the aztec, and then the managing editor. after

John Martin, 9/26/17, Draft 1,

John Martin

September 26, 2017

interviewed by Jane Meyers

for San Diego State University

01:54:38 hrs:min:sec of recording

Transcribed by Jardee Transcription

Meyers: Today is Tuesday, September 26, 2017. I am Jane Meyers, and today I will be

recording the oral history of John Martin, eminent alumnus of San Diego State

University, Class of 1960. This oral history for the SDSU Special Collections and

University Archives is funded by the Jane and John Adams Humanities Grant.

John was born in New York City, grew up in San Diego, and graduated

from Saint Augustin High School. While at San Diego State, he majored in

journalism, became a reporter for The Aztec, and then the managing editor. After

graduating, he served in the Army, where he worked at night as copy editor for

The Augusta Chronicle; then reporter for the Army publication, Rome [phonetic]

Interview, and became editor of the Army weekly, The Jayhawk. During his time

in the Army, he reported on the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

After John completed his military service, he worked in Paris for The New

York Times, and in Spain where he wrote a travel guide.

Returning to the United States, John worked from 1966 to 1975 as a

correspondent for KRCA News in Sacramento.

From 1975 until 2002, he worked for ABC News, where he soon showed

his reporting and writing expertise as a national and international correspondent,

working with David Brinkley, Ted Koppel, and Peter Jennings. In 1983 he

successfully uncovered the story of notorious Nazi fugitive, Klaus Barbie.


[00:01:39] Martin’s documentary-style, on-air obituaries of famous

people in politics, entertainment, and sports, such as Henry Fonda, Edith Head,

Anwar Sadat, and Leonid Brezhnev, reviewed and captured each life.

John Martin has a long and distinguished career as a writer, news reporter,

editor, photographer, avid tennis player, adjunct journalism professor at Columbia

University, and now a Wilson Center Fellow.

John also travels to the tennis Grand Slams to write stories and take photos

for his publication, The World Tennis Gazette. His career is not only of interest to

journalists, but to historians, political science enthusiasts, writers, editors,

television newscasters, and those who follow the news.

Good morning, John! It’s a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to

conduct this interview. Shall we begin with your childhood?

Martin: [00:02:36] Well, Jane, I guess you could call me a grandson of immigrants,

because all four of my grandparents were from other countries, and they all came

around the turn of the 20th century, to the New York area. One was from Ireland,

one was from Northern Ireland, one was from England, and one was from

Denmark. And the Dane—I like to call him the Dashing Danish Sailor—jumped

ship in New York Harbor, which meant he had no documentation, he was an

illegal immigrant for about forty years. And I tell friends who ask about it, I’d

say, “About 1940 he realized that if he were uncovered, he could be deported.”

And the problem in 1940 is that if he was deported, he would be sent back to Nazi

Denmark, because the Germans had occupied Denmark by that time. So he went

to Immigration and he pleaded, he said, “Look, I’ve never been arrested, I pay my


taxes, I have a wife and two daughters, I’m a building superintendent gainfully

employed. Can I please stay?” They investigated him and gave him an alien

resident’s document, so he was able to stay.

All four of those people were, of course, part of my life. My father never

graduated from high school, but he was a taxi driver for about sixteen years in

New York City. My mother was a high school graduate, again in New York City;

became a sales clerk in a department store, then the floor manager in the

department store, Woolworth’s. And so they were happily settled in New York,

loved the Broadway theater, loved all the things about New York that are

loveable, until the eve of Pearl Harbor. And on that night, my father was driving

his taxi, and he was at the corner of Lexington and 52nd Street, and he looked

across the street. There were three men lined up against a building, and a fourth

man going through their pockets. And suddenly one of the three men turned and

shot the fourth man and went running off—all three ran in different directions.

My father followed the gunman, and the gunman tried to get in his taxi, and he

waved him off because he already had a fare. Another taxi driver came up, he had

no idea what had happened, so he picked up the gunman. My father followed

them to where he dropped the gunman off, and they went to the police, and they

were able to begin a manhunt, because this was an off-duty policeman who was

shot. There were 150 policemen, detectives, on the streets of New York,

looking—thanks to my father and the other driver—at places they might find him.

Long story short, he went home, went to bed, didn’t tell my mother anything, and

a few hours later reporters came and said, “Where’s the hero taxi driver?” And


she said, “What hero? What are you talking about?” And they told her, and she

said, “Well, if I wake him up, there’ll be another murder.” So they talked her out

of a picture. The picture showed me, I was three years old, standing on the

running board of his taxi. She was beside the left fender, and he was at the wheel.

And his mother came over and said, “You gave them a picture?! My God, they’ll

come and they’ll kill us, this will be terrible!” Well, they worried all day, and the

family story was that the next morning things were alright because the headlines

said, “Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor.” And I believed that story for many years

until I realized the news of the day before Pearl Harbor went in the newspaper of

the day of Pearl Harbor; that news of Pearl Harbor went in the newspaper the next

day. So for a full twenty-four hours, his name and address were on the front page

of every newspaper in New York City, and they were terribly worried about this.

Anyway, he did his duty, testified before the grand jury, but shortly before the

trial we more or less started our own witness protection program. We got on a

train, went to Chicago, got on another train, went to Los Angeles, and came here

to San Diego. My mother’s sister was here and had been urging us to come for a

couple of years. Anyway, that’s how I got to San Diego, that’s how I wound up

living in Pacific Beach from the age of three.

My father took a job as an aircraft mechanic in a bomber factory along

Pacific Highway, and worked during the war as an aircraft mechanic there, and

for the Navy on North Island; and got so interested in aviation he got a pilot’s

license, learned to fly, bought a small little plane, took me flying. He just loved to


fly. He was a really talented guy—not educated, but incredibly smart. So he

knew aircraft mechanics, auto mechanics, and things of that sort.

[00:07:28] So I was, I guess, an ordinary kid in Pacific Beach, did a lot of

basketball playing, football, baseball. I went to Saint Bridget’s Grammar School

and played quarterback on the flag football team. I guess my shining achievement

was that I threw two touchdown passes in the Ice Cream Bowl, which was held at

the end of the year in my eighth grade.

So then it became a question of where to go to college. I looked at Saint

Mary’s, but it was expensive. I had a partial scholarship offered, but I just didn’t

see a way clear, so I went to San Diego State, which, of course, is this wonderful

institution here. It’d been here for many years. All of us there were mostly

people who didn’t have much money, and so here we were, learning what we

could. I majored in journalism. I also played tennis as a junior. In high school,

every day after school the tennis team would walk into Balboa Park—our school

was very near it—and there was a fellow there who would give free lessons,

group clinics he called them. His name was Fred Kinney, and he always seemed

available in the afternoon. And it turned out he was available because he was first

city editor, and then editor of The Evening Tribune, which was an afternoon

paper, and therefore he was finished with work at about two in the afternoon, he’d

come and give us lessons. Well, at the end of my senior year in high school, I

went to Fred and I said, “Fred, I think I’m going to major in journalism. My

teachers tell me I can write pretty well.” He immediately said, “You will be our

campus correspondent at San Diego State.” Well, if you think about this, the first


job is always the most difficult to get. Here was a professional job, I was writing

for the newspaper, I would take my stories, I’d go to a lecture on campus, or an

event on campus, or do a feature on somebody on campus. I would write it up,

it’d go down at night to the newspaper at 919 Second Avenue, I’d hand it in and

the editor would look at it, and he’d hand it back and say, “No, I want this,” or

“No, you need to move this here and that there.” It was really a wonderful

education. So I really learned my skills at that level, but also at San Diego State.

And the head of the department was a fellow named Art Weimer [phonetic]. Art

Weimer had been a White House correspondent for The Hartford Current. He’d

covered FDR. He had opinions about politicians. He had opinions about

journalism. He was a marvelous, stimulating professor. He wasn’t a professor,

really—he was the director of the department. He was the dean and founder of

the department.

[00:10:30] So I had two opportunities here. I not only had a professional

on campus at San Diego State, but I had a professional in the office at The

Evening Tribune. Later I became a reporter for The Tribune. I became an

assistant photo editor, had some other jobs, and therefore I was able to really

acquire the skills that you need, at a very early age. I even got to write book

reviews for the morning newspaper. So at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three, I

was fairly accomplished. I’m not saying I was a professional in the fullest extent,

but I was really far along.

Then came the question of the draft. In order to finish your schooling, you

had to take a full-time load in order to get a deferment, and I’d been doing that for


five years, and I was a bit worn out, so I allowed myself to get drafted. I was sent

to basic training at Fort Ord. One of the things I remember about that was that in

October of 1962, we went double-timing down to the rifle range on the ocean at

Fort Ord, and we would fire out toward the water. There were berms and so forth.

Anyway, at one point in the afternoon, the range lieutenant called, “Cease fire!”

And he climbed down from his tower, drove his car up to the base of the tower,

lowered a microphone and put it on the dashboard, and turned on the radio. And

suddenly from five loudspeakers on the beach came the voice of John F.

