Northwestern University Alumni

Transcript: 

[MUSIC PLAYING] MAX: Welcome to Northwestern Intersections, a Northwestern Alumni Association podcast. We'll be talking to alums about their career paths and the lessons they've learned along the way. Our guest today is journalist, author, and veteran Bill Lord. He's an award-winning reporter and the author of the book 50 Years After Vietnam-- Lessons and Letters From the War I Hated Fighting, which describes his experiences as a young soldier in the war. 

He has worked in major newsrooms across the country, and he has directly covered major breaking news events. We will dive into all of these topics and more in this edition of Northwestern Intersections. Bill Lord, thank you so much for joining us on the show. 

BILL LORD: Happy to be here. 

MAX: Bill, you've had a fantastic career, but let's think back to your college years. What did you study, and what drew you to Northwestern? 

BILL LORD: Well, I studied political science at first because I didn't know what I wanted to do. But I had just returned back from Vietnam. The country was totally divided, very much like we are now, people who hated the war, people who loved the war, people like me, who had been in the war, but were against the war. 

And the world was so polarized that I didn't really know where I fit in until I stumbled into the campus newspaper one day and I realized that you don't have to be a radical on the left or a radical on the right. You can be right down the middle. You can be involved in public life. You can tell stories. You can learn about everything you can be involved in the events of the day without having to be an advocate for something. 

Political science went out the window. I moved into journalism-- never looked back. The way I got to Northwestern was very interesting because I had a professor I told I wanted to stay with this journalism thing, and I wanted to go to Columbia. And he said, nah, you don't want to go to Columbia. It's all academics and pointy-headed people. 

If you want to be a journalist, you got to work in a newsroom. You need to go to Northwestern. And he knew a guy there. So he wrote a great letter for me. He got me into Northwestern. And, frankly, Northwestern was exactly what I needed. Never mind it was a school that didn't have finals and didn't have exams. That was also good. 

But it taught you all of the specific things you needed to do to be a journalist. And that's really what I needed at that point. I needed, essentially, on-the-job training that was very realistic that prepared me for the world. And that's how it all unraveled after that. I started getting jobs, and life was good. 

MAX: What did some of those early career experiences look like? Walk me through your first few jobs. 

BILL LORD: It's really easy because, when I got out of Northwestern, I wanted to be a TV reporter, and I was penniless. And I had nothing to my name except an ancient Volkswagen. And I literally drove around the western United States stopping in any town that had a TV station, and I applied for jobs. And this took months. And, along the way, I would work odd jobs. I would give you a list of the worst jobs in the world, and that's what I did. 

But, finally, I got a job in Medford, Oregon. It was a little frightening because there were only four people in the newsroom. We all shot, we all edited, we all reported. And, at 6:00, we all got together and sat on the set. So on my first day of being a journalist, I was the anchorman, which makes me very glad that there are no videotapes from that era because I was horrible. 

But I slowly adapted, and I slowly learned a little more. And literally less than a year there, I moved to Salt Lake City. And my job there was as a street reporter. It was a much more sophisticated market, much better news stories, much more fun and active. My whole goal in this era was-- I figured I'll do this local TV stuff for maybe 15 or 20 years, and someday I'll get to be a network correspondent. 

My ideal was to become the guy in the trench coat that you would see every month and then presumably went back to the beach. But I'm sitting around in an edit room one day in Salt Lake. And the phone rings, and it's some guy in London saying that he had just looked at my audition tape, which I was a little curious about because I hadn't sent it to him. It was a photographer friend of mine who didn't have an audition tape, so I loaned him mine. 

And they said, we're hiring Jeff to go to Beirut. Would you like to go with him? OK, let me look at a map real quick. So literally, less than three years into this whole enterprise, I ended up as a network correspondent in the Middle East. And it was astounding to me. It goes to the old "fake it till you make it" because I didn't know anything about it. 

I knew there was a civil war going on there, which made me a little dubious about it. But I had a friend, my guy that I had shot all my stories with in Utah. And we made the best of it. So I ended up in the Middle East for three years, and I went all over the place-- all the countries in the Middle East. It was still, to this day, one of the great experiences of my life. 

MAX: That's an amazing transition, going from a team of four to the Middle East. Did you ever have to just pinch yourself when that was happening? 

BILL LORD: Yes, many times, because it was just like-- I'm doing this way too soon. What am I going to do when I'm 40? It's like-- but, at the same time, when you do it when you're young, I think you enjoy it more. There were dangers involved in that job because it was literally covering a war. 

