Shooter

He's a good shooter." The ultimate compliment. All the awards and professional recognition wither by comparison when a photographer you really admire remarks, "He's a good shooter." You've arrived.

That phrase wasn't in my vocabulary in 1959. In fact, there was not much at all in my vocabulary. I was only in the sixth grade, and at that age, all sorts of things excite the hell out of you--lizards, birds, buttons--you name it. My major interest was fires and fire trucks, not cameras. That would come later. The seed of my future career was planted in 1959, on the day when the woodshed up the street burned down. I saw the smoke, then heard the sirens. By the time I arrived, the old shed was ablaze and local firemen were yelling to one another over the roar of the fire and the water hoses. Suddenly, I noticed a welldressed man standing between the police lines and the fire. He was carrying several cameras. He was a photographer for the Roseburg, Oregon, newspaper, and he clearly had the best job in the world.

He could go to all the fires, and he could cross the police lines and could get as close to the flames as the firemen without getting tired or dirty. And he got to take pictures. That was for me.

•

Working for a wire service is one of the most exciting and competitive jobs in the world. U.P.I.'s motto is "A deadline every minute." The unabashed competition between two major wire services has overwhelmed many young employees and driven others to drink. But I welcomed the challenge when I was hired by U.P.I.'s Los Angeles bureau. U.P.I.'s main competitor is the Associated Press. Employees of the two outfits are locked in permanent journalistic combat, and for me, that battle, at least in the early days, was a personal war as well: I was determined to prove that the A.P. general manager in New York who had declined to hire me some months earlier had made a mistake.

I arrived in Los Angeles just as the U.P.I. photo bureau moved out of the Herald Examiner building because of a strike at that paper. In the next few weeks, we were to work out of darkrooms at Los Angeles International Airport and Dodger Stadium before finally moving into a building on Olympic Boulevard. For someone who had just arrived in that sprawling city, finding one's office was enough of a problem. But this was ridiculous. "Where's the office today?" I'd ask when I called in.

I hadn't been working for U.P.I. more than five months when an escaped murderer from San Quentin named Arthur Glenn Jones nearly terminated my brief career. I was on another assignment at the time, cruising the freeways near Venice, when the radio station I was listening to reported that Jones was holed up in a nearby Manhattan Beach motel, where he was holding the police at bay. I lived in Manhattan Beach at the time--it was the one section of L.A. I could find without trouble--and by racing down the San Diego freeway at over 100 miles an hour, I arrived on the scene in less than ten minutes. Policemen had already blocked off the streets on either side of the motel, and there were men with drawn guns everywhere, including a number who lay prone behind the median.

The Manhattan Rancho Motel was typically Californian, a U-shaped one-story affair with a central parking area. From the central court, you could periodically see Jones as he peeked out from behind a curtain. A detective was standing flat against the wall alongside the window, trying to talk Jones into surrendering. The other officers strongly advised, but did not insist, that my colleagues and I leave the courtyard. The others retreated, and soon Bill Piggott, a CBS cameraman, and I were the only two media people with a clear view of the murderer's window. The murderer had a clear view of us as well.

What neither Piggott nor I knew at the time was that Jones had a large amount of dynamite sitting on his bed in the room and that he had been threatening to blow himself up. We also didn't know that the cops had just decided that, all other efforts having failed, it was time to use tear gas to force Jones from his lair. They began lobbing the gas through a bathroom window at the rear of the building, but Jones picked up the canisters as they dropped inside and tossed them back.

Who fired the first shot I'll never know, but within seconds, a full-scale shoot-out between Jones and the cops erupted. Piggott and I were in the midst of it all, taking pictures, when--"Kaboom!"--the dynamite went off and shingles from the motel's roof began raining down on us. "Christ, he's had it!" was all I could say. But Jones wasn't dead. In fact, as the dust settled, he started to crawl out of the window. Spotting him just as I did, the cops opened up, and for a few seconds, it sounded like Chinatown at New Year's. Jones half rose, clutching his chest, and bullets ripped into him. He fell over into a clump of ivy and crawled across the pavement toward me. He couldn't have been more than 20 feet away. Bullets were hitting him, I was taking pictures and Piggott's camera was rolling as Jones, his clothes smoking from the blast and the bullets, looked up. His eyes caught mine for a brief second--I'm certain I was the last living thing he saw--and then his head rolled to the side.

A figure dressed in a bulky bombdisposal suit approached Jones. He lifted the bullet-riddled body with one hand--looking for explosives, probably--then let it drop when he found none. I was shaken and speechless, and the officer who came over to me was no comfort. He had been the one negotiating with Jones through the window when the fireworks began, and he told me Jones's last words. "See those two guys in the courtyard?" Jones had said. "They better not stand there or I'm going to shoot them." Piggott had been wounded in a similar episode a few years back when a crazy woman with a rifle shot him in the arm. Some guys never learn.

Figuring I'd heard--and seen--enough, I found a pay phone and called the office. I tried to tell them what had happened, but I wasn't making much sense. The guys at the other end told me to get back to the office as fast as I could. On the way in, I found myself listening to a report of the shooting on the car radio and the whole horrific scene returned to me: Jones's life being violently extinguished, the tear gas, the shots, the explosion--and the fact that I had almost gotten killed in the cross fire. I shook so hard I could scarcely drive.

When I reached the office, someone took my film off to be developed. Ernie Schworck, a stocky, silver-haired vet who'd seen it all, grabbed the negatives as soon as they came out of the darkroom. He held them up to the light, shrugged his shoulders and declared, "There's nothing here." My heart sank to my shoes, my life flashed before me... then I looked around the office. Everyone was laughing. I had fallen hard for the oldest joke in Schworck's repertoire. All I could think of at the time was that if those pictures hadn't come out, after all I'd gone through, I'd quit the profession for good.

The pictures had turned out, and they received tremendous play around the world. I got a tear sheet from the Chicago Tribune with my pictures splashed across the page. There was a note attached from Gary Haynes, U.P.I.'s Chicago bureau chief, that read: "The Trib hasn't used this many pix since the Colonel died," referring to the founder of the Tribune, Colonel McCormick himself.

•

In 1970, there was an opening in the U.P.I. Washington bureau. Although I didn't relish getting involved in the political scene, I knew that the assignments would at least be different, and I took the slot.

The Washington bureau chief at the time was George Gaylin, a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man who spent most of his working hours pulling out that hair in sheer frustration. George and I didn't hit it off well at the beginning because of something called the White House rotation system. Five U.P.I. photographers covered the President on a monthly basis. At the end of every fifth month, it would be the first guy's turn again. New York headquarters had insisted that I be put on the rotation immediately, overriding George's schedule. Despite the early hostility that directive caused, George and I eventually became great friends.

I didn't like Washington much in those days, and I particularly didn't like covering the White House. It was, admittedly, glamorous, but only for a while. My first ride with President Nixon on Air Force One was genuinely exciting, and being part of the White House press corps was exhilarating. One gets stars in one's eyes around the President, and members of the press corps are not immune. Like my colleagues, I found myself saying casually, "I'll be out of town with the President next week." It's hard not to get caught up in that scene, especially when you're 23. I did, but not for long.

Being confined by ropes was one of the things I despised about working at the Nixon White House. Just before Thanksgiving, for example, The National Turkey Federation came to present a live bird to the President. Everyone assembled in the Rose Garden for the presentation: They stood behind their heavily drugged bird while the press lined up behind heavy velvet ropes as the President came into view. The doped-up bird became completely alert as soon as it spotted Nixon. It said, "Gobble! Gobble!" spread its huge wings and whacked the Chief of State right on the nose. He cringed, I shot, and that photo went across the country on U.P.I. wires. The White House staff fumed, insisting it was trick photography. And all because the First Bird had taken a liking to the First Man.

