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A former freelance journalist who worked in Jakarta following
the abortive October 1965 communist coup attempt relates his
numerous interesting experiences
Stringing for Time Magazine
Tom Graciano/Indonesia Media
 PART 1
I carried out my stringing job for Time magazine initially by way of an arrangement with Amir Daud, a crack Indonesian journalist. Amir, who was my coach and mentor in good journalism, had been a newsman for almost 20 years when I met him in early 1966. He was a staff reporter for The Associated Press (AP) prior to becoming a freelancer, stringing for Time, the German news agency DPA and several other foreign media. Much later when he was unable to handle the various stringing jobs he had on his plate, the Time job was turned over fully to me.
At that time (1966-67) we usually filed a story for Time magazine when instructed to do a specific topic either by an editor in New York or by a correspondent in the Asia Bureau office of Time-Life News Service in Hong Kong . I remember a major assignment which I think came from New York to do a story on mass conversions into Christianity in several parts of Indonesia . News reports said these conversions were taking place mostly in Central and East Java and North Sumatra ’s Tanah Karo region. Sixty-five thousand people were baptized in Central and East Java , while in Tanah Karo 16,000 converted into various Christian denominations.
 I interviewed an American missionary from Memphis , Tennessee , USA , who was the pastor of the Baptist Church on Jalan Tirtayasa in Jakarta ’s upscale Kebayoran Baru district for this story. I can’t remember his name, but he said something which I quoted in the story. To the best of my recollection, he said people switched to Christianity because they failed to find an inner conviction in Communism. Amir and I wrote the story together. Time always asked us to send copious files, so we sent at least ten pages of copy, equivalent to about 3,000 words. The magazine used the story, including the quote, in a one-column-by-six-inch space in its religion section.
We sent the story by telegram at the government-owned telecommunication center which was the only way we foreign newsmen filed our reports to our respective editorial offices overseas at that time. The wire services were even more primitive, I mean by today’s hi-tech standards. They filed their reports, normally twice a day, by way of what was then known in our jargon as morsecast. I think it was a contraction of Morse broadcast. This was sending the files by telegraphic transmission which came out printed on the tickers in the editorial offices overseas. So in those days we foreign newsmen based in Jakarta had to use cable lingo, or “cablese” in our jargon, when writing our stories. All the punctuations, such as stop, comma, quote, unquote, paragraph, etc. had to be stated in writing as stp, cma, qte, unqte and para.
 Before we could file the stories we had to get them reviewed and approved by a team of censors first. The three-member civilian team, reporting to the military, worked in a room in the Press House making it convenient for foreign newsmen to get their stories checked by the team. Most of us newsmen working for the foreign media stayed in the Press House, while senior foreign journalists worked out of their rooms in HI (Hotel Indonesia). I knew these censors personally and we were good friends so in my case it was just a matter of getting them to sign off on my files. The head of the team, Lie Hartono, visited me in Manila when he made a trip there in 1978.
 Amir and I worked with several high-caliber Time-Life News Service correspondents who flew to Jakarta either from Hong Kong or Bangkok ( Thailand ). The names I can remember now are Frank McCullough, Louis Kraar and Karsten Praeger who years later made it to the top of Time Asia’s editorial hierarchy as its managing editor. Later on, when Amir was no longer involved in the Time stringing job, I worked very closely with Roy Rowan, the Asia Bureau chief based in Hong Kong . Roy, who wrote his first book, The Four Days of Mayaguez , while still with Time in mid 1970s, is now a successful author with eight books to his name, at the time of writing. He gave me an autographed copy of his first book when I visited him in Hong Kong in 1975.
As I was writing this chapter in California , I exchanged emails with Roy in Connecticut , U.S.A. He asked me if I was still in contact with Amir. I then searched Amir’s name in google.com, and was shocked to learn of his death in October 2006. Our mutual friend, Sabam Siagian, former Indonesian ambassador to Australia , now a senior journalist in Jakarta , later confirmed this to me in an email he sent me. I stopped writing for a minute to pray for the repose of Amir’s soul and for God’s blessings on the family he left behind.
F ollowing General Suharto’s appointment as acting president in March 1967 Time Inc., the publisher of Time magazine, was preparing to stage a massive conference in Geneva , Switzerland . The meeting, called Time Inc.’s Indonesia Investment Conference, was intended to bail Indonesia out of the economic doldrums inherited from the previous government. I don’t know whether Time Inc. was the sole sponsor of this grand idea or if there were other co-sponsors involved leaving the publishing company to do all the arrangements. Major North American and European corporations were invited to Geneva to hear directly from a team of US-graduated Indonesian economists what the investment-hungry nation could offer them in return for capital inflow to revive the economy.
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