Lara Logan | From the Archives Lara Logan: Live From Baghdad

---

On February 11, 2011, as Tahrir Square cheered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s abdication of power after weeks of paralyzing national unrest, CBS News’s chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was brutally attacked while documenting the emotional celebrations. Logan was saved from the assault by a group of women and Egyptian soldiers, and evacuated the following morning to recover with her family in the United States. Famed for her fearless reporting from the deepest war regions—Afghanistan in 2001, Baghdad’s Haifa Street in 2007—Logan has dedicated herself to speaking for people living in places few journalists willingly go. In June 2007, Vogue’s Rebecca Johnson profiled the award-winning reporter as she considered the reality of dispatching from Iraq and Afghanistan. Looking back, a tribute to an unfaltering voice in journalism.

In a dark, windowless studio at the CBS News center on Manhattan’s far West Side, Lara Logan fidgeted restlessly in her chair, tugging at a black, close-fitting sweater.

---

“Do you want powder?” a woman wearing a headset asked.

“Do I need it?” Logan asked, grimacing.

A man arrived to fit her with an earpiece.

“I see earwax,” she said, smiling at him, holding the earpiece aloft.

“It’s new,” the man protested.

“Look.” She held it up to the light.

After spending a few days with her, I’ve come to see the moment as classic Logan. She’s cheerful but dogged. Friendly but persistent. And basically impossible to resist. The man returned with a bag of new earpieces.

Logan turned to face the camera. “Can you turn that off?” She gestured to her face on the monitor in front of her. “I don’t want to have to look at myself.”

Another Logan moment. For the last five years, Logan’s reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan has been the stuff on which careers are made. She’s been shot at, blown up in a Humvee, had generals walk out of interviews, waded knee-deep through raw sewage, and seen more dead bodies than she cares to remember, yet in her evening news reports and occasional 60 Minutes pieces, Logan is calm, passionate, serious, and seemingly indifferent to the fact that she has become this war’s It girl. “In every war situation, there’s a journalist who pops,” says Rick Kaplan, an executive producer at CBS News. “In the Gulf War, it was Christiane Amanpour; for this generation, Logan is it.”

---

The red light of the camera turned on, and Logan began to talk. It was supposed to be a brief segment, the network’s chief foreign correspondent talking off the cuff about what she really thinks about the war, but the executive producer had told her to talk as long as she wanted. “Don’t worry,” he’d said, “we can edit it down.” So Logan began to talk. And talk. And talk. What came out was an hour-long monologue on what has gone wrong in Iraq.

“Instead of being grateful that Saddam is gone, the Iraqi people are angry and resentful that the U.S. is fighting the war on terror on their soil. Before the war, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. Now Iraqis’ everyday lives have become incredibly difficult and dangerous. They can spend seven or eight hours in line just to get through a checkpoint, and they watch as the U.S. military drives by in their special lane. ‘Democracy’ has turned their houses into prisons. Almost every Iraqi child has seen something blown up. They’ve seen body parts flying through the air. Those kinds of wounds will take a hundred years to heal. People who would survive a bomb in the U.S. die in Iraq. There isn’t blood. Eighteen thousand doctors have left the country since the war started. Dealing with this every day makes Iraqis more and more angry—the U.S., they think, is so powerful, if it wanted to stop the war, it could.

“It’s hard for the Iraqis to accept that they are in a civil war. There are millions of mixed marriages between Sunni and Shi’ite. Before, there was no division. But now, in Iraq, you will find people who say they hate each other. They blame it on the U.S. On camera, the Marines don’t want to talk about their doubts, but when you talk to them privately, they admit that the country is awash in weapons. The number of detainees in prisons means nothing, because every time they arrest one person, there are a hundred more to replace them.”

At times, the half-dozen crew members arrayed around Logan looked glazed over with boredom; at other moments they were riveted. One bald man teared up as she described a son’s anguish watching his father’s brains spilling out on the floor during a torture session. Their reactions seemed, in short, like a mirror of the American public’s view of the war.

Finally, the red light of the camera went off. The older crew members left for lunch, but some of the younger ones gathered around her. “Wow,” one said, helping remove her earpiece. “I learned a lot more from you than I did from reading the Iraq Study Group report.”