Kennedy, the president, saying that we were not going to allow the Russians to

put missiles in Cuba. As I recall it, it seemed like he was saying we’ll pay any

price it takes to keep them out. And of course we all thought we were the price

that was going to be paid. But of course we were months away from really any

kind of active goal in the Army. But I later wrote about that for The Union. They

had a weekly section called “The Southwest Section.” And the other editor was a

fellow who later lived in Del Mar, by the name of Al Jacoby [phonetic]. Jacoby

was a wonderful editor; he’d been a terrific reporter; and he coaxed the story out

of me about how we had spent that weekend at Fort Ord, waiting for the [missile]

climax. I mean, the whole world was just petrified about what might happen.

[00:13:13] After basic training, I was sent to Georgia, and because I had

journalism experience, but because they didn’t have an opening for a journalist, I

was assigned to write commendation medal citations. So I started looking around,

and I found a job at night at The Augusta Chronicle in Georgia. And so I would

spend my days on base, and then jump on a bus and go in at night, write


headlines, edit copy, and come home to the base at midnight. But I also began to

see if there was a way I could go to Europe, because I really didn’t have much in

the Army in the way of things to do. So I wrote a note to a friend who I had

covered as a candidate for Congress, just before I was drafted. His name was

Congressman Lionel Van Deerland [phonetic], and he, for many years, was a

Congressman from San Diego. And I just asked him if he knew of whether there

might be openings for a journalist-trained Army person in Europe. He talked to

me later about it, and he said he didn’t know, and so he picked up the phone and

called the Pentagon and asked about it. And he wrote me a note back and said,

“No, there’s no way I can do anything.” And sure enough, three weeks later the

orders arrived, and I was sent to Germany. Whether this is an ordinary way to be

promoted and shipped overseas, I don’t know.

[00:14:54] Anyway, so Germany was a new experience, 1963, the

Russians were poised on one side of the Iron Curtain; we were on the other. Our

job was to keep them out of Europe, and our units—I was first with the 4th

Armored Division—were poised to block them coming through what’s called the

Fulda Gap. So we were ready, the Russians were ready, nobody knew what was

going to happen.

At that point, I became editor of a 7th Corp newspaper called The Jayhawk.

I was very fortunate, I had some very good sub-editors, we had some good

reporters. I loved what I was doing. I was editing my own newspaper. And since

I’d had layout experience and photographic editing experience, I was very, very

fortunate. Anyway, at that point, a woman I had been dating before I went in the


Army, and I decided to get married. So we arranged…. I said, “You should come

to Germany. There’s an Army division coming over from Texas. See if you can

get a ride with them.” This was pure fluff, I had no expectations. Anyway, she

wrote to the commanding general, and he wrote back and he said, “Dear Miss

Thompson, nice try. No dice.” So she sent me the note, I wrote a story about it,

and put it in my newspaper, and the wire services picked it up. So the general got

some very good publicity about it. So when he came over on this—it was called

Operation [unclear]—he came over and he was giving a speech in Heidelberg,

and I went one night and went up to him and told him who I was, and thanked

him for writing the nice note to my girlfriend. And I said, “Is there any way I

could possibly get a ride back to Texas?” She lived in Dallas. And so he turned

to his aide and he said, “Put him on the manifest.” So I was able to fly back to

Texas. Long story short, we flew into Bergstrom Air Force Base, she picked me

up, we went to Dallas, and the next morning some friends of hers came over and

said, “Do you want to go to the parade?” And we said, “What parade?” And they

said, “Well, the president’s in town. He’s just flying in today.” We said, “Sure,

let’s go!” So we went to a street corner in Highland Park, which is a suburb of

Dallas, and it happened to be on the route that the parade was coming in from

Love Field, the airport. And sure enough, there came Kennedy and Connolly and

LBJ and somebody else in a trailing limousine. They were all in open limos at the

time. I thought, “Gee, this is lovely, look at that.” And about twenty minutes

later we heard what had happened.


[00:18:04] So I called my former boss at The San Diego Union, a fellow

named Herb Cline [phonetic], and he more or less deputized me, since I was on

leave, to write stories, and he said, “Can you find a hotel and a car to rent for a

reporter I’m sending?” So he sent two other reporters. He sent Lou Scar

[phonetic] and he sent Peter Kay [phonetic]. So we met them at the airport, got

them a car, got them a hotel reservation, and then I set about writing. So I wrote a

piece about seeing the parade come in from the airport and so on. So for three

days we wrote. And it was the worst story of my life, and it probably can’t be

topped by anything I will ever see.

[00:18:54] After that we got married, then we went to Germany. This

was 1964, I was about to get out of the Army. The Union Trib wanted me to

come back, but I was still feeling footloose, so we hitchhiked to Paris from this

little town in Germany, and I spent three nights as a copy editor on The Paris

Tribune copy desk, and two nights on The New York Times copy desk. They had

an international edition there. And I went back to the base and waited to hear

whether I had a job or not. I was getting pretty close to the discharge date, and I

hadn’t heard, so thanks to her shoving, pushing, I got on the phone and called The

Times, and it turned out they really wanted a different guy, but they couldn’t find

him. He had done an audition, as I did, and then he’d gone off into Belgium and

they couldn’t seem to locate him. So the managing editor finally came back on

the line and said, “Well, I think you’ll do.” It was not an encouragement, by any

means. “What would you require, Mr. Martin?” And I think he meant, you

know, “How much money do you want?” And I thought, “Well, let’s see, the last


year at The San Diego Union I made $8,000.” We’re two years later now. It was

a hundred a week. We’re two years later now. I thought, “I don’t want to make

less than I made before I went in the Army.” So I said, “Well, Mr. Daffron

[phonetic], I’d have to have $100 a week.” And there was this silence, and I

thought, “Oh my God, I’ve blown the chance to work for a great newspaper.”

And he came back on the phone and he said, “Mr. Martin, Paris is very expensive.

You’ll have to start at a hundred and a quarter.” So I graciously accepted his

offer.

[00:20:59] So I enjoyed editing. I was writing headlines, editing copy. I

did a couple of freelance articles. I interviewed René Lacoste, the great tennis

player, who had always fascinated me. But I was restless. I wanted to write, and

I was really just editing. So I took a job and moved to Majorca to ghost write a

book on travel to Europe. And I went to work for a very popular travel writer at

the time. His name was Temple Fielding. Fielding’s Guide to Europe was the

best-selling guide. You could spend a hundred dollars a day following Fielding’s

guide. But he realized that the market was really shifting, and Europe on Five

Dollars a Day was a very, very popular book, growing more popular. So he and

his wife and another couple had spent about a year researching what he called

Fielding’s Super Economy Guide to Europe. So we moved there, and he showed

up at my apartment one day with fourteen boxes of notes on restaurants, hotels,

nightclubs, other things, and he said, “I’ll see you in three months.” So my job

was to try to mimic his style, which was, shall we say, idiosyncratic. He was the

first person I’d ever been aware of who wrote smiley faces in the margin of his


books. So for the next year, with only two weekends off in the whole year—

which was idiotic on my part—I wrote this book. I began to realize that I was not

a travel writer. As somebody said, “Travel writing is to writing what military

music is to music.” And it was true! I was really not an adept travel writer, so I

quit.

[00:23:02] My wife and I moved back to the States, I began to look for a

job. I didn’t want to come back to San Diego, I wanted to explore the world, and

I ran into a guy who had just made a tour. He was in Dallas and he said, “If you

want a great place to work in television news, start out in Sacramento. There’s an

NBC station there, they have fifteen reporters, fifteen cameramen, they do an hour

of news.” This was 1966. So I went, and they were interested. They, in fact,

were hiring almost exclusively former newspaper people. So I fit right into their

plans, and I thought, “Well, I’ll go for a year or two and learn the craft, and then

move on.” Well, I spent nine years there. Such an unusual station. I was able to

convince them to send me to Africa for six weeks, the Middle East for a month. It

was great training.

Meyers: [00:24:03] As soon as I press it, you can go on. Okay?

Martin: The trip to East Africa was probably the most both educating and frightening,

because I went to Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. I had written ahead to the

authorities in Uganda and I said, “I’d like to interview the new president,” who

had taken power in a coup. His name was Idi Amin. Nobody knew who Idi

Amin was at that point. And I didn’t hear anything before I left on the trip, so I

assumed I wasn’t going to get an interview. Then it turned out that through a


member of the Kenya Parliament, an interview was arranged. And I arrived in

Kampala, met with a representative of the government, and he asked me what I

wanted to interview the president about. And I said, “Well, you know, he’s taken

power, what has he achieved in the six months he’s been here, what are his

goals?” And then I had a question that had been puzzling me for a long time. I’d

done a little research, and there was a journalist missing in Kampala—a journalist

and a political scientist. And I said, “What does he know about Sidell [phonetic]

and this journalist?” And he said, “Well, I don’t think he knows anything about

it, but you can ask him about it.” So the interview was scheduled for about three

days later. In the meantime, my cameraman and I went up to the north to a place

called Murchison Falls, which is a beautiful area. The Nile narrows down

literally to about twenty feet across and goes over a cliff. It’s gorgeous. And

while we were there, one night at dinner, the desk clerk brought a radiogram to

me. They had no telephones. They had nothing of that sort at that point. It said,

“General Amin cannot see you after all, but if you go to Jinja on Saturday, so-

and-so will meet with you and answer your questions.” And I’d done a lot of

research, but I didn’t know where and what Jinja was. Well, it was a little town

on the road from Kampala to Nairobi. It’s right at the border of Uganda and

Kenya. It looked like about a seven-, eight-hour drive from where we were, so I

thought, “Well, alright,” kind of disappointed that I didn’t get to [talk to] the

president of the country. So we got in our van, started driving toward Jinja, and

all of a sudden, rounding a curve, there in the jungle were five or six guards with

machine guns, and seven or eight prisoners in prison uniforms, stringing barbed


wires to create a concentration camp in the jungle. I said, “My God, look at that!”

