, but after bringing Carlson and co-author Bill Katovsky a Goldsmith Book Prize from the Kennedy School of Government’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy last month, the book is poised to bring the man who once eluded police to get The Crimson and Life magazine photographs of a campus under siege back to the national stage.

Portraits of the Artists in their Youths

It cannot be easy to summon terms to match the places and times where the world’s great ideological clashes have broken out into violent action. Carlson has faced that unenviable task in Cambridge and Baghdad, two instances that are only barely comparable, but which have led him to the same descriptive strategy of metaphor.

In conversation, Carlson is very fond of employing slightly incongruous analogies to revive these vivid memories. The words of New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief John F. Burns, whose meditation on the ethics of reporting from a totalitarian regime forms a centerpiece for Embedded, are compared to the works of Shakespeare and the Old Testament in the book. In person, Carlson reflects that Burns sounded a lot like Winston Churchill—or was that Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg? Newsweek reporter Scott Johnson’s recollection of being shot at makes him, in Carlson’s words, something like a latter-day Stephen Crane. An Al Jazeera correspondent with a fastidious dedication to fairness is, somewhat jarringly, just like Felix Unger of “The Odd Couple.”

There was a time when Carlson saw himself and his classmates in such outsized, metaphorical terms. Concentrating in Visual and Environmental Sciences—“I finally ended up there because I could get academic credit for the pictures and movies,” he recalls—Carlson studied the great 20th-century photography of Robert Capa, Larry Burroughs and Henri Cartier-Bresson, hoping some day to follow them in documenting breaking tragedies for the rest of the globe.

Carlson attended Harvard at a time when it seems to have had a particular knack for turning out journalistic stars. He was an assistant photography editor for The Crimson at the time of the takeover, and at various points during his time there, noted critic and New York Times Associate Editor Frank H. Rich ’71 was The Crimson’s editorial chair and Atlantic Monthly National Correspondent James M. Fallows ’70 was its president. Slate.com founder and former New Republic editor Michael E. Kinsley ’72 was The Crimson’s vice president, and technology maven Esther Dyson ’72 an active Crimson editor and a friend of Carlson’s.

Today, these one-time colleagues have become their own elevated points of reference for a new generation of ambitious Harvard students—it is their names on the lips of undergraduates with their eyes on newsprint history.

“I write for Inside Triathlon magazine, you know,” Carlson says with a laugh when these names come up. “That’s the fact.”

But Carlson says he feels no jealousy toward the contemporaries who seemed to find postgraduate success so quickly—nor, he says, is he bitter anymore about the gastrointestinal ailment that prevented him from going to Cyprus as a professional war reporter all those years ago.

“Then it seemed like a disaster,” Carlson says. “It probably was a blessing…I would have been way too affected, I would have been haunted by covering this kind of thing…[I had] covered a lot of demonstrations, but war is a completely different level of meaning and experience and toll.”

From Iron Man to Iraq

What’s more, Carlson might never have ended up reporting on embedded reporters in Iraq had he become a war correspondent all those years ago. It was at the 1993 Iron Man competition in Hawaii, which he was covering, that Carlson met Triathlete magazine founder Katovsky—a participant in as well as a reporter on the trials of strength and endurance.

The two were fast friends as well as colleagues. It took 10 years, though, before Katovsky’s news-junkie habits led him and Carlson to the idea that would become Embedded.

As soon as they heard about the U.S. embedding program, in which journalists accompanied military units as they descended on Iraq, Carlson says he and Katovsky were fascinated by what they saw as “a sea change in war coverage.” In the first months of 2003, just before the U.S. invaded, he says the embedding process became something like an obsession for the two men who had spent years on the fringes of swashbuckling journalism.

“We talked about it almost 15 hours a day,” Carlson recalls. “We were sort of crazed about it.”

A few months and a meager $6000 advance from The Lyons Press later, Carlson, armed with “a tiny 20-dollar Radio Shack mini-tape-recorder,” was alone on an April 16, 2003 flight to Qatar.

“That was a place I could get into with no visa,” he says.

He was unaffiliated with the official embedding program; the money given him and Katovsky by their publisher would cover the plane tickets and a driver into Iraq, but Carlson still had little idea of how exactly he would secure passage into the war-torn country to do his interviews. And if things didn’t pan out?

“We had to pay it back if we didn’t get a book,” he says of the $6000.

‘Up the River with Kurtz'

Carlson certainly got a book, but not before dodging a series of obstacles, some bureaucratic, some altogether more menacing.

After getting in touch with a public affairs officer from the American army, Carlson got from Qatar to Kuwait, where he says he spent a week “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.” He also had to settle the matter of getting someone to transport him over the uneasy Iraqi border.

“I could have just run in with somebody, but then how would I get out?” he recalls.

Carlson says journalists staying in Kuwait advised him to call off the trip, citing their own near-death experiences as evidence that no driver could be trusted to protect his life in such a setting.

“You can’t go up the river with Kurtz,” he says he was told, alluding to the grim postcolonial boat-ride of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Vietnam nightmare of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

In Embedded and in person, Carlson often cites a back-of-the-envelope statistical calculation that, as a group, journalists were about ten times as likely as coalition soldiers to die during the three-week ground phase of the Iraqi war. The book concludes with a list of 16 journalists (out of 2700) known to have died in Iraq between March 22 and July 6, 2003—13 of them during the earlier three-week period, in contrast with 135 coalition soldiers (out of 250,000) killed in that initial phase.

