The Press Box - The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson on Latin America, War Reporting, and 'Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life'

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Bryan is joined by The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson to unpack his career covering topics ranging from stories in the Peruvian jungle to the first democratic election following Peru’s 12-year-long dictatorship. They discuss his stint at Time magazine and then talk through his journey covering guerrilla groups in Latin America and eventually, Che Guevara. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jon Lee Anderson Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join author and former vibe editor-in-chief Danielle Smith and Black Girl Songbook as she celebrates and uplifts the talent of black women in the music industry. Tune in for in-depth discussions with your favorite songwriters, producers, and artists, as well as anecdotes from Danielle. Plus, you'll hear the songs of black women who change the landscape of American music forever. Check out Black Girl Songbook exclusively on Spotify. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here along with Ace producer Erica Servantes. You know, one of the bylines that gets me excited every time I see it is that of the New Yorkers John Lee Anderson.

He has been writing for that magazine since 1998. He cuts the figure of a dashing foreign correspondent. When I emailed Anderson about coming on this podcast, his reply to me began, Greetings from Afghanistan, where he was reporting. Anderson wrote one of my very favorite nonfiction books, Che Guevara, a revolutionary, life. The book turns 25 years old this year, which is a great excuse, a peg, if you will,

for interviewing Anderson about it and his career. Now, Che Guevara takes a Cuban revolutionary who by the 1990s existed largely in legend and in official government tracks and is a poster on college dorm room walls and helped make him real again. I think you should read the book because it's fantastic, but even if you don't or if you have it, I think you'll love the stories Anderson tells about how he reported it. Anderson had an interesting way of communing with his subject, Guevara, who had died a quarter century before. While Anderson was reporting the book, he sat at Che's old desk in Cuba. He read books that Che had owned. Anderson's family, Nanny, who had once been the nanny to Guvara's children, too, once called Anderson Che,

mistaking the biographer for his subject. Anderson talks here about. Anderson, talks here about how he convinced Guavaara's widow to give him access to journals and writings. And here's the best story. Guavara was executed in Bolivia in 1967. When Anderson was researching the book, he helped reveal the location of Guavaara's body, which had been missing for decades. How many biographers can say that? How do he discover the man, the myth, the body? Here's John Lee Anderson on Che Guevara, a revolutionary life. All right, John Lee, you started reporting in Latin America in 1979. What drew you to Latin America?

That's true. I did. And what drew me there was, well, I was there. I had left my second year in college in the U.S. to lead expeditions for scientists in the Peruvian jungle and the Andes, and I really never came back. I was always keen to have an adventurous life. I wanted to, you know, I had sort of dual impulses, one, to live a life of adventure. And also, I wanted to be a writer.

My mother was a children's book author. I had dabbled in writing, mostly poetry and things like that since I was young. And I had vague notions of writing. And so finding myself at the end of that expedition experience in, it took me all through Latin America, but most in Peru, I was trying to find a way to stay there. I didn't want to go back to a U.S. that I had not lived in much and didn't feel very adjusted to. And so when I saw a writers wanted ad in this little English language weekly called the Lima Times, I went in and presented myself. And that was really the beginning.

What kinds of pieces were you writing for the Lima Times? Well, the editor, we're in touch. After many years, I saw him out years. And he's still living in Peru, believe. but in a train station in the Sacred Valley. He's one of these Brits who pitched up when he was in his 20s and has been there for years since the 60s. He must have scratched his head when I walked in

because he asked me the same question. He asked me what experience I had and all of that. And I basically told him my life's story. And he said, well, and he realized that I had made a number of trips into the jungle, which was my thing at the time. I had been, after leading these expeditions around, I sort of got guys with canoes and local men and went as far as I could up various tributaries

and in the hopes of reaching the heart of the wilderness. And I guess he thought I was a potentially good storytellers. I said, well, why don't you, just to get you going, why don't you write up your experiences? So for the first month or so, I was at the Lima Times, he had me sit in the conference room and write up these chronicles, of my jungle trips. And I look back at them now.

And it's remarkable how unformed I was, but at the same time, how similar, in a sense, my impulse was to get to the heart of something, to explore the unknown, to ferret out stories from places where there was only oral history. And that got me going. And gradually they reeled me in

and at the Lima Times and began to try to teach me a little bit of craft. And I found myself covering the first Democratic election the country had had in 12 years. It was returning to democracy from a 12-year military dictatorship. I covered the plight of foreigners in prison. It was all very callow and, you know, early days. But in a sense, it was a structuring of my impulse to write and the kind of personality I think they found themselves with this youngster who was determined to live as wildly and as fully as possible. In the 1980s, you worked for Jack Anderson, who if people don't know, was the syndicated columnist Muck legendary investigative reporter?

