"It was an anti-establishment period and besides sports there were hardly any extracurricular activities left," said McCartney. "They had all been abolished or sort of just withered on the vine." Instead of twiddling his thumbs, McCartney, who was interested in current affairs, took his talents to The Amherst Student.
Rebel with a cause
"I was at Amherst at a particularly interesting time, a period of great change," McCartney said, speaking of the transition in U.S. politics that took place during his undergraduate years. "In the beginning, the dominant issue was the Vietnam War and people were very politicized. My freshman year was the year of the Westover demonstrations, in which the president of the College and at least half the student body [including McCartney] were arrested."
Each year, the upperclassmen accused the freshmen of conservativism. "The seniors thought we were a really conservative class of freshmen, but as seniors we thought the freshmen were conservative; that was the steady trend," he added. "By the time I graduated, Saigon had fallen to the Viet Cong, and basically, because of the end of the draft, people were turning back to their private lives."
Nonetheless, McCartney's tenure as a Student writer and, eventually, as an editor, gave him the chance to raise his voice on a national level. After helping write an editorial protesting the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre"-the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox by then-President Richard Nixon-McCartney persuaded other college newspapers to endorse it and sent copies to all the members of Congress. The column was promptly denounced by conservative columnists.
More rewarding was the battle being fought on the home front for Amherst to accept female students: McCartney, an enthusiastic supporter of coeducation, and other editors ran the editorial "How Much Longer?" in every issue until the message was finally hammered home. McCartney graduated in the College's last all-male class.
After graduation he worked at the Boston headquarters of The Wall Street Journal; he had worked as an intern at its Washington, D.C. headquarters the summer after his junior year. "In Washington, I had learned to write in news style. But I really learned more when I went to Boston and was working every day," said McCartney. "I worked on some ambitious feature stories and learned a lot about writing hard news. But, I was feeling very restless. So after a year and a half, I quit to go traveling."
Spanning the globe
McCartney, who had never been outside the U.S., wound up backpacking with a friend through South America for seven months, then landed in Rome, Italy, where he worked for an English newspaper, the International Daily News. "It was just getting started, still at the level of about a college paper and, in fact, there were a bunch of us straight from college putting it out," explained McCartney. "[We made do] with wire copy transcripts and whatever we could write when we had time. I was the business editor and the entire business staff. It didn't pay very well, but enough to survive, and it was fun."
Shortly thereafter, McCartney was hired as a correspondent by the AP-Dow Jones news service. "That was a great break," he said. "A salaried job in Italy just covering news. I basically became an international finance/business journalist. I got to travel a lot-all over the Mediterranean-and covered OPEC meetings for a while." Because he wanted more experience in journalism outside of business, McCartney switched after two years to "a different desk in the same office," and went to work in more or less the same capacity for the Associated Press.
"It was a very turbulent time in Italy, with terrorism left and right, kidnappings, assassinations," said McCartney. "The big story I covered then was the shooting of the Pope. Libya was also covered out of Rome, so I went down there whenever I could get a visa." He attended Libyan President Muammar el-Quaddafi's press conferences and the American withdrawal from Libya, observing the early stages of an attempted "war on terrorism" that has now reached its maturity.
Altogether, McCartney spent almost five years in Rome, then headed back to the U.S. for another transition period. "I had done my time with the news services, and I wanted to work for a regular paper," he said. "I was hired by The Washington Post as a copy editor on the foreign desk, with the promise that, if I did well, they would send me out as a foreign correspondent in a year or two." The apprenticeship went so well that McCartney remained in The Post's employment for 19 years, leaving only recently to return to Europe as Managing Editor of the International Herald Tribune (IHT) an international newspaper jointly owned by The Post and The New York Times. In 1983, he was promoted, to foreign correspondent and traveled to Central America.