If I were older and had a wife and children and all those kinds of things, I would not have been able to do that job with any clear conscience. So I'm glad I got all that out of my way before I hunkered down into life in general, but it was a great time. And I think it was a-- it established me. It made it easier to get jobs down the road because that was such a great credential to have on your resume. 

MAX: So, obviously, being a correspondent during tumultuous times is a pretty big deal for someone who's working in the industry. Were there any other individual stories when you were young that stuck out as important in your trajectory? 

BILL LORD: The important stories were the ones in the Middle East, to be honest. While I was there, Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, came to Israel. It was literally the biggest story in that country's history. There was no one on the street. Everybody was watching this whole thing that was televised live. And so it was a huge story. 

And, out of that, I got to interview all the people that I had learned about watching news when I was a kid-- Golda Meir, Sadat, Moshe Dayan. And all these people that were larger-than-life figures, I ended up interviewing. And that was, again, one of those "pinch me" moments where you think, why am I the one that's getting to do this? But don't question it. Just keep going. 

MAX: If you could go back in time and they told you, we're taking you out of the Middle East. You have to do a totally different assignment. What other types of news stories do you think you would have done? 

BILL LORD: Oh, I think-- in a sense, that happened. Because, at some point, I figured out that I hadn't lived in a home. I'd lived in hotels for nearly three years, and I wanted normalcy. So I literally moved back to the States and got a job doing documentaries. And it was a documentary program. It was in Utah. It was a 60 Minutes type program where, once a week, we did all these great stories that we had a good budget for. And one of the workers was the daughter of the owner of the television station, so we were protected from management. 

The only hitch there is that, to do the stories, to anchor the show, I also had to manage the show. I had to be the executive producer. I had to hire and fire. I had to learn all these different things, which I thought I would never do. That was the-- the managers were-- that was the coffee-drinking class. They didn't go out and do stories. 

And, oddly enough, I fell into a rhythm with it. I figured out that I was good at it, or at least better than a lot of the people who were doing it. And it was from there that they made me run the newsroom. And, from that job, the rest of the next 35 years was literally being a news director in big city newsrooms. 

And I think all of my background, including being in Vietnam-- it all set me up to be a decisive and good leader. And I sound immodest, but you have to be a little bit that way. You have to be willing to make a bad decision just to have a decision on the books. You've got to be straight with people. You got to do all these different things. But it worked. And it worked for a long time in a lot of big cities. 

MAX: You mentioned your experiences in that decisiveness being important. Were there any other traits or experiences that you found carried from being a TV reporter to being the manager? 

BILL LORD: Well, in a sense, yes, because I knew all their tricks because I had done all their tricks. So it was easy for me to assign people to do things and know what to expect from them. And, if they were trying to goof off on the job, I knew they were goofing off. 

And I guess the other thing is that-- because I had done those jobs, those people had a pretty good respect for me because they knew I had the chops of doing what they wanted to do better. And most of them wanted to become network correspondents. I had already done it. So this was an opportunity for me to take advantage of all my background, both to be an observant boss and also a friend and boss. So it worked out pretty well. 

MAX: What's your advice for someone who might be going through that transition, becoming a manager, becoming a leader? 

BILL LORD: Well, you have to have a certain philosophy to go into it. I'll tell you a silly story. About 10, 15 years ago, I was sitting around. Some lady from the sales department just said, how do you do this stuff? How do you make all these decisions that's under all this pressure and get all these people to do things? The world is burning down. You seem very calm. And out of my mouth slip these words. [CHUCKLES] 

Out of nowhere, I said, I learned everything I needed to learn about leadership as an infantry sergeant in Vietnam. [CHUCKLES] It was like, where did that come from? But I started thinking about it, and it's true. You get into situations in a war zone where people are dependent on you, and you have to make a decision. 

And, again, there is no obvious correct decision. You have to basically say, OK, if we stay right here, we're all going to die. So we either have to go left or go right or run away, none of which are good options, but you've got to pick one. 

And that was the basis for doing things in journalism without the stress, because nobody was using real bullets in the newsroom. So I was able to develop this philosophy of always be decisive. Always be honest with people. If you're honest with them, they know. If you're dishonest, they know. 

So you've got to be honest with them. And then this is a-- goes back to the military, but it's true in civilian life as well. You got to look after your people. You've got to have their interests in mind. You got to protect them. So, if they know you've got their back, they'll walk through fire for you. And that simple formula proved to be very effective. 

MAX: So, looking back even a little bit further, what's your advice to a young journalist? They're working on their first story, first assignment. How do you stay grounded, but how do you have the confidence to go forward with a tough assignment? 

BILL LORD: I always used to tell young reporters not to try to do too much. Pick a storyline. Pick a simple storyline. You're really only going to get one point across in the story. And, if you pick the right point, it falls together more easily so you can write to it. 