When the White House complained about my turkey shot, I assured them that I'd gladly trade 100 pictures like it for one good, substantive photograph of the President actually doing something important--working on a speech, conferring with Henry Kissinger, anything--as long as it didn't occur under the glare of television lights and wasn't a situation contrived for the benefit of photographers. Just slip me into the Oval Office for a couple of minutes, I suggested. No dice. I pleaded with Nixon's Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, and members of his staff on many occasions, but to no avail. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had Press Secretaries who permitted exclusive photo sessions all the time. Nixon, through Ziegler, did not--another instance of Nixon's abiding mistrust of the press.

After a year in Washington, I was ready to hit the road again. "Send me to Vietnam," I suggested to U.P.I. executive Charlie McCarty in 1971. A year earlier, U.P.I. had offered me the Vietnam assignment, but I hadn't felt ready for it. Now I did. I wanted to go. The biggest story of the decade was Vietnam, and I didn't want to miss it. My colleagues in the press corps thought I was crazy. Photographers usually go to Vietnam in hopes of getting a plush assignment like the White House when they get back, not the reverse. But I believed then, as I do now, that any photographer who had a chance to go to Vietnam and didn't made a big mistake. The only excuse that made sense to me was fear; some guys said, "You couldn't get me near the place." At least they were honest about it.

As I traded in my pinstripes for fatigues, I began to question the wisdom of my decision. I was so tense and edgy that I could hardly eat, especially after word flashed across the wires that four photographers had been killed when their helicopter was shot down by antiaircraft fire in Laos. Larry Burrows of Life was one of them. The others were Henri Huet of A.P., Kent Potter of U.P.I. and Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek. That did it. I couldn't keep anything but bourbon down for a week.

•

Chopper stories. Everybody in Vietnam had dozens of them. Every now and then, the military would assign a helicopter to take the press to big operations, but normally you'd hang out at an airport or air base, give the air controller a few beers and he'd flag down a passing plane or chopper for you. It was the only way to get around.

One day, U.P.I. correspondent Ken Braddick and I were hitching a ride from Phu Bai up to Quang Tri. Ken is an Australian who hates to fly. That day, a Jet Ranger helicopter landed, and after we'd settled into the back seats and tightened our belts, I wanted to get out. The pilot had something written on his helmet that led me to believe nothing was sacred to him. It said, Fuck mom. My assessment proved to be correct, because the next 20 minutes provided Ken and me with the wildest ride since Bonnie and Clyde made one of their getaways.

The Jet Rangers were one of the fastest choppers in use in Vietnam. Because they were highly maneuverable, they were normally used for ferrying generals around. And because they were highly maneuverable, they tempted pilots to show me, time and again, "what this little baby can do."

Undeterred by Ken's lack of enthusiasm, our pilot started off by chasing a truck up Highway One. The poor bastard driving that rig didn't have any idea we were in back of him until he happened to look in the rearview mirror and discovered that there was a helicopter on his tail. He almost drove off the road. By that time, the pilot, who sported a huge, red handlebar mustache, was shrieking with maniacal laughter. He kept looking back at us, wondering how we liked the ride. He didn't seem to be watching where he was going, but Ken was, and he let out a scream when it seemed we were about to slam into a tree head on. The pilot veered sharply to the right, but not before nicking off a few leaves.

Our close shave did not seem to have any impact on our pilot. His next move was to pull back hard on the stick and before we knew it, we were at 10,000 feet. Our stomachs, however, were still following that truck up Highway One. As (continued on page 166)Shooter(continued from page 160) a result, it was two badly shaking correspondents who climbed out of that machine in Quang Tri. We were told that it was dangerous to drive Highway One because of the V.C., but that's precisely how we went back to Phu Bai.

A dead person is scarcely an uncommon sight in a war zone. I spotted my first one as we were driving back to Phu Bai. He lay face up just off to the side of the road, and I shuddered involuntarily as we drove by. I soon learned that what I'd seen was standard practice where Viet Cong casualties were concerned. It is very important to the Vietnamese that the body be buried, so that its spirit won't wander aimlessly for eternity. Leaving a body out was supposed to scare the V.C., but I couldn't see that it did. It didn't bother the 200-odd V.C. who attacked a command post in the Central Highlands where I first admitted that I, too, could be killed. Until then, I'd been fairly detached from that possibility. I was bunked in with some Air Force guys who were running a radio beacon for B-52s. When the first flare went up about 3:30 A.M., several black-clad V.C. had nearly made it to the first perimeter.

Incoming mortar rounds were exploding loudly throughout the compound, so the airmen and I crouched behind sandbags in the innermost perimeter. The noise of the shooting was deafening. (I found myself thinking again that the guy who figures out how to photograph sound is going to become a rich man.) "Take this," said one of the airmen as he shoved an M-79 grenade launcher into my hands.

"Hey, I'm a noncombatant," I blurted out.

"Tell that to the V.C.," he suggested. I never had to use the grenade launcher, since the attack subsided almost as suddenly as it had begun, but I couldn't take any pictures; either. It was much too dark.

"Always try to leave before nightfall," a friend of mine had repeatedly cautioned. Now I knew what he meant. What seemed like years later, the sun finally came up. We could see more than 50 dead V.C., many with live explosives strapped to their bodies.

I was jumpy as hell all that day, and by afternoon, I had decided to head to a new locale. As I sat with a couple of other fellows at the edge of a trench near the landing pad, waiting for a chopper, a soldier began to heckle me. "Hey, newby," he said, "they're not going to shoot you." The words hadn't been out of his mouth two seconds when the first 122mm rocket came in. (Everybody tries to tell you what a 122mm sounds like. To my ears, they sound like bacon sizzling on a frying pan just before they impact. But have no fear--you'd know the sound if you heard it.) The rocket took off the top of the water tower 50 feet away, but I didn't see it hit. I was lying face down in the trench. The jokester was under a truck.

"It's one hell of a time to change the oil!" I shouted at him when he poked his head up.

•

Every now and then, we would feel a need for a break in the action, and on such occasions, many of us headed for Australia. There everyone spoke my language, and there people seemed genuinely anxious to make me feel right at home. Among them was Pat Burgess, a columnist for one of the big papers in Sydney, who showed me that town. We met for a drink in the Invicta Pub near his office, and during our conversation, Burgess said he'd introduce me to some of the local talent. His paper ran daily photographs of beautiful Australian girls in bathing suits, and I wanted to meet one of them. Everything was all set, and I was ecstatic until I returned to my hotel. There I found waiting for me not a beautiful blonde but a cable. Its three words--"Return to saigon"--ruined my day. The North Vietnamese, it seemed, had begun pouring across the DMZ into Quang Tri Province.

This was the story I'd been gearing up for, and I headed back on the first plane. It was no accident that U.P.I. provided superior coverage of the onslaught. For one thing, I had instituted a new policy when I became bureau chief, which was to pay all photographers the same rates whether they were Asians or Westerners. That inspired many Asian photographers working for the competition to come over to U.P.I. In addition, for months I had been buying pictures from stringers, even when we didn't really need their photographs. My policy was put to the test when the North Vietnamese attacked early in 1972. It worked. The North Vietnamese were coming, and we were ready for them. For eight successive days, the work of U.P.I. photographers in Vietnam appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and in scores of other papers as well.

Virtually every time a shot was fired anywhere in the country, we had a staffer or a stringer on the spot with his camera. U.P.I. signed up several new clients on the strength of our coverage of the Easter offensive, and it was clear that we were winning the journalistic war with A.P. There was a real sense of excitement and esprit de corps in the Saigon bureau. Photographers would unhesitatingly take assignments from me because they knew I'd been through it. In fact, I was still going through it. I got out into the field to shoot every other week, leaving Jeff Taylor to run the bureau in my absence.

During one of the weeks I was in Saigon, U.P.I. news-bureau chief Bert Okuley woke me at four A.M. "You'd better come down and have a look at this message," he said. His voice was grave.

Oh, Christ, I thought. Something's gone wrong and New York hasn't gotten the pictures from Quang Tri. I'd been up most of the night developing Ennio Iaccobucci's film from that city. He had sensational exclusive photos of the final evacuation, shot mere hours before Quang Tri was overrun by the North Vietnamese. I assumed that something had gone wrong with the transmission of the pictures, sent via radio wave to New York, and the main office was bitching.

