Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,742

This is the grave of Gee Gee Geyer.

Born in 1935 in Chicago, Geraldine Geyer grew up there. A story she liked to tell was about how she hated bullies. Evidently, her father grew up in the Irish neighborhoods of Chicago and he did everything he could to avoid the gang of Irish toughs that used to beat up weaker kids. The head of that gang? Richard Daley. Good story anyway.

Geyer wanted to become a journalist at a time when it was a man’s world and she wasn’t going to let any glass ceilings stop her, not if she could. That her family really supported her helped, not only her parents, but her older siblings. She went to Northwestern and after graduation, won a Fulbright to study at the University of Vienna. She became fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Russian. Somewhat interesting that French wasn’t one of them, just given the cultural prejudices of the time.

Now, she had to start more or less at the bottom, working at the Southtown Economist, a paper in Chicago. She moved up to the Chicago Daily News, in 1959. Her first big story there was her dressing up as a cocktail waitress at a mafia wedding so she could listen in on their conversations and report on them. She was always more or less a right-winger, but she became close to Saul Alinsky, who she thought bullied by the powers that be in Chicago, so she defended him in her print. She also led a group to save Hull House from the wrecking ball. In fact, Daley and the urban renewal folks managed to destroy that entire neighborhood, but Hull House remains.

Geyer stayed at the Daily News until 1974 and began to do foreign correspondent work while she was there. Now, of course newspapers had hired women for a long time, but they were usually ghettoized into women’s roles–the society pages, food, local affairs. The big international reporters were swinging dicks men. She fought her way right through those dicks. She did indeed start on the society pages. Then she moved to the home desk. Then she became a foreign correspondent. She stayed there until 1974 and in fact started becoming so famous, she went independent at that time and had her own syndicated column.

In 1973, Geyer became the first American to interview Saddam Hussein. She liked her zones hot. She wasn’t too interested in staying in Paris or London or Rome. She spent a lot of time in the Middle East and interviewed basically everyone. That included Sadat, Arafat, King Hussein, Gaddafi, and Khomeini. She worked wherever there was a war though. A lot of that was in Latin America. She interviewed Juan Peron during his second stint ruling Argentina. Death squads threatened her life in Guatemala. She reported on rebels in the Dominican Republic fighting against their evil U.S.-supported government. The rebels in Angola detained her for her reporting there. These were hot zones! She also became skeptical of Israel’s actions in the Middle East, leading those the types who supports its genocide in Gaza today to criticize her.

Geyer wrote a bunch of books based on her journalism. The New Latins: Fateful Change in South and Central America from 1970 has a terrible title. The New 100 Years War came out in 1972. In 1975 came The Young Russians. She turned her pen to herself, the true interest of almost all journalists, with 1983’s Buying the Night Flight: the Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent. She wrote a fairly important biography of Castro in 1991 titled, Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro. In 1994, she wrote Waiting for Winter to End: An Extraordinary Journey Through Soviet Central Asia. In 2004, she wrote Tunisia: A Journey Through a Country That Works. Not sure how true that is now. In 2011, there was Predicting the Unthinkable, Anticipating the Impossible: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to America in the New Century. And finally, she closed her writing career on the best possible subject: cats. That was with When Cats Reigned Like Kings: On the Trail of the Sacred Cats.

She got pretty Beltway though as she rose. It infects all DC-based reporters like a cancer, or most of them. She took on anti-immigrant positions in her writing. As she moved to the right, she freaked out about the horror of things such as hearing Spanish on phone calls and the idea that some people might not want English as an official national language. This led to another book, Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship. Gross. It went further. She was a popular commencement speaker, where she insulted the many immigrants and immigrant families graduating or attending graduations, such as this 1993 commencement speech at Northwestern:

“The problem for the United States in your lifetime will, strangely enough, be related to the problems we see in the Yugoslavias, the Tajikistans and indeed the Russias of our world. It is the problem of national and cultural disintegration. For in our own way we are allowing organizers, activists and ambition-ridden political putative leaders to divide this country much the same ways that Yugoslavia has been deliberately divided since 1987.”

The only problem I see is that people like Geyer spew their hate. As for immigration itself, bring it on. We need more. A lot more.

Geyer got to co-moderate one of the presidential debates in 1984. The 1993 CBS show Hearts Afire actually used her as a model for its lead character without even asking her about it, which then like Mike Royko to attack CBS for that action. The show sounds terrible anyway. Royko wrote:

“So let me pose this question: If you were a Chicago-born blond named Georgie Anne, had built an international reputation as a foreign correspondent and columnist, and had written an important book about Fidel Castro, and you turned on your TV and saw a lewd sitcom about a Chicago-born blond named Georgie Anne who built a national reputation as a foreign correspondent and had written an important book about Fidel Castro, wouldn’t you say something like: ‘Hey, what the hell’s going on?'”

I mean, it does seem weird that they went this far without evidently asking her permission.

The last decade of Geyer’s life included a lot of cancer and she died, probably of it, in 2019, at the age of 84.

Gee Gee Geyer is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

If you would like this series to visit other women who made an impact in journalism, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Winifred Bonfils is in Colma, California and Adela Rodgers St. Johns is in Glendale, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.