We were exposed to it for about ten seconds as we rounded this curve, and I said

to Carren [phonetic], “Can you get a shot?” He said, “No way! It’s right on the

road, and we’ll be seen in a minute. And by the way, I was talking to some

people last night, and they said there are people disappearing around here, being

held without charge, or just not being seen anymore, and people are very

worried.” And I said, “Well, we’re not going to go to Jinja, we’re going to go

back to Kampala and try to get to the bottom of this.”

[00:27:29] So we drove back to the capital, Kampala, and for three days I

tried to get to see Idi Amin. The answers were, “Well, you know, his English

really isn’t that good. You’d be much better off talking to somebody else,” and

[so on and so forth]. Finally I gave up, went on the rest of my trip, went to

Tanzania, actually did a story for NBC News—KCRA was an affiliate—about the

tenth anniversary of Tanzanian independence, where the Chinese were building a

railroad to Zambia for them. Had a very successful trip, and brought a series of

reports back to Sacramento, and they ran them in what’s called the sweeps weeks.

This is still done to a degree. These are the weeks when the ratings companies are

monitoring traffic in the market. Sacramento is the twenty-fifth-biggest market.

[00:28:45] To get an idea how green I was, and we all were—I was in my

early thirties—when we got to Kenya, when we got to the hotel, we all took a nap.

We’d flown overnight from London. And when we woke up, there was the sound

of drums that was amazing! It sounded [like] “ba-boom, bop-bop-ba-boom, ba-

boom, ba-boom, ba-boom!” So I jumped up, I got my cameraman, I said, “Let’s


go find this! This is obviously something going on!” So we started running

around the perimeter of the hotel, which had large grounds and trees and so forth,

and we couldn’t find the drums, and we were just baffled. And after a while we

couldn’t hear them anymore, so we walked back to our room along a trail at one

side of the hotel, and as we did, all of a sudden we could hear the drums again,

and they were coming from a boiler room, and the boiler itself was expanding and

contracting, which, of course, to our mind, we thought we had tribal drum fire. It

just shows you how we were just learning our way, and learning as we went.

[00:30:00] The thing about traveling to that part of the world, it was so

unusual that it produced a lot of interest in Sacramento. Three years later, in

1974, I managed to convince the station to send me to the Middle East for a

month, and there again, what I did there was to interview students before I left,

who were foreign students at the University of California at Davis, who had

relatives in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel, and then went and did

stories about their families, which was a way of going deeper into the story,

instead of just the outer aspects of it.

Meyers: Great idea!

Martin: And we were very fortunate. We found a lot of very interesting stories, worked

very well. And the great thing about working at that particular station was that

you were left to your own journalistic instincts. And yes, these things had to be

paid for, but they found ways to pay for it, and they made money. The station had

what’s called a 60 share, two-thirds of the audience in the Sacramento-Stockton

area watched KCRA, because it was so special. And this was a wonderful aspect


of being a journalist at that time. Then something happened. The station hired

what they called “the news doctors,” and these were people who had done studies

of audiences around the country, and there was a new phenomenon in local

television news called “eyewitness news” at that time. And it had started in San

Francisco and New York, and the news doctors saw how those stations ran their

news operations, and they decided that was really the way to do it. And so they

said, “Well, you’ve got to cut down on the length of your stories.” We would go

two minutes, three minutes. In the overseas stories, I would go five minutes, and

so forth. People watched them. But the news doctors were insistent that we just

needed a much higher story count and a much shorter story length. As a matter of

fact, we should stop doing stories for the eleven o’clock news that happened

before six o’clock. So they set up a night…. And as reporters, we were worried

about this, and we met at my house a couple of times. We didn’t really have a

union, we all belonged to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers,

and our shop steward was the owner of the station. So there wasn’t a lot of union

work going on.

[00:33:00] Anyway, I was assigned to nights, and at first they wanted a

story that only happened after six o’clock, for the eleven o’clock news. Then they

said, “Well, we need two stories,” so I started doing two stories a night: maybe

the city council and the board of education. And then they wanted three, and I

decided that the whole tenor of reporting and journalism was changing—at least

at that station—and it was time to leave, so I quit.


Before I quit, one of the last stories I did—certainly one of the most

amusing—there was a club in town in Sacramento where the dancers—and there

was one particular dancer—danced not only topless, but bottomless. She was

arrested and charged with indecent performance or indecent exposure. And the

case was assigned to a new judge, a young judge, by the name of Earl Warren Jr.

His father was the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and here he was trying a

case of indecent exposure. And so the twist was he decided that the jury really

couldn’t be expected to know what they were ruling about unless they saw the

dancer testify by dancing at the club. So he took the jury by bus to the club, and

of course our cameras were rolling all the time as they got on the bus and got off

the bus and then went in the club. And then we went in and watched her “testify.”

What the club did was to shine very bright colored lights on her so she was not

exactly unclothed, but she was. So the jury heard the testimony, walked out to the

bus. I stopped the judge. I said, “Your Honor, why did you do this?” And he

said, “Well, I think this is the best way for the jury to know what we’re really

talking about.” So off they went, and then we went in and photographed her

testifying, and took another hour to get it, so that we could actually put it on

television. But it was possible, if you shine the light, a dark-enough color, and

bright-enough, you couldn’t see what you thought you saw. And I would say that

was certainly one of the highlights of my KCRA experience.

Meyers: Guilty?

Martin: Guilty. I believe she was guilty, yeah. Gosh, you know, I’d almost forgotten it,

and I can’t remember. I believe she was found guilty.


Meyers: Oh, what a shame! (laughs)

Martin: So then, as I say, I decided to leave the station, and I began looking for a

network job. It so happened that ABC was kind of the orphan of the three major

networks. It had started later, it had less resources, and so forth. And it happened

that they did in fact hire me, as what was called the Northeast fireman. And the

fireman’s job was to get on a plane and get to wherever there was a fire—whether

it was a catastrophe or whether it was a big story—and get it on the air that night.

And so I did that pretty successfully, and they began to rely on me. Pretty soon I

became the Mideast fireman, and got sent to the Middle East several times. One

time it was when the Israeli’s invaded Southern Lebanon. To show you how

green I was, I went into Southern Lebanon with a cameraman and a producer, and

we found a Lebanese captain. The Lebanese were in fact allied with the Israeli’s

at that point. They wanted to get the Palestinians out of Southern Lebanon. So

we were standing in this town square, marshiuen [phonetic], and the camera’s

rolling and I’m holding the microphone up, and I noticed that he is twitching.

Every so often his eyes would twitch, he’d sort of flinch. And finally he said,

“Can we stop and go inside?” I said, “Of course we can, but tell me why.” He

said, “The sound that you hear”—and I had heard it, it sounded to me like

bamboo stalks being broken. It was sort of a crack. He said, “That’s the sound of

Katyusha rockets, and they’re landing all around us, one block that way, one

block this way, and if we don’t get out of here, we’re going to get killed!” So we

got out of there. But I still have some video of us flinching in the town square.

It’s corny to say “baptism of fire,” but that’s how a lot of people learn their craft.


[00:38:35] I don’t consider myself a war correspondent. I had only one

other experience with a war-related story, and that was during the Gulf War. I

was sent to try to find out whether a particular atrocity had in fact happened.

Some people remember it as the incubator atrocity hoax. At the start of the Gulf

War, the Kuwaiti’s said that the Iraqi’s had come in and stolen incubators, left the

babies to die on the floor, and had taken them to Bagdad. And as we checked

around, we realized that seven senators cited that as the reason they voted to go to

war with Kuwait [i.e., Iraq]. Well, it only passed by five votes, and there was a

lot of doubt about it, there was a lot of confusion. The fog of war is always very

great. So anyway, there was no way to check it while the war was still on, but as

it was ending, I was sent to try to find out. I managed to find a very good source

who went with me to London, Cairo, and into Kuwait, and found the nurses and

doctors who’d been there during the time that this atrocity is said to have

happened. And the story was often very much the same: well, it didn’t happen in

my hospital, but it happened at the maternity hospital. So I then went and found

nurses and doctors from the maternity hospital, “No, no, it didn’t happen at this

hospital, it happened at Al Adon Hospital.” Well, I went to the maternity hospital

where they were alleged to have been stolen from, and I found the incubators.

They had been hidden by the staff, because they didn’t want the Iraqi’s to steal

them. And then I found people who said, “Well, babies did die because the

doctors and the nurses fled when they knew the Iraqis were close.” It was a very

sad story, but it was also an instructive story, that often when there’s a vote in

Congress, for example, and people need votes, and the Kuwaitis needed the votes,


there’s certain inaccuracies that develop. And finally I was able to find that they

had actually done focus groups which showed Americans were particularly

interested in liberating Kuwait, restoring democracy. It wasn’t a democracy, it’s a

monarchy, and they weren’t particularly interested in restoring rights to women—

there were no, or very few, rights for women. But if you told them about the

atrocities, they were sympathetic, and that’s the card that the Kuwaitis played, and

it won them their support.