“You should be testifying before Congress,” another added.

Logan smiled. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well,” he answered, “it should.”

If it doesn’t kill you, war can be a great career move for a journalist. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Ed Bradley—all distinguished themselves in combat reporting before going on to highly successful careers in network television. Dan Rather, the first to recommend that CBS hire Logan after she freelanced for the network during the invasion of Afghanistan, recognized early on that she had what he calls “the ability to get through the glass.” That she wanted to do it from Afghanistan made her all the more valuable. “The good ones,” he says, “always want the worst assignments.”

Watching the piles of DVDs sent over by CBS in preparation for meeting Logan, I found her competent, if underutilized, in the softball features. Lara Logan interviewing Bonnie Fuller? A racehorse pulling a plow. Where she shines is the war. One segment in particular drew me back again and again. Logan, who has been embedded many times with the U.S. military, was accompanying a Marine corps in the Al Qaeda–infested town of Ramadi. In the footage, it becomes clear that an attack is imminent—a black burka flutters in the wind as an old woman hurries home; shopkeepers abandon their stores.

Suddenly, just a few feet in front of her, a Marine drops to the ground, hit by a sniper’s bullet. In the footage you can see Logan, wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest, hunkered down against a wall, trying her best to stay out of what soldiers call “the kill zone.” Around her, a full-scale battle starts to rage.

“On the way back to the base”—she turned to face the camera, breathless—“one Marine was hit. He’s wounded in the leg.”

It was riveting stuff and important, I suppose, for conveying the kind of random but constant threat of violence the Marines face just walking the street. In fact, the Overseas Press Club just gave the series its award for Best Television Spot News Reporting, but watching it, I couldn’t help thinking that Logan was out of her mind. If she were my sister or even just a friend, I’d be frantic with fear. “To be honest,” she replied when I said as much, “I just can’t relate. It’s what reporters do.”

Was she afraid for her life? “Not really. You don’t have time. Mostly, you just want to stay alive by getting the hell out of the way so the soldiers can do their job. And you want to get the story.” Not that she was thinking, Great story! as the bullets were whizzing. “No, no, no. I was thinking, I am fucked. Really, really fucked.”

The public-relations woman at CBS News has tried to talk to Logan about cursing, but looking like a lady and cursing like a longshoreman is only one of the many inherent contradictions in Lara Logan’s character. She’s an unfailingly polite overtipper, going out of her way to be friendly with doormen or waiters, but is chronically late for appointments. Osama Bin Laden is her dream interview—followed by Eminem. Her skin and hair glow with good health, but she’s barely exercised in two years and lives largely on a diet of sugar-free Red Bull, Snickers bars, and potato chips. She’s a journalist but doesn’t drink alcohol. She makes a reported $1 million a year but is homeless—the last time she saw the house she owns in London was a year ago. In Baghdad, she lives at the CBS bureau; in New York, home is the Pierre Hotel. She’s 36 years old, wants children, but works insanely long hours in incredibly dangerous places and, more important, is currently separated from her husband, a former professional basketball player now living in Chicago.

---

Lara Logan’s first job was scooping ice cream in Durban, South Africa, where she was born and grew up. You were supposed to be sixteen to work, but Logan, then fourteen, lied about her age. No record exists, but she was probably very good at her job. “We always knew Lara had star quality and was destined for greatness,” says her older sister, Lisa Herr, a former fashion executive living in Durban. “She might not have been the prettiest or the cleverest girl, but she always worked harder than anyone else.” At seventeen, she talked her way into a job at the local newspaper, where she cajoled other reporters into taking her into the black townships, then considered off-limits to whites.

Growing up under the obviously evil system of apartheid, distrust of government was practically a moral requisite. In Iraq, that kind of skepticism has served Logan well. To this day, she doesn’t understand why America is at war. “It’s a question I ask myself over and over. Initially, I thought it was about containing Iran, but having witnessed how much Iran has extended its influence over Iraq since the war, that now seems ludicrous. Obviously, oil was part of it, but Iraq is producing less oil than before the war, and we’re not taking it. So you go back and you look at Rove and Cheney and what they’ve said, and you have to make a mental leap to understand. I call it drinking the Kool-Aid. They are true believers who really thought that a democracy would take root in the Middle East.”

