They are the words of the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, and they seem as if they were penned for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who persevered through tragedy and always did so with a great sense of humor and a love for laughter.

There are many things to say in remembering Senator Kennedy. There’s the passion for helping the downtrodden, the commitment to human rights, the determination to carry the torch for the ideals and the dreams of his brothers, John and Robert. And there are the burdens of tragedy, the lost opportunities for greatness, the failure to achieve health care reform in his lifetime, the scandals that caused so much harm to himself and those who were scandalized.

But in the search for the enduring traits that Kennedy leaves behind, humor should not be overlooked. He liked to laugh and his laughter and playfulness cut across all boundaries geographic and otherwise.

That should be remembered as the somber tributes continue and the country prepares for a world-class Irish wake.

I had a chance to see Ted Kennedy in one of his last public appearances in Boston prior to his diagnosis for brain cancer.

It was at the Kennedy Library in Boston in early May, 2008 at the annual gathering for the Profiles in Courage award which honors leaders in public service in America. And there was Ted, looking great in a tuxedo, and on stage with his beloved niece, Caroline.

I will hold that memory of the way he worked the room and convinced everyone there that he knew them and somehow managed to conveyed a knowing sense of compassion with a wink and a handshake. I’d covered Kennedy on different issues, including his stand on Northern Ireland, the war in Iraq, but also the family’s darker side, including the rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith, an allegation that came out of a night of hard partying in the family’s Palm Beach, Florida estate on Easter weekend.

I’d seen him and studied him and taken notes on what he said in many settings, but it never ceased to amaze me how he worked a room.

Maybe they were just the gifts of a lifelong politician, but something far deeper was there as well. It was a genuine passion for the little guy, a fighting spirit that was always framed by genuine laughter and joy.

On the stage that night, Ted Kennedy sang a Broadway show tune and danced a soft shoe and the whole time he looked like he was having the time of his life. All the remembrance and the tragedy and the weight that surrounds the Kennedy Library was there, but he danced on like the old Irish ballad, the Lord of the Dance, and it felt in that moment like he would always be there. It was just a few weeks later that his diagnosis of brain cancer was announced.

I would see him again, but not laughing. Instead he was focused and serious and impassioned and that was the night of his endorsement of Barack Obama for president in the heat of the Democratic campaign.

Last August, he went on to deliver what was his last great speech during the Democratic Convention. Kennedy’s address echoed perhaps his most famous speech at the convention in 1980 when he delivered, no, roared a single phrase that is now echoing across every broadcast honoring him from America to Africa and Asia and Latin America and Europe and the Middle East.

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Those words will echo for a very long time, and so will his laughter.

Pierre Vimont, French Ambassador to the United States, sat down with GlobalPost this week to talk about the global economic crisis, President Barack Obama’s dramatic shift in U.S. policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan and what the future holds for U.S.-French relations.

In a week in which French labor unions held strikes across the country to protest the way working people are bearing the burden of the financial crisis, Vimont articulated the French view on what is meant by President Sarkozy’s desire for the “reform” of capitalism.

“By reform we are talking about more accountability. We should allow for an entrepreneur to succeed but if an entrepreneur fails he should not take bonuses or retain salary. President Sarkozy has been very outspoken on this,” said Vimont.

Another aspect of correcting the global economy, Vimont said, will have to include “more coordination internationally, particularly with emerging economies.”

“We need much more participation from Brazil, India, and other emerging economies. We have to find a way for them to have more of a voice,” he said.

“If we don’t show to people a coherence in our principals then the French people will lose faith in the system,” he explained, speaking directly to a global sense of unrest amid the dramatic downturn in the economy.

Vimont is a career diplomat who was appointed U.S. ambassador by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 when the new French president began a distinctly warm tone toward America and President Bush.

So where will U.S.-French relations stand now with the new administration of President Barack Obama?

“We were working very closely with America before in many ways. And with President Obama relations will improve even more,” said Vimont.

He said he welcomed the “excellent choice” of Sen. George Mitchell as U.S. special envoy to the Middle East and believed President Obama’s announcement that Guantanamo would be closed within a year was “something the world applauds.”