Meyer: [00:41:15] Wow.

Martin: So what did I learn as a correspondent? I learned not to make quick judgements.

I learned to sometimes suspend my disbelief. I got a call one morning, and the

voice said, “I want you to find Joseph Mengele.” And I said, “Who is this?

Walter, is that you?” Walter Cordis [phonetic] was the foreign editor of ABC

News, and he said, “Yeah, it’s me, and I want you to find Mengele.” And I said,

“Well, he’s been missing forty years. Do I need to get him by airtime tonight?”

And he said, “No. We’re going to look for him, and I’m going to help you.” And

I said, “Well, really, where do we start?” He said, “We’re going to Vienna.” And

I said, “What’s in Vienna?” And he said, “Simon Wiesenthal.” Simon

Wiesenthal was the leading Nazi hunter of that period. He’d been in

concentration camps himself, he kept the fire burning, always saying, “Where is

Mengele? Where is Mengele?” And Mengele was the so-called Angel of

Auschwitz, who was doing experiments on twins—kind of pseudo-scientific

experiments—which was gruesome and grizzly, and for which he was rightly

notorious. He had disappeared after the war, and nobody knew where he was. So


Walter said, “We’ll go to Wiesenthal in Vienna, and he’ll tell us where Mengele

is, and we’ll go find him.” I said, “Sounds easy. Let’s go!”

[00:43:09] So we went to Vienna, and we went to see Simon Wiesenthal,

and he said, “I’m not going to tell you where he is.” And we said, “Why not?!”

Walter was just stunned, aghast, that a fellow Jew would not help. He said, “Well

if I tell you where he is, he’ll find out that you’re looking for him, and he’ll

escape.” Well to be truthful, I don’t think Wiesenthal really knew where he was.

He saw his job as keeping the fires burning, keeping people agitated about what

had happened—and rightly so. So we came out of Wiesenthal’s office in Vienna,

and Walter turned to me and said, “Well, it’s up to you now.” (chuckles) So I

spent the next four or five months…. I went to France, I went to Germany, I got

an interview with Mengele’s nephew in Gudensberg, Germany. Nobody had ever

been able to get that. And I managed to do that by making friends with the mayor

of the town whose parents had been persecuted by the Nazis during the war, and

therefore he was not friendly to the Nazi cause, but he was also familiar with the

Mengele family company there, the Mengele farm equipment company. So he

helped me get the interview. And I asked Dieter Mengele if he knew where his

uncle was, and he said, “You know, if you ask me, I think he’s dead. There’s so

many people looking for him, I would think by now they would have found him.”

And being a cynical, hard-bitten journalist, I said, “I’m sure you’re lying to me.”

I’m saying this to myself. Off I went, and I went around. I went to Paraguay, and

I managed to get an interview with the president of Paraguay who had emigrated

from Bavaria, and he said, “Well, you know, Mengele was here, but about 1962 I


know he left, and I think he went to Brazil.” Here my hard-bitten reporter came

back in and said, “You’re just trying to spoof me, send me in the wrong

direction.” And sure enough, he had, in fact, gone to Brazil. His family did know

that he had died several years earlier, in 1979, but they didn’t dare let anybody

know that they knew, because it was against the law for them to have helped him,

as a hunted criminal, hunted fugitive. And so anyway, we finally did bring the

Mengele story to a close. What happened was that the family was so outraged

that this nephew had given me an interview, they decided they needed to leak the

information that Mengele had died—so they did. We all descended on Sau Paulo

where they exhumed his grave, checked his body, checked his DNA against his

son’s DNA, and concluded that it was, in fact, Mengele. The Israelis did not

accept it immediately, but did about five years later. The lesson there is, don’t be

so quick to assume you’re being lied to.

[00:46:44] Working at ABC was a wonderful education. One of the best

educators was Roone Arledge, who became president about two years after I

joined ABC. One of the wonderful things that can happen is that somebody in

charge can think they’ve discovered you, and that’s what happened with me. I

was just a straight, general assignment reporter, the Northeast fireman, the

Mideast fireman, and he did seem to take a liking to me. And we all respected

him. At first there was some concern that he was too much of a show business

kind of guy because he started “Wide World of Sports” and “Monday Night

Football,” and he’d hired Howard Cosell, and we all sort of shook our heads at

this. But it was true that he had a genius for what the audience wanted to see, and


a very energetic way of finding methods of suppling that need. He created so

many good programs. He created “Nightline” out of the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

He created “This Week With David Brinkley” by hiring David Brinkley away

from NBC and making a Sunday morning program that just took off and took

away all the ratings, practically, for that morning. He reinvigorated the whole

news division, but there were a couple of moves that were questioned. He hired

Geraldo Rivera from the local ABC affiliate in New York, and we all shook our

heads thinking, “Oh my God, this guy is kind of a real showboat.” And Roone

kept saying, “He’s working hard, he’s getting stories,” and obviously his eye was

on the ratings.

[00:48:30] Well, one time after the, I think it was called the Son of Sam

scandal in New York—someone was going around murdering people. He put

Geraldo on that story, and Geraldo would do sort of strange things, do stand-ups,

and he would walk, and he would say, “And then this fiend moved from here to

there and got in his car and drove away.” So TV Guide went and interviewed

Roone about it, and he said, “You know, I think this is just a mistaken

assumption. It’s really a cultural thing. If John Martin had said that, everybody

would have said that was great reporting.” To which I always replied, “Yes, but I

always said ‘alleged’ fiend,” which was true. I was a much more sedate…. But

then again, I would have said that I’d never been satirized on “Saturday Night

Live,” as Geraldo was, but in fact I was at one point. I never got to see it. I did a

story about limb reimplantation. People had severed limbs, and then they would

microsurgically reattach them. I did it for “20/20” and at the end of the piece,


Hugh Downs said, unexpectedly, to me, “So John, what should you do if one of

your limbs is severed?” I said, “Well, based on the reporting we’ve done, you

make sure you find the limb and you put it in ice and transport it to wherever

you’re going to have your surgery.” And I went my way, and sure enough, a few

weeks later, according to what I’ve been told, “Saturday Night Live” had a story

about carrying cases for your severed limbs. So I know what it’s like to be

satirized. I only regret I don’t have a copy of that.

[00:50:33] But anyway, Roone was a very special force of nature in

broadcasting. He changed the economics of it, almost single-handedly. He hired

the first $100,000-a-year correspondent, a woman reporter named Cassie Mackin,

away from NBC News. And he bid not only for correspondents and on-air

people, he bid for the technical people, the producers, the field producers, the

camera crews. He went for the best, and he really shook up broadcast news, in a

good way. People were fearful that it would be in a salacious way, but it really

wasn’t. There were moments of questionable kinds of things, but we think we did

a pretty good job.

[00:51:31] One of the lovely opportunities I was given was to work for

David Brinkley on the Sunday morning show. And the fellow I replaced as the

field correspondent was a guy named Jim Wooten. Jim Wooten had been a New

York Times reporter, and for the first two years of the Brinkley show, he was the

cover story. I liked to call it the cover story. They always said it was the

background report. But anyway, Jim was a bit disgruntled because—and it was

true when I was there—the producers would never decide until the last minute


what the topic was. So you spent the early part of the week twiddling your

thumbs in Washington, hoping to find out as early as possible when you could

begin a story, because you’ve got a lot to do. And sure enough, it would be

Thursday night or Friday morning before they’d say, “Okay, we’re going to do it

about OPEC and the meeting in Vienna.” So this one time, Jim did his

interviews, had them fed in from around the country, did them by phone, and

cameras rolling in the room somewhere elsewhere in the country. Wrote his

story, recorded the track, handed it to the editor, and said, “Okay, I’m going to

Vienna.” This was the week that the OPEC ministers met in Vienna during the oil

embargo crisis. They said, “You’re going there?” He said, “Yeah, well, we have

to have a stand-up where the meeting is.” So he got on a plane, flew to Vienna,

got off the plane, and was met by Tony Hirushiki [phonetic], who was one of the

top cameramen, and he said, “Jim, where are we going to do this stand-up?” And

he said, “Well, we’re going to Sigmund Freud’s house.” And Tony said, “Oh?

Why?!” He said, “Well, you’ll see, you’ll see.” So they got to the house, set up

the camera, the camera’s rolling, Jim has a microphone, and the style, the format,

in those days was you were pretending that you were talking to David Brinkley.

So Jim said, “David, you know, even in his wildest dreams Sigmund Freud never

would have guessed why the OPEC ministers were meeting this week here in

Vienna,” and tossed it to David; got on a plane and flew back. And that was his

revenge for not getting the word until much too late in the week. I wish I could

have been that creative, but I never figured out a way to do that.


[00:54:01] But those were the kinds of things: “Nightline,” working with

Ted Koppel, it all started very inauspiciously. The night that the American

hostages were taken in Tehran, we decided we should do a half-hour special. I

can’t remember exactly, I may have done the story of the takeover. We had

somebody in Tehran, Bob Dyke, and then we would do fill-in stories, interviews

with diplomats or military people and things of that sort. And of course this grew,

we stayed on it night after night. And then they decided to make a program out of

it called “Nightline.” Koppel was put in charge, and I was one of the three

original correspondents: A fellow named Charlie Gibson, who later became an

anchor; and another guy named Ron Miller, who later retired, lives in Chicago.

