Fellow Travelers
By Jason Tanz ’05I’m not quite sure when I came to the realization that Charles Eisendrath was trying to kill me. It could have occurred to me when I heard my spine crackle during the group trip to a Turkish bath, as the sausage-fingered “masseuse” (I use the term loosely) tilted my head forward until my chin touched the top of my Adam’s apple. Or perhaps my moment of clarity came as I wrote the following words in my Argentina journal: “The steak buffet we had for lunch was great, but the immense steak dinner we had four hours later was even better.”
Most likely, though, there was no single epiphany, just the accumulation of sleep-deprived nights and action-packed days that skirted the fine line between aggressive scheduling and sheer sadomasochism. Even for a group of Knight-Wallace Fellows that has seen its share of adventure—and members of this year’s class have dodged bullets in Iraq, covered Yasser Arafat’s funeral, and touched down in Antarctica—traveling internationally with Eisendrath and company presents a unique set of challenges.
What sets the Knight-Wallace trips apart? Let me put it this way: If you’ve taken an overnight flight that dumps you in the Buenos Aires airport bleary and discombobulated; and if you then arrive at your hotel with just enough time to change clothes in the lobby and zip off to visit the German ambassador; and if, while staggering around the backyard of the embassy, admiring the bougainvilleas and concentrating on retaining consciousness, you’re handed a glass of champagne that sends your brain spinning in its casing and whirling out of the top of your skull; and if, at that very moment, a woman approaches you and says “Hi, I’m Jill Abramson, managing editor of The New York Times. I’m looking forward to traveling with you,” and looks at you as you try futilely to come up with some incisive and witty comment … if all of these things happen to you, chances are good that you’re traveling with the Knight-Wallace Fellows.
That was just the first day of our first trip, and the pace never slowed. We’d wake up each morning with just enough time to choke down a quick hotel breakfast before piling into our bus for back-to-back-to-back-to-back seminars with some of the most important and interesting figures our host cities had to offer. (Fortunately, many of them served coffee.) We’ve spoken with Turkey’s popular foreign minister about his rumored forthcoming bid for prime minister; the mayor of Buenos Aires about how to maintain his people’s faith in government despite a history of repression and violence; a former Turkish ambassador about the likelihood of his country’s accession to the European Union; and a member of Argentina’s Supreme Court. It’s the kind of pace that might not impress paterfamilias Mike Wallace, but for those of us without an extensive background in international reporting, it provided valuable trial-by-fire experience. Even those rare moments of designated “down time” were filled with activity: riding horseback across the pampas for a few hours, say, or navigating a rowdy soccer game at Istanbul’s Fenerbahce stadium.
Still, as the cliché goes, that which does not kill us yadda yadda yadda, and there is nothing like a shared odyssey to strengthen the bonds that link a band of already close Fellows (and spouses). Spending 18 hours a day with the same two dozen people did not send us screaming from one another as you or, more accurately, I might expect. If anything, we returned from these trips with a greater appreciation of one another’s quirks and personalities, our incisive questions and inquisitive minds. And did I mention the Turkish bath? They don’t wear suits in there, you know.
Furthermore, the opportunity to explore all of these issues with local journalists provided a much-needed dash of perspective to the official party line. On our first day in Buenos Aires, a guide took us for a tour of Recoleta cemetery, a sprawling necropolis where so many of Argentina’s aristocrats are buried that their caskets are piled atop one another. Even as our guide was pointing out the remarkable detailing of the mausoleums, and explaining the dramatic histories of their inhabitants, our Argentine Fellow—Sergio Danishewsky, sports editor at Buenos Aires’ Clarin and possessed of a streak of bracing anarchism—pulled me to the side to give me a less official take: “I hate all of these people, I’m glad that they’re dead, and I’m also glad that they’re stacked on top of one another so they can’t claw their way back to the surface if they come back to life.” Bora Bayraktar of CNN Türk shared his similarly candid views of the various diplomats, economists, and—most urgently—soccer fans from teams other than his favorite that we had occasion to meet.
Travel has been one of the distinctive features of the Knight-Wallace Fellows since the group took its first trip to Toronto in 1990. In subsequent years, the touring was extended to include driving-distance destinations such as Chicago, Detroit and, of course, the Eisendrath manse in northern Michigan. But it wasn’t until 2000 that intercontinental travel became a staple, with the first trip to Buenos Aires. This year, Istanbul was added to the itinerary.
It’s a great perk for present and future Fellows, but something of a sore spot for those alumni who missed out on the boondoggle. Ford Fessenden ’90, a reporter with The New York Times, says in an email that he thinks that restitution is in order: “I think any Fellows from those dark years should be offered a second Fellowship.”
He’s not the only one. “As a business columnist, I can appreciate that I’ve been shortchanged,” writes Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins ’92. “Charles owes me one foreign trip, plus interest (compounded since 1992).”
But it would be impolite for me to poke too much fun at my forebears’ grumbling. I’m sure I’ll feel the same way in five years, when I hear that Charles has added another group trip to the planet Neptune. I can hear the authoritative German clip of the program’s inestimable Birgit Rieck right now: “Okay, Fellows, unbuckle and get out of the pressurized evacuation pod. We’ve got a meeting with the Department of Intergalactic Development in 20 minutes.”
— Jason Tanz ’05 is a senior editor with Fortune Small Business.
—Milt Priggee ’01
