What happens when you bring together three veteran foreign correspondents, each carrying decades of wisdom, scars, and tales from the world’s most dangerous places? 

In this timely gathering, WhoWhatWhy hosts a conversation among these long-time journalists:

William Dowell, former NBC, ABC, and Time magazine correspondent, who covered conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, and Beirut; he is now the international editor for WhoWhatWhy.  

Greg Dobbs, Emmy Award-winning ABC News correspondent, who reported from over 80 countries, covering everything from apartheid’s aftermath in South Africa to the lingering wounds inflicted by Agent Orange in the jungles of Vietnam.

James Dorsey, scholar-journalist who brings nuanced analysis to the world’s most turbulent regions, from Middle Eastern soccer politics to real-time global complexities; he is a frequent contributor to WhoWhatWhy 

From experiencing near death in Vietnam to dodging machete-wielding rebels in Tehran to witnessing chaotic drug raids in Colombian jungles, these veterans share harrowing stories of survival, near-misses, and the peculiar brotherhood of war correspondents who seem to show up in every global hotspot. 

The far-ranging conversation explores how journalism has evolved, the unique role boots-on-the-ground reporters once played as unofficial diplomats in hostile territories, and the increased dangers facing today’s intrepid correspondents. 

Despite their hard-earned cynicism about current events, the three remain surprisingly optimistic about humanity’s long-term prospects.

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:15] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. When global history is written in real time, it’s not penned by historians, but by journalists, seasoned observers who’ve witnessed humanity’s great triumphs and catastrophes firsthand. Today I’ve gathered three remarkable and very seasoned journalists, each a front row witness to decades of global upheaval. These are three guys who, across continents and conflict, have seen how history unfolds, not in quiet archives, but amid gunfire, turmoil, and occasional bureaucratic chaos. There’s something irresistible and perhaps slightly dangerous about putting three aging and very active reporters together, each still chasing a world rapidly changing, yet carrying within them the wisdom and scars from the one they’ve traversed. William Dowell, Greg Dobbs, and James Dorsey each come to us steeped in journalism of grit and relentless curiosity, from the jungles of Vietnam to revolutions and civil wars, from global political dramas to deeply personal human stories. William Dowell, WhoWhatWhy’s international editor, has chronicled history as it happened, from Vietnam to Iran, Beirut to Afghanistan, distilling conflicts into human terms through NBC, ABC, and Time magazine. Greg Dobbs, with a string of Emmy Awards to his name, has spent decades illuminating stories for ABC News and HDNet, covering everything from apartheid aftershocks to the lingering wounds of Agent Orange, delivering truths from over 80 countries worldwide. Dr. James Dorsey, scholar and journalist, brings a nuanced lens to the world’s most turbulent regions. From soccer in the Middle East, where culture collides with geopolitics, to scholarly pursuits in Singapore, Dorsey continues dissecting global complexities in real time. The idea for this gathering first struck me during an editorial meeting at WhoWhatWhy, when an international issue sparked a spontaneous, slightly unruly competition between these three veterans, each politely but pointedly trying to one-up the other. It was in that moment that I realized that putting them together might provide profound insight, chaotic brilliance, or perhaps just prove that journalists never really retire; they just talk louder. With a combined average age, comfortably north of 75, anything could happen. Wisdom, wit, war stories, and possibly a few exaggerations. What I promise in the next hour is a great conversation and an unprecedented spin of the globe. It is my pleasure to welcome William Dowell, James Dorsey, and Greg Dobbs here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Gentlemen, thanks so much for doing this.

[00:03:04] James Dorsey: Pleasure to be with you.

[00:03:05] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is great to have all three of you here. Thank you for doing this, and for being brave enough to do it. I kept the introductions to all of you to a minimum in the intro because I really want the three of you to talk a little bit about your history and background, and that really is where I want to begin this. Bill Dowell, I want to start with you and just a little bit about your history and where you’ve traveled the world.

[00:03:29] William Dowell: I would say I got into journalism really when I was eight years old, and I read a book by Ernie Pyle, who was a top war correspondent of World War II. And Pyle, instead of writing an analysis of the war, just joined a rifle squad and just wrote about the daily occurrences. And I was so moved that I decided at that moment I wanted to be a journalist. And it was kind of a rocky course to actually get to doing it. But I think that Vietnam certainly changed my life. I was going to be drafted into the army, and so I said, well, I’ll enlist and have some control over what I do. And so I ended up in Vietnam on a province advisory team, in which I was directly involved in the administration of the province and what everybody was doing. And it was clear that it was a disaster on the part of the United States. I mean, it was just an understandable mistake, let’s say. And so as soon as I got out of the army, I went back to Vietnam as a reporter and stayed four and a half years there. And after that, I ended up working for NBC News. And as soon as I left Vietnam, well, actually, when I left Vietnam, I decided I wanted to go once around the world by land. So I just took taxis and buses and went from Saigon to Europe. And that was quite an experience. It took a couple of months. Then I ended up at NBC Nightly News in Washington. And I had gone through Afghanistan, and I saw these women washing rugs with the Hindu Kush behind them. And I said, that’s probably one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. And so I ended up at the NBC bureau in Washington. I said, am I never going to see the Hindu Kush again? So somebody said, well, we’ve got an opening for a radio stringer in Paris. And I said, well, if I do that, I’ll never have a career. So I guess I’ll do that. So I went to Paris. The European news director for NBC was Irv Margolis, who was referred to as Genghis Khan, the destroyer from the east, because he wrecked so many careers. And I called him an asshole. And he said, the only honest thing he ever said in his life was people who like us, we like, and people who don’t like us, we get rid of. So I was talking with Jack Klein, who was the bureau chief in Paris. And I said, Jack, I feel like I’m on a downward spiral. Jack said, well, actually, you were fired last week, but I didn’t have the heart to tell [you]. So being young and not really caring that much, I took off for Morocco for a month and came back to Paris after that and was in a discussion about television. And I said, you know, it’s not stupid; it’s just kind of oblique in the way it approaches things. And so somebody said, well, you want to come and write for us? And I said, who are you? And they said, Time magazine. So I started writing for Time. And then the next thing I knew as a stringer, you know, just as a freelance, next thing I knew, I got a call saying that the bomb had gone off. And at first I, and could I go and cover that for ABC? So that’s how I ended up. I ended up working for both Time and ABC during the time I was in Paris, which was about 15 years.