What was it like to work for Jack Anderson? Yeah. It was a bit like working for, I think, I've never worked as an intern for a senator, but I think it was something like that. He was this, he looked like one of the, one of that silver-haired villain with the cat in the early James Bond movies, except he didn't have a cat and he wasn't really a villain, but he was this silver-haired man in a suit who walked around this rather plush, northwest Washington, one of those redrick mansions.

It was at one time one of the vice presidential residences and also Bordello. And he held forth there with this small staff of a coterie of intimates and a larger staff of underpaid, basically kids like me. And he would periodically, you know, see me and clap me on the back and tell me what a great name I had because, of course, we shared a surname. And what I didn't realize was that Jack was not just a muckraker, you know, famous for the Pentagon Papers and so on. He was really part of the establishment himself. And he, you know, he had a Rolodex with everyone in it.

He was on a first name basis with some of the Watergate burglars, one of whom he introduced me to. This was after Watergate. He was conservative, which was a surprise to me. He was a Mormon. He had 11, 10 or 11 kids. and eventually he would ask me to do things that didn't feel right, which was really muck-raking. But all of that were kind of realizations I came to later.

Initially, I just saw it as an opportunity to continue reporting, even if it was on a slave wage. And he would periodically agree to let me go off to Central America or places like that, which is all I really wanted to do. for almost no money. Again, I would basically starve and go into the boonies with guerrilla groups, meet with death squad leaders, and so on. And this was a very exciting time. It was right as the Reagan era began. And, you know, the kind of covert rollback of communism was beginning. So I plunged right into that firmament with the, you know, Nicaraguan Civil War, El Salvador and Guatemala. Everything was intensifying and I was determined to get right into the heart of things and he let me do it. And although I increasingly didn't agree with the conclusions he drew, he was in fact quite

close to the Reagan administration, which is why I didn't stay really. You know, it was a great kickstart into this kind of world of, of, I guess, more serious international journalism, and also something of the kind of Washington intrigue in the way Washington works, even if I spent most of my time, as I say, in these backwaters where nefarious things were going on. The frustration was, I really wanted to be a writer, as I said, and while, you know, I'd been able to do that at the Lima Times to an extent, at Jack Anderson's, I wrote as if I was Jack and gave myself a credit in this, I think it was a 800-word column that went out to 1,200 newspapers. And then the piece would go to this, the rewrite guy, who's name was Dave Bratton,

and had worked for Jack for years. And he would kind of give it Jack's gloss, and then it would come out. And I'd see something I'd written under Jack's byline with some sort of name credit to me in the middle of the text. So it was frustrating to work like that. And soon enough, after about a year and a half, two years, I jumped to a stringer's job in El Salvador for Time magazine. In the 80s, what kind of appetite did Time and other magazines have for pieces from Central America? There was a huge appetite. But they, again, that was another learning curve because I was, I mean, I guess because I'd grown up abroad and lived abroad and I really wasn't part of the Northeast establishment and hadn't been to an Ivy League school and all

the rest of it. I was pretty unaware politically of how things worked. And I, and again, just as I was unaware of Jack's leanings, I was not really up to speed on time and the way time was really an extension of the of the American and particularly American conservative political establishment. But I was thrilled to be writing for, you know, a magazine with that sort of prowess. And I quickly became, or was made what they call a super stringer where I was able to rove around the region, mostly because I kept getting myself into scrapes that produced news. and I had a bureau chief that was a great guy who was not really a time guy either, an old Irish American from Chicago who really liked me.

And about every six months, he'd say, Johnny, go up to New York and show yourself around. You know, the idea was you'd get on the career track. They'd hire you. They'd turn you into a time person and then send you off. And I went through the motions of just a few times, but I didn't really want to do it. My heart wasn't in it. I didn't feel like a time guy. I usually didn't agree with, again, their take on things.

And I had a mounting frustration that I wasn't really writing. Again, I was rewritten by time. And very often, the stuff that I saw and the narratives I found that stayed with me and really felt as though they mattered were never making their way into print at time. And so a combination of feeling politically censored and just creatively frustrated, I started, you know, freelancing on the side. I did a couple of pieces for the San Diego Union, for the nation, for various outlets like that. It was all, and I also talked to Human Rights Watch, which was just getting going at the time. And when I say talk to human rights watch, it's because a lot of what I did was I basically

I hung out with perpetrators, people who did really bad things. And I couldn't carry that around with me. And if I couldn't write about what they did, because, as I say, time really wasn't interested, you know, it became a kind of moral weight that I had to expunge somehow. And so I found myself talking to a couple of times to the, the human rights people who were looking for exactly that kind of information. It was a, it was a very stressful time. You know, there was a sense that there was, it was still very cold war.

