ROLE MODELS: Robert Trout

Under the title ROLE MODELS, CJR asks accomplished journalists to write about the people who inspired them. Here Tom Nagorski, foreign editor for ABC's World News Tonight, remembers a brief but instructive moment with Robert Trout, whose path he crossed ten years ago.

BY TOM NAGORSKI

When word came in November that the great broadcast journalist Robert Trout had died -- in his sleep, in a Manhattan hospital -- colleagues in the newsroom and obituary writers remembered the D-Day landings, Alan Shepard's space flight, and some of the seventeen presidential campaigns Trout covered, all the way back to FDR's whistlestop tour in 1932. I had less lofty recollections. Nothing for the vaults at the Museum of Radio & Television.

In March 1990, I was twenty-seven, an ABC News producer in Berlin covering the first and last democratic elections in the former East Germany. On the Monday after the vote I had a call from one of our London editors: Go to Brussels, she ordered. "The nuns story."

The "nuns story," as it turned out, was about eight Belgian nuns ranging in age from sixty-two to ninety-three who had sold their convent in the medieval city of Bruges. They had pocketed the proceeds, bought a chateau in the south of France, and fled in the middle of the night in a convoy of Mercedes. The convent was more than six hundred years old, and it was not at all clear that the nuns -- from the order of The Poor Sisters of Clare -- had any business selling the convent buildings. The Bishop of Bruges was furious.

The London tabloids were feasting on the story. nuns in paradise, cheered the Daily Star. From The Daily Mirror: "Eight naughty nuns who flogged off their convent for nearly one million pounds were settling into a life of luxury today. They made themselves at home in a grand French chateau, with swimming pool and tennis courts . . . ."

Our London editors found all this irresistible. They sent me with a crew to Bruges to look into what had happened. Then they dispatched Trout -- eighty-one but still taking the occasional ABC assignment -- to Provence, to trail the nuns. A few days later we met in a London edit room. He and his crew had managed brief interviews and some shots of the chateau's grounds before they were shooed away. "We never intended any harm," a Sister Josephine had said softly to Trout, in French. The bishop, she explained, had been obdurate, even abusive. "So with only a few of us, all quite old, we came here, looking for a more peaceful life." Trout had also discovered "discrepancies," as he put it, between the tabloid accounts and the scene in Provence. The chateau's "Olympic swimming pool" was actually a dry, cracked-concrete pit. Nor would anyone have known, from the pictures, that the weedy plot off the front lawn had ever been a tennis court. "Not my kind of chateau!" bubbled Trout.

I was discussing "Nuns On The Run" with the greatest living figure in American broadcast journalism. Trout had been the eminence grise at CBS News when I was a child. A generation earlier, he had given voice lessons to the great Edward R. Murrow. It was Trout who coined the term "fireside chats," to describe FDR's radio broadcasts to the nation; Trout who first broadcast live reports from a presidential campaign, in 1936; Trout who brought London bombings and the D-Day landings at Normandy into America's living rooms. Between World War II and the end of the cold war, few great moments in the nation's history passed without intelligent on-air commentary from Robert Trout.

Now he and I were chatting about itinerant nuns. He was thin, hunched slightly, dressed in a beige tweed suit and maroon vest. He treated me as he might a longtime colleague. "Think I should start this way," he asked, "with the pictures from France?"

"That ought to be fine," I said.

We worked on the piece until dinner. He may have been eighty-one years old, but Trout was still working to get the nuances just right, still clearly enjoying the quirks of the story and the business in general.

He wanted to sidestep any details about precisely how the nuns had arranged their flight. "Don't feel we really know enough -- or that people will care enough, frankly -- about every fact in this case," he said. Instead he wrote,

In the quiet Belgian city of Bruges, nuns from the order of the Poor Sisters of Clare had lived and prayed, without incident, for six hundred years. But suddenly, eight of the Poor Sisters have created an incident. They're rich!"

In a paragraph delivered deadpan, facing the camera in southern France, Trout said:

And this is what they bought: a handsome chateau that needs work. Lots of work. And lots of money. Maybe all the money they have left. But this is where they want their adventure to end. In the sunshine. [Here Trout peered up at a cloudy sky]. When there is some . . ."

When he finished tapping out the story on a borrowed laptop ("not sure I'd have gotten anywhere," he muttered, "with gadgets like these"), I helped him print it out, and while we waited for word from the editors at World News Tonight, Trout asked what had brought me overseas. I gave him a few answers, and he nodded.

"Well you've certainly come at an interesting time," he said. "You'll have yourself some marvelous experiences, I imagine."

After a quiet minute or so he began to laugh. "I'll bet you didn't think you'd be covering the story of the Missing Nuns!"

And then Trout lost himself in a wonderful gathering laugh. "The Runaway Sisters of Clare!" he cried. "Oh, my goodness. Now there's a story to cut your teeth on!"