CNN Chief Anchor Bernard Shaw is Accidental War Correspondent During a Night in Bagdad
Yet never became a network anchor like NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s Peter Jennings and CBS’ Dan Rather
USA TODAY Weekend, March 1, 1991: In a restaurant bar near the U.S. Capitol, a morose Bernard Shaw scowls into his vodka tonic. “You cannot be normal and be an anchor,” he says in a tight monotone. “I know I’m not normal. Anybody who would submit to the extreme pressures daily cannot be normal.”
It’s late in the evening, and Cable News Network’s chief anchor is going through with a promised interview, even though he’d rather go home to his wife, children and the salmon fillet he’ll broil for himself long after the family’s dinner hour. His work on TV is “one hell of a challenge, to have the mental energy and physical energy to do that day in and day out.”
And that’s how Shaw was feeling months before his bombs-bursting-in-air vigil in Baghdad. While waiting for an interview with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the anchor inadvertently became a war correspondent. His live broadcast, with CNN reporters Peter Arnett and John Holliman, gripped at least 10.8 million U.S. households (up from the usual 840,000 prime-time households). That day, the reporters got almost as much media coverage as the war. And later, Shaw was deluged by fan mail, requests to speak at university commencements, even offers for TV movies.
A war correspondent is the last thing Shaw wants to be. His wife, Linda, their daughter, Anil, 15, and son, Amar, 14, are “eminently more important” and “they are clearly still feeling the effect of this experience,” he said, 10 days after returning from Baghdad. His family knew he was alive only by hearing his voice — over the gunfire — on TV.
Shaw, who says he would not return to Baghdad if CNN asked him, feels he came home a changed man. Changed, he says, in ways he is still not sure of. “I stared death in the face, and death blinked. I don’t expect to get too many more chances like that.”
Typical Shaw. Through three interviews and several phone conversations last year and this, he ruminated, sometimes gloomily, about his steep expectations for himself.Shaw’s intensity sometimes amuses friends. “I tell him, ‘Lighten up, Bernie,’” laughs Peter Jennings, his ABC counterpart. A lot of people at one time or another have said that to Shaw-including President George W. Bush.
It’s just not in his nature. An angst-filled Shaw often is awake at 3 or 4 in the morning musing about life and death. “I have this tremendous opportunity with my wife and my son and daughter. I have this tremendous opportunity with my profession, journalism. I have this tremendous opportunity with the problems of our country and our world,” he says, with some anguish. “What am I doing about it? What am I doing to help bring about clarity and understanding? It bothers me when I don’t squeeze life as tightly as possible.”
The Shaws live in Takoma Park, Md., a Washington suburb, in a 100 year-old stucco house they’ve been remodeling for a decade. “We love it and all its problems,” laughs Shaw. His favorite neighborhood spot is a jazz club where he sometimes stops on the way home from work and where, on the war’s first night, other regulars cheered their buddy while watching him on the bar’s TV.
Despite his solemn demeanor, Shaw, 50, can be warm and charming. He smiles as he says, “I love sending roses.” — to friends, to his wife, once even to Pat Nixon after attending a small dinner party at the Nixons’ house. Richard Nixon sent a hand-written thank-you note for his wife’s flowers.
The amiable part of Shaw’s personality emerged at lunch at a restaurant close to the CNN Washington bureau, near the Capitol. Relaxed and reflective, he enjoyed a leisurely meal instead of one gulped at his desk, his usual routine on a workday.
If Shaw’s on-air personality is sometimes described as humorless, even severe, it may be because he doesn’t see anything particularly cheerful about the news. “I’m dealing with serious matters. Television is a cool image. I am not an excitable or an exciting person.”
Part of his restraint stems from his acute awareness that he is a black role model, and he wants to set a straight-arrow example. “The responsibility is so weighty it keeps me up at night.”
One would think Shaw succeeded in blurring the color line long ago. “It doesn’t occur to me that Bernie is black,” Jennings comments, an observation repeated by others interviewed for this story.
But a friend of Shaw’s, independent TV producer Kenneth Walker, who also is a black man, says race is ignored only as long as there’s no trouble. If Shaw “makes one mistake, he becomes a black person with an attitude problem. God knows, if he let the network go black for 6 minutes” (as did a peeved Dan Rather, who once let CBS transmissions stop after a sports event ate into his air time) “he’d be outta there.”