And, you know, this idea that we had to be neutral in a conflict where it was pretty clear which side was the more villainous was, was, I think, I think caused. caused me a lot of anxiety. And I, again, I left time after two years because my younger brother announced that he had gotten a book contract for us, based on a proposal extrapolated out of a series of columns I'd done for Jack Anderson, precisely about right-wing terror groups. And well, I, so we sort of shared that book. the writing of that book. I did it on the side. And then our then publisher, sweet old guy,

Dodd Mead and Company, one of the last independents, offered us another book. And we decided we wanted to do a book about guerrilla groups around the world. I think I drove that idea. And so I quit time to go off and do that with my brother Scott. And we, this was our second book together. And we decided to go to five different war zones around the world and talk to the people on either side. And so, and that was, you know, that, and that was, it was an oral history in a sense. And anyway, I'm getting ahead of your questions. But we're getting right to them because the reporting on guerrillas leads you to the idea of writing about Che Guevara. Right. So I did this journey with Scott for a year all around the world.

the end of it, we produced this book which didn't get much display because our publisher folded right after it shipped it. Dodd Meaden and company ended up being bought out by some right-wing Christian group. So ours was the last book of the old imprint, I think, or something like that. At any rate, my brother wanted to write a novel, so he went off and did that. And I wanted to continue on in this world to explore more deeply. So I got a book contract to write about guerrillas. and I spent the next three and a half, almost four years, traveling the world, living with different guerrilla groups. Some of the ones I'd seen before and very different ones, I chose not in a very scientific way, but I chose to, I chose to be with every kind of insurgent group that I believed was out there and one on every continent. and for enough time that I felt I understood their folklore, their mysticism, their ethos.

And really that's what it became. This book became a search request to understand the insurgent mind. And in a sense, the evolution of, in a sense, of tribal groups. Because if you look at most guerrilla groups, they conform to those early defense. bands of humans that roamed the earth a long time ago. And I became particularly interested in their creation myths and how they invented themselves and the sacralization of violence.

And so my book, while it's a very anecdotal book, it's a kind of ad hoc manual to, I guess, the psyche of insurgency. And yes, that experience led me to begin to think about Che Guevara. Because the journeys that I took took place as the Cold War was ending, as communism collapsed, so much was going on in the world at the time. And here I was in these jungles of Burma. Well, I was with the Karen guerrillas in Burma while Tiananmen Square was happening. The guerrillas I was with, in some cases, the older ones, had been fighting in the jungle since the 1940s.

Europe was Eastern Europe was the Berlin Wall was falling down and I was in you know with the Afghan Mujahideen with Islamist groups I

and I was still with Marxists still fighting for the dream of the better world wherever I went though one thing united them and that was this figure of Che Guevara I kept finding people either venerating him like a saint or still carrying around his manual to guerrilla warfare.

He was the universal archetype of the guerrilla role model. And that got me thinking about him. And in popular culture at this point, he exists as something of a mythic figure. Is he a brand at this point as he would be 10, 15 years later? No. No. At the time I began to live. look at Che more seriously and realize that he's the very, he's the personification of this, of the kind of individual I had been seeking out all over the world as a result of this exploration of warfare and insurgency on my part. He was not the poster boy in the dorm room

wall at that point. There was a brief period of time. He died in 1967 and it was immediately after his death until about 1970 that that happened. You know, there was this, the way he died and the kind of, you know, the John Berger contemplation of his body lying in state like Christ, Mantegna's Christ and so on. It was also Paris 68. There was the firmament was radicalized and he he became a martyr figure to the to the radicals all around the world that needed one that needed a potent sacrificial figure, almost a Christ-like figure, to carry their wars forward. That by and large had had dissipated by the end of the night by the end of the 80s when I was when I'm beginning to think about Che. Nobody talked about Che in London or Paris or New York.

If you wanted to find books of Chee, you had to go to the Trotskyite bookshop in New York. And you'd find, you know, the guerrilla diaries, the Bolivia, the guerrilla manual, the Bolivian diaries and maybe some books by Regis Debray. That was it. So, but here he was this potent figure in the world of actual insurgency, which I had been exploring and been fascinated by because I realized that there was oral history there, but not written history. And that was one of the, one of the things that stimulated me to write was realizing that the world of insurgency, you know, it occupied a lot of geography, but it wasn't represented on the political maps of the world. So there was this, there was all over the world around 40, 50 insurgencies at the time. And they weren't being addressed by the newspapers. They weren't part of the discussions of the big five.