[00:07:13] Jeff Schechtman: Greg, it’s time for your story.

[00:07:15] Greg Dobbs: My route was more accidental than deliberate, like Bill’s. And you called him William, I call him Bill because he and I go back, what is it, maybe 40 years to the Paris bureau of ABC. Our bureau chief, by the way, was the renowned Pierre Salinger. So we’ve known each other for a long time. But how I got started was this. I went to the University of California at Berkeley in the mid 1960s. And people with the color hair I’ve got will remember there was something called the free speech movement, which was sort of a civil rights movement, and there are parallels around the country today, of course, but it was a group of students who demanded the right to distribute civil rights literature on the campus at Berkeley. I was not politicized. I was not with them or against them. I was just a fascinated observer because they would fill the main plaza on the campus. They would occupy the administration building. They crushed a police car. And I was thinking, this is cool. It was better than going to class. One day I began to realize that I was seeing the same grownups there day after day after day. They were the reporters. And I got up the guts to go up to one of them. I was pre-law; I was going to be a lawyer. But I went up to one of them. And in so many words, I said, do you always get to go where the action is? And he kind of patted me on the back. Dave McLean was his name. He patted me on the back and said, sure, kid. When this story’s over, I’ll go someplace else exciting. All of life is an adrenaline rush. I was hooked. I was hooked by that two-minute conversation. And I wanted to be a journalist. But I had not studied journalism in school because, as I say, I was on my way to a job as an attorney. So I applied to graduate schools in journalism. I was lucky. I got into a couple, including Northwestern in Chicago. And so I got my master’s in journalism. And while I was there, there was an interview process to be a temporary employee at the ABC News Bureau in Chicago. And because I had been an intern at a TV station in San Francisco, from which this reporter had come, I had been in a newsroom a couple of times in my life. And so I got chosen. And from there, I morphed into the job as editor for the renowned Paul Harvey. You all remember Paul Harvey? Hello, Americans. Stand by for news. And for two and a half years, I was Paul Harvey’s editor. He was the biggest thing in American radio back in the 60s and the 70s. And that morphed into a job as a producer with ABC News. And then eventually, I did something they liked, where there was no correspondent available. And I stood in, and they asked me to be a correspondent. And so I traveled around the Midwest and the South on stories for a few years. Then they sent me to London. And from London, which was a wonderful place to work and a wonderful place to live, you fanned out over the continent of Africa, over the continent of Asia, over what was then Eastern Europe, as well as a little bit of time in Western Europe. And so I got my spurs doing that. And then, after five years based in London, simply because my wife and I loved London, but wanted to live in Paris, we moved to Paris, I became a part of that bureau. And in all those years overseas, spent the plurality of my time in the Middle East. Of course, that’s when Egypt and Israel shook hands. That’s when the Beirut Civil War was going full tilt. That’s when the Iranian Revolution occurred. That’s when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. There was the Rhodesian Civil War. There was the first Gulf War. And so I got to cover all of that. And the way I have always described it is this, I had a front row seat to history, large and small, but a front row seat. And while there are days of my career that I would easily trade, I wouldn’t trade the career at all.

[00:11:16] Jeff Schechtman: James?

[00:11:17] James Dorsey: Like everything in journalism, my path was one of, on the one hand, determination, on the other hand, circumstance, and finally luck. I think what I share with Greg and Bill is that we’ve all covered, at least my focus has been, and it’s been, as I understand it, much the focus of Bill and Greg, ethnic and religious conflict across the globe. But I got into journalism in a very different way, in that there was a confluence of circumstance. One was financial. I was studying, not journalism, but economics and tropical agriculture. But I was suddenly cut off from my funding. And so I had to figure out a way to fund myself. And I did that by freelancing for various Dutch media. And I was lucky in the sense that one of the foremost Dutch dailies, whose history was that they were an organ of the resistance against the Nazis during World War II, and they were also the newspaper that broke the back of the Dutch colonial war in 1948 in Indonesia. But they were at a point, they were Christian Democrats, very strong Christian readership base, and they wanted to move away from a totally pro-Israeli position. And they needed someone to be the fig leaf. And because of my own background, I served the purpose. And as a result, I was their Middle East editor, I was their Middle East correspondent then. But in 1978, I think it was, when Menachem Begin went to Camp David for the first Middle East peace negotiations after the visit to Jerusalem in 1977 of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, I broke a story that led to the rupture of diplomatic relations between Austria and Israel. And the Dutch paper didn’t know how to deal with it. And so at that point, I decided that I needed… One, I decided what I want to do is influence people who have influence. And I was going to have to do that in English rather than in Dutch. And so I moved to the Christian Science Monitor. And then from there on to the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, I’ve now ended up in Northern Thailand.

[00:14:00] Jeff Schechtman: Can any of you imagine, James, I want to start with you, a young person today that wanted to pursue a career in journalism, having the opportunities and being able to follow any kind of path similar to what you guys have done? James, start with you.

[00:14:17] James Dorsey: I think we were lucky. I mean, as a matter of principle, would I go back into journalism if I had to do it again? I wouldn’t think twice about it. It’s been a phenomenal opportunity, a phenomenal learning process, a phenomenal career. I’ve done things, met people that I normally would never have met or never been a witness to. So in that sense, I would strongly recommend people to go into journalism. But journalism today is a very different beast. And it’s much tougher. And if you want to try and make a living out of it, it’s very, particularly in international affairs, as a foreign correspondent, more than probably in any other segment of journalism. It’s very tough. And therefore, I think I would also be cautionary about it with a great degree of regret.

[00:15:09] Jeff Schechtman: Bill?

