Focusing on war's fuzzy front line

There were rumors that Khrushchev had summoned the party's Central Committee for an emergency session, but no Soviet official would confirm that such a meeting was in progress or in prospect.

In October of that year, Khrushchev had returned from an unusually long vacation in the Crimea. I had a bantering relationship with the earthy, ebullient Khrushchev, and, meeting him at a diplomatic reception, I tried to find out whether the Central Committee was in session.

After a long discussion of his vacation in the Crimea, I asked whether I could go to the Black Sea for a vacation, "pozhalyista!"("If you please.") But, I said, CBS wouldn't let me take a vacation because of rumors of an important Central Committee meeting. He nodded gravely, discerning my purpose. He asked when I wanted to go on vacation. "Tomorrow."

For how long? "Two weeks."

"And so let me understand. You are afraid that during that time you might miss a meeting of our Central Committee?"

"Exactly."

He leaned toward me, and said confidentially, "Gospodin Schorr, you can go on your vacation."

"You mean there is no meeting?"

"Don't worry. If absolutely necessary, we will have the meeting without you."

As it turned out, when I could read the minutes 40 years later, the Central Committee did meet, did order the sending of tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising, did decide to threaten to send forces to Egypt unless Anglo-French-Israeli forces withdrew from the Sinai. This seemed to us one of the most dangerous moments of the cold war. And yet, in 1989, when the Berlin Wall that I'd seen being erected finally came down, and with it, the nasty East German regime and the whole Soviet structure, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said to me: "Just wait! One of these days you will be nostalgic for the cold war."

In time I came to understand what he meant. From 1946, when Churchill coined the phrase "Iron Curtain," resistance to Communist designs had served as the organizing principle for the US. Great undertakings, from the federal highway system to the Defense Education Act to the landing on the moon were all justified as necessary for defense against the Communist world.

Then the cold war ended, leaving America to face a different kind of war. Today, America fights against "enemy combatants," a loose phrase that permits the compromising of civil liberties. It is hard to apply American military power when one doesn't know where to apply it. A generally successful operation in Afghanistan rooted out Al Qaeda training camps. Looking for somewhere else to apply force of arms, the Bush administration chose Iraq on the questionable assumption that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with Al Qaeda terrorists.

Iraq became, not a unifying principle, but a disorganizing one. Fought without United Nations or major European support, the war has left a system of alliances and collective security built over half a century in tatters.

America has yet to find a unifying principle for the age of terror. It will have to repair alliances and relations with the UN. It will have to overcome the widespread feeling that we are all involved in a clash of civilizations. America will have to find itself before it can lead this new kind of war against this new kind of enemy.

And, in this time of terror, journalists like Danny Pearl will be on the front line. That's because there is no front line.

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