I ran down the stairs from my apartment and rushed into Okuley's office. "Look at this," he said, handing me a sheet of paper torn from the wire machine. It read: "01170 Saigon--Kennerly has won pulitzer for feature photography, which brings congrats from all here. Now need effort some quotes from him and pinpoint his location when advised for sidebar story. Brannon/nx cables."

I was dumfounded. I had won the highest award a photojournalist can receive--and I hadn't even known that I'd been nominated. I thought maybe there had been some kind of mistake. We sent a message to New York, asking for clarification: "02054 Exhsg Brannon's 01170 are you Kidding? If so it isn't much of a Joke. Is there a pulitzer awarded to a unipress photog and is it Kennerly? okuley." Whereupon the wire machine broke down. For over three hours, we were cut off from the world. I hadn't had a cigarette for better than two months, but in those three hours I started again.

Many cigarettes later, the wire machine finally sprang back to life: "01181 okuleys 02054 no kidding and can you reach kennerly for sudden comment need to know where he was when he got the news. wood/nx cables."

The Pulitzer Prize is the premier award in the news business, something all photographers and writers dream of winning. Without my knowledge, Larry (continued on page 230)Shooter(continued from page 166) Desantis, U.P.I.'s picture editor, had submitted a portfolio of pictures I'd taken in Vietnam, India and Cambodia to the Pulitzer committee. The Pulitzer citation read: "For an outstanding example of feature photography, awarded to David Hume Kennerly of United Press International for his dramatic pictures of the Vietnam War in 1971." They also noted, "He specializes in pictures that capture the loneliness and desolation of war."

•

After a couple of more years of covering combat, I decided it was time for a change of scenery and moved back to Washington, D.C. One of my first assignments was to cover the man who might possibly replace resigned Vice-President Spiro Agnew.

I'd never met Gerald R. Ford, but that morning the House Minority Leader granted me a few minutes to take his picture in his Capitol Hill office. "You're wasting your time," he said with a grin.

"At least you'll have a portrait to hang on your wall," I told him.

I spent only five minutes with Ford, posing him near the window, where the light was good, and then departed for the office.

After shipping the film to New York, I waited anxiously for the announcement. President Nixon's choice, he informed the dignitaries in the East Room of the White House, was Minority Leader Ford. Ford was wrong--I hadn't been wasting my time. And I had my first Time cover.

The next chance I had to talk with Ford was on a plane heading for the West Coast. "Looks like we both made it," I said with a smile.

"It's my first time on the cover, too," he pointed out, and I found myself struck by how unlike Agnew this man was. Here I was, actually sitting with the Vice-President-designate in his Air Force jet. I no longer had to jump out of bushes to get my pictures. Ford would be a relief--for me and for the country.

One of the stops on Ford's previously scheduled West Coast itinerary was my home state of Oregon. It was going to be great fun for me, returning home in such style, but I was worried about Ford. He kept referring to the state as "Oragawn," just as virtually everyone born east of the Great Divide does. And if there is anything Oregonians hate more than Californians, it is people who mispronounce the name of their state. "If you want to score points with the locals, pronounce it 'Orygun,' " I told him.

Later, when Ford reached the point in his speech where he said, "It's good to be here in"--he shot me a sly and mischievous glance--"Orygun."

"Did I get it right, Kennerly?" he asked with a grin as we reboarded his plane.

"Spoken like a true native," I assured him.

My primary assignment in those days soon became the Fords. Time magazine wanted an extensive layout on the family that could be run when he was sworn in as Vice-President. Without Betty Ford's help, I never would have been able to complete my job. There are some people in this world you like right off the bat, and Mrs. Ford is one of them. I strongly suspect the reason is that she likes people; her affection is infectious. For instance, one of our first encounters occurred on a Sunday morning. I was supposed to arrive at their home early to take some pictures for the spread Time was planning. Instead, I called to say I'd be a bit late (too much partying the night before). Although I didn't say so, my voice must have sounded like it, for when I finally arrived, Mrs. Ford was standing at the door, waiting for me. In her hand was a cold beer. "Drink this. You'll feel better," she said. She then invited me to share Sunday breakfast with the family.

Sunday was the only day I could get the two senior Fords together for the picture we'd planned to be shot on the grounds of their church, which was only a few blocks from their home. It was autumn and the trees were turning brilliant colors. The Fords were dressed casually, and as they walked quietly down the street, their affection for each other was as obvious as their enjoyment of that moment of serenity.

The Ford family rarely assembled in one place, except at Christmas, when they traditionally went skiing at Vail, Colorado. Mr. Ford believed in taking that vacation, and after he was sworn in as Vice-President, he maintained the old tradition. That meant that I went to Colorado as well. I'd never been skiing before, so when we got to Vail, I gazed up at the snow-covered slopes with great trepidation. It was clear to me that I couldn't really do my job properly if the Vice-President went up the mountain and I stayed below, so I was determined to take a crash course in skiing. Crash is exactly what it turned out to be, and I was plenty sore after the first couple of days. As the Vice-President was overheard to say, "Kennerly skis with ten percent talent and 90 percent intestinal fortitude."

I never did get to the point where I could ski backward and shoot pictures, but I was able to negotiate the slopes without serious injury, which for me was a major accomplishment. To repay the Fords for their hospitality, I threw a dinner party at a Japanese restaurant for them while we were in Vail. There were 14 of us at the table, and after dinner, the management sent over a huge tray of fortune cookies. Everyone took one, including Mr. Ford. He opened his, studied it a moment and slapped it down on the table, covering it with his hand. Mrs. Stan Parris, wife of the Congressman and friend of the Fords, was sitting next to the Vice-President. It was she who read the message aloud to the gathering: "You will undergo a change of residence in the near future." It was the first time in my memory that a fortune cookie had ever been truly prophetic.

The next dinner of mine that the Fords attended was of my own making. It was a small gathering at my house in Georgetown to celebrate my 27th birthday. When Vice-President and Mrs. Ford showed up, Mr. Ford had a huge package wrapped in gold tucked under his arm. Inside was a case of Coors beer, the first I'd seen since Vail. Having the Vice-President of the United States over to dinner is a memorable event, particularly if you're a bachelor living alone. I had done the cooking myself, with a great deal of able support from my mother, who was one of the guests. I had two big pans of beef Stroganoff simmering in the small kitchen, and the other two burners were also in use. The already hectic situation wasn't helped any by the Secret Service agent watching the proceedings. He wasn't there to make certain I didn't poison the Veep--he was watching the rear entrance of my house--but the effect was the same. Every now and then, I'd offer him a taste of the food just to get another opinion, and he agreed it wasn't a bad effort. I somehow managed to serve the whole dinner without dropping anything into anyone's lap, and my mother received a great many compliments on the food. No one would believe I'd had anything to do with it.

When my friend and colleague Dirck Halstead wasn't in town, Time assigned me to cover the White House. Things at the Executive Mansion had gotten worse for photographers since my return from overseas. If the story itself hadn't been so good, I don't think I could have put up with it. On one occasion, the metallic drone of the loud-speaker in the press room announced a "photo opportunity" in the Oval Office: Energy Chief William Simon was conferring with the President.

I hadn't seen Nixon in over a month, and I was shocked at his appearance. He looked tired and haggard. After taking the obligatory shot of the two men across the desk from each other, I took seven tight frames of Nixon's face with a small telephoto lens. The following week, Time ran one of the close-ups of the embattled President. One of his dark-ringed eyes drooped and the right side of his face appeared to sag. The White House reacted violently to my photo, labeling it "unfair," and the U.P.I. vice-president for news pictures suggested in a letter to all U.P.I. clients that my photo was "out of context."

Now my integrity was at stake. Those incidents were serious, and I felt obliged to defend not only my taking of the picture but also Time's excellent use of the image. In a private cable to picture editor John Durniak, I pointed out that the light in the office was exactly the same as at every other time I had been there, and that there was nothing unusual about the expression on Nixon's face, or anything that would cause any distortion. In short, the picture was a true representation of how Nixon looked at the time.