And, now, that advice has helped a lot of people. It actually helped me when I finally learned it. I had to learn it without somebody telling me that, but-- you have to find ways to formulize some things to make it easy to produce. Because anybody who's working in the media right now is not working one story a day or one story a week. You're pounding out lots and lots of copy and lots of different things. You're serving lots of platforms. 

They have to be fast, and they have to be understandable and coherent. And the best way to do that is simply say, this is the point of my story. This is going to be the lead-in to my story. I'm going to elaborate on that. And then I'm going to conclude right back where I started so there's something of a circle. And that works. It's a good way to write definitive news stories. 

MAX: I want to switch the focus a little bit to hearing about the book that you produced. And I think that there's a little bit of a line, obviously. You're telling a story as a reporter. You're telling a story as a journalist. You're literally writing a story when you're writing a book. But that's still a pretty big transition. What inspired you to write that book, and how did you start? 

BILL LORD: The inspiration was me coming home from work one day. And my wife was all teared up and very agitated. And I was like, what the heck is wrong with you? And she said, I just read all of your letters from Vietnam. 

I was like, well-- and I vaguely recalled-- my sister had dropped off some envelope with all those letters in it like a year or two before that. And, honestly, I had never bothered to look at them. I didn't-- it was nothing to me. But she said, you have to write a book about it. Well, I was getting ready to retire at that point anyway. So I took her advice. The letters, because they were in a certain order and certain events, became the backbone of it all. 

And then I just told stories that I could remember from Vietnam interspersed with them. And I don't know how to write a book. So what I did was I wrote down about 100 things that I could remember. And it's astounding how you can not talk about something for 50 years, and, when you try, you can remember it in infinite detail. I was like, where is this coming from? But I did. 

And the book flowed pretty easily. It was not a chore. I've tried to write books since then, and I have gotten nowhere. But, because this was a personal story, because I had lived it, it wasn't something I had to research. It was something that I had to basically explain. And they were all just literally stories about me and the guys I was with. It came together pretty well. And I was-- in the end, I was quite pleased with it. 

MAX: When you look back on the letters that you'd written as a younger man, what lessons did you learn from yourself when you were writing that book? 

BILL LORD: Well, obviously, I could watch myself grow and mature during that year because, when you're 19, you're 20, you do not have a global perspective of anything. You're a kid. [INAUDIBLE] We showed up over there, and we were clueless. They had a term for us. When you arrive in Vietnam, you were an FNG-- an effin' new guy. And new guys knew nothing, and-- literally, it was like a kindergartner going to high school. You were just lost. 

And, slowly, you picked up what you needed to learn and how to do things and how to get by. But there was no university of this. It was just basically-- you get there, you figure it out, you hope to survive. And that's the whole thing. And I didn't write a book about battles. I wrote a book about experiences and things that happened to me or happened around me. 

But I didn't get into the domino theory or international relations or what was happening in the Defense Department. It was a very personal report of how I changed during that war. I went from being-- I wasn't gung ho, but I bought into this whole notion of-- we're fighting communism. Well, you get there, and you realize that you're not really fighting communism. You're fighting an Indigenous people who are in a revolution, and we're fighting in their backyard. 

And it's like-- that requires you to really rethink your position a little bit. It was not what we thought it was going to be at all. But then you face this thing about, well, OK. I'm becoming an anti-war soldier. What am I going to do? I can become a conscientious objector and go sit in Fort Leavenworth for two years and then have a criminal record all my life. 

Or I can make a deal with myself that I'm going to do whatever I can to get through this. I'm going to do whatever I can to survive this thing. I'm going to help my friend survive. And then I'm going to-- for the rest of my life, I'm never going to compromise again. 

And that's what I did. It made the rest of my life really easy because, in journalism, I never compromised. I never sucked up to the boss. I never had to, gratefully, much. But, because of this deal I made with myself of do this, get your ass out of here, and survive, the rest of your life is going to be easy. And it was. 

MAX: That's incredible advice. I'm not just saying that for the podcast. That is incredible advice. Wow. 

BILL LORD: Yeah-- you don't have to compromise in life. And journalists are like that to begin with. You have to have a little bit of no compromise in you to be a good journalist. But I took it to extremes. Like I was in management, but I managed down. I managed my people. 

I never managed up. I probably would have been the president of the company if I had learned to suck up earlier to say, oh, yes, boss, let's do this. Let me go lay off a couple of people and save you some money. But I-- that wasn't me. I was the guy who was in the newsroom, hands on all the time with the people doing the work. And I loved it. Never had a day that I didn't want to get up and go to work. 