While based in Mexico, McCartney covered the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador simultaneously, walking the no man's land of violence between contras and Sandinistas, guerrillas and government troops. "It was the most intense period of reporting I've ever had-traveling all the time, getting on the plane to cover a story in the middle of the day," said McCartney. "One of the biggest difficulties was getting to where the story was. A lot of the fighting happened in very remote mountain areas; it was dangerous to go there." During his tour of duty, McCartney dodged gunfire, risked landmines as well as air strikes and was shot at in a helicopter.
McCartney and his wife, Barbara, relocated in 1986 to West Germany, where McCartney continued to work as a correspondent for The Post for three and a half years. Barring the birth of their son Daniel in 1988, this period was relatively uneventful. But the uneventful became chaotic with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Walls come tumbling down
"It was an unusual tour," admitted McCartney. "For the first three years, it was a pretty steady but not spectacular flow of stories, covering the beginnings of what would eventually become the European Union, negotiations on arms control, the diplomacy of the Gorbachev era. Then, in my last six months on the job, all Hell broke loose, and there was a revolution.
"My claim to fame is that I was at the press conference where they announced the opening of the Wall," he added. "It's a great story, because it was announced almost as an afterthought, after a long, dull list of central committee results. The speaker read a statement that had just been handed to him, and then disappeared, leaving us sitting around wondering if he meant it."
McCartney and his fellow journalists were stunned. "It was a fantastic scene: a hundred of us journalists sitting in a cramped auditorium in East Berlin, playing it over and over on our tape recorders, turning to each other to ask, 'Did you hear what I just heard?' By the time I was writing my story, of course, there were thousands of people drinking champagne on the wall, or chopping at it with pickaxes. It's hard to imagine I'll ever cover a bigger story than that."
Soon afterwards, McCartney went back to the U.S. as The Post's financial correspondent in New York. "I'd been overseas for a long time and felt like I'd become an expatriate without ever planning to be. I didn't like having to travel all the time, so I was eager to get back to the States." Based in Manhattan, McCartney covered plea bargaining, C.E.O. compensation and the Trump bankruptcy-signature stories of decadence and downfall that peaked as the affluent '80s eased into the more uncertain early '90s. In 1992, McCartney decided he wanted to be an editor and moved to Washington, D.C. to work at The Post's central office. Working a series of positions, dealing primarily with international news and U.S. foreign policy, he became Foreign Editor from 1999 to 2001, where he supervised 25 correspondents and over a dozen other editors.
"Even though I'd been a reporter for a long time," said McCartney, "I really liked editing. There is an additional challenge to it. Not only are you asked to create great journalism, to think about what's going on, how to cover it and the best way to present it; you're also confronted with trying to make a group of people work effectively together and make it as much of a collective enterprise as possible. Providing leadership is very rewarding, and I got to know a lot of people in a lot of different sections very well. It was hard to leave."
Puddle hopping
Ultimately, however, McCartney returned to Europe in April to become Managing Editor of the Paris-based IHT. McCartney found himself in a situation similar to the one he had been in not long out of college: "I was a little restless again. I figured I'd been in the States for a long time and was ready to go back overseas," he said. "I wanted to expose my son to the culture there and to reconnect with my experience in international news. The great thing about the IHT is that we cover all countries like foreign countries, though with a good deal of U.S. coverage because of our parent papers. It's the most widely circulated international general interest newspaper, so the perspective is global."
After nearly 10 years in the U.S., McCartney found this refreshing. "The American media's commitment to covering international news has been declining steadily since the end of the Cold War. To their credit, most of the elite papers have kept on the same number of international staff, or more. The trend is still pronounced in television, though-there's been a scandalous cutback. The networks are paying the price because they don't have adequate facilities in place to do a good job on this huge story that's happening right now."
McCartney said that the deemphasized role of international reporting hurt the network. "Their attitude seems to have been that foreign news really didn't count for much anymore, that there were plenty of ways just to get a videotape and have someone write copy," he said. "But it's a liability not having your own people on the scene to make sense of what's going on. Here [at the IHT] it's a much smaller operation, but still very satisfying because people are definitely committed. Many of them have worked here for a long time, and they really care about international news." Just like McCartney himself.