They were simply not part of our, they weren't on our, on our horizon. And they were on mine. And so was Che. And so I realized that he had over the previous. preceding quarter century since his death become this very potent figure of emulation. And I decided to try to

I began to look for books about him. I realized that again, most of the what could be called biographies, they were other demonizations or hagiographies and they'd been written in the first three or four years after his death. And by now they were in book finders, places or remainder shelves.

You had to look for them. And I realized in reading them that there was very little known about it. He died. He would have been a public figure. He'd had this dramatic arc to his life and death. And he died at the age of 39. And yet he had these huge gaps in the chronology of his life. And so I began to think about it as a possibility of a biography.

And for me, this was a huge challenge, a huge leap forward professionally. It took me some time to get my head around that. I initially thought I might do a kind of in the footsteps of Che thing and gradually came to the idea that I had to try this more, more, well, more profound or a deeper effort. And so, again, I proposed it to a publisher. and it was a grove of the press that agreed and signed me up. And then I had to make an approach to the Cubans. And so I came to the Cubans having just come out of my guerrilla sojourn and with my book on guerrillas just coming out.

And with them just having had the rug pulled out from under them with Soviet collapse, literally the previous year. And so it was a very interesting time. Again, I think I'm getting ahead of myself, but I realized that I needed to go finally to Cuba, which was after all the ultimate repository of the guerrilla experience in a sense and where I'd never been to tackle this book.

That was, after all, the launching pad for the man who became Che Guevada. One question before we get to Cuba and going to Cuba and asking them for help with the book, is it exciting for you as an author not to have the stack of proper biographies of Che Guevara? Do you say, oh, this is, even though it's going to be a big challenge to nail down all these facts and go find all these things, was that exciting for you at that moment? It was very exciting.

I mean, it was, you know, I almost couldn't quite fathom. I couldn't quite believe that a figure as universally recognized as him, this figure who, who, who, was a mythic figure evanescent at that time, but very real in the world of insurgency. And certainly, if you asked people in the, you know, in those cities I mentioned before about Che Guevara, the older ones would remember him. They would say, oh, when I was a student, they would say things like that. But there was nobody walking around with his t-shirt on. Nonetheless, he was this universally recognized figure. He had this extraordinary life. he was a lightning rod figure for the for the end of the Cold War and the whole Cuba story.

And yet there was no enduring book about him. So I kept looking over my shoulders to say, I can't believe this. This sin of a mission is extraordinary. I have a clear field to go forward. And so it was very exciting. But I was so concerned with, you know, jumping. over the hurdles and the obstacles I had in front of me that I didn't sort of, you know, I didn't pause to sort of bask in the rapture too long. I had the book to write. I had all the

work to do. I had the Cubans to convince. And you choose to do it in the form of a biography rather than in the footsteps of because there are so many facts to be nailed down because there's so much value in finding these holes, filling in these holes in his story? Yes. I mean, you know, this was a long time ago now. And of course, I think, you know, the, the contemplation of a proper biography emerges in the course of my conversations with my publishers as well. And over the period of time in which I was finalizing guerrillas and setting about writing my proposal for my next book, the world had just changed, was changing right at that time. I had a young family. I was now based in England. I had a universal sort of perspective on the world, having just come out of all of these conflicts and against the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union. A new war's beginning. I had had to periodically take detours to earn a bit of money.

I went to Bosnia a couple of times at the very beginning of that civil war, which was the first war of a serious war following the breakup of the Soviet Union. So I was very aware of the kind of the fragmentation. that was going on. And I guess out of that, I wanted a project that would allow me to really sink into it in one place. And I was fascinated by the idea of Cuba,

always had been. And so, yes, I wrote a proposal that would, that essentially said that I would fill in the holes of his life. And also of some of the mysteries of the Cold War that were yet unexplained, this thing that had just ended. The smoke was just clearing from the battlefield. And for the first time ever, it seemed at that moment possible that I could get people in Cuba, the communist regime in Cuba, and for that matter, the former Soviet Union and other places, to talk to me about what was now history and it was no longer military intelligence, secrets.

that proved to be a lot more of a spotty, you know, way forward than I hoped at the time. But nonetheless, it was true for the first time people might talk. That was one of the reasons why there were these big black spots in his life, is that the war was ongoing. And now it had just ended. So now I could talk to people. I was not a typical American journalist. You know, I had come out of this other experience.

I had written in a kind of non-judgmental way about the idea of the guerrilla, the insurgent, the revolutionary. So I was potentially someone who could also be influenced. I think there was a certain, and perhaps I could offer validation to people whose lives had just apparently been spent in the feudal enterprise of bringing about Marxist revolution. And that had just come crashing down. So it was a, the door, the door opened in a way, historically speaking, I think that a door opened that had never been opened before. It was open just a crack. And it kept closing. I kept having to open it. But it was, it was probably the only time to try to tackle this. And I began, I think this is something I began to be aware of, you know, as as I moved on, it was largely intuitive at the time.