MAX: Thinking very generally about the process that you had for writing your book, if there's somebody else out there who wants to tell their life story, or who even wants to write maybe something that's fiction, what's your advice on how do you get started? 

BILL LORD: Well, it's really simple. You sit down and start writing. [CHUCKLES] And I know that that sounds too simple. But while I was writing this book-- I have a daughter. I have several daughters, but one of them's a writer. And she would sit down at a typewriter. And, as fast as her fingers would move, she was writing dialogue and writing stories and creating novels. She's got four or five novels out already. 

I couldn't do it that fast. I was a plodder. If I worked from 10:00 in the morning till noon, it was like, I'm done for the day. But at least I did it every day. I sat down. I forced myself to do it. I didn't take days off. I didn't accomplish a whole lot every day. But it was a-- it took three or four months to get it all done. But, in the end, because I was on top of it, because I forced myself to sit down and write, I think that's the best advice I could give. Knowing your material is another thing that is always good. 

Having a good editor-- I had a great editor because I would knock off three or four pages of the day and hand them to my wife, who was a journalist. She was a TV anchorwoman and reporter for years. And she would critique it all, and I would make some changes. You know, those things-- write when you can, write what you know, have a good editor that you are in touch with every day so that they see where you're going. 

And it's funny how it affects you. When I got pages back from her and made changes and gave them back to her for [INAUDIBLE], I figured, if I'm selling this to her, readers out there will be easy, because she was not kind. [CHUCKLES] But, at the same time, getting past her-- I figured, well, this is going to be OK. If she's buying into this, somebody else will too. 

MAX: It's so interesting. You've really got a family of storytellers, you and your wife both being journalists. Your daughter-- correct me if I'm wrong-- I think was a bestseller with a book that she wrote. How often do you talk about writing and just journalism in general as a family? 

BILL LORD: We do, but it's funny-- not as much as you would think. We're so disparate. We don't read the same things. We don't necessarily write the things-- my daughter writes young adult romance novels. I write nonfiction. My wife was a-- just great news writer. 

And I should point out that I was-- we met when I hired her way back. And, initially, she was a reporter, and I was her editor. So it was also-- payback is well deserved when the tables were turned. But, as a family, we all love it, and we all discuss the books we're reading, but we don't necessarily talk much about what we're writing. 

MAX: Now, before we close, I wanted to ask you, are there any projects that you're working on now, and what's next for you in general? 

BILL LORD: I have a couple of different projects that I have started and altered several times. One is to write a period piece about television news in Los Angeles during the OJ trials. I was a news director at KNBC during that time, a fascinating period of television news history where the entire world was flipped upside down almost every day. And I just can't nail it. Because you try to-- you want to include real people. But you have to try and write about characters. You have to invent characters. So that's been difficult. 

I also would love to write about what I told you about before, going to Beirut. My first three days in Beirut were nothing short of amazing. You get off the plane. You can already hear explosions in the background. You get into a car-- my friend met me at the airport and says, you're going to need this if you're going to survive. And he hands me a baseball-sized chunk of hashish. 

And it was like, oh, wait a minute. And we're driving through a refugee camp where all of these people have dead-eyed stares and guns over their shoulders and looking at us, and he wants to start smoking hashish. I was like, wait a minute. [CHUCKLES] So I would love to somehow create that whole period of time. I could not use real names in that one. I would have to make that [INAUDIBLE]. But I think it would be good if I could ever get it done, because I haven't made much headway on it [INAUDIBLE]. 

MAX: If you're interested in those works and more, check out the Alumni Authors CATalogue from the Northwestern Alumni Association. Discover your new favorite book in the NAA's new online collection of Northwestern alumni author books. Are there any Northwestern shout-outs that you'd like to give, and are there any Veterans Day shout-outs that you'd like to give? 

BILL LORD: Well, Northwestern-- honestly, that was another one that I went into not knowing what to expect. And I was immediately befriended by a guy named John Farley there. We were in the Washington program together. Our timing was such that we were together the whole year we were there. We became friends and stayed friends our whole lives. He passed away a few years ago. 

He was just one of those really great guys. And, if you were to ask anybody in the master's journalism program of 1973 about John, they would say he was a wonderful human being. He was just great. And I guess he was one of the people that made the experience much easier for me because he had lunch money compared to the rest of us, and he was-- his grandmother lived in D.C. She would feed us. It was just it was just a very nice experience. And we all miss him, so John Farley, MSJ '73. 

MAX: Well, Bill Lord, thank you so, so much again for joining us. Best of luck with all of your future projects. 

BILL LORD: Thank you very much. It was great to reconnect with Northwestern. 

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