He was asked about the fraying of relations between the U.S. and France in the run up to the war in Iraq. That unique moment in history when French fries became Freedom fries, French wine sales plummeted and Bart Simpson coined the moniker “Cheese-eating, surrender monkey.”

At that time in 2003 and 2004, Vimont was serving as the chief of staff to then-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, the silver haired Gaul who, to Americans, embodied French arrogance.

Given just how costly in terms of human lives and dollars the U.S.-led war in Iraq has been for all those involved, it would be so easy for the French to say they told America so.

But you would never hear that from Vimont. Not only because he is a seasoned diplomat, but because he has a distinctly down-to-earth, almost humble and I would even dare to say un-French bearing about him.

“There is a passionate relationship between our two countries. When we disagree it causes great anger. … I think it comes from a closeness. It is something very special, but at the same time we like to be critical, no?” said Vimont with a slight smile.

He signed the executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year and shut down secret overseas CIA prisons, a roll back on a national disgrace that had subjected prisoners to years in detention without charge and subjected them to interrogations that human rights groups say is tantamount to torture.

In making that his first official act as president, he told the world that the United States is going to confront the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”

And he vowed to prosecute the struggle “vigilantly” and “effectively.”

For Obama, we are in a ”struggle” against terrorism: not a “war on terror,” as Bush has consistently called it. This represents a small shift in terminology, but one that speaks volumes about the approach.

If you try to fight terrorism in a “war” with tanks and troops, you lose. When you define the struggle in purely conventional military terms, it’s over.

It has to be a battle of ideas and street smarts and dogged investigative work and the skill it takes to build up a network of confidential informants. Sometimes a conventional military approach is necessary, but the real struggle for terrorism is a quiet, stealth operation that includes more wire tapping than missile firing.

Obama gets this, Bush didn’t.

Just ask the French or the British who both saw the failures of the conventional approach and saw what happens when they abandoned their own ideals in the struggle. So many Israeli counter-terrorism officials I know would agree, but that does not mean that their elected government officials have always seen it the same way. Certainly, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert doesn’t given the brutal offensive just undertaken in Gaza. What did it accomplish? Did it serve the purpose of destroying Hamas and undercutting its capability to launch rockets into southern Israeli? Time will tell.
But most experts in the region don’t think so.

I have covered terrorism for more than 16 years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.

And in every capital where I have covered terrorism from Belfast to Madrid to London to Jerusalem to Cairo to Paris and beyond there is an understanding that when a country abandons its ideals in the struggle it loses to the terrorists. It loses because it reduces its own moral standing. It falls into the trap of asymmetrical warfare.

The United Kingdom learned this in its struggle against the IRA and applied its lessons in its very sophisticated investigations and prosecutions in the London underground bombings of July 7, 2005.
Spain learned this in its long fight against the Basque separatist group ETA and also applied its lessons against those who carried out the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004.

Did the United States learn this in Iraq – or is it perhaps in the process of the lesson? It is hard to tell right now, but for sure it seems there is now a sharper student of history in the Oval Office.

And in one of the more powerful moments of the speech, he spoke directly to the world:

“…And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.”

And in this historic moment, as many as 2 billion people from every corner of the world tuned in or linked in via the internet to hear Obama’s words about the “hope” he promised to Americans, and the hope the whole world has that America might live up to its greatest ideals.

“Those ideals still light the world and we will not give them up for expediency’s sake,” he added with some edge in his voice and as the CNN cameras turned to President George W. Bush listening to words that seemed on some level directed at the outgoing administration.

It seemed an unmistakable part of the script for the day that there was an eagerness to say goodbye to the last eight years. Some of the choreography seemed straight out of Hollywood. Now-former Vice President Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair with a cane and a grimace. Did anyone else notice that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Potter, the mean old guy in the wheel chair from the American classic “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

But the essence of the speech was to go beyond partisan politics and the bitter divisions of the past. It was a speech about the fact that there is work to do:

“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

And there is indeed an enormous task ahead. This presidency perhaps more than any in history comes with extraordinarily high expectations that Obama can indeed change or “reboot,” as he put it, the way America deals with the world.

And there are many observers who believe these expectations for change — from climate change to controlling AIDS in Africa, from terrorism to tariffs on trade — will be virtually impossible for the new president to live up to.

