Truth-seeking, always
Friday, December 24, 2004
am New York
Journalism took big losses this week. New York lost the much-lamented columnist Jack Newfield; the world lost Anthony Sampson.
I didn’t know Mr Newfield, regrettably; I am grateful I did know Tony.
Tony wrote for newspapers and magazines internationally through five decades, and topped it all with brilliant books. “The Seven Sisters” dissected multinational oil conglomerates incisively, and “Arms Bazaar” did the same for the weapons trade. Two editions of “Anatomy of Britain” (first 1962, then an update just this year) helped more than one New York Times London correspondent to find their political bearings.
But the constant thread through Tony’s work was his devotion to South Africa - ever since as a fresh university graduate he was invited to run Drum magazine in Johannesburg. “I knew nothing about business, journalism or Africa,” he later recalled, “so I went."
He became friends with Nelson Mandela and covered his 1964 terrorism trial, which condemned the freedom fighter to life imprisonment. (Tony neither confirmed nor denied it, but he was said to have helped Mandela write his resounding defense speech, proclaiming that a free South Africa was an ideal for which he lived, but if necessary was “prepared to die”.)
During one of our occasional, always long lunches, Tony predicted that it was in New York - meaning Wall Street - that Apartheid would meet its end. I was skeptical, but within a few years global disinvestment had brought the white supremacists to their knees, Mandela was released from jail, and free elections installed Tony’s old friend as President.
Not surprisingly Mandela asked him to write his biography. It’s the definitive account of that complex hero - respectful and admiring, but pulling no punches to portray a man, not a myth.
Most obituaries this week headlined Tony as Mandela’s biographer. But I was heartened to see the New York Times apply the simple label “investigative journalist” in its opening sentence.
SOME LAUGHABLY SHODDY JOURNALISM had already made me turn to Tony. Among all the inspirational sayings being spread around at Christmas time, there have been yet more citations of an ubiquitous - but totally spurious - quotation from Mandela.
You’ve probably seen it. He is supposed to have urged us all - at his 1994 Presidential Inauguration, specifically - not to be fearful of expressing our individual value to the world: “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?”
The words “gorgeous” and “fabulous” should make anyone sense something wrong. I was at Mandela’s inauguration and he certainly didn’t say those words.
But the World-Wide Web keeps regurgitating the fallacy, and mainstream print publications have fallen for it, too, including the New York Post (carrying the syndicated celebrity-maven Liz Smith herself), Black Enterprise magazine, the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, and the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers.
The passage turns out actually to come from the “motivational speaker” Marianne Williamson, in her 1992 book “A Return to Love”.
I wanted to double-check that Mandela hadn’t perhaps said it sometime, maybe even quoting Williamson, so I consulted Tony.
Overnight he confirmed Mandela never, ever had employed that passage. And on a personal note, he wrote: “Glad you asked that question - I've just been arguing with a friend who used it at her husband's funeral.”
Some hours after that e-mail he died in his sleep. Right to the end as always Anthony Sampson was helping to establish, in small matters as in large, what was true and what was not.