Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990 TAG: 9003252163
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Elizabeth Kastor The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Her dream is far more mundane: Buy a motor home, toss the grandkids in the back and go someplace decidedly unexotic, someplace like the Grand Canyon. It is a dream straight from the heart of an energetic 49-year-old who loves to fish, who keeps her auburn hair trim and practical and her needlepoint close at hand. It is the dream of the housewife she is - or at least was before the struggle began.
For the past five years, her stolidly grieving face has stared from countless newspapers and television screens. She has propelled herself onto the national stage as a latter-day, middle-class prophet - an enraged visitor demanding immediate moral action from every person she meets, whether politician or citizen. Daily she condemns the ethical failure of a country that would let her brother Terry Anderson remain a hostage in Lebanon since he was seized on a Beirut street on March 16, 1985. Daily she asks the country to bleed with her.
The problem is, who can bear to listen to someone scream with pain for five years? To be with Peggy Say is to feel constantly guilty, to wonder constantly why it's your fault, and then to feel guilty again for wishing her scream would stop.
Over the years Say has learned that although she does not falter, the audience for a prophet's cry is not as constant. She is no stranger to hate mail. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke, she says, she was seen as bearing partial responsibility for the Reagan administration's contortions on behalf of the hostages. Tainted by her earlier connection with Oliver North (White House liaison for the hostage families), she was shunned by the politicians who once helped her. In her own hometown of Batavia, N.Y., the atmosphere grew so hostile she felt compelled two years ago to move far away to Kentucky.
"I know people don't like to see me coming," she says. "I think I represent failure to a lot of people, and they just wish I would go away."
But Say cannot stop. And now, with elusive but encouraging signals out of the Middle East suggesting that her brother and the other hostages could soon be released, she is making what she hopes will be her final round. As she has learned to do, she is visiting the ambassadors, giving the interviews, taping the television profiles, appealing to the media to keep her brother's story alive as she simultaneously condemns the media for failing to do more for Anderson, a journalist himself.
In an office near the White House, a birthday card waits. The illustration was drawn by Garry Trudeau, Anderson's favorite cartoonist, and the large card has been signed by hundreds of journalists, from the famous to the obscure. She grows hard when she talks about it. Even that card reminds her that the tragedy her family is living is not everyone's tragedy.
"Although 95 percent of those people probably did nothing more for Terry than sign their names to that card, Terry doesn't need to know that," she says in a flat tone suggesting that although he will never know, she remembers.
"What's important to me and David is that when Terry gets off that plane, there are only going to be a handful of us who can look him straight in the face and not flinch," she says. "I may have erred politically. I may have erred strategically. I've never erred morally. This was the thing - there was no choice."
The surprise of Peggy Say is that she manages to be a moral presence and a casual companion at the same time. In their hotel suite, the Says wear nearly identical bluejeans, white T-shirts and sweat socks as they juggle phone calls and visitors and joke that she's so much in demand he had to buy his own birthday present last week. She makes coffee, hunts for cigarettes, shares a grim smile with her husband when he says that they would have given up smoking years ago if there had been no kidnapping.
By now it is accepted that Peggy Say will step forward whenever a comment is required from The Hostage Families, a phrase upon which she bestows the capital letters of an honorific. When asked why she is the one to wage this campaign, she replies with the simple, ultimate persuasiveness of suffering: She is doing it for her brother - who wouldn't do such a thing for a brother? But the fact remains that she is the one who has done it longest, loudest and with the greatest skill.
Anderson's journalistic career also gives his sister access to the media that might have been unavailable to others. Because Anderson was the Middle East bureau chief for Associated Press, AP has paid for all of Say's travel, from trips to Washington to trips to the Middle East and Europe. The company also underwrites her phone bills, which David describes as enormous.
But the emotional and spiritual costs of Say's campaign are high, and it takes more than corporate money to drive her. If survivors feel guilt, how much more tormented are observers, the people like Peggy Say who have never been in danger, never been chained to a wall for months on end, and who see in the future a moment when they will have to justify themselves to the man who lived in those chains?
