Reporting from the Heart

...There is no center of things here...

...Kinzer does not try to catalogue the effects that Sandinismo had on every single sector of Nicaraguan life, but the details he does offer are appalling...

...Reviewed by Paul Berman Contributor, "Village Voice," "Dissent," "Mother Jones" The first time that Stephen Kinzer landed at the Managua airport, in 1976, he hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him downtown...

...A further grandmerit of Blood of Brothers is summed up in that anecdote...

...by the end of his stay he had seen, he tells us, more than a hundred of them...

...At the moment that Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize, Kinzer happened to be in the right place to overhear the prizewinner gloat that his Stockholm triumph was "a kick right in the balls" to the White House...

...But this man, dedicated as he was to democracy and justice and, yes, to the security concerns of the United States, had to fight uphill against the Reagan Administration because the White House ideologues did not understand that Arias' policy, if put into eifert, ensured Sandinismo's defeat...

...To keep one's head in a fierce debate is a virtue that we automatically appreciate...

...Rosenthal could see from a window of the paper's offices on 43rd Street in Manhattan...

...When their history is written," he says of the Miskitos, "the era of Sandinista rule will be the blackest chapter...

...Asense of pathos, a compassion for the poor and the ruined, is Kinzer's outstanding virtue as ajournalist...

...Managuadoesn't exist...

...Emotional crises of that sort were perhaps not characteristic of American commentators on Nicaragua during the 1980s...

...From 1976 to 1983 he visited Nicaragua repeatedly for different newspapers, then he set up the New York Times bureau in Managua and manned it for another five years—giving him, all in all, probably more experience in the country than any writer in the history of American journalism...

...Arias himself knew exactly what he was doing...

...It never occurred to him, for instance, to stop attending funerals...

...The sole indisputable hero in Kinzer'sbook, the one figure who emerges as not merely admirable but successful, too, is former President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica...

...In any case, he leaves little doubt that from the outset the Sandinistas were a deeply pro-Soviet movement whose true beliefs failed to become widely known because of a powerful code of secrecy and the practice of what he calls "masterly deception...

...He says much less, however, about the aspects of his life at the Times that bear on the controversies of the period: the political pressures that he or his editors must have come under, the effect on him of being criticized by the Right, the impact of the campaign of vilification that was conducted against him by Stalinist-style journalists at the Nation and elsewhere...

...Kinzer describes the working conditions of the Managua press corps...

...Our national debate over the Sandinistas and the contra policy tended to be abstract and coldly ideological, or else demagogically maudlin for partisan purposes...

...This, he says, was mostly because of the CIA's insistence on backing leaders like Enrique Bermudez and other officers of the National Guard, instead of authentic nationalist revolutionaries like Eden Pastora and, among the insurgent Miskitos, Brooklyn Rivera (if the contras at all were to be backed...

...As he observes, "most"—not just some—"of those who joined in the years before 1977 met violent deaths soon after signing up...

...But among the journalistic surveys that have been written so far, Kinzer's book, because of its expertise, thoroughness and goodheartedness, is the best...

...He began to worry that, after a decade of war reporting, his luck was running out...

...The warehouses ended...

...Blood of Brothers cannot be called a definitive history of modern Nicaragua, since a lot remains to be said about the revolution, the contra war and U.S...

...What made the Nicaraguan war especially cruel, Kinzer writes, "was that its purpose was so vague and undefined...

...He acknowledges the spectacular dedication of the Sandinista Front's members...

...He toured the bedsides of the wounded, found himself driving a nearly dying child to a medical clinic, visited the children's wing of a wretched Managua hospital...

...No one has known so many of the Central American players in the Nicaraguan controversy as well or for so many years as Stephen Kinzer...

...People who made a show of weeping over the damage inflicted by the contras and the Yankees could not find it in themselves to feel a little sorrow for the damage done by the Sandinistas—and vice versa...

...That only one American journalist, Bill Stewart of ABC, was killed during the Nicaraguan Revolution (he was murdered in cold blood by the National Guard) was the sheerest luck...

...Let me explain something to you," the driver finally said, waving his arm out the window...

...He concludes that at the end of their rule, the Sandinistas acted commendably and honorably once more by turning over the presidency to Violeta Chamorro—although had he completed his book a few months later, my suspicion is that he might have been a little more cautious about congratulating them...

...Yet American policymakers believed the war was worth fighting because of what it symbolized" —namely, a militant stance against Soviet expansionism and a comeback from the United States' defeat in Vietnam...

...These sacrifices enabled the Sandinistas not only to overthrow an extremely brutal Somoza dictatorship but also, he believes, by eliminating the worst structures of the old class system, to lay a basis for future democracy...

...policy— and since the outcome of the Nicaraguan struggles is still somewhat in doubt...

...Kinzer's political judgments are mostly bitter...

...There were vacant lots...

...The lesson of history is so clear, he told Kinzer before his theory had come under the test of reality...

...That is an amusing anecdote of Nicaraguan life, but also, in its humble way, a heartbreaking one...

...His book is for this reason supremely, wisely sad...

...There is no downtown...

...Some 30,000 Nicaraguans were killed for these vague purposes, and with a good deal of extraneous cruelty, too, since terrorism was, among the contras, a military strategy...

...The contras, hopelessly outmanned and outgunned, never had the slightest chance of military victory...

...He devotes considerable detail to his early efforts as a Nicaraguan correspondent and his move to the New York Times, and even pauses to remember the chorus girls that he and former executive editor A.M...

...In Blood of Brothers the correspondent at last has a proper occasion to shudder in print, and we get to see how very dangerous, how frightening it was, year after year, to find oneself stationed in the middle of Central America's civil war...

...They drove in silence along the airport highway past rows of warehouses...

...By early 1988, after too many horrifying expeditions into the northern hills and the war zones, his own dreams began to fill up with dead bodies and sobbing peasants...

...No Communist system can survive with freedom of the press...

...His tale of Nicaragua follows a structure that is part career memoir, part history of the revolution, with sometimes an awkward fit between the two...

...Moreover, the political precepts the Sandinistas drew on once they were in power, their insistence on imposing, as he says, "economic policies that had already failed in every country on earth where they had been tried,"the messianic arrogance of the commandantes, their conviction that critics were traitors and that they alone knew what was good for the country, their private contempt for the democratic and pluralist values that in public they claimed to embrace—these elements of Sandinista rule undid every good and decent project the revolutionary government ever attempted...

...And, indeed, the Arias peace plan, which was finally adopted in late 1987 and 1988, led to the victory of the group around La Prensa...

...The principal international backers of the Front during the years of insurgent struggle were, in order of importance, the Cubans, the North Koreans, and the PLO...

...His most vivid and moving example is the fate of the Miskito Indians of the Atlantic Coast, many of whom fled in terror to Honduras...

...The fear Kinzer felt innumerable times riding along dirt roads that might well have been mined by the contras, and again when teenagers waved rifles at him, and when the Honduran Air Force bombed his corner of the Coco River—this fear was not, according to the rules of daily journalism, news that was fit to print...

...An air of the faceto-face exudes from his book...

...We find him on one page shielding himself with a folding chair from the rocks of a Sandinista mob, and on another page getting beaten unconscious by a Sandinista policeman...

...On the other side, the contra war was, in his account, an even worse disaster —aprogram that, unlike the misguided Sandinistas, did not even aspire to anything decent...

...But the experience seems not to have left Kinzer jaded or cynical...

...but Kinzer's virtue, a superior one, I would say, is to have kept his heart...