Shaw is somewhat aloof about the issue and more concerned about measuring up to his own expectations. “I refuse to let my nation’s fixation with race and color deter me from fulfilling myself.” Still, he’s pleased about his contribution in a “pivotal industry,” “I have a sense of pride no different from that of boxer Joe Louis when he was in the ring, or Paul Robeson acting or Ralph Bunche practicing diplomacy. I am standing on the shoulders of some excellent giants: Bunche, Robeson, Louis, Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow. And their colors interest me not.”
He also is standing on the shoulders of his father, Edgar, a house painter, “a voracious newspaper reader and a man of few words.” And like his mother, Camilla, a strong parent. “Dad was stricter than my drill instructor in the Marine Corps.” He sums up his father’s influence on his life in two word — — discipline and teamwork.
Shaw grew up the youngest of four children on Chicago’s South Side. One brother became a chef, the other, a cabdriver, his sister, a home maker. Three of Shaw’s best friends date back to elementary school. One of them, Eugene Woodard, who is now president of Hudson Life Reassurance in Connecticut, says the boys all had nicknames. Woodard’s was Beans, and “we called Bernie ‘Rhino,’ because when we teased him during recess, he’d put his head down and charge into us.”
The nickname didn’t stick. But Shaw’s charge-ahead nature didn’t escape Thelma Ford, his English and public-speaking teacher at Dunbar High School. Now 83, she reluctantly reveals she once had to “send for” Shaw’s mother. “Bernard talked too much in class,” she explains. After high school, he lacked money to go straight to college, so he spent 4 years in the Marines before entering the University of Illinois.
In college, Shaw picked the brain of John Mackin, an English literature professor and authority on classical rhetoric. He found Shaw fascinated with “Plato’s picture of Socrates confronting society.” Shaw’s career profile is very much like those of Jennings, Rather and NBC’s Tom Brokaw. Shaw put in years at local radio and TV stations in the Chicago area before being transferred by Westinghouse’s Group as a Washington correspondent.
In 1971, Walter Cronkite brought Shaw to the attention of Richard Salant, then president of CBS News. Cronkite says he used no influence on Shaw’s behalf — “I just opened the door.” As a CBS Washington correspondent, Shaw sometimes covered the White House, in the same booth as Rather and opposite Brokaw’s.
By 1977, Shaw had moved on to ABC, where, fluent in Spanish, he covered Latin America and later became senior Capitol Hill correspondent. He went to the newly created CNN in 1980 for one reason: “I always wanted to be an anchor.” He says he never would have achieved that dream at any other network. Shaw has been on a journalistic par with Rather, Jennings and Brokaw for a long time, even though he lacks their glamour, their entourages and their million-dollar-plus salaries.
He reportedly doubled his salary, to $500,000, in his last go-around with parsimonious CNN, although he still doesn’t have simple perks like a secretary or a clerk. In an office so cluttered he uses the floor to stack the overflow, he keeps “everything important” in a pile on the middle of his desk. “If I really need something, I know it’s in there someplace.”
Perhaps Shaw’s most humbling experience so far working for CNN was in the fall of 1989 when the network launched a new prime-time weeknight hour, The World Today. He says he was led to believe he’d be sole anchor. It came as a shock to him — “my opinion was not asked or sought” — when CNN hired Catherine Crier, a stunning blond judge from Texas, to be his co-anchor. That Crier was not a journalist devastated Shaw even more. The news wounded his pride, but Shaw kept his cool and his counsel and today says he is on the best of terms with Crier.
Shaw, one of 27 co-anchors at CNN, had every reason to expect to be given his own news hour. He’d brought prestige to the network and just that year he’d been showered with awards for his 30 hours of informed, calm anchoring of the student uprising in Beijing. Brokaw, watching the continuous CNN satellite feeds from China, observed his friend ignoring his own needs and “keeping the troops rallied” during commercial breaks.
Cronkite, Shaw’s idol and mentor, described him in words often used to describe himself. “He sounds authoritative and believable.”Shaw is often compared to Cronkite. “He has the same sense of calmness and confidence; he conveys the same respect for his audience,” says Abe Rosenthal, New York Times columnist and the paper’s former editor.