And based on the work of our GlobalPost correspondents in the field it seems that in many corners of the world, it was quickly becoming apparent that not every place in the world chose to bask in the warm glow that enveloped the Mall in Washington, D.C. where several million people gathered to witness history.

To gauge those expectations, GlobalPost’s 65 correspondents in some 45 countries have set out in this series “For Which It Stands” to listen to people in the countries they cover and to document what this day means for them. And all day they filed into what we call “Reporter’s Notebooks”, which are essentially blogs in search of a better name. Please check out the Reporter’s Notebooks on the GlobalPost site featuring correspondents such as Seth Kugel in Brazil, Miriam Elde in Russiar, and Caryle Murphy in Saudi Arabia.

And so these questions loom large before Obama as he enters the Oval Office: If he truly is the first global president, will his worldwide constituents be patient with his promise for change? And will he ever be able to live up to all that the world expects from the United States of America?

And he stated with clear conviction his view of how he will project American leadership in the world:

“To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your first.”

“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”

“For the world has changed and we must change with it.”

And so today will mark the first truly global inauguration with an estimated 2 to 3 billion people turning their eyes to witness how Obama will capture this moment — more viewers than any World Cup, or Super Bowl, or Olympics or any other event in the history of television.

The world will tune in to hear what words he might choose to begin a presidency that sets out to restore not only the “hope” that Obama spoke of for Americans, but the hope the whole world holds that America might live up to its greatest ideals.

It is a moment that comes with high expectations that Obama can indeed change or “reboot,” as he put it, the way America deals with the world. And there are many observers who believe these expectations for change — from climate change to controlling AIDS in Africa, from terrorism to tariffs on trade — will be virtually impossible for the new president to live up to.

To gauge those expectations, GlobalPost’s 65 correspondents in some 45 countries have set out in this series “For Which It Stands” to listen to people in the countries they cover and to document what this day means for them.

And, based on their reporting, it seems every corner of the earth feels a connection to the new president in a way they have never connected to an American president before.

People across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe all feel Obama is one of their own. And in so many ways, he is.

In Ireland, relations from the village of Monegal on his mother’s side have transformed the spelling of his name to O’Bama and a catchy, new Irish song proclaims, “There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama!”

In Kenya, the country proclaimed a national holiday when he was elected and his extended family is being treated akin to royalty. His paternal step-grandmother, “Granny” Sarah Onyango Obama, 87, will be at the inaugural in the full traditional dress of the Luo tribe. Back home cousins and distant cousins in a small village called Kogelo all claim a connection to the First Family.

In the Arab world, Obama’s Muslim middle name has become the basis for a term of endearment. They call him “Abu Hussein,” a moniker which would roughly translate as “Papa Handsome.”

In Indonesia, school kids giggle with glee before television cameras there to record the same classroom where the next president once sat as a school child and took his lessons in the Koran just as they do now.

In Venezuela, there is a new name for a cup of black coffee mixed with cream, the “Obama.” Such a remark might smack of racism in another country. But in Venezuela, a place of many races and a sophisticated understanding of shades of white, black and brown, it is meant as a compliment to the president, an assertion that he is a kindred soul for Venezuelans.

And yes, in Kansas they celebrate Obama as a native son as well.

His American grounding in Kansas seems almost secondary to his experience in the world.

When Obama is sworn in today, millions of Americans will watch, but the event will be viewed via satellite dishes in small villages in Kenya, on static-filled televisions in crowded alleys in Jakarta, in cafes across Europe and in the sprawling apartment blocks of Beijing.

The world looks on at this event with some sense of what would have to be called envy.

At least that was a theme that came through the powerful reporting of our correspondents who asked one question in the countries where they live: What does the idea of America mean to the world?

Gershom Gorenberg, writing from Jerusalem, wrote how Israelis and Palestinians —once again locked in a brutal conflict — look at the United States on this day with a jealous recognition that America knows how to write its own history. America can redefine itself anew, and Gorenberg wrote how Israelis and Palestinians can only look on and wonder why they cannot seem to do the same.

A similar sentiment — for very different reasons — was also heard among the youth of Italy. Our correspondent Angelica Marin found them longing for a political process that might engage them in the way American youth were in electing Obama, and that they, too, might transform their political landscape in a new way.