Having spent time in Baghdad before the war, Logan had no such illusions. “One of the hardest things for me to come to grips with is that the U.S. government truly believed that the Iraqi people would fall to their knees in gratitude when we invaded. Even Iraqi people who were glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein never said, ‘I’m so happy to see the end of Saddam.’ What they said was ‘Who will replace him? Will he be worse?’ The day the statue came down, there were Iraqi men standing on the roof of the hotel, screaming and crying at the humiliation of having American troops on Iraqi soil. In Iraq, pride is everything. No country wants to be occupied, but the Sunnis are the snobs of the Arab world. Even if they needed us to get rid of Saddam, they resented us from the beginning.”

---

Logan was hired by CBS when she was 31, after having distinguished herself reporting from Afghanistan for British television. “She had good contacts and accurate information,” remembers Dan Rather, currently a global correspondent at HDNet. “More important, she could write. Her stuff had a beginning, middle, and end. A lot of people who might be good on air don’t have that skill.” At its best, network news is like cathedral building: lots of people with lots of resources all working to produce a highly polished, professional piece of work. At its worst, it means you are part of a machine that can tell you when and where to go when it wants, which is exactly what happened to Logan during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“I call that my psychotic period,” she says of the two weeks she spent on the Jordanian border, watching the action on a CNN feed. “I had been in Baghdad before the invasion. I asked if I could stay, but my boss at the time said, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ I had done wars on my own—Afghanistan, Angola. I did the Mozambique floods on my own, which was not an easy story. So I wasn’t worried. But you need preparation. The most critical thing is to have a local person you can trust. I didn’t have that, because the bureau had hired those people. I came back to the bureau right before the invasion; they had taken the food, the generators, and the drivers because they didn’t want me to stay. I was new. I didn’t want to step on any toes. Television really is about being on a team. When your colleagues say, ‘It’s fine for you as a woman. If you’re raped by the republican national guard, we would have to defend you’—that really was an added layer of pressure. Now it’s not just you; you’re putting other people’s lives at risk.”

Leaving Baghdad for Jordan nearly drove her crazy. “I was going out of my mind! The biggest news story of the world, and I’m sitting on the border? It’s hard to explain, but there is no other place in the world you can bear to be.”

Two weeks into the invasion, an Iraqi driver who worked for CBS woke her up in the middle of the night with a hand over her mouth. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her, “but if you want to go back, I will take you.” They took a few tins of food, a camera, a phone, and not much else. “The road in front of us was being bombed,” she says, “and the road behind us was being bombed.” Back in Baghdad, she worked nonstop, getting by on the scraps she could scavenge from the networks that had stayed put. “I’ve never been so hungry! After the BBC finished their lunch, I would literally sneak in and eat the leftovers from their table.” When the Marines finally arrived, she traded her satellite phone for a freeze-dried ready-to-eat meal.

It’s easier being a female war correspondent today than it used to be, but there are still moments Logan wants to throttle someone, like when the rest of CBS finally arrived back in Baghdad and a producer said, “Why don’t you take a rest and give the boys a chance to be on TV?” Or when the CNN bureau chief in London told her that nobody with long, straight hair would ever be taken seriously on the news. “I thought about it for one second and then thought, Screw that.”

Logan is an indifferent steward to her God-given good looks—she never had a manicure until she was 32 and a bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding. Her (current) blonde highlights suit her well, but it took years of hairdressers’ begging before she finally relented. “I could just see my roots coming in after being in Afghanistan for four months,” she fretted. After she signed her contract with CBS, she went out and bought the black Calvin Klein suit she wore the day of our first interview, but mostly she wears T-shirts from the Gap or American Apparel—the more disposable the better, as everything in Baghdad smells like diesel from the generators that keep the power grid humming. And no country is harder on clothes than Afghanistan, where laundry is cleaned by being hit with rocks.