CNN vice president Ed Turner calls Shaw “today’s Walter Cronkite. Bernie is so unflappable; he’s never flustered. He doesn’t show anger or the frustration or all the grief that goes with it.” Clearly, CNN has gotten the message: Shaw is a hot property. For the first time, CNN gave an anchor his own show, Gulf Talk, a half-hour show in which Shaw and guests discuss the progress of the war.
As of this printing, Shaw also appears on a War in the Gulf news hour, with co-anchor Crier. The later times are significant, Shaw says, because the live broadcasts catch more viewers nationwide, especially in the West. Viewers seem to be responding. Shaw is getting “mega-mail” now, from people like Tina Stearns of Chicago, who preferred watching №1 rated Jennings until that night in Baghdad. “Peter has officially moved to the back seat in my heart,” she wrote Shaw recently, “replaced by you!”
Shaw’s contract expires Inauguration Day 1993. What will be available to him then is anybody’s guess. “There’s nothing ahead of Bernie but green lights and the open road,” Rather says. “He could have anything he wants at the networks. He loves what he is doing. He’s comfortable at it and has a great sense of accomplishment. I think if and when he chooses to move, he can write his own ticket, name his own price.”
But in a decade with CNN, Shaw hasn’t had a nibble from the networks.”We’ve talked about it,” Brokaw revealed last year, but there isn’t a comparable job for him here. And he has an awfully good job where he is.”
Some suggest Shaw easily could replace Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline if the spot opens. Before Baghdad, ABC News president Roone Arledge hedged. “I’d put him on anything. But it is hard to find a place for Bernie that would be more fun than what he is doing now.”
Bernie Shaw, a very cool customer, says flatly, “I’m not going anywhere. “I tell Bernie it’s too bad we didn’t know each other in high school, we’d have been good friends,” says NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who covered the White House with Shaw. “He takes his work seriously, his life and his self less so.
“He’s been a comfortable friend for more than a decade,” says Dan Rather, who competed with Shaw at CBS’ Washington bureau during the 1970s. “He is a comfortable human being” and “an excellent storyteller.” “He is steady in a crisis,” says Peter Jennings, who covered the Iran hostage crisis with Shaw at ABC. “It was a mistake for us to let him go.”
Of the Big Three anchors. Bernard Shaw says: “I talk to them all the time, socially, professionally. We always peel off into some corner when we’re together on a story. I love duking it out with Tom and Dan and Peter.”
Don Kirk, who covers the Gulf War for USA TODAY, recounts his brushes with Bernard Shaw in the momentous first hours of the war. At 4 a.m. Jan. 17, Baghdad time, Bernie Shaw appears relaxed and at ease, the picture of cool efficiency, when encountered in the predawn observing and reporting on the war from one of the CNN rooms on the ninth floor of Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel. He has been on the air since 2:35 a.m., when Iraqi gunners on nearby rooftops began firing anti-aircraft artillery as U.S. missiles and bombers approached the capital. When the live broadcast ends at 4:30 a.m. or so, Shaw breaks for a beer. No sign of fatigue; he is high from having a ringside view of war.
Overnight, Jan. 17–18, Shaw sleeps face down on the floor of the hotel bomb shelter. The CNN team, other reporters and the families of hotel staff had rushed in after a report that allied weapons were being aimed at the hotel. The report turns out to be false. Shaw is as cool off-air as he is on-air chatting with an Iraqi Information Ministry official.
Jan. 18. The Iraqi official makes a point of bidding a downright fond farewell to Shaw, who is waiting on the hotel’s front steps to hop in a car for the 600-mile ride to relative safety in Jordan. CNN reporter Peter Arnett, staying in Baghdad, tells Shaw the war’s first night was “the most thrilling experience of my career.”
“Yes,” Shaw agrees, in a classic understatement. “It certainly was.”
Sizing Up Shaw
When the bombs began falling in Baghdad, Bernard Shaw’s star rose. Wha’s behind the CNN anchor’s poker face? Worry about whether he’s making the most of his opportunities.
By Judy Flander
Photographed by Brian Smale