Even in France our Paris correspondent Mildrade Cherfils found her neighbors pondering the issue of race in a way they never had before, and it’s not often that the French offer a self-effacing moment of recognition to America for living up to its promise of equality.

In Africa, there is unbridled faith that a president whose father hails from Kenya will embrace the desperate need to not just continue but enhance funding to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar), which was started by President George W. Bush.

In the Middle East, the Arab street holds out hope that a president whose middle name is Arabic and who was clearly opposed to the war in Iraq might finally establish a reputation for America as an even-handed broker in the region and help bring about a lasting and just peace for the Palestinians and Israelis.

But at the end of the day, Obama is the president of the United States, not the world. And that reality will inevitably confront him very soon.

It will no doubt be an extraordinarily difficult task for this administration to manage down the expectations the world holds for Obama.

With an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression, he may not be able to fund Pepfar at the levels that President Bush has proposed.

With a need to turn his attention to Afghanistan and begin his promised draw down of troops in Iraq, it is not certain that he will be able to focus his diplomatic efforts on the boiling tensions of the Israelis and Palestinians anytime soon.

The domestic needs for energy may undercut his promises to address global concerns on climate change.

And so these questions loom large before Obama as he enters the Oval Office: If he truly is the first global president, will his worldwide constituents be patient with his promise for change? And will he ever be able to live up to all that the world expects from the United States of America?

Seven days until we launch GlobalPost! Wildly exciting and incredibly busy at our offices in Boston, but I am going to do my best to keep you updated daily and even hourly about the countdown until the site goes live on January 12.

Today, we got the Field Manual for Correspondents out to all 65 of our correspondents in some 45 countries. In the spirit of full transparency, we thought we’d share this statement of our principles and journalistic standards with you over the next week. I am going to post here the Introduction and the first of seven short rules of great foreign reporting. (If some of the first chapter seems familiar, that is because the idea originated here in an earlier blog post I did on GroundTruth.) In the coming days and weeks, I will keep posting chapters and eventually I will also post some incredible essays written by foreign correspondents connected to GlobalPost, including Sebastian Junger, Matt McAllester, Jane Arraf, Simon Wilson, HDS Greenway and others who will be sharing advice and insights about working in the field.

Here’s the introduction and chapter one on “being there.”

GLOBALPOST’S FIELD GUIDE FOR CORRESPONDENTS

BY CHARLES M. SENNOTT

GlobalPost is setting out to redefine international reporting in the digital age, but we are old school when it comes to journalistic standards.

GroundTruth: A Field Guide for International Correspondents is dedicated to putting some of these standards in writing and sharing policies and practical information with our reporters, columnists and contributors in the field.

This is a working document, the same way your dispatches from the field are a rough draft of history. There is a revolution going on in media right now. And we are in its tumult and we love being there. It’s truly an exciting time. So we believe it smart and necessary to keep our eyes wide open to new and perhaps better ways of carrying out the craft of reporting and the art of story telling.

We want to create a community of correspondents – decorated veterans, mid-career professionals and younger reporters looking for their first shot at a foreign posting – who share their insights and stories and learn from each other in this changing environment for journalism.

To that end, we have collected essays from veteran correspondents connected to GlobalPost. In this collection, GlobalPost columnist HDS Greenway weighs in on nearly 50 years of work in foreign news; GlobalPost editor-at-large Sebastian Junger writes of the practical advice that keeps you alive covering conflict; GlobalPost Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum reflects on covering and living the story of Zimbabwe for 23 years; the BBC’s Simon Wilson shares what he learned from the Gaza kidnapping of a colleague; GlobalPost’s Jane Arraf provides a woman’s perspective on covering the war in Iraq; and GlobalPost’s Matt McAllester takes a self-effacing look back on his reporting from Fallujah.

These essays each tell a story from the field that offers a teaching moment. In the coming weeks, they will be posted on my blog which you can link to from GlobalPost.com. Eventually, the manual and the essays will be bound together as a hard copy and sent to you.