In the U.P.I. executive's letter, he'd said, "If any one of our photographers makes 30 different views of the President, and one of those views makes him look significantly different than the 29, the rule of thumb is not to use it." The implication was that I'd gotten one shot that made Nixon look unusually bad; the truth was that the other frames actually made him look worse.

The letter also said that the U.P.I. executive had "examined more than 100 U.P.I. pictures taken over the past two months, and they show no discernible change in his appearance." That led Halstead to comment, in a separate note to Durniak, that "it can only be interpreted as an indictment of the lack of perception of either U.P.I.'s photographers or editors." Halstead went on to say that U.P.I. photographers have to get their shots of such a meeting in the less than 60 seconds afforded photographers in the Oval Office, and they don't have the luxury of being able to concentrate on Nixon the man. A year later, I was told by General Alexander Haig, who had been Nixon's chief of staff at the time--and one of the few who knew the true story--that the day I took the picture, Nixon hadn't slept well for three days. He'd been reviewing the White House tapes or transcripts containing the infamous 18-minute gap.

•

"Our long national nightmare is over." With those words, President Gerald R. Ford announced the start of a new era, one with which I would be intimately associated.

After the swearing-in ceremony, Mrs. Ford invited me to their home in Alexandria. They were having a small dinner for some of their personal friends that night, and I knew there would be dozens of my colleagues outside the Fords' home when I arrived. I didn't want them to know I was going to be taking pictures--they would have objected to the show of favoritism--so I got one of Ford's Navy stewards to help me out. He met me in the parking lot of a school near the Fords' home and we put all my cameras in a cardboard box. Then he walked by the assembled press with the carton, which I'm sure they thought was more food. And I entered without my cameras, just like any other invited guest.

I got some pictures of the toasts being made to the new President and made one of my own with a glass of champagne. During the buffet supper, the President asked me if I would mind staying after the other guests left. When, in time, they did, President and Mrs. Ford and I sat down together in their living room. We spent some time discussing the day's events, and then he asked me what I'd like to do if I were to go to work for him. Until that moment, we'd never talked about that possibility, and, to be quite frank, I found the whole idea of Ford's wanting to discuss a job for me on the same day that he became President of the United States almost surreal. I seized the opportunity, however, and told Ford that to produce a true photographic document of his Presidency, I would have to have unlimited access to his meetings. He allowed as how the idea had merit and then suggested we go into the den to watch the 11-o'clock news, which would have coverage of his swearing-in ceremony. The television in that room wasn't working, so we went upstairs to their bedroom to watch. Mrs. Ford sat in a chair; he, on the edge of the bed. Susan came in and lay down near her father.

I could have pinched myself. Not only was I sitting with the man whose image was being relayed around the world as he was sworn in as President but also that same man was talking about a job for me on terms that satisfied both of us. "Dave," he said to me as the broadcast ended and I was preparing to leave, "if you come to work for me, won't it be taken badly by your colleagues? I mean, after what's happened the last few years and all." Unreal. The President, with all the problems he had to face, was worrying about me.

The next day, I was sitting in the Time office when the phone rang. "It's the President for you," said the shaken operator.

"How would you like a job?" he asked.

"When do you want me to start?" was all I could think to say.

"Get over here right away," he responded. "We can't have you wasting the taxpayers' money by working only half a day." Slamming the phone down after Ford had hung up, I jumped up and yelled to my best friend, Dave Burnett, "I got it!" And, blue jeans and all, I charged across Lafayette Square to the White House. After I showed my press pass, someone from the photo office came to take me to the press room to look over my new digs.

At 4:05 that afternoon, I got an urgent call from Nell Yates, the President's receptionist. I was expected in the Oval Office immediately. In fact, the President had been expecting me at four P.M. sharp, but nobody had bothered to tell me of the appointment. Off to a great start: Late for my first meeting, I thought as I ran up the stairs from my basement office. But, as it turned out, the President just wanted to say hello, and after taking a few pictures, I left.

Over the next few weeks, I had the walls to a White House office adjoining mine knocked down and enlarged the available staff space to three times its original size. In doing so, we acquired--and I took over--a nice wood-paneled office that had once been the White House vault. Scouting around for furniture in the attic of the Old Executive Office Building across the street, I found a rocking chair that White House historians told me had once belonged to President Kennedy. I temporarily took it over, too. Then, instead of a regular rectangular desk, I chose a round table. I added table lamps and a striped couch, got rid of the more formal straight backed chairs, and suddenly the place looked like home. A good thing, too, for I was spending more time there than in my Georgetown house.

My new telephone had a silver handle that read, Robert Haldeman, given to me by someone who had worked for him. It also had several buttons connecting me to the White House operator and to various other staffers. I felt I was flying a jet whenever a bunch of calls came in at once. On my walls hung signed photos and other memorabilia. In back of me on a table was a tank full of fish, a gift from Jack Ford. My favorite was an ugly Oscar named Zarkov, who ate only live goldfish. It never occurred to me that his eating habits would create trouble, since big fish eat little ones every day. But when someone from the National Enquirer did a very descriptive piece about the poor little goldfish that were being torn to bits and devoured by big, mean Zarkov, I started getting mail from goldfish lovers around the country. One was addressed to: "David Kennerly, Barbarian, The White House." They went downhill from there.

On top of my book cabinet was a small box known as a "family locator." Secretary of State Kissinger, Vice-President Rockefeller and all members of the Ford family were hooked into this system, and every time one of them changed locations, the locator beeped and their new destination appeared in orange letters on a tiny screen. The box was devised by the Secret Service to keep track of everyone's whereabouts, but it was also immensely useful to me. My sanctum was 50 paces from the front door of the Oval Office, and there was a direct line between the two. If an unscheduled guest showed up to see the President or if Ford wanted a photograph, Nell would pick up the hotline that ran directly from her desk to my office. Then I or one of the other photographers would bound up to the Oval Office in less than 15 seconds.

The President had a little buzzer that he could sound when he wanted his assistant, Terry O'Donnell, to come into the office. Next to that buzzer was a panic button, which summoned the Secret Service if something untoward happened in the Oval Office. During the first week the President was in office, he accidentally hit the wrong button while I was with him. All three doors to the Oval Office flew open simultaneously and agents charged in from all sides--scaring the hell out of both me and the President, the only people there at the time. At least they didn't draw their guns.

One day some weeks later, I was standing in Nell's office when the President succeeded in hitting the right button and got Terry, who entered, and found the President talking to Kissinger. Kissinger asked Terry to get Helmut Sonnenfeldt, one of his aides, on the phone. Terry returned to Nell's office to call Sonnenfeldt at the State Department. For some reason, he had trouble getting through, and after a brief delay, the door to the Oval Office burst open and Kissinger strode out.

"Where is he?" Kissinger demanded.

"We are having a problem reaching him," Terry replied.

"I want him here," Kissinger said, jabbing his finger in 30 directions.

Terry interpreted that to mean that the Secretary wanted Sonnenfeldt physically present. When he finally did get hold of Sonnenfeldt, he told him to get to the White House as fast as possible.

Once again, Kissinger came charging out of the Oval Office.

"Where is he?" he again asked, even more impatiently than before.

"He's on his way here," Terry said.

"What! I don't want him here," Kissinger said, pointing to the room in general. "I want him here," he said, pointing to the phone. O'Donnell gestured helplessly. Kissinger looked at him with complete disdain and said, "Then get me one of my idiots."

•

Things looked bad for Vietnam. Quang Tri had fallen to the advancing North Vietnamese army, and it looked like the country was coming apart at the seams. I wanted to go back. The President liked the idea. "OK, Dave," said President Ford, "you can accompany General Weyand. When you return, I'd also like your view of what's happening."

When I arrived in Saigon, it was obvious to me that the end was at hand. Vietnamese friends were begging me to take their children with me when I left the country. They had lost all hope.