How did you approach Guavares widow Aleda in Cuba? So I made, I made an approach to the Cubans in London. They received me. It turned out that the guy that I talked to who was something like, you know, the second secretary, who ended up becoming a very important guy and probably was already at the time. He said he would, you know, check with Havana and get back to me. I was summoned. two months later and they said they would be willing to receive me in Havana. I went to Havana. A man greeted me. This is 92, who turned out to be the head of Europe for the Communist Party and informed me that although he was my sort of guardian angel, there was another guy I had to convince.

And that in my trip, that visit to Havana, it would sink or swim my whole project on whether this man liked me or not. This man turned out to be the historian of the Politburo and a Fidelista, not at all, Gavaris, but I didn't know that at the beginning. I'll cut to the Chase because I was desperate to meet Chais, where I realized, again, intuitively, although she'd never spoken to anyone in 25 years, that I had to get to her if I was going to have any hope in finding out about Gavara's true life. And in the course of the 10-day trip I had with Cuba and this man, I got nowhere near her. And I felt that I was being kept away from her.

And that I was very much part of another group, another faction, much closer to Fidel. But at the end of these 10 days, he asked me if it was anything on the way to the airport. He asked me if there was anything I wanted to know. And I said, yes, is my project going forward or not? He said, you're in. So I returned home. my wife was about to give birth to our third baby a boy and I had I had no idea what that meant or how I would go about it from there I was still being kept away from the source the you know

the Holy Grail but I was somehow in in Cuba so long story short about when my child was a couple of months old I returned to Havana to to to I'm sorry, I screwed up the chronology a little bit. My wife was still pregnant. I returned a few months later, feeling like I had to see Che's widow. And this time, I somehow managed to do that. I got to her. I told my guardian angel that I needed to see her and he somehow made it happen.

I was received by Chez Widow Aleda at the house they had lived in together. It was essentially exactly as when he had left it. quarter century before. His uniform still hung on a coat hanger next to his desk. The books he was reading were still on his desk. Everything was humid and fading a bit. And she went there every day with an assistant to sort of futz around. It was not officially even the center of studies of Che Guevada at the time. It was just Aleda coming from her house back to their old house and sort of knocking around. Anyway, she invited me. I spent 30 or 40 minutes just talking to her. I remember sweating, knowing that I was having to convince her. And at the end of this pitch, in which I basically

said, I'm fascinated by your husband. I want to write the truth of his life. And there was, she hadn't said a word. And she just stared at me with a stony look. And she didn't say anything. And I had finished my pitch and I said, so, you know, probably querulous, said, so are you going to help me? And she kept the stony look going. And then in a very small voice, almost from the middle of her throat, she said, yeah, like that. And then I said, at that moment, I knew that I could no longer just come and go from Cuba, that I would have to move there. Or I would be treated like a tourist and a gringo tourist at that. So I said enough for, and at that moment, I made the decision.

I said, enough, will you help me enough for me to move here with my family? And she said, again, a bit tentatively, yes. And that was when I made the decision that we would come. I returned to England. My wife had the baby. And literally, six weeks after she had the baby, I came back to Havana, found us a house. She followed. And we launched into this thing.

Yeah. early 92, just when everything was imploding there and spent the next three years living in Cuba, five altogether to write the book. But yeah, just an extraordinary time in which, I mean, a few months after we got there, the man who was supposed to be my guardian, not the guardian angel, the kind of control officer, the Politburo historian, committed suicide. And that set off a whole series of problems for me because he was the guy that the, I guess, the secret services depended on for vouching for me that I was really who I said I was and the rest of it.

So after his death, I came under a certain amount of scrutiny, which was uncomfortable. Aleda, though, became my guardian angel and basically kept them off my back. and she was an autonomous figure. She was after all the widow of Che Guevara. But it took me over a year and a half for her to really begin to show me things, tell me things, open doors for me that really made a difference. But that did finally happen. So I had to put in the time.

I had to, you know, I would spend every week I would go twice, sometimes three times, sometimes five times, to that house, and I would sit at Chey's desk and read his books, read what he had been reading, what he had been studying. And then after hours and hours, I would come down and we would have a coffee. If she was in a good mood, sometimes she wasn't.

I didn't. Days would go by, and it wouldn't see her. But, and graduate, I would try to see people. And some people gave me the runaround. Other people saw me. Gradually, I developed a small circle of people that seemed to believe in me. And yet mostly their reminiscences and observations of Che were anecdotal. And I felt always kept at a distance from the real man.