Later this year, we will also be creating an intranet site, a sort-of virtual water cooler where you, our correspondents, can communicate directly with each other. On the GlobalPost intranet, we hope you will share practical advice about everything from how you managed to get a great story to low rates on a hotel in London to tips on obtaining health insurance as a freelancer. It will be a place to track inside information about journalism grants and fellowships or the latest technology and new opportunities for freelance work.

We recognize that GlobalPost correspondents are freelancers and we want to encourage and foster a sense of community, a feeling of camaraderie that is too often missing from the wonderfully independent but sometimes isolating life of a freelancer.

We want to invite you to write essays from the field on this intranet site and then we plan to republish them every year into this Field Guide. So as we go along, please let us know if you have ideas.

We want to hear from those of you in the field about how we can work together to create a new voice in international news, a voice that is consciously attentive to an American audience. We do not mean that we will be in any way jingoistic or nationalistic. Nor do we want to imply that our stories will only focus on issues that affect America or involve American interests. The world is much bigger than that.

We are looking for reporters who can tell the kinds of stories that resonate with an American audience. We want writing, photography and videography that has a good ear for the music of America – an ear that ranges in its appreciation from Miles Davis to Johnny Cash to Yoyo Ma. A sense of writing about the world that seeks to emulate great American truth tellers, including Mark Twain, Langston Hughes and Edward R. Murrow. We want stories that ultimately enlighten all of us about the world in which we live. But we are particularly attentive to an American audience because we believe America, despites its tremendous exertion of military and economic power in the world that is dramatically under-served in international news. We believe the paucity of American venues for international news is a dangerous blind spot for America, and one that often has a wider impact on the world. We need look no further than the war in Iraq for proof of that.

We are consciously setting out to try our best to fill the void left by so many American mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks who’ve chosen to cut back and in many cases abandon the mission to cover international news.

While we consider this Field Guide a work in progress and we are eager to gain new insights from those of you in the field, we also want to be clear about the simple, time-tested values in which we believe and which we expect to see carried out by our correspondents.

That is, we believe in fairness. We believe in accuracy. We believe the best reporting comes from good old-fashioned shoe leather. We believe in listening and allowing yourself to be convinced by a point of view you may not have considered before. We believe good reporters do more than merely present two sides of an issue, they unearth facts and then consider all sides in a way that helps create a new understanding of the kinds of complex issues that we face globally.

We believe in giving voice to the voiceless. We believe in respect for different faiths and cultures and ways of seeing the world. We believe humor is a good way to get at truth, but we have less time for laughs at someone else’s expense. We believe in connecting the dots and saying something important without resorting to the kind of rabidly opinionated reporting that is cluttering too much of the airwaves and the internet.
In the end of the day, we have faith in you, our team in the field to embrace these standards and to go out and find the great stories that make for great journalism.

ONE:

Be there.

It’s all about being there.

There is no value that GlobalPost holds higher than having correspondents who live in the place about which they write, who know its language and its culture.

Many of you are native speakers or fluent already. And for those of you who are not, we eagerly encourage you to study the language of the places in which you are reporting. We believe foreign reporting requires you to be a first-hand observer of the events unfolding in the country you cover. We believe that the strength of GlobalPost will be having a breadth of coverage by reporters with an ear to the ground. We are looking for the kind of authoritative reporting that can only come from a reporter who is living the story. We call this ground truth. It’s an important idea at GlobalPost and “GroundTruth” is the name of my weekly column and regular blog that will highlight your daily reporting from the field.

So what does “GroundTruth” mean?

It has a pretty obvious and intuitive meaning. You may have heard it in a military context. But its origin, as best we can tell, is a precise phrase used in digital technology that was coined by NASA. This is how NASA defines it on its website:

“Ground truth (n) … one part of the calibration process. This is where a person on the ground makes a measurement of the same thing a satellite is trying to measure at the same time the satellite is measuring it. The two answers are then compared to help evaluate how well the satellite instrument is performing. Usually we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

In other words, Ground Truth is a scientific belief that the greatest calibration of what is happening in a far-off place is best achieved by being there on the ground to witness it and record it.

As a web-based news organization, we recognize that even in the digital age when we have access to information from all over the world at our fingertips and satellite transmissions that can focus on images thousands of miles away, the most trusted reading is still made by those human beings who are there witnessing the events and measuring history live.

