The Death of a Journalist
(Page 11 of 11)
September/October 1996
Lynda Schuster, Granta (www.granta.com)
Through the years, I've been sustained by the belief that Dial wouldn't have wanted his life any other way. He had been a desk man, an editor, before becoming a foreign correspondent and got out because, as he described it, the walls of the city room seemed to close in on him a bit more every year. Dial delighted in the challenges of foreign reportage: the hostile governments, impossible terrain, poor telecommunications. Surmounting those difficulties required the summoning up of what he called 'Greek excellence.' Given the choice, Dial would surely have preferred to live, but the security of the newsroom would, for him, have been no life at all.
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For my part, I came to feel differently about the profession. I continued to work as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, South America, southern Africa. But it was never the same. The sense of glamour, of boundless expectation, had vanished; something in me had changed. Perhaps it was because I would never be 25 years old again and not have had the person I loved most in the world blown to bits. Perhaps I just outgrew it. I eventually left daily journalism to write about the world in a more measured way, bequeathing the coverage of coups and earthquakes to others. Only one such story, Dial's story, I carry in my heart always.
Reprinted from Granta, Spring 1996.
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