Return of the Rolling Reporter
“It’s actually much easier to live as a disabled person in the third world than in the United States or Germany or Great Britain,” John Hockenberry was telling us. “They’re used to being humiliated and having themselves be made fools of–in which case I fit in. I was used to being made a fool of. So we were all like brothers. If I needed half the neighborhood to carry me up the stairs, there was half the neighborhood. No one cares how anything looks.”
A few days ago we heard that Hockenberry had been reassigned to New York. We called him there and found him full of stories and observations.
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Last spring, Hockenberry spent ten days in Iran covering the Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral. A Chinook helicopter flew the press from downtown Tehran out to the general area of the burial; but when his copter set down, Hockenberry found himself sitting in his wheelchair in a field more than a mile from the grave. The other reporters took off running. “There was no way for me to move in this giant field–it looked like a giant cauliflower field–and I’m sitting there wishing maybe they could bury him over here because I’m not going to get a story. And these Persians, these wonderful people on the way to the funeral, figured out what I was . . .
“All told, there were six of them,” Hockenberry said, “two people carrying me, two my chair, one my equipment, and the sixth was for moral support. They carried me almost two kilometers and they were running the whole way.” When they reached pavement they put Hockenberry down and ran interference for his wheelchair. Then the leader of the group, a chubby man in his late 30s whose name Hockenberry made out to be “Oscar,” commandeered an ambulance. Hockenberry and another reporter climbed in back.
Eventually they gave someone a couple of cigarettes to lead them to the Intercontinental Hotel, and once they were in their room, Hockenberry felt much better. “From the balcony, you had a perfect view of the snipers,” he said. “You could see what they were going after, what kind of weapons they were using.”
“I must say, I feel a need to kick around the ideas that have come out of the last two years,” said Hockenberry. “It’s nice to have a program where you can do long discussions of things and sort of think of the connections between them.”
We were surprised at the timing. “That was one of the caution flags raised here,” editor Dennis Britton acknowledged. ‘You shouldn’t do it with the National coming.’ [But] I decided our sports coverage is strong enough to stand up to that.”
