In an earlier life, The Scrapbook worked at the Washington Times under the storied foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, whose long career at Newsweek was already the stuff of legend when he became editor in chief of the Times in 1985. As an underdog, upstart, scrappy competitor of the Washington Post, the Times had an eccentric newsroom in those days. There were some solid professionals surrounded by the very young (including this writer), and the very old, wannabes and has-beens, oddballs, obsessives, and even a brilliant crackpot or two.
The ideal newsroom dynamic, in The Scrapbook’s experience, can be compared to a nuclear reactor, with a little bit of fissile material, typically the aggressive young reporters out to make a name for themselves, surrounded by a lot of control rods, to keep the thing from blowing up or melting down.
Arnaud turned this relationship on its head: He was pure energy. If there was danger ahead, his instinct was to step on the accelerator, hard, and never hit the brakes. This could make for interesting editorial meetings, with the subordinate sometimes trying to figure out some politic way to rein in the boss.
The Scrapbook particularly remembers when Arnaud, in early 1989, scored an interview with the just-inaugurated President Bush and solicited questions from a few of us. Our ideas were so boring we don’t recall them now; Arnaud, on the other hand, with a twinkle in his eye, said he was going to ask the president about German reunification. At the time—almost a year before the Berlin Wall fell—this struck us as pure fantasy, if not science fiction, and a waste of valuable time with the new president. We may even have rolled our eyes. Arnaud, being Arnaud, of course went right ahead.
After the Wall came down that November, we reminded him of his prescience, but he deflected all credit. He confided that Vernon Walters—an old friend of Arnaud whom Bush had named ambassador to West Germany—suspected that the East Bloc was about to come unglued and that the administration was not sufficiently prepared for such a momentous event. He had suggested to Arnaud that he ask Bush the question, in hopes of provoking more imaginative thinking within the national security apparatus about scenarios that, as it happened, became reality sooner than almost anyone had anticipated.
That was Arnaud to a tee—unbelievably well-plugged-in, with access to the highest levels of government, putting his access to maximum use. He died last week, at 88, not the last of a breed, as some of the obituarists put it, but one of a kind.