You might think a woman’s good looks would be an asset in a visual medium, but people in television are weirdly defensive on the topic. “Lara Logan is an incredibly courageous, passionate, and intrepid reporter,” says CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric. And the fact that she’s a woman? “I think we’re past that. It’s time we became gender neutral when talking about reporters. I’d say the same thing if her name were Larry Logan.”

Fairly or not, Couric and Logan are often compared in the media, as in New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley’s review of Couric’s premiere—“The woman who stood out the most was CBS’s chief foreign correspondent, Lara Logan, an experienced and unusually pretty war correspondent. . . . ” The comparisons make Logan cringe. “I always think it is some kind of secret plot to destroy me,” she says. “I mean, to disparage the anchor at my expense? First of all, we do different jobs.”

But even the men go squeamish on the subject of her looks. “She’s the perfect storm—bright, smart, experienced, courageous,” Rick Kaplan effused about his new employee. And pretty? “Lara has gotten where she is because she is a terrific reporter,” he said, frowning. “I would hate for anyone to think it had anything to do with her aesthetic presence.”

You have to go down the masthead a notch to get an honest assessment. “Yes,” Peter Klein, one of Logan’s producers at 60 Minutes, answered when I brought it up, “she’s attractive. I suspect viewers do respond to that. But it’s more like, she’s a novelty because we’re so used to seeing a 50-year-old gray-haired man in a war zone. But it’s like going on a date with a beautiful woman—if she’s shallow, you don’t want to see her again. With Lara, I think it really comes across that she knows the place.”

A low point in her career had to be the morning Logan woke up to find pictures of herself as a fifteen-year-old bathing-suit model plastered over the cover of a British tabloid. Her mother, trusting the nice young man at the door who said he was writing an article about Logan, had naively turned the pictures over, believing “all publicity is good publicity.” Logan, whose career as a war correspondent was just beginning to take off, was embarrassed by the photos, taken in high school when she was trying to earn money to buy a secondhand car. But what mortifies her now is her anger at her mother over the incident.

“I was hard on her.” She shakes her head at the memory, her eyes filling with tears. “I said to her, ‘How could you do that when you know how hard I have worked to be taken seriously?’ But of course it didn’t matter, and I wish I had told her that.” Not long after the incident, Logan’s 61-year-old mother contracted a drug-resistant staph infection at a hospital and went into a coma. Logan, who had just covered the fall of Baghdad, asked for a leave of absence to be by her side. The network gave her five and a half months, every day of which she spent next to her mother (who eventually died of the infection). “That,” she says, “was a gift.”

Working extra hard at a job that could change public opinion on a topic of global import isn’t the worst way to expiate one of life’s great sorrows, but that doesn’t keep Logan’s family from worrying. “Her life seems very glamorous, but there is a lot of sacrifice that I don’t think people see,” her sister Lisa says. “When you put your career first, something has to give. The separation was definitely a result of that, and I think it has been one of the hardest things for her. She’s showing no signs of stopping, so maybe it would be easier for her if she said, ‘No, I don’t want children.’ My mother used to say, if Lara failed it would be because she had too many choices.”

At 36, Logan herself is finally beginning to understand how, like it or not, life eventually pushes you one way or the other. “When you’re eighteen,” she says, “you reject the notion that you can’t have a career and a family. You think that is your right. If you choose not to, fine, but no one can deny you that. Only as I got older have I realized how hard it is. You really can’t have both and do it the way you want to. I don’t want to end up alone, and I definitely don’t want to give the company so much control over my life.

“A lot of the soldiers talk about the same thing, how hard it is on relationships. You can survive the first year, but the second time is even harder, and after that. . . .” She shrugs. “It takes a heavier toll than you realize. And when you do, it’s too late.”

Featuring covers, advertisements, articles, photographs, and illustrations in their original context, the Vogue Archive offers a glimpse of Vogue’s unparalleled record of fashion, social, and cultural ideas.

Vogue.com registered users have access to a selection of editor-chosen issues from the Vogue Archive. Vogue magazine subscribers have access to a selection of 36 issues, including the very first issue of the magazine from 1892. To access the Vogue Archive, go to voguearchive.com and use the Archive Login in the upper-right-hand corner.