It sounds like a simple idea. But it’s not so easy when the ground you are on is a shifting, complex story that requires knowledge about and a deep background on the forces shaping the news. We have reporters who do this in the places where there is ongoing conflict like Iraq and Afghanistan; in places where there is a contradictory mix of poverty and opportunity like India and Brazil; where there are ancient cultures to understand in a modern context from China to the Andes. Our correspondents will be there on the ground equipped with the knowledge that is needed to interpret the events in a way that allow you to truly see and understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what it means to viewers of our site.

This is not a new idea by any means. It’s just good old fashioned reporting.

But these days we believe there is too much distant analysis — not only at news organizations but also at international businesses and even in military and national security organizations — by those who are too far removed from the ground.

Those who analyze from on high are only one part of the calibration process in understanding a complex world. They are like the satellite viewing the image from afar, and we want to be that optic on the ground telling you what it really looks like.

NASA states in its own definition, “we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

So do we.

I just traveled from Haoni , Vietnam to Jakarta, Indonesia – two cities that provide formative chapters in the lives of both presidential candidates.

For Sen. John McCain, Hanoi is where he spent five years as a prisoner of war. For Sen. Barack Obama, Jakarta is where he lived briefly as a child where he attended a public school in the heart of the Muslim country’s capital.

There’s no doubt that McCain’s path to politics – his world view — was forged out of his service and his experience in the “Hanoi Hilton,” as the prison camp was called. I wrote last week about the waters of the lake in Hanoi from which McCain, then a young bomber pilot, was plucked after his plane was shot down during an air strike on the energy plant in Hanoi.. I wrote about the small statue that commemorates the spot where Vietnamese citizens pulled him ashore and turned him over to the Vietcong leadership that held him in a prisoner of war camp. For five years. He would return as a Senator and help open ties between the US and the government that was once the enemy in the war in which he fought.

Obama lived from 1967 to 1971 in Jakarta as a child with his mother and stepfather, who was Muslim and Indonesian. For two of those years, Obama attended a small public elementary school in Menteng, an affluent neighborhood in Indonesia’s crowded, teeming capital. . The small public school is also part of the path of Obama’s journey — his world view — that led him into politics and what he hopes to achieve in reaching out to the world if he is elected president.

(It should be noted that Obama also attended a Catholic school for two of those years, according to the Obama campaign website.)

I stopped by the public school Obama attended to check it out after I landed in Jakarta.

Public School 01, as it is officially called, has a pleasant atmosphere with its red tile roof and green stucco walls. It is clearly well maintained and up-scale and I was told by locals it was one of the more desirable public schools in the city. I can tell you for sure it is not a “madrassa,” or religious school, as the unhinged hosts who rant on conservative talk radio persistently maintain.

When I visited the school, the morning prayer was just coming to an end and the chanting was carried on a warm breeze from the nearby minarets of the neighborhood mosques.

Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. There are 230 million Indonesians and close to 90 percent are Muslim. It is a place where moderate Islam has flourished and where it is woven into the fabric of every aspect of life in this emerging democracy.

A father and son were returning from the mosque. Both had prayer rugs slung over the shoulder as they entered the gate of their home right next to the school. The father’s name is Tungal. He’s a 41 year old food distributor to small groceries.

“I think Obama will be a good president because of his background, the fact that he spent some time here means he understands who we are,” Tungal said, speaking through an interpreter.

“He will help America have a closer relationship with Muslims and with Islam. And I think that is important,” added Tungal.

I agree with Tungal.

Just as McCain’s experience in Vietnam defined him as a man, and confirmed his love for his country, Obama’s experience in Indonesia is also formative. Obama is defined by his international upbringing with a father from Kenya and a stepfather who was Indonesian. It is part of what gives him an ability to understand a complex world.

And just as McCain forged his experience in Vietnam into statesmanship as a US Senator and helped open relations between the US and Vietnam, it is very possible Obama will use his experience as the son of a Kenyan man who was born Muslim and a stepfather who was a practicing Muslim to forge a new relationship between the US and the Muslim world. Sadly, too many of the more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide have increasingly come to see America as a potential enemy and a military aggressor. I believe Obama has a uniqe opportunity to change the tone of the dialogue between the two faiths. I believe he has a chance to constructively challenge the Muslim world, to appeal to its moderates – who are the vast majority of the adherents of the faith – to condemn the blasphemy of Islamic extremists who have carried out terrorism in the name of the religion.