[00:15:09] William Dowell: Yeah, I had a discussion with Claude Angélix, the political editor of the Canard-Chenet, the satirical magazine of Paris. And the question was, do you train a journalist or do you identify them? And I think it’s a certain personality that just wants to be out there. And they’re going to be out there whether anybody hires them or not. And then the publications just pick out the guys that are already there and have the most knowledge. But I don’t see journalists dying at all. I think it’s going to boom. But it’ll be different. You know, instead of being yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s newspaper, it may be direct from the correspondent in the field directly to the public or something, you know. But I don’t think journalism is going to die at all. If it were, it would have died a long time ago.

[00:16:03] Jeff Schechtman: Well, certainly television journalism is dying. I mean, as we see happening every day, linear television, the television networks are just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. It is a dying business. Go ahead, Bill.

[00:16:18] William Dowell: You can go straight from iPhone to the news headquarters, you know. Television is going the way radio goes. And, you know, Arden Ostrander, who was a producer at ABC, said there are only three things to remember about radio. One is nobody cares about radio. The second is screw radio. And I forgot what the third one was. But I found that radio is a direct connection. You are there. This thing is happening to you and it’s communicating to people all over the world. And I got more reactions from working in radio than most people did in television. Television trained you to be a traveler. And that was about it. Although people like Greg are above, beyond the call. I was going to ask Greg if he was in, you were in Tehran during the revolution, right?

[00:17:13] Greg Dobbs: Yes.

[00:17:14] William Dowell: And so the reporter, the correspondents were going out, getting shot at, getting all the news, brought it back, and Peter Jennings would voice over. And Jennings was, to his credit, was embarrassed by that, you know. But the point is, real journalists, they’re not going to stop.

[00:17:34] Jeff Schechtman: Greg?

[00:17:35] Greg Dobbs: Yeah. I mean, the business is different and the business is the same. It’s different for the obvious reasons, because of technology, because of staffing, and because of public interest, which is lower. But it’s also the same because it requires the same skills, the same interests, and the same talents. You have to want to be a reporter. And in the case of being a foreign correspondent, particularly, you have to be willing to take part of what the job description requires, which means risk. I mean, you calculate the risk. You go to a dangerous place and you calculate, you know, how far to go without going too far and how long to stay without staying too long and all the rest. But it still requires the same principles and the same standards that all four of us employed or tried our best to employ over our many decades in the business. And television being a dying business, I would characterize it differently for only one reason. The principles are the same and the techniques of putting together a television story as opposed to a radio or print piece are the same as well. What’s different is the audience. It’s a much smaller audience.

[00:18:45] Jeff Schechtman: And getting smaller all the time. All the networks are continuing to shrink. CNN is about to shrink even more dramatically. CNN could disappear almost within the next five years. I mean, all of these television outlets are going to be gone soon.

[00:19:01] Greg Dobbs: Well, they might be, but there’s always going to be a certain interest in people who absorb the news that way rather than on a computer screen or auditorily. But it still takes the same things to put a story together. That is the point. You began, Jeff, by asking about young people…

[00:19:22] Jeff Schechtman: Right.

[00:19:23] Greg Dobbs: and them wanting to be journalists. Not long ago, sometime in the past month, I had somebody ask me – I was moderating a forum about journalism – and a young person asked me, how can I become a journalist? I gave them a two-part answer. The first part was, well, you’ve just got to be in the right place at the right time. And she looked at me and said, well, how do I do that? My answer was, exactly. I mean, that’s how I got where I was. I was in the right place at the right time. But there were a lot more opportunities to be in the right place at the right time and to get a job because of it. Today, there aren’t. The second question, the second thing I said was, in the form of a question, why do you want to be a journalist? And I asked them because of this. I mean, my entire adult life until I retired about 10 years ago was spent in television news with the exception of six years between two different television networks. And in those six years, since I live in Colorado, I became a talk show host, a radio talk show host on a 50,000-watt station in Denver. It was a station that carried Rush Limbaugh, had an entire conservative lineup of hosts with the exception of me. Point is, I was a talk show host. And therefore, for the only time in my life for those half-dozen or so years, I didn’t travel. I wasn’t on the road. And so I was able to teach once, and for a couple of semesters, twice a week at the University of Colorado, then the University of Colorado School of Journalism. And I began every class every semester, the first class by asking the students, taught a variety of courses, but asking the students, why do you want to be a journalist? And this was broadcast journalism I was teaching. And about half of them, I’m embarrassed or ashamed to say, answered by saying, I want to be on television. Not, I want to help people understand the news. Not, I want to be Woodward and Bernstein. They wanted to be celebrities. And television gives you a certain faux level of celebrity. And so that’s why I asked this woman, why do you want to be a journalist? And her answer was a noble answer. She said, because the world needs good journalists.

[00:21:40] Jeff Schechtman: Remember, it was Norman Mailard said, the only thing better than sex was being on television. James, go ahead.

[00:21:47] Greg Dobbs: Well, he was wrong.

[00:21:51] Jeff Schechtman: James.

[00:21:53] James Dorsey: I just want to clarify one point. I wasn’t saying that journalism was dying. What I was saying is that, and particularly focused on foreign correspondents and covering international news, that making a living out of that is becoming increasingly more difficult. And, referring to the risks that Greg rightly pointed out, it’s become riskier. The war in Bosnia, and this goes back in terms of the narrowing opportunities. This doesn’t go back in the last five or 10 years. This goes back to the 1990s. Going back, for example, to the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which at the time was the conflict with the highest rate of journalistic casualties. Largely because these were young people who had no preparation, who were looking for a shortcut and didn’t know how to manage a very complex and difficult situation. In fact, in 2000, we got together in Beirut. There was a group of about 12 journalists who drafted a code of conduct in terms of ensuring that a correspondent voluntarily is going into a situation of danger, in terms of getting them an SAS kind, special forces kind of training. Think of the military, where the military goes into battle, and when it comes back, when the soldiers come back, they’re given post-war psychological counseling. I went from one conflict to another. You landed back at your home base on day one, and on day two, you were gone again. And that was a code of conduct that actually was adhered to for several years, but then again broke down. The point here is that when it comes to international news and covering international news, the bar is much higher, the opportunities are less, the risks are higher, and if you’re at the same time someone who wants to make a living, has a family, that’s become much more difficult.