I traveled the length of Vietnam, photographing refugees fleeing the advancing Communists, and even made a side trip to Cambodia to check out the situation there. In Phnom Penh, I ran into my old friend Matt Franjola, the A.P. bureau chief there. He had just written the latest Sean Flynn story, based on an interview with a Khmer Rouge political commissar who had defected to the government. The official had told Matt that he personally saw Flynn killed by the injection of a lethal drug at a field hospital a year after his capture. The order, the commissar had told Matt, came from a higher command. When Franjola showed the defector a number of pictures of missing journalists, the Khmer Rouge operative immediately picked out Flynn's. As usual, there was no way of verifying the story, but Matt observed that the commissar didn't know who Flynn's famous father was and, as far as Matt knew, he had no reason to lie.

After two weeks of watching the rapid disintegration of Vietnam, I was totally convinced it was a wrap for South Vietnam. All that remained for me now was to convince the President that the end was in sight, in the best way I knew--through my photographs. General Weyand and his staff were preparing their report. I was formulating my own. President Ford was in Palm Springs, so that's where Weyand's plane landed. Ford wasn't home when we arrived, but Mrs. Ford was. She was sitting by the swimming pool; when I walked out, she immediately leaped up, threw her arms around me and gave me a kiss. "We got a report that they'd shot at you, David, and we were so worried," she said. I assured her I was all right but that Vietnam wasn't. We talked for a time and then I excused myself to ship my film on to Washington for processing. I was eager to deliver my photographic report on Vietnam to the President, and as soon as my developed pictures arrived in Palm Springs late the next afternoon, I showed them to him.

"This is what's going on," I said as he slowly studied each photograph. He sadly shook his head, first at the pictures of ships filled with refugees from Da Nang, then at the buses crammed with fleeing villagers in Nha Trang, and finally at the dying civilians in Phnom Penh. "Mr. President," I said in my typically diplomatic style, "Vietnam has no more than a month left; anyone who tells you different is bullshitting." He was devastated.

It may have been the first time in history that an American President had ever been shown the human side of was almost as it was happening. It was one thing to read the weekly body count and the other statistics, and quite another to see those bodies before your eyes. My stark, black-and-white photographs of refugees and civilian casualties soon replaced the color prints of dancers, state visits and similar events that hung in the corridors of the West Wing. My pictures were everywhere you turned, even in the hallway leading to the staff dining room, and many people reportedly couldn't eat after seeing them. (I only wish my pictures had been hung in the White House when the war began, rather than as it ended.) I began to receive complaints about those grim pictures and decided that the President should decide whether they stayed up or not. "Leave them up," he said emphatically. "Everyone should know what's going on over there."

Less than two weeks after the evacuation of Vietnam, the President faced another international crisis: A U. S. cargo ship, the Mayaguez, was captured by Cambodians. Initially, the Administration tried to secure the release of the crew through diplomatic channels, sending messages through the Chinese to the Cambodians. There was no reply, however, and there was some doubt that anyone, including the Chinese, really knew who was running Cambodia at the time. The President knew one thing for certain--he had to get the crew back. The National Security Council was called into emergency session and contingency plans were presented to the President, ranging from massive B-52 strikes against Cambodia to more localized military operations. Throughout the ensuing debate, I shot photographs of the Council in the Cabinet Room. Around the table were the nation's heavies: the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, the Chief of Naval Operations and the Deputy Secretaries of State and Defense.

I had never before spoken out in a Presidential meeting, but this time I couldn't contain myself. I was almost certainly the only person in the room who had been in Cambodia. The discussion centered on the problem of releasing the captured ship, and each proposed solution assumed the existence of a viable government in Phnom Penh, one that would cave in under military pressure. They were talking about darkening the skies above Cambodia with B-52s flying wing to wing, the very sight of which would bring the Khmer Rouge to their knees. "Has it occurred to anyone," I asked the startled group, "that this whole thing may have been the act of one local commander taking matters into his own hands and seizing the ship?"

The President did not choose to exercise his strongest option, the use of the B-52s. They never took off from Guam. Instead, Navy fighters from a nearby aircraft carrier made an air strike around Kom Pong Som and the Marines landed on a small island where the seamen were thought to be held. Ford also ordered jet fighters to blow some Cambodian patrol vessels out of the water. It was that act, Captain Miller of the Mayaguez later said, that saved him and his crew. I photographed the President jubilantly announcing to his top aides that the crew had been released. You could almost see the weight of the past three days lift from his shoulders as he spoke.

•

One of the responsibilities of the President, in his role as a world leader, is to visit other heads of state. He travels on Air Force One, a beautiful blue-and-silver Boeing 707. Inside, the big jet is plush and functional. The President has his own cabin-office and he travels with a full staff, including Secret Service, press aides, communications experts, military aides, advance men, secretaries and his personal physician. The only thing that changes is the scenery.

Air Force One has the best communications setup in the world, and I occasionally used it for my own purposes. If you were to find yourself on the receiving end of one of my calls, a voice would say, "This is the White House signal operator. I have a call for you from Mr. Kennerly on Air Force One. Please remember that these calls may be monitored, so don't discuss classified information. Mr. Kennerly's code name is Hot Shot. Please use that when talking to him. Go ahead." By this time, the party I was calling would be slightly disconcerted, and when my voice crackled on the line, the first question was usually, "Where are you, Hot Shot?"

These state visits are superficial, largely ceremonial affairs that transport the Chief Executive and his entourage--including, of course, his chief photographer--through countries so fast that you sometimes wonder if you've really been there. Scheduling is so tight that those who plan the President's itinerary have to build in a few minutes during the day when the President can go to the bathroom. This is called "personal time."

On all previous foreign assignments, I'd had an opportunity to photograph everything that was going on. Not so on a Presidential trip, where the man himself was my only subject. On one of those outings, there was no way to take in the local atmosphere or the local culture, and certainly no way to get any outside pictures. Unlike the intense experience of war, such trips provided little more than a break in White House routine. They did, however, make for occasional excitement. The odd, amusing incidents I prefer to describe the way they happened: quickly.

Austria: The President's most spectacular arrival, Welcome to Salzburg, Mr. President, read the signs at the bottom of the ramp, but Ford had little chance to read them, since he tripped and fell down the stairs. It seems that the day before our arrival, the ramp that had been designated for the President's aircraft was taken to the other side of the field. In its place was substituted a ramp that had no antiskid material on the stairs. It was raining when we landed, and a steward handed the President an umbrella as he stepped out of Air Force One. He held it in the air with one hand and guided Mrs. Ford with the other. Then his foot caught on a stair tread and one of his heels came off. When he pitched forward, Mrs. Ford grabbed the umbrella and moved gracefully aside, like a matador passing a bull, as the President hurtled by. He wasn't hurt, but he was frightfully embarrassed. Typically, Ford held no grudge against the photographers who took pictures of his fall. "They were just doing their job, and they would have been fired if they'd missed it," he said later.

The Vatican: Classified cables had been exchanged by the White House and the Pope's aides concerning my attire for this trip. The Vatican was somewhat concerned about "that wild, bearded photographer the President will have with him." Someone in Rome had apparently read a press clip describing me as frightfully irreverent. I never wore a tie, it said, and preferred blue jeans while working at the White House. The Vatican requested that I wear a dark suit, white shirt and tie when meeting His Holiness, Pope Paul VI. Ford's advance staff assured them that I would be dressed correctly for the occasion.

To get into the Papal library, where the Pope was waiting, we had to pass under numerous arches and down several long corridors. I walked ahead of the President down those quiet hallways where the only sound was the slap of leather soles stepping on cold marble. Everyone spoke in whispers, if he spoke at all. In order to position myself for a picture of the Pope greeting the President, I entered the library first. His Holiness was expecting a President, not a Presidential photographer, even one in a dark suit and tie. His hands were held out in greeting, but he quickly drew them back when he saw me and my camera.

Poland: A big motorcade was arranged to greet President Ford on his arrival in Poland in July of 1975. Arrangements are usually made for photo trucks to carry the photographers on such occasions. In this case, however, the Polish government had arranged for only two jeeps, one for the Polish photographers and one for the Americans. The motorcade got no more than 100 yards out of the airport when the American jeep stalled. We pulled off to the side of the road and Ford, passing by in his car, gave us a quizzical look. We immediately jumped out of the disabled jeep and started flagging down other cars in the motorcade. Six of us, myself included, piled into a car that looked like a Checker cab but was actually a Russian-made car of some kind.