And I think I began to express this to Aleda. And I began to think that I needed to go back to his origins to Argentina where he came from in order to find the youngster before he became this mythified figure. Because he was very mythified in Cuba. Even then, he was a kind of official cipher. He was the patron saint, but you couldn't look behind the cardboard cut out. And that's what I did.

After we'd been there about a year and a half, I went there. And she, taking a chance, convinced Alberto Granado. who was Che's buddy in the motorcycle diaries to go with me. And we spent two months knocking around Argentina together. And anyway, it was on that trip that I began to feel that I understood the young Guevara and really, I think, got to obtain what I thought was an intuitive understanding of the person. And it was following that trip back in Cuba that she, again, I think, gambled took a risk and allowed me to have the first of three unpublished diaries of his that she gave me

access to and and the world changed at that point now you're not seeing chea remove you're actually reading his thoughts as he wrote them down that's right an unpublished form at that point that's right can you give a sense of when you're engaged in this project to what extent chay dominated your thoughts on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis? Oh, hugely. I mean, I used to, I used to, I thought, I've thought about that a lot because there was this period of approach, you know, this effort to approach him, which also there's a certain amount of sublimation you have to go through as a biographer to approach and absorb this

person. It's a very strange process for me. I mean, I really went native. And I was aware of it at the time. And I even remember stopping and saying, wait, do I want to do this? Because I guess even one's ego is part of that equation. And I'm talking about the kind of the sublimation. Because you have to actually just go into their mind and their life and accept their way of seeing.

the world. And I was resistant to aspects of Che. But I remember thinking to myself, no, this guy, I don't know another person who fascinates me as much. And he was relevant enough and interesting enough so that I can do this. And so I think there was then a period when I was really in, in which, I mean, I don't know if I behave like Chee or what. I do know that one day our nanny, who had been the nanny for Che's kids and was not. now ours. We were in the kitchen together and she called me Che. She said, Che, and then stopped dead and realized what she'd done and laughed and said, I mean, John. And maybe it was in that period that I was somehow channeling him to a very significant

degree. I don't know. But then there was a necessary period of separation too. And it corresponded with a growing need for me after three years to feel that I needed to leave Cuba to write his life. And that had to do with the political pressure I was feeling just to a large extent and the sense I had the people peering over my shoulder a bit and a need to get away to truly write his life. After I had both lived in Cuba and taken very extensive trips, not just that one in Argentina, but other ones elsewhere. And more and more, I had more and more revelations from people that had never spoken before. People in Sweden, in Russia, in Spain, in Bolivia, in Mexico, even in the United States, most of them, again, former guerrillas, the people that talked to me

tended to be the people who had been with him in the field. They trusted me. The people that were truly guerrillas and that had somehow adopted his ethos, which involved self-sacrifice and those notions, which made him such a heroic figure, were the ones that tended to trust me and talked to me and opened up the world of Che Guevada to me. The people that distrusted me and held me at arm's length were more the political cadre types. And in some cases, I would say, also opportunists, bureaucrats of communism or the politicians. And so I think there was three periods, and it was this approach, this attempt to get close to Che. There was this kind of moment of a kind of an epiphany of revelation about who he was as a young guy.

And then once I had that, I was in his life. And I was then able, then with the diaries, to see who he was and go through that. transformation he underwent from Ernesto Guevara to Che which was this other identity that he consciously adopted and I was able to see it and feel it and understand it then and then eventually I was back in Cuba and in Cuba of the 90s and of Fidel Castro and I had to write this book for the world, you know, not for a violin concerta somewhere in, you know, in Havana. And I, so we moved to Spain. And that was where I began writing and really making progress on writing the book. When we were there, I both returned to Cuba and made additional trips of research for about another two years.

But it was, it was then that I was able to write his life with that distance. And that was a necessary pulling away, I would say, that third period. in which I pulled away from Jay. If I had, you know, channeled him to in the middle period, I was no longer, I was no longer some kind of Chee cat's paw. I was able to stand back and give him a good hard slap once in a while, too. Three years living in Nevada, trips to South America, trips to Moscow, trips all over the world to report on this.

So here's a base question. how did this all add up economically with the book advance that you'd got? I think we renegotiated my advance three or maybe four times. I think the last one, he, I'm not sure whether my publisher asked for, you know, seigneurial rights, but it was on the verge of, I think I basically signed away everything. And I'm not sure whether I offered him my soul at one point, but he gave it back. I'm sort of joking, but yeah, I kept having to get more money. we were seriously broke all the time.