[00:24:20] Greg Dobbs: I don’t know that the risks are higher. I mean, the risks were higher back in our day in hostile places. And yeah, sure, when you cover your first war, you cover your first revolution, whatever it is, you go in unprepared. We all went in unprepared. The only way you learn, at least in my experience, is by doing it and being lucky enough to come out unscathed, and then you’re a little smarter the next time you go into a dangerous place. I mean, I’ve had two friends—you guys might have similar stories—but two friends killed, in one case right next to me. Joe Alex Morris of the Los Angeles Times was killed. We were standing together on a balcony on the second floor of a building in Tehran during one of the worst days of the fighting during the revolution there, and somebody decided to shoot at one of these two Westerners on the balcony, and he happened to catch the bullet instead of me. In Beirut, a friend, a good friend—he was a reporter for the Canadian television network named Clark Todd—was killed during that long, miserable civil war, not far from where I was. So the risks, those are pretty high risks, and that was all 30, 40, what, 50 years ago.

[00:25:36] Jeff Schechtman: Go ahead, James.

[00:25:37] James Dorsey: Sorry, we were both in the same street in Tehran leading up to that military base early in the morning, and I had dinner with Joe Alex the night before.

[00:25:47] William Dowell: If you end up covering wars, you find out that there are about 20 or 30 guys, wherever there’s a problem, they show up, the same guys, you know, and it evolves over it. But these people are not afraid of taking risks, and when I, you know, if I look back and say, well, what is probably the most important story I worked on was, I’d just gone to Cairo to work for a time covering the Middle East, the whole Arab world and Iran, and we got a call from Sheikh Fadlallah, who was the sort of chief philosopher behind Hezbollah. And he had just killed an American lieutenant colonel who was with the UN. They hung the body and then they distributed videotapes of it, everything. So Fadlallah said he wanted to talk to somebody. So everybody had agreed that no journalists were going to go back into Beirut. But he said, well, I can smuggle you in by a secret road that the Syrians have. And I said, well, I don’t mind doing that, but I don’t want to have my photographer do it. So we met outside of Damascus. And I said, well, now you’ve done this. You know, he just killed this American lieutenant colonel. Everybody hates you. What did you get out of it? And he said, well, he said, we feel that you don’t really, you Americans don’t really care about foreign affairs. All you want to do is take a six pack of beer, kick back and watch TV. But he says, what you do causes enormous pain to us. And he says, some people feel that you only understand that if you feel it yourself. So I said, well, that sounded reasonable to me. But I said, where do we go from here? And he said, well, there’s still hostages being held in Beirut. It was Terry Anderson and a bunch of others. And so he said that he and Rafsanjani, who was the president of Iran, had decided that there was no longer anything to gain by holding the hostages. So I said, well, okay, then why don’t you let them go? And he said, well, they had to go to the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, to get their permission to let the hostages go. And he said, we have to give them a reason. So I said, well, what reason? He said, well, you’ve got all this funding frozen in The Hague at the World Court. And so if you can release some of it, we can release the hostages and everybody will be happy. So I went back to Cairo and wrote up the interview. And I’m never perfect. But then I got a call from Larry Heinzerling, who was the vice president of AP. And he said, well, I understand you talked to Fadlallah. And I said, yeah, I think the White House should see the interview. And he said, well, that’s why I’m calling. And a journalist operating in the Middle East can be a bridge that the diplomats can’t do. Nobody else can do it. But the journalist is there. He’s a free bloke. And the people who want to do that, want to play that role, they don’t care whether you’re going to hire them or not. They’re going to do it anyway. And when I was in Paris, I was friends with Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who became the Iranian foreign minister in the new government. And so I was going out to the Chateau for Friday prayers with Khomeini and the whole gang around him. And so I saw a political officer at the American Embassy. And I said, I think you ought to talk to these guys, because what’s going on is pretty important. And he said, we can’t. If we talk to them, it’s sending a signal. So we had this privileged position, being able to slide in and slide out, talk to both sides, be able to put it all together. It really is very special. And the people who do that, they don’t care if you’re going to hire them or fire them. They’re going to do it anyway.

[00:29:59] Jeff Schechtman: Greg, you were mentioning the story before. Was that the most dangerous situation that you were ever in, the Iranian revolution?

[00:30:06] Greg Dobbs: Um, it was one of them. It’s hard to prioritize. Danger is danger. You know, when you’re in a nation where the leader, if you offend him, can make you disappear with a snap of a finger, that’s pretty dangerous. But yeah, and this is something James might remember, because the same day that he and I just discussed a few minutes ago, an order went out amongst the rebels who were trying to break, as I recall, into an armory to get weapons to fight against the Shah’s Imperial Guard. That was the whole point of the revolution. It wasn’t the point of the revolution, but that was the tactic of the revolution. And an order went out to destroy all cameras of Western media. Why? Because if the rebels were to lose, then, you know, cameras could be seized, video and still photos could be used in court marshals against them, and they could be hanged. And so at a certain point, a camera crew and I were on the street, and we knew about this order that had gone out amongst the rebel forces. And so we were furtively trying to shoot something, and somebody saw us and screamed to a group, and they started chasing us. I don’t know where they got them, but they were armed with machetes, machetes in their hands. They started chasing us. So the camera crew and I, and mind you, that was, what, 1979. Camera equipment was a little bigger than an iPhone in those days, and all three of us were burdened with heavy sort of awkward paraphernalia. We’re running down the street, and these guys are gaining on us because we’re trying to protect our equipment. How smart are we? Unfortunately, we had a driver a few blocks away who was just sitting there waiting for us. He was an Iranian taxi driver we had hired for the Bureau. Bill will remember all this. And he saw us, and he suddenly started his car. He raced toward us, swung into a U-turn as these guys were gaining on us, and he actually leaned over as he’s doing the U-turn and threw the doors open. We jumped in, and he gunned it and took off, by which time there were two of these guys with machetes on the trunk. They of course went flying as he sped up, and I don’t know what happened to them, nor do I care. But yeah, that was dangerous. But at the same time, I wouldn’t trade it. I’m going to tell you, if I may, tell you a quick story. This is on a different continent. I was with a cameraman in Colombia. We were doing a piece about the drug war in Colombia, which at the time, at least, the United States funded from the tanks down to the lip balm of the Colombian drug police. And we were on a drug raid in the deep jungle in the south part of the city. We’d gone in on one or two helicopters, and the helicopters spray the landing zone. They have determined that there’s a drug lab down there under the canopy in the jungle, and they spray it with machine guns, and then one of the helicopters land, and we pile out, and we go running, and then the other one keeps guard over us. Anyway, suddenly, while they were setting fuses to blow up the drug lab—this is the Colombian drug police—one of their people shouts in Spanish, they’re coming, they’re coming, and a gang of the drug people were coming to shoot at us. So we go running back toward the helicopters. Now, here’s the reason I tell you the whole long story. We get on the helicopters, and we take off. I can’t talk with the cameraman. We’re sitting on a bench in the outside end of the helicopter where the machine gunner normally sits, and when we finally land at their forward base, after all this adrenaline-pumping excitement, they shut down the helicopter, and I hear the first words from the cameraman who says to me, I wouldn’t miss this shit for anything. And I think every foreign correspondent has that feeling. If you didn’t feel that way, you wouldn’t do the job.

