Wheeling and Able: NPR’s Man in Jerusalem
“I think they wanted to find the right assignment for me, and they didn’t have the right sense of what that was,” Hockenberry reflected. His bosses weren’t going to ship him overseas out of sympathy, and they couldn’t bring themselves to send him on his merits. Hockenberry felt the only way he could prove to them he could do it was by doing it; he found himself identifying with Jesse Jackson: “Liberals have this idea Jesse Jackson will be able to become president when we reach a certain utopia. And Jesse sees it very differently. He’ll be able to become president when he does it and becomes president.”
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“You need certain physical tricks,” Hockenberry explained just before he left. “You need to get up and down curbs and go down steps a little bit, and you need to know how to flag a cab, which is a skill. You need to really stick yourself out in the road and stare that cabby down. You have to learn how to coax television cameramen to let you hang out at the front of a stakeout, which requires a certain persistence and maybe a little nudging with the metal front of your chair on the Achilles tendon.
“The thing you have to do most regularly is just set people at ease. They may think you’re nuts wanting to go up a flight of stairs and you have to tell them it’s only about the five billionth time you’ve done it and when you get to the top everything will be OK. And sometimes when everything else fails, you have to be willing to make a complete spectacle of yourself–to get down off the bus or down off the stairs and into the mud and haul yourself along like a sack of melons. But you wind up getting the attention of the people you want to get the attention of.”
“I think people are more likely to respond to you when they get the sense you have the capacity to reveal something about yourself. Not to get all cushy and mushy, but I think a basic sharing is involved in having a conversation with anyone.”
Hockenberry returned to Chicago in 1984 as a Benton Fellow at the U. of C. He was apprehensive–he didn’t know if he could cope with another Chicago winter in his chair. “I wasn’t up to the task in 1976, when I came back after the accident. And then I realized I was in a heck of a lot better shape than I’d been in nine years before. You just get a little more skilled and a little more gutsy.”
“I understand there’s six steps up to the press center in Jerusalem,” Hockenberry said. “I guess I’ll make friends with a strong cabby, or a courier or something.”