My wife also kept us going via some credit card she had gotten from some sweet man at a British bank and she would write to him. And this man kept extending us money. So we lived off of some British credit card debt, advances from my publisher. And in the end, after five years, yeah, I mean, we were able to live rent free

It was a family house. We lived in a very Spartan way, but the kids were very small. And, you know, it didn't really matter. By the time the book came out, though, I owed just about everybody I can think of money. And one of my greatest delights in life, I'd never thought about royalties or anything like that. And this is the first book I ever had royalties from was after a year, I began to get some checks because the book did pretty well. And then I spent the next year, I think it was, broke, but paying off these debts I had to everyone. And it gave me a huge pleasure to do that.

And yeah, it was funny. We were so broke, in fact, that my book became a bestseller in a number of countries. And it came out in a lot of different countries, even that first year following its publication in the United States. and I found myself being flown as happened in those days. Publishers flew you to those countries where you gave, you know, you had book tours and they put you up in nice hotels and threw parties for you and all of that. And kind of lavish, in some cases they were pretty lavish and generous in their hosting of me, Finland, Brazil, Italy.

And I had literally nothing in my pocket, literally nothing in my pocket and was completely broken. and we would have these discussions about what to do about that. And, you know, sometimes borrow money to keep up appearances. And I would see that my book was number one on the best seller list or number two or whatever it was. And yet I was completely, and we were completely broke. That was that funny period of time. But yeah, kind of also a wonderful period of time. You mentioned Che was killed 1967.

His body vanished. after that. And in the course of reporting in this book, you go to Bolivia and talk to a former army general in Bolivia. And how did it come about that you helped find the location of Che's body? Yeah. So I had spent a couple of months in Bolivia. I'd been talking with everyone that I could think of or find who had anything to do with his final episode of life, including enemies and so on. I had this one general, I was pretty exhausted, I had located this one general he'd agreed to see me. He, I almost didn't go to the interview because I realized he didn't, he wasn't going to tell me anything about Che himself. But he was famous for having wiped out half of Che's guerrilla column two months before he died.

And part of that group was the Tanya, the famous German Argentine guerrilla who joined Che and was killed. And I went to see him and he turned out to be, he was then a retired general in his 50s. He met me on this farm. We drank coffee. And he opened up. I was curious about one gorilla who was never known how he died and there was some suspicion that he'd been executed by this general's men. And I asked him and he admitted that that's what they had done. This was highly unusual.

I'd interviewed a lot of characters, a lot of generals. Nobody ever admits to carrying out an extra. judicial execution and he explained the circumstances. And I thought, this guy is unusual. Nonetheless, I ran out of questions after three hours. I clicked off my tape recorder in those days. We carried around little micro-cassette recorders. I had one in front of me.

I stood up. And just then I remembered, well, wait a minute. He told me that he happened to be in Viagrande, the town where Chez's body was last displayed and then disappeared the night of his disappearance. So I clicked it back on. I said, General. You said you were in Viagrana, the night Che disappeared. And I just thought, I said, what did you do with his body?

And he looked at me and he said, Chico, kid, I've been wanting to talk to you about that. He said, we buried him under the airstrip in Viagrande. Now, nobody had ever said this before. What I was unaware of at that very moment was that this was a military secret. Now, and I asked him why he was telling me, he said, oh, 28 years have gone by by then. It's time that we make peace with our former foe. I just want to go clean with history. Anyway, I walked around for a couple of weeks with this knowledge,

and then I realized I couldn't. I was somehow thinking I was going to save it for my book. And then I called a friend at the New York Times, and I said, by the way, I have this information. I don't know how long this will keep. This is pretty incredible. What do you think? He talked to the foreign editor, and they said, write it.

I did. It came out. put it on the front page. I was still in La Paz. It was a bombshell. And anyway, I don't want to go too much in the weeds here. But basically, what happened was, you know, it was a huge bombshell. The general went into hiding, sent a fax saying I was lying. The president accused me of having gotten him drunk. I held a press conference, which I said, the man I spoke to was a man of honor. I don't believe that the communique he sent out denying it was written by him. My illusion was that he was under military duress. And I told the president that we'd been drinking coffee,

not whiskey. And I pulled a tape out of my socks in front of the journalists and waved it around and said everything's on tape, whereupon another facts emerged admitting that it was true. The president signed a decree ending the military secrecy. So confirming that, in fact, there had been military secret. Ending the military secrecy regarding the whereabouts of the bodies of Che Guevada and his comrades and ordering a commission to go find them. I then went back to Vaya Grande, along with the generals and all these other, a small town, very small town.

So all in the press that ascended. Anyway, Argentine forensic anthropologists. some people with Gio Radar came. The general, however, arrived on a, the one I talked to, arrived on a little plane on that airstrip and flanked by two very angry looking active generals, walked around the airstrip for 20 minutes, followed by the press, didn't say anything,

got back on the plane, said, it's been too many years, I can't remember where, and flew away. We never saw him again. It turned out later that he was placed under house arrest and we stayed there for the next five years. So we were thrown to our own devices. I say we, because it was all this group of people looking for Che's body.