[00:34:14] Jeff Schechtman: James, what was your most dangerous situation?

[00:34:16] James Dorsey: Before I come to that, just coming back to the military base in Tehran, Greg will probably remember we all went out, I think, at five in the morning, just after curfew ended, to that street. And if you remember, there were these ambulances racing up and down the road. And I, at that moment, thought, gee, there must be a high level of casualties. The ambulances weren’t transporting casualties. They were transporting arms that were being brought out of the military base. I want to return to one point that Bill made about the mediating role of journalists. I think that’s particularly with regard to the United States, far more than it is with regard, for example, to Europeans. And the reason for that is that American diplomats, by and large, are much more restricted in their contacts with opposition forces, certainly with opposition forces that are not part of a parliament or whatever, so more irregular forces. That’s not to say that journalists don’t, as a matter of principle, often play a mediating role. But the role is, in some ways, much bigger for American journalists than it is for others. I’ve covered conflict across the globe. Probably the most dangerous situation, or the situation that strikes me most in that sense, was in Haiti, the first post-doc elections after the fall of the son of the dictator.

[00:35:58] Greg Dobbs: Duvalier.

[00:35:59] James Dorsey: Yes, exactly. In which, you know, we were literally chased in a car, almost, what do you imagine, Chicago-style in a Hollywood movie, guys hanging out of the window with machine guns firing at you. And then we ended up in a church where a Spanish TV correspondent was killed. I escaped from the church over a back wall and was then rescued in an armored car, brought back to a hotel in the center of Port-au-Prince. And interestingly enough, that’s where you see how mass psychology works, in a sense. We were sitting in this glass windows from ceiling to floor restaurant, and someone comes running towards the restaurant and everybody panics, hits the floor, the buffet tables are overthrown, people jump through windows. I had several fractures as a result of that and was medically evacuated.

[00:37:07] Greg Dobbs: May I? I want to elaborate on what you said about the diplomats, because I think you described their job and how they have to go about it pretty darn well. I always described it a little more simply and a little more colloquially. I mean, we had, and this is a little braggadocio, but we had our boots on the ground. There’s no other way to describe it when we went into these places. We didn’t have the protection of government. We didn’t have the immunity of a diplomat, to the degree that they have it. We had our boots on the ground. I, in too many places, saw diplomats land, if I was covering their mission in a hostile country, I’d see them land and their shoes, their leather shoes, which everybody wore in those days, the days before Skechers, you know, were shined to a fine polish. When they left, the shoes still had no dust on them. And that’s my metaphor for the difference between what diplomats see representing the United States of America when they go into a country where we’re not close friends and what we would see, because our boots got—

[00:38:17] William Dowell: Yeah, I’d add that I was doing a cover on Africa at the time, I mean, working on it, and I was in Bamako and Ali, and one of the political officers who was there said, well, you know, when a journalist comes in here, they know in one day what it takes us a year to find out. I think that was pretty accurate, also because everybody wants to give you the information. You know, they finally want somebody to pay attention.

[00:38:48] Jeff Schechtman: James, can I just add one thing? I mean, I think Bill is absolutely right. We’re a profession where we land in a country in the morning that we couldn’t find on the map, and by evening, we’re the world’s experts. But I think that Greg touched on something very important that harks back to the issue of risk, which is, you know, Greg said we wear boots on the ground immediately. But we also, if you go back to the 1970s and 1980s, journalists basically had a sense that they had a sense of immunity, that there was a degree of immunity. They were the impartial observers.

[00:39:28] William Dowell: It is, because there was the fallout from Colonialism. In other words, there was a hesitation in shooting white people. That hesitation is now gone.

[00:39:36] Jeff Schechtman: Well, but in general, I’m talking about the self-perception that journalists had. You had this sense of immunity, and yes, you could have tough luck. I mean, the guy who fires an RPG is lucky if he hits you, and you’re lucky if you don’t get hit. But the point of it is that that sense of immunity has vanished, and targeting journalists has become much more common. And in that sense, that’s part of what raises the risk that we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation.

[00:40:08] William Dowell: Well, Tariq Aziz, who was, you know, Saddam’s prime minister, he said, we’ll have to hang a few tourists to get over the rejection, too. You know, in other words, there was a hesitancy of, you know, taking on foreign white people from major countries, and that has certainly gone now. And now you’re a soft target. So it’s a totally different situation.

[00:40:35] Greg Dobbs: But that, to a degree, Bill, takes us back to what I mentioned a little earlier in our conversation, how you calculate the risk. Because what you also have to do in countries like that is calculate the risk of breaking the rules, which you often had to do. We had to break the rules if we wanted to cover the story at all. So how far do you, how many rules do you break without crossing the line?