And I stuck it out for about six months. Absolutely grueling: get into the office

between eight and nine, we’d work until midnight, until the show was over. It

was grueling, it was exiting, because you were doing the top story of the day in

any area. It was fulfilling. You like to think that that’s what journalism at its best

is—to bring light to a subject that is really new and misunderstood—often the

case. But finally I was worn out, so I guess you could say I fled. I managed to

work my way off the program.

Meyers: What was Ted Koppel like to work with?

Martin: He was terrific. He was very knowledgeable. He’d been a correspondent, so he

knew what it was like to be on the road. He had very good people working with

him. The key to these programs are the executive producers and the field

producers. Correspondents are a very important part, they’re the part that you see,

but the background piece, the logistics are handled, and the thinking of where


we’re headed is pretty much the work of Koppel and the producers. And the

original producer was a fellow named Bill Lord, a big overbearing, a bit of a

blunderbuss, warned me he would ruin my career if I left the show. Another one

was a fellow named Tom Petag [phonetic], who was the last producer with

Koppel: fabulous guy, had been Dan Rather’s producer, really knew the news,

and he knew the television news business. And so these were people who were

easy to work with, if you don’t mind the hours.

[00:56:57] So one day I got a call—this was years later, after I’d been on

the Brinkley show, and I was doing more general assignment things—got a call

from Koppel and he said, “Want to play some tennis?” I knew that he had played

as a junior, and of course I had played as a junior, and I said, “Oh-kay,” and I

knew something was coming. So I went out to suburban Maryland where he

lives, to his club, and we hit for a while. And then we were having lunch and he

said, “I’d really like to get you to come back on the show.” And I said, “Look, I

really appreciate it, I’m honored that you would ask me. Let’s make a deal, I will

crash”—meaning, just throw myself into—“any story that you want me to do, as

soon as the evening news is over.” And by that I meant I would do my duty for

the evening news, which was who I was assigned to, and then at 6:30 or 7:00,

whenever that show was over, I would turn and do any reporting, any narrating,

anything he needed. And I would, I would do anything for Ted. “… if you’ll just

let me stay off the staff.” So he appreciated that, and he accepted that. And so I

did many stories as a crash, as an emergency, and I was fortunate enough to have

very good producers, and I was able to help “Nightline” at a time when they


needed help. And often they would be spending too much, there’d be people

working on pieces that were taking three or four days, and they didn’t have time

for tonight. But then I also was able to do some other kinds of reporting for them.

One time I did a piece on torture in Brazil, when the government there changed

from military dictatorship back to democracy. A book was published called

Brazil: Never Again. The Catholic Church had funded an underground

investigation of torture in Brazil during the time of the 1960s, 1970s, because it

had been a military dictatorship. People in all walks of life were tortured,

believed to be communists and so forth. And the Church funded this

investigation. Young lawyers went into the military tribunal in Brasilia, checked

out the records. Brazilians are very legal-minded, and when there’d be a trial and

somebody would be accused of treason, they would, in their defense, say that

they’d been tortured. They took notes on everything: where they were tortured,

how they were tortured, who had tortured them, and that sort of thing. And these

files were available in the military tribunal. So this group funded by the Church

checked out the legal files, made copies, and sent them all over the world, and

then came out with a book, Brazil: Never Again. So I went and did that story. A

book had been written about it by Lawrence Weshler, a New Yorker writer.

Again, you didn’t get to do those sorts of things if you were working for the

evening news. Now it’s still the case. If you’re working for the evening news,

it’s so much…. Now the most commonly-used word on the evening news is

“tonight.” Tonight, tonight, as if all these stories started tonight—and they

don’t—they start many other times.


[01:00:40] But you know, that leads me back to the changes in

journalism, and it leads all the way back to The Aztec, because I had written for

The Aztec before I went to work with The Union, and in my senior year, a political

science student by the name of Jeff Fishell [phonetic] decided to run for editor of

The Aztec—it was chosen by the leaders of the Journalism Department—and he

won. And he said, “If I win, will you be my managing editor?” And I said

“sure,” thinking that it would be not too much…. And I was working full-time at

The Union. So he won, and he had a revolutionary idea. This was 1960. The

Aztec had been a very conventional newspaper—it was conventional size, it was

eight columns, it was, I don’t know, ten pages, something like that. And it had

mostly written about sorority-fraternity events, things the college wanted people

to know about—nothing too particularly sensational. And so what Jeff decided to

do was to turn it into a tabloid, and we in fact made The Aztec into a tabloid. The

first issue was about the chaos of parking. Parking has always been an issue at

San Diego State.

Meyers: Yes.

Martin: So we went into it as to how much planning was underway, whether there’d

been promises that hadn’t been kept, things of that nature, things that kind of

pushed against the grain. And the next issue was there’d been some break-ins in

one of the dorms, and I remember writing the headline, “Toltec Thefts: Cops

Baffled.” And this was in 72-point type. Well at the time we took over the Aztec,

there were about 13,000 students here. They used to print 7,000-8,000 copies

once a week, and 5,000 would stay on the stands, nobody was reading it. By the


time we finished, we were printing 8,000 copies, and all were being sold. The

Journalism Department disowned us, they thought we were just terrible. We just

delighted in doing stories that hadn’t been thought of as college newspaper

stories. There was a big anti-death-penalty movement at that time, and a

convicted rapist, Carroll Chessman, was scheduled to be executed in San Quentin.

And so they sent me to San Quentin to cover it—and I did. Again, the copies sold

out, people wanted to read about what was happening. As it happened, a San

Diego State professor was arrested protesting the night before the execution. It

had been on the wire and I hadn’t heard about it, but I managed to get an

interview with him a couple of days later at the San Francisco Airport, so that

made us…. Again, we were digging for things that people were very interested

in. At the end of our semester, they decided to go—I think I have my history

right—they decided to go twice a week.

Meyers: Oh wow.

Martin: And then within another year or two it went daily. But I had moved on by then.

[01:04:49] I guess the best thing about getting disowned by the

Journalism Department is that it taught me that the people in charge aren’t always

exactly right, but it really helps to have smart people making editorial judgements

about what news is, because if you don’t, it sort of gravitates downward. The

great thing about working for, say, ABC in the seventies was that they were smart

people. One programming example is we used to have a program called “The

Eve of Christmas Eve,” and correspondents would be sent around the world to

different countries. It was an hour program, and you would report back on


preparations for Christmas. And after several weeks, I was able to talk myself

into going to South Africa, which was still in the grip of apartheid, Nelson

Mandela was still in prison, and about a year earlier, a leader by the name of

Steve Biko had been murdered by the government for leading people against

apartheid. So I convinced the South Africans that we were doing this story about

Christmas, which was true, and while I was there they lifted a curfew that had

been in place since Biko’s murder. A cathedral in Soweto had a day of pageantry

in celebration of Biko, in celebration of the coming of Christmas—more or less

just the freedom to actually express themselves. And I was so moved by it, I

made it part of the story. I’ll never forget, there was an out-of-work truck driver

who had a poem, and he said, “A great man is gone. Steve Biko is gone. What

will we do now that a great man is gone? The Orinoco is weeping, the Nile is

weeping, the Thames and the Mississippi are weeping.” And of course we were

all weeping because it was such a terrible loss. And that’s the kind of thing you

encounter as a correspondent. It’s one of the benefits, I guess you could say. You

may never know where you’re going to go next week.

[01:07:20] One week I was sent to China when President Reagan went in

1984. In order to show the changes in China, we hired an American graduate

student by the name of David Schambaugh [phonetic], and David got us into the

University of Beijing, partly because he was the starting forward on the Beijing

University basketball team, but also because he was a very smart political science

student. He’s now chairman of the department at George Washington University

in Washington. But anyway, we got into a classroom, and it was like an


amphitheater. And sure enough, it was a class in western political thought, and

sure enough the lecture that day was about American political presidential

campaigns. The professor was writing on the blackboard, “Gary Hart and Walter

Mondale,” and things like that, and “Democrats and Republicans.” And then he

reached into his desk and took out a book and started translating directly into

Chinese from this book. And all of a sudden the class erupted in laughter! And I

said, “David, what is this, what’s going on?” He said, “Well, he’s quoting an

eminent American political analyst-observer.” I said, “Who’s that?” And he said,

“Art Buchwald.” And most students today have no idea who Art Buchwald is, so

when I tell that story I say, “Well, he was sort of the Stephen Colbert of that era,”

to get the idea. And that was another benefit—seeing how China was trying to

change itself. They were beginning to allow certain incentives. People were

allowed to sell privately some of their work. It was a critical moment, a pivotal

moment. That’s part of this collection here at San Diego State of videos that we

have.

Meyer: I did see that one, yeah.

Martin: [01:09:21] As is the obituaries I did—Leonid Brezhnev, which turned out to

be…. Actually, it turned out to feed more than one obituary. I found out that

there was an American businesswoman by the name of Bettina Parker, who had

known Brezhnev because she had gone to Moscow to a trade fair several years

before he passed on, and had struck up a friendship with him. So I included her in

the obit. I did advance obits whenever I could, when we knew people were fading

or whatever. So the Brezhnev obit was ready, and when Koppel put it on


“Nightline,” we were nominated for an Emmy because it really highlighted the

program. Anyway, a few years later, I got a call one morning, and the voice said,

“If you want to know anything about Klaus Barbie, call Bobbie Wilson in

Vancouver.” First of all, I said, “Who’s calling?” and she said, “Bettina Parker.”