And it took a year and a half. But he was indeed eventually found under the airstrip along with his comrades. And I was given a call. My book had just come out. This was now a year and a half later. I was happy to be in Miami of all places with my Chee book. and the head of the Argentine forensic anthropologist team called me and said, John, we found him come.

And I flew the next day to Baia Grande, and I was given the privilege of seeing his body before anybody the public knew that they had found him. And I wrote a second story for the New York Times saying that his body had been found. The kind of funny coter to that is that I was supposed to be the best. man at one of my sister's wedding that next day. I had to call her and tell her that I couldn't come because I had to go to look at Che's body. Anyway, so that was it. And so Che was found with just a few weeks to spare before the 30th anniversary of as the Cuban celebrated his last battle. And there was a whole lot of intrigue in getting the body out of Bolivia and back to Cuba.

and there were people, and there are people to this day who claim that, mostly anti-Castro-Cubans, who claimed that that wasn't really him. But they told me when I arrived that they had done a dental check on his teeth. They'd found tobacco in his, his head was covered with a parca, a military parca. His hands were severed. The night they disappeared and they'd also chopped off his hands and kept them, and they were, again, secreted away as some kind of proof.

that they had had him. They did that before they disappeared the body. It was a very moving moment, as it was to find the other ones, because in the end, quite apart from the fact that this was Chigabata, this was the husband of Aleda, the father of the kids,

her kids, whom I got to know, the man who had been a friend of so many people that I knew this extraordinary figure, but then there were the people who were murdered alongside him. And then, you know, this was a crime. scene and it was deeply gratifying and moving to be somehow a catalyst for the discovery of these

remains. I'd never really understood the trauma and tragedy people feel when they can't find their loved ones' bodies. I'd never really understood that. I used to think, well, they're dead. They know they're dead. So why worry about it? But it was only through that experience with Che that I realized how profoundly, it's almost a physiological need, I think, people have. to finally be at rest when the remains of their loved ones are found. And here they were in shallow graves in some cases, murdered, executed dirtily, secretly. And it was, you know, as I say, it was deeply moving to be able to be part of this moment when Bolivia anyway came clean with its past.

Because that triggered, by the way, a whole movement in the country to come. come clean with all of the disappeared in Bolivia. And gradually, you know, and it caused quite a ruckus. But many, many people who had been murdered by various regimes over the years were then, you know, their whereabouts were discovered. The circumstances of their deaths were clarified. And, you know, it, you know, I think it somehow, it's somehow, well, it certainly helped their families.

Last one for you, John Lee. A book comes out in March 1997. As you said, it was reviewed very well, it sold very well. How did it change the trajectory of your career? Well, you know, for the next year and a half, I think, as I say, I was just promoting the book everywhere. I think I even went on three book tours in the United States and a lot of other countries.

And then, and again, most of that time I was, as I say, broke. But, you know, promoting the book. And at the end of that, I was approached sort of, so that end of 98, I was asked by the New Yorker to contribute a piece to a Cuba issue they were planning. Because they'd heard through the grape find, I think from my publisher, that I'd kept a diary of my time in Havana. And so early 98, they were planning this Cuba issue and they asked me if I would contribute it. And so I didn't, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do next, to be honest. And but that began this relationship with the New Yorker that has continued ever since.

So I suppose it was transcendental in my career. The book was, you know, a huge, a huge, I don't like to use words like investment because I don't think that way. But, or sacrifice, really. I mean, I spent five years of my life engaged with this. this extraordinary life that was connected like a weather vein to all of the past 30 years and the final days of communism and the rest of it. And through all of the guerrilla, like arteries, to all of the guerrilla wars and the insurgencies that had flourished in the world I'd grown up in. And so I felt very much attuned and at one with history of my time. and going to work for the New Yorker

allowed me to plunge into and continue to make sense of that world that had just disappeared and was now reforming itself in different ways, you know? So I guess it was the, it was the, yes, it was my, it was the book that changed my life,

my career. Yeah. John Lee Anderson, thanks for coming on the press box. You're very welcome. Thank you, Brian. Huge thanks to John Lee Anderson. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes.

We've got some really fun interviews coming up here on The Little Press Box. Next week, I think we're going to have Al Michaels in advance of him calling his 10th Super Bowl for NBC. In February, we're going to have Margaret Brennan, a host of CBS's Face the Nation on this podcast. That will be very cool. And in two weeks, unless the... COVID variants intervene, I'm going to be at Radio Row at the Super Bowl here in Los Angeles with interviews with some of the media life forms I encounter there. Here's my monthly plea.

Please share the podcast. I really appreciate it. David Schumacher and I back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.