[00:40:58] William Dowell: It’s luck. And I think that there were two incidents in Paris when I was almost killed. And one was, there was a fight between the hardline PLO and the softline PLO. And the softline PLO ambassador of Paris was Ezzedine Kalak. And so I went around to see him because a French policeman had been shot and killed. And so I, so they said, well, Kalak isn’t here. Come back tomorrow at 10 o’clock in the morning and you can have an interview with him. So the next morning I was at the funeral where the police officer was shot. And it was so emotional. I said, well, do I stay at the funeral or do I go see Kalak? And I said, I think I’ll stick with the funeral. And at precisely 10 o’clock, somebody burst into Kalak’s office, set off a grenade and killed him. So that was a near miss. And then a producer from ABC came over to Paris and everything. And I said, well, we’ve got to go see Goldenberg. That’s a great Jewish delicatessen in Le Marais. And New York kept calling and saying, well, can you do this one extra story and everything? And so finally it, you know, it’s impossible. You couldn’t have lunch there. At exactly lunchtime, one of Abu Nidal’s groups went in and machine gunned the whole restaurant. So there, a lot of this is luck. And I think people, you know, especially in Beirut, people did a lot of mind games. They said, okay, if I have a rabbit’s foot or something like that, I’m not going to get shot. It’s bull. You know, it’s just roulette whether you make it or not.

[00:42:48] Greg Dobbs: Well, in a way that comes back to what I said to the young aspiring female journalist when she said, how do I do it? And I said, you got to be in the right place at the right time. The job of journalism in places like that, you just don’t want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[00:43:06] William Dowell: The key to being a foreign correspondent is that history moves in a wave and you want to feel the wave and be ahead of it. And so when I was starting off, I began feeling that when I arrived in the country, the country was about to be overthrown. And I began feeling like the angel of death because I knew what was going to happen, but none of the people in the country did. But there’s another thing that I learned in Vietnam in the army was that, you know, your consciousness occupies about 25% of your brain and the rest is intuition. You’re taking in all of this information and you may not consciously understand it, but you can feel it and go with your feelings. You know, don’t get on that helicopter, don’t get on.

[00:44:04] Jeff Schechtman: We’ve talked a lot about your individual histories. I want to take a 30,000 foot view based on all that experience, based on that history that you’ve all had, the experiences that you’ve all had, and how that shapes the way you see the world today. James?

[00:44:21] James Dorsey: On the one hand, much more cynically. On the other hand, I think in some ways also much more optimistic. So I still think, contrary to many people, that there is a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite where we’re going at the moment. You know, I think that’s fundamentally how it’s shaped me.

[00:44:47] Jeff Schechtman: What drives that optimism? The cynicism, I understand. What drives the optimism?

[00:44:52] James Dorsey: Talking to people and, you know, and talking to people over long periods of time, in which you see the evolution of their thinking. And, you know, and I say that despite the fact that Israel has radicalized. People who you would have looked at as liberals or moderates today are radicals and use language that would be beyond the pale. And yet, at the bottom line, they too actually want a resolution. The extremists are still on the margins of those societies, even though extremism has become mainstream.

[00:45:37] Greg Dobbs: I couldn’t disagree more. And at the same time, I completely agree. How do you like that for having it both ways?

[00:45:43] Jeff Schechtman: All right, explain that, Greg.

[00:45:45] Greg Dobbs: The disagreement comes from all my time in the Middle East. And again, that’s where I spent the plurality of my years while based overseas. And then even when I returned to the States and lived here, I kept going back. And I’ll use this little microcosm. Many, many years, everything was many, many years ago. I did a story for Nightline on ABC. And the story was very basic. The aim was very basic, to explain why the two sides, and I put this in quote marks, hated each other. And it was for Nightline. So those are long pieces. And I didn’t have much time to get it all put together. So I chose a cheap journalistic trick called Man on the Street Interviews to fill a little portion of the Nightline piece. And with a camera crew went out on the street in Jerusalem, might have been in Tel Aviv, I think it was in Jerusalem, and went up to young Israelis and said, What do you have against the Palestinians? And their answers, although in different words from different people, all came to the same thing. What I have against them is that back in 1948, when Israel was formed, they fled rather than live beside us. Then we went down to Ramallah. So we must have been in Jerusalem, because Ramallah in those days, it’s only about 10 minutes away, and you didn’t take a long time to get through, as it does now. We went to the capital of the West Bank, Ramallah. And I did the same thing with Palestinians and said, What do you have against the Israelis? Well, in 1948, when Israel was created, they pushed us from our home, they drove us away. What I haven’t told you yet, well, I guess I did say they were young people. I made a point of only asking people who were clearly too young to have even been alive in 1948. So I was doing this maybe around 1978, 79. And what that told me was that they weren’t there, but their parents had told them something. Well, I kept going back. And every once in a while, I would ask people the same question year after year after year. And the response was the same. So they were telling me what their fathers had told them. And their fathers were telling them what their fathers had told them. Well, now we’re a couple of generations even farther down the road. And if anything, that kind of animosity toward the other side is only worse. So no, I don’t agree that it will get better, certainly not in our lifetime, maybe not in our grandchildren’s. But the agreeing part is another trouble spot, Northern Ireland. And I covered the Troubles, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And they were basically between Catholics and Protestants, although it wasn’t really a religious war, it was an economic war that the Protestants held all the power and the jobs, and the Catholics had to beg for everything, which doesn’t justify their terrorism in Northern Ireland. But nevertheless, today, although there are still radicals, they work together, they govern together, and they live to some degree together, whereas there used to be walls between the Catholic and Protestant communities. So I used to think the same thing in Northern Ireland about the Catholics and the Protestants that I thought about the Palestinians and the Jews, they will never make peace. And yet in Northern Ireland, they have. That’s my 30,000 foot view.

[00:48:58] James Dorsey: Can I just respond to that?

[00:49:01] Jeff Schechtman: Yes, sure, James. Go ahead.

[00:49:02] James Dorsey: Yeah. I mean, first of all, the Middle East is a region, as all of us know, where a thousand years ago was yesterday. That’s the way it works.

[00:49:12] Greg Dobbs: I have a long view of history.

