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Rubbing Shoulders With Two Presidents Part 8
Tom Graciano / Indonesia Media
 It was about 9:30 a.m. when I got to the building. It was packed with foreign and local journalists, including photographers and TV cameramen. On my way to the lobby I was intercepted by Dick Stone, the UPI Bureau Chief in Jakarta. “Tommy, go as quickly as you can to the office and call UPI bureaus in New York, London, or anywhere else in North America or Europe,” Dick told me in a voice sounding a high degree of urgency. He asked me to use one line to call the UPI offices and get whoever answered first to stay on the line until I communicated to him the full announcement.
 Hartoyo and Kurnipi, the staff photographer, were in the room where the transfer of power would be officially announced, along with dozens of local and foreign newsmen. Dick didn’t understand Indonesian, in which the announcement would be made, so he was coordinating the coverage to ensure UPI would be the first to break the story to the entire world. UPI’s top competitor, The Associated Press (AP), deployed the same number of personnel – a staff reporter and a staff photographer, coordinated by Jeff Williams, its Jakarta Bureau Chief.
I wish I had wings so I could fly to the UPI office on Jalan Lombok in the Menteng residential district. I fully understood what Dick wanted to do. He wanted to beat AP in letting the world know about the historical transfer of power . I was determined to help him make that become a reality. So no sooner did I get to the office than I started frantically calling UPI New York, London and Amsterdam. There was no dialing system yet at the time. I had to place the calls through an operator. After what seemed like ages, the operator put me through to someone answering the call in UPI Amsterdam. I used my limited Dutch to tell the guy to stand by for a great breaking news story. Then I was nervously waiting for Hartoyo’s call to come through the other line. Again it seemed like ages. It made me much more nervous.
 Finally the other phone rang and Hartoyo was on the line. He told me the name and title of the army officer making the announcement but I can’t remember it now. I relayed this to the guy at the end of the other line in UPI Amsterdam. Then, as the officer was reading the announcement in Indonesian, Hartoyo almost simultaneously translated it into English to me. I passed this on, word for word, to the UPI reporter in the Amsterdam office. This went on for more than 10 minutes, as far as I can remember. It was a long announcement. We finally did it, apparently because there was a missing link in AP’s team, somebody in their office to relay the breaking news in real time to an AP bureau outside Indonesia. Dick told me later that day UPI beat AP by six or seven minutes in breaking to the world the news about the historical transfer of power from President Soekarno to General Suharto. This was the event that ushered in a new era in the history of this archipelago nation, at the time the fifth most populous country in the world.
 The days following the official announcement of the power transfer were hectic and full of newsworthy events. More and more senior correspondents from the world’s major news media descended upon Jakarta. Indonesia had been in the forefront of world news coverage since October 1965. CBS News Asia Bureau Chief Bernard Kalb was in town with his cameraman, French Alex Bauer, and soundman, a Thai national whose name I don’t remember. I was working with them along with Sie Lukman, a local cameraman who was also a stringer for CBS News.
Bernie Kalb, who in the mid 1980s did a two-year stint as a US State Department spokesman, was an admirer of Bung Karno. He was posted to Jakarta as a New York Times correspondent for two or three years in the late 1950s. The president knew him personally. And Bernie made friends with a lot of Indonesian politicians and intellectuals. The two I remember well were Dr. Umar Kayam, a leading poet-cum-writer, and Dr. Sudjatmoko, who later became Indonesia’s ambassador in Washington, DC. Bernie asked me if I knew someone who could arrange for him to interview Soekarno. I asked Guntur, Bung Karno’s eldest son popularly known as Mas Tok,, whom I met through a mutual friend. But he told me even he and his siblings had a hard time getting a pass from the military to visit his father.
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