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Fall 2002

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Love & War

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Love & War
Boston Globe bureau chief Charles Sennott ’84 navigates news & life

by Patricia Wright, photography by Iva Zimova




	Dasht-e-Qala, Takhar province, Afghanistan 2001. Translator Nabi winds a scarf around Sennott's head.

On a rainy morning in March, the Europe bureau chief of the Boston Globe is keeping an appointment near his home in Hampstead, a moderately posh district in north London. A big, friendly guy wearing a balding leather jacket, Charles Sennott ’84 looks less like chief of anything than like the streetwise reporter he’s been for most of the past 18 years. And which he still is: "The Globe’s Europe bureau is a garden shed," says Sennott, who was named to the post in 2001 after four years as Middle East chief in Jerusalem.

Sennott overstates the humbleness of the garden shed, as his clothes understate the importance of his position. He’s working at home today, so clothes don’t much matter, but in general he’s had to pull his sartorial socks up as Europe bureau chief. (In Israel, he says, even cabinet ministers run around in sports attire.)

Still, a bureau chief is a working reporter, a foreign correspondent based in a region and responsible for his paper’s coverage there. The Globe has six such regions; Sennott’s is broadly enough defined to have had him hopping in and out of not only Vatican City and the Hague but also Afghanistan, where he spent some weeks traveling with Northern Alliance troops before the fall of the Taliban.

In an article called "Love During Wartime" in the June 2002 Men’s Health magazine, Sennott wrote about the strains of war reporting on his family. After the murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, Julie Sennott, a woman of mordant humor, asked her husband, "Do they have a good picture of you at the paper?" Three-year-old Riley Sennott, frustrated by one too many bedtime talks by satellite phone from Afghanistan, told his father, "I don’t want to talk to you today, Dada, unless you’re going to talk about coming home."

Worry about his family was a major reason why "it was time to get out" of Israel for Sennott, who turned his time there to exceptional advantage in The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land’s Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium. (See excerpt, page 36.) Published last year by Public Affairs, the book portrays the indigenous Christian communities of the modern Middle East – Palestinian Christians, Maronite Lebanese, Egyptian Copts, and others – as minority populations dwindling ever more rapidly as their members are both left out and caught in the middle of the region’s conflicts, preeminently the struggle between Muslims and Jews.

But the place and the politics that provided Sennott with such a compelling subject was necessarily nerve-wracking to the parents of small children. He and Julie "had taken to spelling words like t-a-n-k and w-a-r in our daily conversations," Sennott wrote in Men’s Health. "After a bomb went off two blocks from our son’s school, we noticed that our 4-year-old was starting to put the sounds and letters together. That’s no way to learn to spell."

Here is a snapshot of Charlie Sennott in what must have been his senior year at UMass. He’s a skinny blond boy hustling down the hill between Memorial Hall and Old Chapel, heading for a demonstration at the Student Union. In his hands and under his arms are various items of audio equipment – a bulky tape recorder, a microphone. His shirttail is hanging out.

"Really, you remember seeing that?" he says with a laugh. "I’d have been working for WFCR" – the Five College public radio station based at UMass. "And yes, if it was fall I might have been blond! We had this family painting business and I spent a lot of time in the sun in the summers."

Sennott says he loves UMass, "which I praise to the skies wherever I go." (His brother Mark ’77 and numerous cousins went to UMass, as did Julie’s sister, Marcy Klapper ’77.) He is especially glowing about WFCR, where he was part of a group of budding broadcasters that included current NPR South Asia bureau chief Michael Sullivan ’82; Deb Wong, later an Asia correspondent for NPR and ABC; and NPR producers Ken Hom and Doug Berman.

All of which might have predicted a career in broadcasting for Sennott, but didn’t: "Writing for sound drove me a little crazy, because what you write is so ephemeral." After finishing his history degree at UMass and a master’s at the Columbia School of Journalism, he went straight into newspapering, apprenticing at the Bergen Record in New Jersey before landing a job at the quintessential big-city tabloid, the New York Daily News.

"It was a pretty intense run," says Sennott of his eight years at the News. "I covered Belfast, the Gulf War, the Medellin riots, Waco, the Susan Smith murders."