[00:49:13] James Dorsey: I think the fallacy in your argument is twofold. One, the limitations that we all know that the man in the street interviewed two minutes, and it’s done, you get a response. I was talking about having long, in-depth conversations over time. The other thing, one of the fundamental issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that both sides want the other to adopt, to recognize their narrative. In a lot of ways, people like Moshe Dayan and the ideological father of the current Israeli government, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, were the most honest of the Jewish national movement, because what they said was they have a legitimate narrative. From their perspective, they’re absolutely right. The hardline response to that was, given that there’s only room for one of us in this land, and it’s going to be us. The fallacy is that you cannot have those two narratives living side by side. You can. Keep in mind that Israel’s demand, not that it be recognized, but that its right to exist be recognized, which is not a judicial or diplomatic concept, is basically saying, you have to accept my narrative. As long as you don’t accept that conflicting narratives can exist side by side, you’re going to have a conflict.

[00:51:00] Greg Dobbs: You say you’re optimistic, but you’ve just given us more reason to be pessimistic.

[00:51:06] James Dorsey: No, on the contrary. What I said is, you don’t need to impose a narrative. You can accept that their narrative contradicts your narrative.

[00:51:18] Greg Dobbs: Well, I think that’s a 30,000-foot view, but when you get your boots on the ground, it doesn’t work that way. I mean, you talked about having long, substantive conversations. I, of course, had those too. I was just giving you a sort of ground-based example, but one more microcosm from long, substantive conversations. We had a stringer / fixer in the West Bank with whom I always worked whenever I went there. His name is Luai Kaddoumi. He and I are still in touch. He was a member, amongst other things, of a Palestinian-Israeli or Palestinian-Jewish conference where they were looking to resolve those conflicting narratives. He wanted nothing more than not only peace in his region, but relationships with his Jewish neighbors. That was then. Here’s now. He would like to kill every last one of them. This is not just since Gaza, but really since some of what he perceives as the oppressive Israeli behavior worsened in the last 15 or 20 years.

[00:52:23] James Dorsey: You’re going to hear those voices on both sides.

[00:52:26] Greg Dobbs: Well, there are enough of them.

[00:52:28] James Dorsey: They’re mirror images of each other, basically.

[00:52:31] Greg Dobbs: Yeah, that’s true.

[00:52:33] James Dorsey: Basically. When the chips are down, I mean, at the end of the day, the real question is, are you willing to compromise? On what terms are you willing to compromise? Actually, I think there’s more willingness for that right now on the Palestinian side than there is on the Israeli side. That will change. But if you took a snapshot today, I think that’s what you would see.

[00:53:03] Jeff Schechtman: Bill, come back to the broader question. In how all of your experiences, all the places you’ve covered, all the dangers, the positive part of it, how all of that has shaped your view of the world today?

[00:53:16] William Dowell: Well, I’m pretty optimistic. I think you need to take a 2,000-year time frame. The human race has moved forward to an amazing degree. And there are setbacks. I had a friend who was a Chinese professor. She said, in China, nothing moves in a straight line. It’s always a zigzag. I think human development is that way. But if we were going to forget how to read, we would have done it a long time ago. We were going to forget how to think. We would have done it a long time ago. I think a really good observation came from Winston Churchill when he said, Americans always do the right thing after they’ve tried absolutely everything else. Well, trying everything else is a little depressing. But eventually, people come around and do the right thing.

[00:54:14] Jeff Schechtman: All of you, what do you still want to do? What would you still like to cover? What do you still want to do in the time that you continue working? Greg, start with you.

[00:54:26] Greg Dobbs: Well, what I’d still like to do is what I used to do because I miss the action. I miss the front row seat to history. I missethe contact with some of the newsmakers. All of us can brag that we’ve interviewed world leaders, good ones and bad ones. We’ve interviewed terrorists. We’ve interviewed thinkers. Somebody asked me at this journalistic forum not long ago, what was the most exciting interview you ever did? And I didn’t even have to think twice. It was with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Interviewed him once in South Africa during apartheid and then once in South Africa after the end of apartheid. And he just filled the room with wisdom and laughter and kindness and, in fact, optimism. So I miss that. On the other hand, I’m coming up on 79 years old, and I know that physically I couldn’t do it anymore. What a lot of people don’t know, they can go online and read the news or turn on the TV, those few who still do, and watch the news, listen to the radio. They don’t have to think about what it took to get to the point of reporting the story. Physically, it’s terribly taxing. Just traveling and going across time zones and landing in dangerous places and having to bone up, as James said, the day after we get there, we have to be an expert in places we couldn’t have found on the map the day before. I’m just not capable of doing it. But what I’ve done, and I know that we’ve all done it, is moved into the opinion side of the business, where I at least try to employ my journalistic principles in writing my opinions about world events and right now national events and perfectly happy doing it because it gives people food for thought. If it’s coming from somebody who just somehow wormed their way into the opinion business without any background in the events they’re writing about, to me at least, it doesn’t mean much. But people have told me, and I’m proud to say, they said, you know, you’re a journalist. I know you’re still dealing in facts and then collating those facts, putting them into your opinion pieces on Substack, on the platform Substack. And so I’m perfectly happy doing that. It’s the best way to use whatever background I have at this age.

[00:56:44] Jeff Schechtman: Bill?

[00:56:45] William Dowell: Yeah, well, I think at WhoWhatWhy, as a supposed international editor, I’ve got about a half a dozen stringers around the world who I’m working with to try to develop them into being journalists. But apart from that, my real interest is book publishing, and I’m helping two authors actually complete their books and lay them out. And to me, a book is like a landmine, you know, it just lays there, nobody notices it, and then suddenly somebody picks it up and it explodes in their mind. And I think that still is the most interesting, the most valuable thing we could do. So I think we’re at the end of the arc of our lives. We can see what worked, what didn’t work, and, you know, we have a little more judgment that puts things into context.

[00:56:44] Jeff Schechtman: James?

[00:57:44] Greg Dobbs: I would prefer it if you said we’re at the far end of the arc rather than we’re at the end. Oh my god.

[00:57:51] William Dowell: The end goes on for quite a while.