I said, “Oh, hi. Who’s Klaus Barbie?” because I didn’t know about Barbie.

Barbie was this escaped Nazi fugitive who had been the Butcher of Leon,

responsible for the deaths of about 4,000 Jews and French resistance fighters.

And he’d escaped and nobody had ever been able to find him. And he’d just been

arrested in Bolivia and sent back to France. And I said, “Well who’s Bobbie

Wilson?” She said, “He’s a jewel thief.” I said, “Oh really?! How do you know

him?” And she said, “Well, I was giving a party one year in my vacation home in

Cuernavaca, and I discovered this guy going through the house, casing the place

for things he could steal, and I threw him out. And the next day I was walking in

a park in the middle of town, and I bumped into him and we started talking and

we became friends. And he lived in Bolivia with Barbie in the seventies and

eighties, and he was going to write a book about Barbie, so he recorded

conversations with him and took pictures of him.” So I called Wilson, and long

story short, my boss agreed to let me go out and interview him. And the story

developed that American Army counterintelligence helped Barbie escape at the

end of the war. Why? They had been employing him, not knowing he was a

fugitive, to set up a spy ring behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. And then

when the French came looking for him, they realized how embarrassing it would


be that he was working for the Americans, so they helped him escape through

Italy, and literally helped him get all the way to South America.

[01:12:12] Well, this developed into quite a story because there were

people in Congress who wanted an investigation of how this could have

happened. The attorney general kept saying, “Well, you know, we’re not the

department of history.” But when I was able to show through some more help

that he had visited the United States, that raised all sorts of questions about

whether maybe he was working for the CIA, and maybe there was more

embarrassment there. As it happened, we were able to spend time in Bolivia and

elsewhere in the United States, tracking down these people, and pretty much

established it wasn’t a grand conspiracy, but the counterintelligence officers had

violated the law, but the statute of limitations had run out. So the remedy was to

apologize to the French, which we did. As a great country, we are able to do

these things, and it was a mark of a great country that we did apologize to the

French. Again, these stories happen, you have no idea they’re coming, and all of

a sudden somebody’s on the phone and you have to, in some cases, suspend your

disbelief—in other cases, disbelieve, because sometimes they’re just crackpots.

Meyers: Was there any difficulty with our counter-intelligence system in the United

States to actually get them to agree to the apology, to admit it?

Martin: [01:13:37] Well, the Justice Department was blessed with a great young lawyer

who ran the Office of Special Investigations. His name was Allan Ryan

[phonetic]. He’d been a Supreme Court law clerk for [Byron] “Whizzer” White.

He’d been an outstanding law student from Minnesota, and also—I guess he was


from Harvard. And he did such a thorough job of investigating this, and wrote

such an incredible report of several hundred pages, that everyone said, “Of course

we should apologize.” And the French were very struck by it. They wrote a note

and said that the report and the apology brought honor on the United States, and it

was true. That was one of the other wonderful benefits of being a reporter and

meeting people of that sort. He now is the general counsel at the Harvard

Business School. There’s just an unending series of experiences that you’re

fortunate enough to have at ABC.

[01:14:45] The week after I did the China story for David, I went to San

Francisco, and there was a Democratic Convention there. And then the week

after that I went to Israel, and there was an election going on there. But probably

the greatest string of travel—how do you overcome jet lag?—came from a story I

was working on for “Nightline.” I was asked to do a story about people who were

in the government, who leave the government and write what they call kiss-and-

tell books. There’d been several at that point, and people were wondering, “How

does this happen?” So I was in New York when I got the assignment, and I went

and interviewed Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who was a historian and worked in the

Kennedy Whitehouse and so on. So I interviewed Schlesinger, got in a taxi, went

to the airport, flew to Los Angeles and interviewed John Dean, who had also

written a kiss-and-tell book. Got in a taxi, went to the airport, and flew to

Houston, spent the night in the airport hotel, got up the next morning and

interviewed somebody else who had done a kiss-and-tell book. Flew back to

Washington. The following night we put the story on the air. The next morning I


got on a plane and flew from Washington to Anchorage. The next morning I got

on an airplane and flew to Nome.

Meyers: Oh my goodness!

Martin: And the morning after that I flew to the middle of the Bering Strait to a place

called Little Diomede Island, and with me was a fellow named Genadi

Gerasimov, who was Gorbachev’s right-hand man. The story was about attempts

by Alaska and Siberia to have commerce, and to reunite the peoples of Little

Diomede Island and Big Diomede Island. Because of the Cold War, relatives

were unable to travel between the two islands, and they were literally frozen,

which is a bad choice of a verb, during the Cold War. Finally there was some

commerce developed. Unfortunately it has withered away now, and we’re now

back to the way we were during the Cold War.

[01:17:07] But those were the kinds of experiences that I was so fortunate

to have, and I never did get jet lag on that trip, because I didn’t have time to!

Tennis has been such an unusual, wonderful part of my life. It started very

simply in grammar school. I was in the eighth grade. I played football,

basketball, and baseball. The school principal came in—Sister Mary Helen. She

said, “You”—pointing at me—and then “you and you, are going to learn to play

tennis.” And we looked at each other. We thought we were real men, “We’re not

tennis players!” She said, “And you’re going to have to hurry.” We said,

“Why?” She said, “Well, in three weeks you’re going to represent the school in

the citywide tournament, the Harper Inc. [phonetic] Tournament.” Well, that day

we went to the Pacific Beach Recreation Center, checked out some old wooden


rackets and some beat-up balls and went out on the tennis courts. We had no idea

what we were doing: we didn’t know how to keep score, we didn’t know which

end of the racket was up, practically. Anyway, within three weeks, one of us—I

wish it were me, but it wasn’t—one of the three of us won his first tennis

tournament match!

Meyers: [01:18:49] Wow.

Martin: And the three of us played tennis all through high school on the team, and we

also played on the college team here at San Diego State. Bill Jack was number

one, I was number two, and Tom Mullen came along later and was also on the

team. And it’s just been a special part of our life. As I mentioned, through tennis

I really got my first job as a journalist, as a stringer at San Diego State, where you

would write your story, cut it out of the newspaper and measure it, and get paid

twenty-five cents an inch. So I had a deep financial investment in tennis.

But the other thing is, after having played at San Diego State, I started a

tennis newsletter called The Aztec Tennis Reporter. This is about 1998, ’99. And

experimenting with the format, it turned out I found a way to do a newsletter that

made it very interesting, used pictures and so on. So when I started teaching

journalism at Columbia, national reporting, I started another newsletter in very

much the same style, called Fault Lines. And Fault Lines dealt with four

subjects: labor unions and employment law, digital technology, wrongful

convictions, and national security. And all these were areas that I had done some

reporting in, and so we took a month on each of them. Classes were seventeen,

eighteen students, sixteen. And what we did was to assign stories in those topics


and share the sources that we developed, so at the end of the class you could walk

out of one of my classes and you would have about 200 contacts—not in each of

those four areas, but in those areas. So if you were starting at a small newspaper,

or a big one, and somebody had a labor story, you might be able to get a quote

from somebody in the field. All the sources were practicing either lawyers, labor

organizers, people who knew the realistic situations in these fields. And I think

that was probably what made the class useful for graduate students.

[01:21:22] I found teaching the hardest job I ever had. I’d been a national

reporter, I’d been on television, I’d been on newspapers. Teaching in a class,

making it important, realistic, and useful is really something I think every teacher

strives for, and I feel I was able to do it. I used to be able to recruit interesting

guests. I had covered part of the pretrial hearings in the Daniel Ellsberg

Pentagon Papers case. And so I kept up with him and I got him to come to class,

and so he was a guest speaker. I got Janet Reno to come, under unusual

circumstances. I had never covered the Justice Department, but through a mutual

friend, I discovered that we had a [mutual] interest in wrongful convictions. And

I met her at a conference, and we were sitting and talking, and I said, “Janet, I

understand you’re the black sheep of your family.” And she sort of laughed, and

she said, “Oh, you know!” I said, “I do.” Her mother, her father, and her brother

were all journalists. Of course she was a lawyer, which qualified as a black sheep

as far as I was concerned. But when I was teaching at Columbia, she called one

day through a friend and asked if she could come talk to the class. And I was

delighted, I said, “Yes, of course!” So the day was approaching, and I arranged


for the class to come in at a special time because she was going to be there in the

daytime and our class was at night. Anyway, just as I was walking toward the

classroom, I got a call back and the associate said, “She can’t come, she’s

overscheduled. She won’t be able to come.” So I said, “Okay. Well, thank her

for trying,” and I walked on and went to the class. Just before—I can’t remember

whether I got in or not—at any rate, she called back and said, “Look, if you can

bring your students to my hotel tomorrow night, I’ll pay for dinner.” And we did.

Not everybody could make it, because it was different than the regular class night.

But she was terrific. She answered every question: about Waco, about

everything that had gone on. She was actually attorney general longer, I think,

than almost all but one other attorney general, because she was confirmed almost

in the second or third week of the Clinton administration, and served all the way

to the end. Just a very, very special person.