"When I get aggravated with it and think, `God, I don't want to do this!' I think of Terry and truly it is my motivation," she says. "What would he give to do what I'm doing? You kick-start yourself and say, `Get on with it. Stop complaining.' "
It was that determination - the willingness to risk life in Beirut, to do any dangerous job - that made Anderson a much-admired reporter. He is also a brother who sometimes "acted up," as his brother-in-law gently puts it. Anderson is the kind of person friends describe as "impossible," but mean it as a compliment.
In his sister, the stubbornness sent her back to college in her 40s to study social work and into the fields to teach migrant workers how to read.
But her will has been battered over the past five years, first by Terry's capture and then the deaths of her father, Glenn, and brother Glenn Richard and an infant grandson. She still believes in justice but knows it does not come on demand.
But that she cannot change her little corner of the world and free her brother seems still to defy Say's understanding. She does her best to wield political influence by serving as a constant reminder of the eight American hostages and actually becoming friends with members of the Lebanese and Syrian diplomatic corps. But in the end she has staked out American hearts as her battlefield.
It was that unstinting battle that brought her into conflict with some of the residents of Batavia, a town of fewer than 17,000.
"We picked up criticisms on the part of citizens," says Joe Higgins, an editorial writer at the Batavia Daily News. "They were very bored with the whole business, with Peggy going into public meetings and telling Batavia how it was failing . . . as if the average citizen could go and see the ayatollah and kick him around a little, I guess."
After the Iran-Contra backlash hit the hostage families, a disheartened Peggy Say fell silent for almost a year. But the response from Batavia was particularly wrenching for Say, who felt abandoned by her hometown. Her appeals to Batavia were "like talking into a well. There was no response, an absence of caring."
Higgins wonders if she was perhaps asking for more empathy than any town could provide. Anne Zickl, a fourth-generation Batavia resident who has been the Anderson's family spokesman for the last two years, believes her neighbors balked at Peggy Say's criticism of government policy.
"Basically, they are people who trust the government," says Zickl. "And in many small communities, a strong woman with strong opinions who is forthright in expressing them can have some problems."
Zickl believes whatever antipathy there was has passed, but Say feels her work is more accepted in Kentucky. "They know it's family, and that's enough," she says.
Publicity is the force that distorts the Says' lives. It is also Peggy Say's best weapon. It is a conflict she seems not to have resolved, and her relationship with the news media is equally ambivalent. Ever friendly to the individual reporters who follow her around, she is cynical to the extreme about the profession at large.
There is one imagined terror she comes back to repeatedly with the force of a compulsion: After the release, some reporter will get to her brother and inform him of the deaths of his father and brother, facts she believes his captors have kept from him, "simply to get his reaction on camera."
She has been singed by the press before. Soon after both her father and brother died of cancer, a reporter told her there were rumors one of the hostages had cancer, and didn't she think it was probably Terry. Anderson was not sick, but his sister would not know that for months.
Both Says are pained on Terry Anderson's behalf as well. In March 1985, he was between lives, separated from his first wife, beginning again with a Lebanese woman. He left behind him one 8-year-old daughter, Gabrielle, in Japan, another not yet born in Beirut. His Lebanese fiancee now waits in Cyprus, along with his 5-year-old daughter, Sulome. He has seen Sulome's face in a picture, but does not know her name.
"He had never broached interference about his private life, so it was horrible that he was taken at such an embarrassing time," says David Say. "In the only letter we got from him, he said, `I've left a mess.' It's particularly hard because Terry was what we called a straight-arrow kid. He'd been married for 20 years, from the time he was 18. And up until this happened, I couldn't tell you much about his private life. I think Peggy and I are both very much the same. Our life is private."
Some friends say Peggy Say can never really go back to life as it was, now that she has been in the spotlight. Anne Zickl, who believes her friend "has the heart of a social worker," says, "She gets so mad at me because I tell her she is being prepared for her great work; she hasn't done it yet. Peggy says she never knew what she had in her. Although she will never long for the limelight and she is truly a private person, she will not do as she claims she will - grow tomatoes in Kentucky for the rest of her life."
Say knows she can't return to her former self, but she sees the changes in her life in terms of family members lost, pain survived. She does not mention the expertise she has acquired over the last five years, the lessons in international politics and negotiation tactics and media attention. But every once in a while, something slips through: "We have to talk not only about Terry Anderson, but about Lebanon, and what happens to it in the future," she will say. "There are men there who grew up only in war."
by CNB