As for Carlson’s own safety, he ultimately found a driver who managed to ferry him in and out of the country intact—indeed, Carlson says, the man Katovsky awards “an honorary NASCAR membership” in Embedded’s acknowledgements saved his life.

On the long road to Baghdad—“It reminds me of Mad Max,” he says of the ravaged city—Carlson says his driver’s car was passed by a truck with weapon-bearing men inside. When the truck returned a few minutes later with a second truck, no more friendly, Carlson says his driver’s agile stuntwork at the wheel might well be the only thing that prevented an instant death in the desert.

“There are enough characters like that that you should be going 100 miles per hour so that you’re the smallest target,” he says of the Iraqi roadways.

Between the Rebels and the Riot Helmets

Still, Carlson says he had no desire to live out his decades-old flirtation with reporting from the frontlines at last.

“In no way was I trying to be a war correspondent,” he insists. “I wanted to talk to them, but I didn’t want any risk.”

Carlson concedes that going into Iraq at all in April 2003 was “a somewhat calculated risk.” He is more adamant on a theme that runs through Embedded’s chapters: staying fair in an atmosphere as charged as Baghdad was.

Throughout the book, journalist after journalist reveals objectivity to be an extraordinarily slippery concept when dealing with the twinned subjects of Saddam Hussein’s regime and President Bush’s invasion. Times reporter Burns drew prominent media attention this fall when Embedded included his excoriation of those of his colleagues whom he saw as kowtowing to the Ba’athist government before the invasion.

“In this profession, we are not paid to be neutral,” Burns says in the book. “We are paid to be fair, and they are completely different things… As far as I am concerned, when they hire me, they hire somebody who has a conscience and who has a passion about these things.”

For Carlson’s part, he is careful to point out that he gave equal time to embeds from all parts of the political spectrum. Views from Voice of America and Al Jazeera, the words of a peace activist and the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of public affairs, appear side-by-side with what seems like every position in between in Embedded.

“We…made a pact that we had no agenda politically,” he says. “I have a lot of feeling, but I’m not an advocacy journalist.”

Long before making his way to Baghdad, Carlson was familiar with the ethical questions faced by journalists struggling to remain balanced as they report on the chaos around them. In 1969, he stood with Harvard’s radicals as they barricaded the doors to University Hall, snapping pictures as the students ransacked Faculty files. When then-University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 called in the police—whom Carlson describes as “looking like gladiators” as they came in at dawn carrying sledgehammers—Carlson witnessed classmates being beaten and went along with the conquered occupiers to jail.

He says that he was allowed to leave his cell when Harvard was notified that he was covering the takeover for The Crimson, but on the condition that his film be confiscated. Carlson gave authorities an empty roll and proceeded to sell his shots to Life magazine and the Associated Press.

Several of his Crimson colleagues were in the University Hall crowds that spring—some of them as reporters, some protesting themselves. James K. Glassman ’69, who was The Crimson’s managing editor the year before the takeover and away doing thesis research during it, wrote in Harvard Magazine a few years ago of his decision to abandon the shield of journalism and declare himself an “obstructive demonstrator” at an earlier sit-in. For punishment, Glassman explains in that article, he was put on probation and prevented from printing his own name on The Crimson’s masthead during the first semester of his tenure as managing editor, though a charitable dean allowed him to remain enrolled at the College and hold that office.

But asked on which side his allegiances fell during those turbulent years, Carlson pauses for a while. At last, he mentions the profound effect that the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy ’48 and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had on him in 1968, then goes on to talk about his father and uncle, both veterans. He came to oppose the war in Vietnam vehemently, but says he still retained a great respect for the military.

Ultimately, Carlson says his journalistic aspirations guided him to the middle of the road in a polarized time.

“I wasn’t as absolutely sure as a lot of other people,” he says. “But I was absolutely sure that I wanted to be there to record the best and worst passions of my generation trying to do something.”

Split-Second Exposures

Three and a half decades later, Carlson still remembers the composition of those University Hall photographs, one of which he says was “like a Renaissance painting” that he happened upon as it formed for a moment in the Faculty Room.

Another of his best images—the two students and Benjamin Franklin’s statue—he says was captured after belatedly realizing that he had wasted three hours shooting without any film in his camera.

“I saw this thing aligning,” he says. “I held my breath and shot an eighth or a fifteenth of a second…It just was electric.”

Carlson describes a much more painstaking process as he and Katovsky assembled Embedded last spring: the interviews in Iraq plus several more done by phone from the United States, a painstaking editing process, writing an introduction to each chapter, arranging the interviews into a coherent whole.

“We actually thought of it like music,” he says. “We would reorder [the text] so it had the form of an arc of conversation, an arc of emotional moment.”

But Carlson says their attachment to neutrality did not keep him and Katovsky from putting their own imprint on the text.

“There is an authorship there,” he says. “People who are compilers are people who take already-written pieces and put them in order…We were out there in the field, doing the midwifery.”

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.