Meyers: Thinking about your class at Columbia, I can say as an educator, the way you

taught is the way we’d like a lot of teachers to teach. I spent years teaching

teachers, basically to bring in people who are expert, and to send your students

out, so that they are out in the field and working, and then bringing it back and

sharing. Basically then they had to come up with other twists, or they had to find

other people to talk to. It’s excellent, an excellent way of teaching, and I know

that people who aren’t teachers sometimes find it the hardest job ever, but

obviously you did a great job.

Martin: Well, thank you. Janet Reno was a great source. I always assigned my best

student to call her and see what she was thinking about things. And so this one


year I had my best student, he called her, and apparently he hadn’t really prepared

for a decent interview, and she read him the riot act. He sort of struggled through

the interview. He was sitting in a lab at Columbia with a tape rolling in one of the

machines, and he struggled through it, and signed off. Before transcribing it, he

went to the restroom or something, came back, the tape was gone. So he just had

an hour’s worth of tape that was missing, and he called me and said, “What

should I do?” And I said, “Well, sit down right now and write down everything

you can remember that she told you, and then call her and tell her in the interest of

accuracy you really want to make sure [you] heard properly.” “Call her?! I can’t

do that!” And I said, “Yes you can, and yes you should.” So he did. He called

me back and said, “It was the best lesson I ever learned.” Just put your head

down and do it. I don’t know what else I could have taught him that was more

helpful. He didn’t write the best story that week, but he had some pretty good

quotes.

Meyers: That’s great.

Martin: The reason the class was useful was because every reporter got a starter source,

but then the deal was they had to come back with at least three more sources for

every story. And then at the end of the semester we pooled all our sources, so you

had the name, e-mail address, a phone number, and a little bit of information

about the person. So there were lawyers, professors, labor organizers, Pentagon

people. The other thing that we did was every year we’d spend a long weekend in

Washington. And again we would use our sources. I had another professor and I

both went there. I had Cy Hirsch [phonetic] come in one time. I had David Wise


[phonetic] who wrote the first book on the CIA. A lot of people like that. Again,

so much of what we learn is from people who are in the field, doing what they’re

doing, and you realize they’re human beings just like you are, and you realize that

you’ve got to use your wits to get on with the conversation and get on with the

job.

Meyers: You mentioned some of your students from Columbia might be journalists now

that you know about.

Martin: [01:28:12] Many of them are. Of course you know the field is just withering.

But one of my students is one of the editors at The Boston Globe, in what’s called

the “Ideas” section. And then two of them have just gone to work for The

Washington Post, one covering Silicon Valley and one probably doing computer-

assisted reporting. He was at USA Today, and then before that he was…. Where

was he? Associated Press. It’s always gratifying to find a student that’s stayed in

the field. It is a terribly difficult field right now. People are leaving the field,

people are not going into the field because the future seems so grim. And all I can

say is, if you’re going to go in it for the money, forget it, but I never expected to

make any money. I guess if your expectations are low, you can’t be disappointed.

It’s a great field. It’s a great way to be part of the conversation about what’s

going on in the country.

Meyers: What do you think about the online news? Like I get The New York Times

online, and my husband loves to read the paper.

Martin: Well, I’m addicted to both. It’s more difficult to be a journalist today, because

you’re filing for many more—they call them platforms. As an ABC


correspondent, I would do a story for the evening news. I would do at least two,

and sometimes three radio stories associated with the same television story, and

then I would write usually one piece for the ABC online website, ABCnews.com.

But now they’re filing for Face Book, Twitter, there’s so many tools I’m worried

that the journalists are spread so thinly now that they don’t have time to really

report. What ABC has its reporters do, they write a piece, they file it for Face

Book, and then they check responses to that, and try to develop the story further.

And they think that this somehow expands the reach and expands the coverage. I

think it just eats away at the amount of time available to really dig deeply in a

story. I could be wrong, but it’s the way things work now, and it’s not something

that’s likely to change very soon.

[01:30:50] Probably a good example of how stretched we are, you know,

I had my interest in tennis, and about 90 percent of your assignments in ABC

News and newspapers are from editors who say, “Well, this is what we should do

here,” or “this is what we should do there.” I came up with a story about tennis

one time because of my interest, and it turns out there is a national championship

for ninety and over players on grass; there’s another one on clay; and another one

on hard courts indoors. So I convinced a weekend news editor to do a story. I

flew to Palm Springs and so on. The story went very well, and I’m not thinking

of going into the details of the story, but it turned out to be a tug of war between

my editor at the evening news and my editor of the weekend news. And the

editor of the evening news was complaining that I was doing the story about the

ninety and over. And this is a problem of every reporter, because there’s so much


demand for their time; they don’t hire as many as they used to; they don’t give

them as much leeway on a single story. So you don’t find these longer stories.

And it’s a real problem. [Unclear 01:32:10] was faced with this kind of shortage

of time to do the work properly, and I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not

to go faster.

Meyers: Well going back to the tennis for a minute, you are way younger than that, but

basically do you still play tennis?

Martin: I do.

Meyers: Tell us about that.

Martin: Well, I vowed to myself, after seeing these guys, and they were terrific, that I

want to play in the ninety and over tournament. And I’ve got some years to go.

The great thing about them was that they really had a world view that, of course,

is only available if you’re ninety and over. One of them was a former Pan Am

pilot who’d flown one of the first China Clippers. One of them was a top secret

inventor for submarine warfare in World War II. And another guy was a semi-pro

baseball player who stayed active. I am momentarily having trouble with a knee,

but I do expect to get back on the court soon. It’s just something that you can’t

beat as an exercise, you can’t top it, and I intend to keep doing it as long as I can.

Meyers: Now do you play with friends where you live?

Martin: Some. You can play in tournaments. I haven’t played in tournaments in a while,

but I can play somewhere almost every week, particularly in San Diego County.

There’s never a shortage of tournaments to play. I usually play neighbors and

people like that. So it’s something to be kept active, and I can’t wait to get back.


Meyers: How did The World Tennis Gazette come about, and how old is that, and how

does that work?

Martin: World Tennis Gazette started about 2002, as I recall. No, I guess maybe it was

later. When I retired from ABC, I knew I wanted to cover tennis. I actually had

done a couple of pieces for ABC on the U.S. Open. So I got the ABC.com people

to let me represent ABC News at the Grand Slams in Australia, France, and

Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. And then it became a question of, well, if you

apply for a press credential, who do you work for? Some of them didn’t want to

give credentials to a website—this was early—and so I decided to create a

magazine called World Tennis Gazette—again, on the format of Fault Lines and

Aztec Tennis Reporter, and write about topics that interested me. So I became my

own editor and photographer, so I just began to get credentials. They accepted

that as a valid journalistic pursuit, and so I’ve been doing premier events fifteen,

almost twenty years now, doing stories at these four tournaments.

Meyer: [01:35:28] And what’s the reception to World Tennis Gazette?

Martin: It’s not very widespread. I have it posted online, and I feed it pretty much

whenever I’m in the right mood. But I’ve done stories about the world team

tennis franchise here in San Diego, the San Diego Aviators. I did it when it was

first brought to San Diego from back east. I’ve done stories about security at the

four Grand Slams. I did one called “The Four Tenors of Tennis,” about the public

address announcers at the four, at Wimbledon and Australia. Kind of quirky, I

did one about the ball boys—the ball kids, excuse me. I did that piece for The

New York Times. I began writing for The New York Times probably six, seven


years ago. All told, I’ve done more than, I’d say, about 200 pieces on tennis for

The Times. Most of them were just on the website, but some of them in the paper

as well—which is really enjoyable for me. I love being able to see a print piece

with a byline, I’ll be quite honest.

[01:37:03] Probably my favorite story for The New York Times happened

in 2007. We were on a visit to our friends in South Africa, and we were in

Johannesburg, and we discovered that a tennis center in Soweto, which [Arthur]

Ash had started along with his wife years before, had actually fallen into disrepair

and become a garbage dump. But a white soccer executive and a black city

council member had revived it and had done some marvelous restoration, and had

gotten money to do it from white South African sources, as well as others. And

the headline said, “A Dream Restored,” because Ash’s widow came to South

Africa and was just astonished at what had been achieved. It made a very special

story. So The Times bought it from me and saved it for the opening of the U.S.

Open that year, 2007. It was very satisfying to be able to do a piece like that.

Meyers: John, could you tell us about your Wilson Center Fellowship and what you’re

doing now at the Wilson Center?

Martin: Well, this has been one of the most interesting parts of my career, and it’s

coming late in life, and it’s just really special. The Woodrow Wilson Center has

been in the Smithsonian for forty, fifty years, and it’s a collection of scholars and

researchers, academics, politicians, former government people. There are lots of

former ambassadors there, and they’re all writing on topics of importance to the

public policy deliberations that the government is undergoing. I’ve been able to


write about a couple of topics that I was very interested in. One was the Fairness

Doctrine. For people who don’t know about it, it was instituted in 1949 as a way

of making radio principally more equally arranged on controversial topics. In

other words, if you had a topic and a story, you were under a requirement by the

FCC to provide a reasonable chance for the other side to be heard. And by the

1980s, it was clear it didn’t work, because stations were avoiding these topics just

because they were afraid of not satisfying the government, and causing problems

with getting sued and things like that. So by that time they were really shunning

controversial topics. In 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine. Well the

result, unfortunately, was not what was hoped for.