[00:57:53] Greg Dobbs: Okay.

[00:56:54] Jeff Schechtman: That’s the good news. James?

[00:56:56] James Dorsey: I’m essentially doing what I want to do, which is reporting, writing my column. I’ve got a little bit of a different perspective. I’m 73 going on 18. With one caveat, I’ve become more cautious. I wouldn’t take the kind of risks I took before, or not at least to that degree. There’s a very famous Dutch conductor, André Rieu, who is the man who basically popularized classical music. He gives his concerts not in a concert hall, but in a football stadium, and the football stadium is packed. He turned 70 a couple of years ago, and he was asked, well, what are you going to do now? And his answer was, what do you mean? I’m halfway. I’m going to live to 140. That’s my perspective.

[00:58:54] William Dowell: Well, the new 80 is 100.

[00:58:57] Jeff Schechtman: 100 is the new 80, right. Finally, how do we get Americans in particular to care more about what’s happening in the world? Sure, there’s a lot going on domestically right now, but there is constantly this turning away, and more so lately, from what’s happening in the rest of the world. So I want to finish by talking about that. Greg, start with you.

[00:59:24] Greg Dobbs: I don’t think we’ve got any magic wand. I don’t think we can, the way you put it, get them to show more interest, get them to be more engaged. But here’s how I think about it. I don’t happen to be a big fan. It’s an understatement. I hate Donald Trump. I hate everything he’s doing to the country. I know it’s not the biggest issue. It wasn’t in the ‘24 campaign, but the way he’s taking a hatchet to democracy is, it’s not permanent, but it’s going to last for generations, because once this wannabe authoritarian disappears, there are others already rising in his shadow. And people say to me, you keep writing about it. You keep writing about it. Enough is enough. And I say to them, it’s no different than the way Crest became the leading toothpaste in America. They didn’t put one ad on television and one ad in Time magazine and say, okay, everybody’s learned about Crest. They kept bombarding us with advertisement after advertisement, commercial after commercial, until finally a lot of us said, I got to try this new toothpaste. And suddenly they overtook Colgate. It’s the same way. I think we have to keep pounding away. And those who bother to pay attention at all to the kinds of commentaries people like us produce, eventually we’ll get the point if they don’t get it on day one. I think that’s, from my point of view, that’s our best hope.

[01:00:51] Jeff Schechtman: James?

[01:00:52] James Dorsey: Peter Beinart, who is one of the harshest critics, Jewish critics of Israel, did an interview earlier this week with a man called Khalil Sayegh, who is a Palestinian. He’s American Palestinian. He’s a Palestinian Christian who spends a lot of time speaking to Christian nationalists, evangelical, and communities of that kind. And he strikes a chord with them. And he strikes a chord with them because what he doesn’t do, is beat them over the head and say, you’re doing this, you’re doing that. What he does is he tells his own story. His father was killed in Gaza. His sister was killed in Gaza. His friends were killed in Gaza. And he talks about this in a very personal way without being confrontational. And as a result of that, he gets a lot of response, both publicly in those meetings, as well as in terms of people coming up to him after the meeting and saying, you know, you really helped me because I’ve been struggling with some of this stuff. So, that’s one way of doing it.

[01:02:11] Jeff Schechtman: By not beating them over the head.

[01:02:14] James Dorsey: By engaging, and engaging constructively, rather than confrontationally.

[01:02:20] Jeff Schechtman: And to the broader question of how to get people more concerned, more interested in what happens outside of America.

[01:02:29] James Dorsey: I don’t know that that is, I mean, it’s particularly prevalent in the United States, but it’s not uniquely U.S. Most populations aren’t particularly interested in foreign affairs, certainly not in the Far From My Bed show. Most people are interested in foreign affairs to the degree that it affects them. When I was at the Dutch newspaper many years ago, the assumption was that 5% of the readership was interested in foreign news. So, it’s not all that unique to the United States. It has a greater impact in the United States because of U.S. influence globally.

[01:03:07] Greg Dobbs: But of course, James, because of U.S. influence globally, particularly in the Trump administration, it affects them almost as much as it affects us. I mean, my God, the tariffs and the changing alliances between the United States and its one-time friends and allies. I mean, if the citizens of other nations have ever been more interested in foreign affairs in the shape of American affairs, then now I’m surprised.

[01:03:36] James Dorsey: I would agree with that. I would agree with that. I mean, this is an administration which obviously is taking a radically different course. It’s an abrupt rupture, if you wish. And that affects a lot more people than foreign affairs may have affected in the past.

[01:03:54] Jeff Schechtman: Bill, you get the last word on how we get people to focus on this.

[01:04:00] William Dowell: What Donald Trump and the, you know, the tobacco crowd are trying to do is radically change American values. For 250 years, the country has believed in government of the people, by the people, for the people, and e pluribus unum, from many, one, and in equality. And Trump obviously not only doesn’t believe that, he’s actively attacking that. But I would say that Machiavelli said that when a government goes through a crisis, it forces it to confirm its values, that crisis can turn out to be a valuable thing. So we don’t know which way the U.S. is going to go now. And the question for me is, is Trump a virus or is he a cancer? And a virus serves the purpose of, you know, getting the antibodies going and getting people to react correctly. The cancer just kills. And it’s possible that Trump could kill the country, but we don’t know. And that’s what makes life interesting.

[01:05:04] Jeff Schechtman: William Dowell, Greg Dobbs, James Dorsey, I thank the three of you so much for doing this today.

[01:05:10] [Various]: It was a pleasure to be with you, Jeff.

[01:05:12] Greg Dobbs: This is Greg. I feel, I have felt a little out of my element here because James and Bill have been citing thinkers and scholars and writers, and I cite Crest toothpaste as my favorite.

[01:05:27] William Dowell: So do most of the thinkers and scholars.

[01:05:30] Jeff Schechtman: Probably.

[01:05:31] Greg Dobbs: Absolutely.

[01:05:32] William Dowell: That’s what it’s all about.

[01:05:33] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you so much, guys.

[01:05:35] James Dorsey: What a pleasure. Thank you.

[01:05:37] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.