Every time the motorcade slowed down, we'd make a mad dash toward the front, our objective being the Polish photo jeep. We were well back in the motorcade at the time, and although I ran as fast as I could toward the President's car, before I could reach it, his car started up again. I was only three or four cars from the front of the motorcade, and I had to do something fast or once again find myself stranded.

There was a big car near the front with only one lady in the back, so I motioned to her and she waved me inside. I could scarcely talk, I was so winded, but I did manage to introduce myself. Her English wasn't good, but she managed to introduce herself: "I'm Mrs. Piotr Jaroszewicz," she said, "and I'd like you to meet my husband, the Prime Minister." She pointed to the man sitting next to the driver. Christ, I thought, now I'm in for it. I glanced out the rear window and, sure enough, there was a car full of Polish security agents behind us, and they were madder than hell.

When the motorcade slowed down again, I thanked Mrs. Jaroszewicz for the ride and hightailed it for the front of the motorcade. This time I made it to the Polish photographers' jeep and they pulled me aboard.

Finland: On July 29, 1975, the President and 30 other heads of state attended the Helsinki Conference. It was there that I got one of the best shots ever of one of my favorite subjects, General Secretary Brezhnev. In fact, I liked one so much I later sent it to Moscow for Brezhnev to autograph. The photo showed the General Secretary, a cigarette in one hand, glancing slyly out of the corner of his eye. General Brent Scowcroft, who had dealt extensively with the Russian leader, told me it captured his personality perfectly. My courier for this errand was Peter Rodman of Kissinger's staff, and Rodman presented the print to Brezhnev during a break in one of the General Secretary's meetings with the Secretary of State. The Russian leader looked at my photograph for a couple of minutes. He then walked out of the room with the picture and returned shortly, handing Rodman a photo. "I think you'll like this one better," he said. The picture, which he had signed, was a very formal portrait taken several years before. It looked as if it had been hastily removed from a frame in the next room. Brezhnev didn't like my shot but didn't bother to give it back to Peter.

During the Helsinki Conference, I took more pictures of the Soviet leader. His security force was immense: Standing rigidly against the wall, within a step or two of where Brezhnev was sitting with other heads of state, were no fewer than 14 K.G.B. guards, each one of whom looked mean enough to eat hand grenades. Just to the right of those huskies sat a well-dressed man who looked for all the world like a young businessman attending a convention. He was a U. S. Secret Service agent.

Romania: On August second and third, the President took a train ride through the land where Count Dracula is supposed to have lived. The count wasn't in, but our whistle stop did give Terry O'Donnell an opportunity to drop his favorite line from Mel Brooks's movie Young Frankenstein: "Pardon me, boys, is this the Transylvania Station?" We visited an old castle that had been built exclusively of wood in the 19th Century; at any moment, I expected some sort of evil presence to step from the shadows. O'Donnell and I understood the original plans had included many secret passageways and bedrooms where the king kept his mistresses. We endeavored to find the hidden passages by looking into every bookcase and trying to locate hidden latches under railings. Alas, the only thing we found was some dried gum.

We also got our hands on a bottle of local brew that had been presented to the President by some officials. Knowing that the Secret Service would never allow Ford to touch it--never let the President eat or drink any food gifts--we drained the whole jug ourselves. For a while afterward, I kept a wary eye on O'Donnell to make sure he wasn't growing fangs.

Yugoslavia: At this point, it was the last of a five-country trip and the President was tired. He'd had one reception too many, and this one almost caused him great embarrassment. He had asked for a few minutes alone to review his notes before meeting President Tito, and was sitting in a chair in the middle of a huge room to which only members of his staff had access. There was a set of giant sliding doors that led to the area where his conference was going to be held, and suddenly those doors opened and President Tito--who was not used to waiting for anyone--entered with the whole Yugoslav delegation and made straight for the President's chair. To his horror, O'Donnell, who was responsible for keeping the President on schedule, noticed that he wasn't getting up to greet Tito. He was sound asleep, the notes for his speech in his hand. Just before Tito reached his chair, an alarm must have sounded in Ford's head; he stood up and stretched out his hand. Terry pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.

People's Republic of China: I had been thwarted in 1972 in my attempt to photograph Chairman Mao, but I thought perhaps my new status as the President's photographer would impress the Chinese, and I figured I might have a chance of seeing the legendary Chinese leader.

We landed in Peking and were greeted not by Mao but by Teng Hsiao-ping, then China's Lilliputian vice-premier.

During his meeting with Ford, Teng, who is smaller than Napoleon, sat opposite the President in a large, overstuffed chair, his feet barely touching the floor, and chain-smoking. He also wore white socks.

The Chinese were very secretive about when the President would meet with Mao. They scheduled no appointment and traditionally came only at the last minute to collect whoever was to have an audience with the aging Chairman. When Ford's time arrived, I vowed to be in the motorcade that went to Mao's residence and tried everything I could think of to get on the official list. Kissinger also tried on my behalf, but he didn't offer me much hope. As the motorcade began to assemble, we were told that only those who were on the list could get into the cars. I was on no list, but I got into a car, anyway. The Chinese promptly threw me out. So much for détente. My final chance to see Mao, much less take his picture, was gone. It was a bitter disappointment. Dick Keiser, the head of the President's Secret Service detail, told me that even his men were stopped at the gate of Mao's house, and only the official party was permitted. "For all we know, they could substitute another man for the President," he said, a remark designed to get your sci-fi juices flowing.

•

Having a job at the White House can be likened to working in a mine field--one wrong step and you get blown to high heavens. It almost happened to me during Ford's 1976 primary campaign battle with Ronald Reagan. Something I had done privately threatened to become public in a way that might possibly have cost the President the nomination. Two months after I'd started the job in the White House, my dentist asked me if I could do a favor for one of his other patients. The patient, a secretary for Congressman Wayne Hays, was Elizabeth Ray. She wanted some pictures for her modeling portfolio. I shot the pictures, some seminude, at my home. That was at least a year before the revelations about Ray and her Congressman created a sensation and led to Hays's leaving Congress. I'd forgotten all about the session until I picked up a paper and saw her name. My first reaction on seeing the story was, Hey, I know that girl. It didn't take me long to wish I hadn't. The problem was not that I had taken the pictures but that I had naively sent the film to the White House lab for development. I had long ago reimbursed the Government approximately five dollars for the costs, but that wouldn't have made the slightest difference to those eager to exploit the situation. I could see Reagan supporters gleefully hoisting papers with headlines like "White House Lab Develops Nude pix." I was a nervous wreck. I sought the advice of Dean Burch, an attorney who was an assistant to the President and a man I liked and trusted. "I'm going to resign before this thing hits," I told him, but Burch advised me not to be hasty. For three days, I went through hell, and when it finally appeared the story wasn't going to break, I felt enormous relief.

I managed to make it through the rest of the Administration without any major screw-ups, and after Ford lost the election, I re-entered private life as a free-lance photographer. It was tough at first adjusting to not being on the White House, but I soon got over that.

In July and August of 1977, I conducted my own version of a Kissinger shuttle. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel were on the itinerary, and my assignment was to photograph each country's head of state for Time. I flew first to Cairo, where I made contact with President Anwar el-Sadat's staff and arranged to photograph Sadat at his summer home in Alexandria. Getting there involved a four-hour drive from Egypt's capital, so I hired a car and driver. I specified to the rental agency that I wanted a dependable Mercedes and a chauffeur who spoke English. I did not want to break down in the middle of the desert. I was told that the driver would meet me in front of my hotel at six a.m. and, sure enough, he was right on time. He didn't speak any English and he was driving a 1960 Oldsmobile. It was too late to get another vehicle, so we set off.

It was late July, and it seemed that every Egyptian had gone to the seaside resort of Alexandria. I was staying at an old hotel with ceiling fans that turned slowly above several old waiters as they shuffled from one stained tablecloth to another in the dining room. A constant swarm of flies vied for each morsel on my plate, and I was constantly shooing them away. Outside was an esplanade that ran for miles along the water and teemed with hundreds of honking cars. Horse-drawn carts piled high with goods wove in and out of the traffic.