And so this was off the beaten path for me on this trip. I am here to establish bureaus and to hire correspondents. But this completely unplanned and fascinating part of my journey offered a chance to ponder the two candidates in light of these two places that are such a big part of who they are. What is certain is that the next president will have an extraordinary challenge before them to reengage with the world after eight years of a presidency that seemed to go out of its way to alienate the world.

By just about every measure, the reputation of the US has suffered greatly and the next president will have a daunting challenge to repair the damage that’s been done. It is the good fortune of all American voters to have two candidates who both have these personal touchstones to the wider world. For which ever one of them becomes president, their time in the wider world will serve them — as well as America and thew world — well in doing their job.

Both candidates addressed the idea of how they will seek to restore America’s standing in the world. Eight years of a George W. Bush presidency, both candidates agree, has undeniably damaged the reputation of America in the world. And so in the fall of 2008, these questions seem to resonate across the debate and across the world as it watches this debate:

What does America mean to the world?

How do we present ourselves to the world?

And what does the world think of us?

Vietnam defined itself against America. It’s birth narrative as a modern nation came in resisting an American invasion. Ho Chi Minh ’s Vietnam defeated America through patience and persistence and an unrelenting belief that it could shake off a leviathan like America with its B-52s and its Agent Orange and its ground troops and its sense of destiny.

And so Hanoi is an interesting dateline from which to observe the first debates in the presidential election in the United States at a time when America is involved in yet another fateful struggle in a distant land. This time it is the hardscrabble deserts of Iraq rather than the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. But what the history of our involvement in Vietnam teaches us about Iraq hangs in the air over this election, particularly with the presence of Sen. John McCain as a candidate. The debate moderator Jim Lehrer even raised the question directly for McCain.

I spent some time today at a small memorial for McCain that stands on a promenade around the lake in the center of Hanoi where his fighter jet crashed as he carried out a bombing raid on a power plant in the major city of the north of Vietnam. The memorial is an abstract piece of art that pictures a US Airforce pilot suspended in a parachute and looking down at the wreckage of a plane.

All around this memorial was a modern city going about its business. There were families resting on a Saturday morning along side the lake, and young people playing fierce games of badminton and elderly couples practicing tai chi. A mighty river of motor scooters and bicycles flowed past with the sound of beeping horns and the low, grinding hum of traffic.

One young woman who works as a political reporter for a Vietnamese news agency had this take on the debate in a casual and background conversation I had with her: “There are many people in this country who like John McCain because he has a connection to this place. He knows the war here. He knows Vietnam. And he will be connected with us. But there are a lot of young people who think that it is Barack Obama who understands the world. They believe that Obama is the best leader to see that America needs to improve its image with the world. So a lot of young people are voting for him.”

Another young man who had just graduated with a degree in computer science from Hanoi Open University put Vietnam’s relationship with America in sharp focus. “We want to work with America and not for America… We see America on an equal level. I think Barack Obama understands this and I think he understands the world and how America figures in the world.”

Tomorrow I leave for Jakarta, Indonesia where Barack Obama lived and went to elementary school as a boy. I will arrive in the largest Muslim country in the world at the height of the festival celebrating the end of Ramadan. And it seems a wild — and fitting — coincidence that I am traveling from Vietnam where McCain has a deep connection to Indonesia where Obama has roots in his extraordinary American journey that goes from Kansas to Kenya through Hawaii and Indonesia and elsewhere.

I leave Vietnam having finalized a deal with a solid correspondent, Matthew Steinglass. I also completed the necessary meetings with officials from the Foreign Ministry to officially apply for a news bureau in Vietnam. Just like in China, we will be breaking new ground as the first international web-based news organization to open a bureau. While here, I also deepened our relationship with Mr. Tuan at Vietnamnet, the leading on-line news agency in Vietnam. We have vowed to work together in the future and he is planning on attending a pre-launch gathering we are holding in mid October for our board of advisers and our investors and a close circle of editors, reporters and writers who are connected to our mission. In Jakarta, I will continue signing up more correspondents and then push on to Delhi from there for the final leg of the trip.