He also covered the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993. In fact, his anger at the way a series on the roots of terrorism was packaged by the News – "coarsely reduced," is his phrase – led to his decision to leave the next year. "I’m not a highbrow about this," says Sennott. "I loved working for the News. The people I worked with were some of the best reporters I’ve ever met. But at some level, because of the packaging, I felt like I was becoming part of a kind of racism, of hate."

In 1994 Sennott left New York, got engaged, and joined the Globe, where he hit the ground running as a part of the paper’s special projects team. His 1996 series, "Armed for Profit," for which he traveled in the Middle East and elsewhere, won the Livingston Award for National Reporting, the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a National Headliner Award for Investigative Reporting. By 1998, he’d been listed as the city’s best reporter by Boston magazine and by George magazine as one of the top 10 journalists in America, and he and Julie and their first son, Will, had moved to Jerusalem.

I did think of calling it ‘A Boston Irishman’s Wayward Pilgrimage through the Holy Land,’" says Sennott with a grin. The thought survives more judiciously as the second subtitle of his books, The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land’s Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium: A Reporter’s Journey. The Body and the Blood is scrupulously researched. While Sennott is careful to acknowledge that he’s a journalist, not a scholar, an impressive amount of reading is reflected in the notes to his text. Shining just as brightly through, however, is the motivation behind his reporting and research.

"I grew up in Massachusetts, in what some might call a traditional Irish Catholic home, though it never felt traditional to those of us growing up in it," Sennott writes in his prologue. "But looking back, our lives revolved around the spiritual axis of our local parish. Our extended family gatherings usually began in churches, at baptisms, weddings, and funerals. They ended up at the family home, with coolers full of beer, and a well-stocked bar for my aunts and uncles. My mother’s cousin, Father William Morgan, a priest in the Boston archdiocese, presided over and preached with soulful spirituality at all of these family events.

"I still somehow feel at home," writes Sennott, "with the ritual functions of the Catholic church, with the work of its institutions on behalf of the poor all over the world, with the generosity and spirit of the nuns and priests I’ve known."

These continue to be his feelings, he says, despite recent revelations of priestly abuses. "The church is ultimately about the people who gather there," he says, "not only the hierarchy, which has proven corrupt and inept and lacking compassion throughout this scandal."

Moving to Israel brought Sennott to the birthplace of the faith in which he’d been raised. Woven into a cultural fabric now dominated by the Judaism from which it arose and by the Islam that would follow, that faith was still represented in living, if beleaguered, communities.

Thus "the Boston Irishman’s pilgrimage." Correlating his travels as a reporter with biblical accounts of Christ’s journeys through areas now known as Israel, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, Sennott set himself the project of visiting all the places mentioned in the Gospels in the course of the Christian millennial year.

Back at the house in Hampstead behind which is located the Globe’s Europe bureau, Charles and Julie Sennott are resorting to spelling again. It’s a measure of how much better family life is here that the word they don’t want Riley to register is not
"T-A-N-K" but "B-A-B-Y." The Sennotts’ fourth child is due this fall. "Julie doesn’t eat much meat except when she’s pregnant, so I usually find out by coming home and finding a lot of lamb in the freezer," says Sennott cheerfully.

The house is open-planned and sunny. Gabriel – the Sennotts’ Bethlehem baby, born in a West Bank hospital in December 2000 – is down for his nap. Will should be home from school in a while, wearing his little-English-kid uniform. Riley is a happy man whose dad has been home several days now.

"We’ve got a challenge ahead of us teaching our kids about faith," says Sennott. "Julie is Jewish, I’m Catholic; under Jewish law they’re Jewish; under Arab law they’re Christian. Because Gabriel was born in a West Bank hospital he has a Palestinian Authority I.D.; because Riley was born in an Israeli hospital, he has a passport that lists his place of birth as Jerusalem, blank’!" – no country listed.

The blank on Riley’s passport could be seen as poignant, denoting the contested political status of a city holy to three major faiths. But to his father, "that passport is a beautiful document. It’s not about a baby born in a void of faith – it’s about tremendous possibilities. Our children are the people in between, and they can be part of that."

Then Sennott wants to show their guest the garden shed, which turns out to be a snug, spacious studio a few steps along a forsythia-lined walk from the back door, before he has to leave for an afternoon appointment. As the appointment is at the American Embassy, the balding leather jacket has the day off. A well-pressed trenchcoat has taken its place. Handsomely turned out, he’s out the door, every inch a bureau chief.

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Love & War

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