Amid this confusion stood President Sadat's quiet, orderly summer home in Maamoura, on the outskirts of Alexandria. The house itself was not opulent, but it was roomy, situated on several well-manicured acres and surrounded by tall bushes and many guards.

The day I arrived, Sadat was in the midst of intensive negotiations with Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. The two were not meeting face to face but were using Palestine Liberation Organization's leader Yasir Arafat as an intermediary. Arafat shuttled back and forth between Tripoli and Alexandria, trying to squelch the ill feelings that had arisen out of a border battle between the two countries a week before. Sadat granted me remarkable access. I was even permitted to sit outside the door while he met with Arafat. Had I been able to understand Arabic, I'm sure the lively, sometimes loud exchanges would have been intriguing and possibly disturbing.

Sadat has many residences around Egypt, but his favorite is in his home village of Mit abul Koum, about 70 miles from Cairo. When meeting with residents of the village, he wears the long native dress for men called a jellaba. As I photographed him, clad in a jellaba and standing behind his modest home, he looked up at a passing jet and frowned. "These planes never used to come over here," he told me. "Now it gets very noisy."

Remembering how Lyndon Johnson once prohibited all planes at National Airport from taking off during ceremonies on the south lawn of the White House, I said, "Well, Mr. President, you could change the air routes."

He pursed his lips and, looking back at the disappearing jet, observed, "You know, you're right. Maybe I should do that."

A couple of months later, Sadat announced his intention to visit Israel, and Time asked me to cover the historic event. I called an old acquaintance, Hamed Fahmy, the son of Egypt's foreign minister, and asked if he could help me get a seat on Sadat's plane. The overseas telephone link-up between Washington and Cairo was none too good, but even so, Fahmy sounded uneasy and was very vague about what he could do. Not a surprise, really; his father resigned the next day to protest Sadat's trip. As Hamed put it later, when I saw him in Cairo, "My trying to get you on the plane at that state would have been about as easy as arranging a trip for Yasir Arafat to the Wailing Wall."

After I got to Cairo, I tried frantically to contact Sadat, even riding the 80 miles to Ismailia the morning he was to leave for Israel, hoping to get a note to him with my request. Sadat's place was totally sealed off by armed guards and I left the note with one of them. When I returned to my hotel, everyone was looking for me. Apparently, Sadat had received the note and, although there wasn't any room on his plane, he'd arranged for me to fly on a second aircraft, which was carrying the Egyptian press.

As we crossed into Israeli airspace, the reporters on board began to look out the window and point excitedly at the lights of Tel Aviv. It was one sight they never expected to see in their lifetime. We arrived ahead of the 707 bearing President Sadat, and when we deplaned, we encountered, lined up on a set of risers, more photographers and television cameras than I'd ever seen. This is going to be a rough one, I thought to myself.

When the Egyptian president's jet taxied up and the ramp was rolled to the door, the aircraft was still so far away that I realized I wasn't going to get any decent pictures of that monumental first greeting extended an Arab head of state on Israeli soil. But then neither would anyone else: There was such a crush at the foot of the ramp when Sadat descended to greet Begin that all of the photographers were blocked out.

The date was November 19, 1977. Sadat was going to stay in Israel for two days and I had the funny feeling I was never going to get another picture of him. Everything was so tightly controlled that only select "pools" of photographers were going to be able to cover the events. Because I'd come with the Egyptians at the last minute, they didn't have any press accreditation for me; and due to the fact that I'd arrived in Jerusalem at the same time Sadat did, the Israelis didn't have any for me, either. That meant I had to cover the biggest story of the past score of years, taking place under what the Israelis said was the "tightest security ever," with no piece of paper identifying me as press. To complicate things still further, I hadn't bothered to renew my Washington, D.C., press I.D. after leaving the White House. No matter. The closest I got to Sadat and Begin the following day was watching their motorcade move down the street.

On previous trips to Jerusalem, I'd spent a lot of time in a pub called the Goliath across the street from the King David Hotel. (It billed itself as being "just a stone's throw from the King David.") It was from one of its bar stools that I decided to watch history sweep by me, for the King David was where Sadat was staying.

Late the next afternoon, through the good offices of Alon Reininger, a fellow photographer and friend of the Begin family who was also shooting for Time, and Moshe Milner, the official Israeli photographer, I was able to secure a place on the pool covering the farewell dinner at the King David. Being in the bus with the pool would get me past the first barricade, and near the hotel, but without a press pass, there would be no way to get through the main entrance. While sitting in the Goliath the day before, I'd noticed that its paper coasters were the same yellow color as the official press pass, and just for the hell of it, I stuck one in my pocket. And that's what I waved in the face of the guard at the door of the hotel. He let me by: Goliath had beaten David.

My photos of the dinner were some of the best of the trip, and having gotten into the hotel, I decided I wasn't going to leave. That's why I was standing in the lobby when Walter Cronkite came rushing by. He had an interview with the two leaders after the dinner and I'd found out about it. "Mind if I shoot a few snaps during your interview, Walter?" I asked.

"Not at all," he said. "Come on." I followed him up the stairs to a room where the CBS camera was set up and, once again, I found myself watching Cronkite in action, which is always a memorable experience. During the course of their conversation, Begin mentioned that he and Sadat were going to conduct further talks in the Egyptian president's suite, and after the interview, I asked Sadat if I could come down and take a few shots of that meeting as well.

"For sure," he replied.

Those photos weren't great, but they were the only exclusive ones of the whole trip, and taking them gave me the opportunity to ask Sadat a crucial question: "Could I fly back with you to Cairo?"

"Only if you promise to pay your own way, Kennerly," Sadat joshed.

Figuring that nobody would believe me if I went out of the room and told one of his staff, "Oh, by the way, President Sadat has invited me to fly with him to Cairo tomorrow," I tried something else.

Gesturing at one of Sadat's aides, I asked, "Would you like Mamoud here to make the arrangements?" I put my arm around Mamoud.

"Yes. Make sure that he gets on the plane, Mamoud," the president ordered. I walked out of Sadat's suite still unconvinced that it could possibly work.

The next morning, I arrived at the outer perimeter of the hotel, about 100 yards from the building itself, at the prearranged time. The guards, who were supposed to be informed of my arrival, wouldn't let me in, so I asked them to deliver a message to Sadat's party. I even tried calling Mamoud from the Goliath. It was now about 30 minutes before Sadat was due to leave and nobody had showed up for me. Twenty minutes before, and still nobody. I could see people starting to get into cars. At ten minutes to go, I thought I'd had it. Five minutes before departure, an out-of-breath Egyptian security guard came running up to ask why I wasn't in my car. "Ask Israeli security," I said. Without further adieu, he escorted me through the lines and to the car. Riding with me in the motorcade from Jerusalem to the airport to Tel Aviv was Sadat's interpreter. It was he who had provided the running English translation during Sadat's speech, capturing every inflection and pause perfectly, and I complimented him on a beautiful job.

When we arrived at the airport and leaped out of the cars, my lack of identification was again a problem. The cops wouldn't let me through, but the interpreter grabbed me and, speaking rapidly to the confused guards, pulled me to the ramp of the plane.

On the ramp were more security guards, and they didn't have my name on the list. The interpreter had a few words with them, turned to me and waved me on board. When Sadat climbed the steps of his plane, he turned and waved at the assembled crowd. Begin, who was at the foot of the ramp, saluted him. I stood right behind Sadat; with my camera held over my head for a better angle, I took a picture that showed him in the foreground and the Ben Gurion Airport sign behind. It also showed several hundred photographers lined up in the stands. Had they been selling David Kennerly voodoo dolls in the airport that day, they would have gone like hot cakes.