[01:40:15] At that point talk radio took off, the number of radio stations

quadrupled, and it developed a situation where now most stations—and this is

true of cable television as well—talk about only one side of an issue. If you want

to hear the other side, you’ve got to go to another station, which is not, I think,

what the government had in mind. So I was able to write a piece about that for

The Christian Science Monitor while working at the Wilson Center. I did another

piece about the Barbie case as a description of different kinds of archives that are

available. The premise of that is that history recovered, history preserved, is

history enriched, because these stories have a way of kind of just floating off into

the air, particularly television news stories. And it’s important to know how

information is gathered. And that’s been another subject that I’ve been able to

write about at the Wilson Center. It’s been really exciting, and it’s been

extremely refreshing, because you have all these different points of view, it’s very


collegial, we all kind of work with each other, “Oh, I know something about that,

I’ll help you with this.” It’s a great moment, and I’m very fortunate to be able to

do it.

Meyers: [01:41:34] Speaking of the collegiality, are there people that you have met

there that you find particularly interesting, or people you’d like to talk about?

Martin: Well, my desk is right next to a former ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh,

and Bill Mylim [phonetic] is among the most humorous, as well as assiduous

writers. He still writes for an English language Pakistani newspaper called The

Friday Times. We have a lot in common. I’ve found him very enjoyable.

There’s another guy named Aaron David Miller [phonetic] who was a

negotiator at the State Department for years, in the Middle East areas. And he’s

been interesting. He’s very active. He’s one of the vice-presidents of the Center.

The place, just about everywhere you turn there’s somebody of interest. So I just

feel blessed.

Meyers: That brings to mind that that’s in Washington, D.C., and Columbia is in New

York, and you’re not at Columbia anymore, but basically you’re in San Diego.

Where, of these places, do you think of as home?

Martin: That’s a really hard question. We seem to discuss it about every other day,

where do we really want to be? Washington, I was eighteen years a

correspondent there, so there’s a lot of that in my blood. New York is my

birthplace, born in the Bronx. We love New York, we love the theater, we love

the activities, and the people of New York. And we love San Diego. It’s a place

of great interest to me from my childhood. Three of the four grandparents moved


out here, the fourth one had passed away already. So I think the answer on that is

I’ll get back to you on that.

Meyers: Okay! (laughs) And moving [along], we’ve talked a little bit about your

retirement and what you’re doing and that in a work way, but talk a little bit about

your friends and family in these many places, and what you like to do.

Martin: [01:43:46] Like any modern family, we’re spread all over the globe. My

brother, who’s quite a bit younger than I, lives in Seattle. He’s an IT guy, he’s

retired now. He’s the only other sibling that’s around. My children, I have two

daughters: one is a freelance writer, who writes a monthly column for The New

York Times called “Prototype.” It’s in the Sunday business section—Claire

Martin. And my other daughter is Sophie Martin, and she is a lawyer in

Albuquerque, and she runs the state bar exam in New Mexico.

Meyers: Where does your daughter Claire live?

Martin: She lives in Los Angeles and has a daughter, Frances, who is the next

generation. So I guess she could be the great-great-granddaughter of immigrants.

And Sophie lives, as I think I mentioned, in New Mexico. So the family is slowly

making its way deeper into the 21st century.

Meyers: And tell me more about Frances.

Martin: Well, she’s one year old, she walks, she talks—gibberish, but cute gibberish.

Her father is an online businessman. He has several businesses: furniture, dog

treats, and wine.

Meyers: Good sellers, all of them!


Martin: And Sophie’s husband is a mathematician at the Sandia Labs outside

Albuquerque—nuclear physics. So it’s a diverse family, diverse interests and

skills, and we’re very fortunate.

Meyers: [01:46:06] Okay, and given your friends are from so many places, what do you

like to do socially?

Martin: Well, my wife says that I liked to work all the time, but we enjoy getting

together. We used to, every Sunday, sit down and watch “60 Minutes” and have

pizza, which was probably the height of our kind of social enclave—and we still

do, to a degree. It’s a fine program. It really upholds a lot of the best traditions of

the business.

Meyers: It sure does. And speaking of television, you have a big interest in

photography. Where did that come about, or how did that start?

Martin: That started here at San Diego State as well, interestingly enough. I took a class

in photo editing from Art Weimer [phonetic], who was the chair of the

department. He’s a very skillful professor. And as a result, I worked as a photo

editor for a period of time at The San Diego Union. I was the weekend photo

editor. So I’ve loved learning how to compose. Composition is a big part of

photography, and so it’s kind of stayed with me. So when I decided I was going

to get the chance to be up close with these tournaments, I said, “I’d like to throw

myself into it.” So a photographer who has been on the tennis tour for thirty

years, forty years, gave me a list of the right equipment. I had never taken a

photography class, but I knew how to compose, and I kind of picked up the ins

and outs of F-stops and shutter speeds and stuff like that. I don’t claim mastery of


it yet, but I do find myself using the skills that Art Weimer taught me in

composing—in composing pictures of tennis players, and knowing where to look

for the shot. And the great thing about it, if you have a press photographer’s

credential, you are sitting on the court. You’re within fifteen feet of the players,

so you really get a chance to—it really puts you in a position to make good

pictures.

Meyers: [01:48:32] And speaking a little bit about San Diego State, you were here when

Malcolm Love was the president, and Jack Kennedy came to speak here.

Martin: He came to speak, and received the first doctorate degree from a Cal State

University campus. It was in 1963, it was only a few months before he was

assassinated. And I was in the stadium when he came and delivered the speech.

It was very exciting. He was young and talented and telegenic and there was great

hope. So it was especially difficult to cover his assassination, but I did.

Meyers: Definitely. And [since] that time, do you think San Diego State University has

evolved even as a better university, or how do you feel about it?

Martin: It appears to be. I don’t know the minute-to-minute details of how it operates,

but it seems to be a very solid place. [It has] developed its research abilities,

which were not at all evident in the 1960s. I see it ranked in various categories as

being among the best in the country. I’m delighted to have had a part of being

here.

[01:49:59] Well here we are all these many years after my class graduated

in 1960, and my connections with San Diego State remain strong. We give

money to the Art Weimer Scholarship Fund in the Journalism Department. We’re


very interested in musical theater. Musical theater has exploded here at San Diego

State. It is, to me, one of the very finest departments, and we donate a scholarship

every year because we see the quality of students. It’s one of only two in the

country that offer a graduate program in musical theater. There are lots of

undergraduate [programs], but if you want to teach, and a lot of former New York

Broadway performers come here to get a master’s degree so they can teach—and

that’s why the quality of the program is so high. We give to that.

[01:50:50] I’m trying to remember the other place where we give, that we

were just talking about. The library, which is so special, and the Special

Collection, which is so special. Obviously I think it’s great. The great thing that

they did for me was to digitize the collection of more than 300 videos of stories

that I had done as a professional journalist. I’d like to think this will be a very

useful archive for researchers, historians, political scientists. And it’s due to the

farsightedness of Rob Ray, the head of Special Collections, that it’s taken place.

Meyers: John, is there anything else you’d like to share about San Diego State

University?

Martin: Well, one of the great gifts to me was this basic understanding of the world and

life, as an undergraduate. But one of the things I haven’t talked about is I left in

1962, without a degree. I was nine units lacking, and all those units were going to

be in biology. And I was scared of biology, I just didn’t think I could deal with it.

So I allowed myself to be drafted. And years later, after I’d won a Monty, which

was, you know, for graduates without a degree, a friend asked my wife if there

was something the school could do for me. She said, “Give him an honorary


degree.” Well, they lifted my transcript and found that I had more than enough

units to graduate under the current situation. And so in 1995, which was fifteen

years after my class graduated, I walked through the graduation ceremony, and

Joyce Gaddis [phonetic], the dean of Professional Studies and Fine Arts, handed

me a diploma, and at that point I began to cry, because I didn’t realize how

important it was. I had always thought it was important, but I always thought life

went on, and I just didn’t have a degree. Thanks to my wife, and to Joyce, and to

Tom Carter, my friend, I got one, and I’m so grateful.

(recording turned off and on)

Meyers: John, is there anything else about San Diego State University that you’d like to

talk about?

Martin: Well, I want to reveal a great secret, and that is that I didn’t get a degree here in

time to graduate with my class in 1960. I was lacking nine units, they were all

going to be in biology, which terrified me, and so in 1962 I left school, was

drafted into the Army, and went on with my life. Years later, around 1995, a

friend asked my wife if there was anything the school could do for me. I had won

a Monty and had brought, I hope, credit upon the Journalism Department here,

and she said, “Well, give him a degree.” And so they looked into it, and I had

amassed more credits than was currently needed to get a degree, and my grade

point was adequate. So that year, that spring, I walked through the graduation

ceremony with my cap and gown, and Joyce Gaddis, the dean of Professional

Studies and Fine Arts, handed me a degree, at which point I began to weep. I

hadn’t realized, until that very instant, how important that degree is, and how


important it was for me. And I’ll just be eternally grateful to San Diego State for

being so understanding. And that’s where I am right now.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

the aztec, and then the managing editor. after

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