Shortly after we took off from Tel Aviv, two Israeli Kaffir jet fighters appeared off each wing to escort us out of Israeli airspace. I immediately ran into Sadat's cabin, which is very similar to that of the American President's on Air Force One, and tried to get a shot of him looking at the fighters. But every time I got ready to shoot, the Israeli aircraft dipped just below the wing tip. Sadat eventually tired of my saying, "Wait a minute, wait, wait... There!... Missed it... One more minute..." and he started to give me the what I now recognized as his "You better hurry" look. I finally got my shot, and although it wasn't the greatest picture, it did capture the moment.

As Sadat's plane rolled to a stop in Cairo, an NBC correspondent on the ground described the historic moment: "Sadat's jet has just taxied up. The ground crew is rolling the ramp to the plane. The door is now being opened from the inside. We see movement. Yes, someone is in the door. It's, it's... it's David Kennerly?"

•

The Middle East stories were nothing compared with Jonestown. Don Neff, Time's New York bureau chief, and I were on an assignment in Miami when we got the word that a U. S. Congressman and some newsmen had been murdered in Guyana. We chartered a Learjet and flew straight to the South American country. We arrived late Sunday night and couldn't get much information, but the next morning. November 20, the Guyanese government held a press conference at which it was reported that there had been a large number of suicides at Jonestown--possibly as many as 400. The authorities didn't have full details. Communications between Georgetown and Jones's camp, some 150 miles away, seemed negligible, possibly even nonexistent. It was nevertheless clear by then that something awful had happened. At the press conference, it was decided that, due to the lack of adequate transportation in Guyana, only a small pool of press people could go to Jonestown. Frank Johnston and Charles Krause of The Washington Post were selected. Neff and I were not, but we were determined to get in on our own. To complicate matters, a national emergency had been declared and no unauthorized aircraft were being permitted to fly over the Jonestown area. CBS, NBC and ABC all had chartered planes standing by, but those aircraft had been chartered outside the country; the government had specifically forbidden non-Guyanese pilots to fly into Port Kaituma. Neff and I began a frantic search for an aircraft that met the government's requirements... and found the only one in the country that did--the small Cessna that had been involved in the shooting. There were two bullet holes in its side and dried blood all over the inside, but it could fly. The pilot, the same one who had been present at the shooting, was Guyanese. The owners of the plane said we could lease it if the government gave us permission to land at Port Kaituma.

The next step was to camp out in the information minister's office, trying to get her to call the director of civil aviation for official permission. Neff and I spent most of Monday imploring her, and late in the day she relented and called the aviation chief. All we now needed was a letter of permission, addressed by the information minister to the director, the only man who could give permission for an airplane to take off and, we understood, a real stickler for protocol.

To our dismay, the information minister departed without writing the needed letter. We thought we'd missed our chance. But during the course of the day, we'd become rather friendly with an extremely efficient secretary who worked for the information minister. Neff, in desperation, asked her to write a letter of authorization for us. Knowing that we had verbal permission from her boss, she agreed to do it--the letter she produced satisfied the aviation director.

At daybreak on Tuesday, November 22, we were winging our way to Port Kaituma. We had invited an NBC crew to join us. They had been unable to get in on their own and Don and I felt that because their people had been shot up, they deserved a chance to cover the story.

Nothing I'd seen in my entire life, including wars, plane crashes and natural disasters, prepared me for the horror that was Jonestown. As our plane dipped low over the jungle clearing, we could see scores of small, tin-roofed buildings grouped around a much larger structure.

Encircling the pavilion at some distance were scattered pieces of what appeared to be brightly colored cloth. As we closed in, the cloth became dolls, strewn casually about. Closer in, the dolls appeared for what they really were--bodies, hundreds and hundreds of them. We circled twice, taking pictures, then headed back to Port Kaituma.

The twin-engine Otter was still on the airstrip, one of its tires shot flat. While we waited for a Guyanese army chopper to take us the six miles to Jonestown, Matthew Naythons and I explored the scene of the assassination. The bodies of the Congressional group had been removed two days before, but brain matter of our fallen colleagues remained on the airfield. Naythons, a medical doctor and photojournalist from San Francisco, helped me bury the remains by digging holes with a metal plate we found. "Do you think we should say something?" Naythons asked as we finished the job.

"I think it's all been said already," I replied.

The government helicopter finally arrived and we boarded for the flight to the death site. What we had witnessed from the air prepared us in part for what we encountered when we entered Jonestown to cover the story close up.

We fashioned face masks from a towel I'd brought from our Georgetown hotel, then dashed cologne on it for good measure. The bodies we'd seen from the air had been out in the tropical sun for two and a half days, and the stench would be overpowering. "I think I'm going to get sick," a television cameraman remarked.

"If you think that before we get there, you've got a real problem," I told him.

Again we circled the area, then landed a few hundred yards from the main group of bodies. I walked apprehensively down the path toward the large building, took a deep breath and prayed I'd be able to go through with taking the pictures. The only other time I'd ever felt remotely that upset was in a brickyard in Dacca, where I saw dogs eating human bodies--and this was 100 times more disturbing.

I came upon the first body, a man hunched on his knees, his face in the ground. He was all alone behind a small structure. The main group was on the other side. Had it been a scene of obvious violence, it might not have seemed so surreal, but it was so tranquil. It looked as if most of them had simply lain down and gone to sleep. Most of them appeared to be family groups, face down with their arms around each other. The little feet of children stuck out from beneath those of adults.

I moved about mechanically, taking the pictures. While stepping over a dead dog, I noticed a big brown vat. Inside was the purple death potion that Jones's followers had consumed. I photographed that scene, container in the foreground and bodies strewn behind it--and Time chose that picture for its cover.

Dozens of crossbows were stacked nearby. We speculated that there must have been guards standing by, ready to shoot those who refused to participate in the ghastly rites. The field around the meeting place was covered with bodies. At the time, we were told there were 400; later we learned the total was more than 900. I didn't stop to count. Inside the pavilion were rows of pews. At the front was a chair, set up like a throne, from which Jim Jones had ruled Jonestown. It was surrounded by bodies. Jones himself lay just outside, a bullet hole in his head. His abdomen had been slit open and then crudely stitched closed by the doctor who performed the government ordered autopsy on the cult leader.

As I walked among the dead under the big tin roof, I started getting the eerie feeling that one of those lifeless people was going to grasp me around the ankle--and I hightailed it outside to join my colleague. Naythons, for all his medical training, declared he could take no more, and neither could I. We headed back to the chopper.

Neff and I shipped my film to New York on a chartered NBC jet. We departed the next day for Barbados, where Neff could use the better communications facilities to file his story--and we could put some distance between us and the horror of Guyana.

The wars I have covered, for all their violence and gore, have never given me nightmares. Somewhere in my subconscious is a safety valve that spares me that. Not so with Jonestown. A week after my departure, I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I'd dreamed that I had walked into a room and encountered the bloated--but living--body of Jim Jones, seated on his throne. I turned to escape but found my path blocked by one of Jones's followers, flesh dripping from his bones. I twisted into wakefulness just as a rotting hand reached for my throat.

•

I often find myself thinking how lucky I am. From the age of 15, I've known what I wanted to do--and I've turned out to be good at it. There's no question in my mind that everyone has a talent for something, but it's sometimes tough to figure out what it is. Fortuitously, I found out early what it was and have been able to pursue that talent ever since. There's nothing on this earth I'd rather do than take pictures, but there are drawbacks to the shooter's life. Its immediacy is what makes it so endlessly fascinating, but it is also what makes it frequently frustrating. You go directly to the very heart of history, record the moment and move on. And in doing so, you seldom see a story, a war, a life played to its conclusion. You tail an American Vice-President daily for weeks on end, then he resigns under threat of indictment and you never take his picture again. You dog the heels of his successor--even moving with him into the council rooms and private quarters of the White House--and then he is turned out of office and you are cut loose.

What you end up with are episodes of intense involvement but little in the way of sustained interaction. The curse of the shooter is that he is always an observer, never a participant. Unfortunately, that's the way it should be.

"He lay face up just off to the side of the road, and I shuddered involuntarily as we drove by."

"'Did I get it right, Kennerly?' Ford asked with a grin. "Spoken like a true native,' I assured him."