The journey continues.

REFLECTIONS ON A BIG WEEK FOR GLOBAL NEWS AND A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF 9-11 IN NEW YORK.

I wanted to take some time before the trip to Hong Kong to reflect on what was a pivotal week in the formation of Global News Enterprises. The team is truly starting to come together now.

We brought on board two key editors. After a job search that attracted a flood of great candidates for the senior editing positions, we are thrilled to announce that we have hired Barbara Martinez and Thomas Mucha to serve as Managing Editors.

Barbara comes to us from the Politico where she was a Deputy Managing Editor. For us, she will serve as Managing Editor – Web. She was a strong asset at Politico and one of the driving forces that helped make the website for political junkies the excellent news source that it is today. We look forward to having her strong skill set and her passion for web-based news organizations and breaking new ground in new media to our team. She honed her skills as executive editor of the Harvard Crimson and worked for three years as a reporter at The Washington Post.

Thomas will be Managing Editor – Correspondents. He comes to us after working at Crain’s in Chicago where he headed up a multimedia team that focused on covering globalization. Thomas is a 17-year veteran of journalism and brings a unique blend of television and print experience to the table. He worked for 8 years at CNN mostly on the business desk and has worked for the last 7 years in print, mostly at Crain’s. He also has a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the University of Chicago where he studied the emerging markets of China and India. He has a great eye for a story and a keen interest in unraveling the complex themes of globalization.

We are also thrilled to announce that we have hired Andrew Meldrum as a Senior Editor and Regional Editor for Africa. For those who follow news in Africa, Andrew is well known for his courage and insight through more than 25 years as a reporter on the continent. He has worked in Africa for both the Economist and the Guardian and other publications. Most of his work has been in Zimbabwe where he has courageously uncovered and challenged the injustices of the Mugabe dictatorship. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University last year.

We have had some other stellar hires on the editorial team, including Amy Jeffries who worked for many years in public radio and recently graduated from University of California at Berkeley in its News21 program, which is seeking to train a new generation for the skills they’ll need to break new ground in multimedia journalism. She will be our Web master. And Sarah Liebowitz will be joining us as a Deputy Editor. She worked most recently as a political reporter for the Concord Monitor. Before that, she worked with me in London as a bureau manager and then as a correspondent who played a crucial role in our coverage of the London bombings in July of 2005.

For me, this big week ended with a a trip on Thursday, September 11th and Friday, September 12th to New York for the Service Nation forum which brought together presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. On the seventh anniversary of 9-11, the two senators vying for the White House put aside the petty political bickering that too often marks our national politics and joined together to offer their ideas on how the country might raise a call for public service among young people.

Both men noted that seven years ago, President George W. Bush missed an opportunity to call the country to service in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11. If you remember, in the days immediately following 9-11 when the country and the world were still in shock, Bush delivered a speech where he literally encouraged Americans to “go shopping” and to go back to doing what they were doing.

Both candidates criticized Bush for that response and said their presidency would be very different. They said they would face the tremendous challenges that lie ahead — from terrorism to climate change and from the after effects of Katrina in New Orleans and the slow slide of standards in too many public schools — by calling on the skill and energy of young people in this country. And they would ask them to serve their country. Not only in the military.

But both candidates urged them to join Teach for America or City Year or the foreign service to help the country in a time of tremendous challenges. The forum was a tremendous success and was organized by a dear friend of mine, Alan Khazei, the co-founder of City Year and now of a new organization called “Be The Change.”

You might ask what a conference on national service has to do with our venture at Global News Enterprises. GNE is not a public service institution, it’s a for-profit media company. But still it is our great hope that our correspondents work in the field of international journalism will be of service to the country.

At Global News Enterprises, we want to give young reporters a chance to take up the calling to be foreign correspondents, to go out in the world and cover it. We want them to pursue a passion for international reporting and help bring stories to light that are currently going uncovered in so many corners of the world. We think our mission fits in with the goals of Service Nation and the call to action that the forum highlighted.

I was in New York for two days for the forum, and it was great to be back. I worked as a reporter in New York City for many years for the New York Daily News before I landed at The Boston Globe. And on this trip on this somber and sacred anniversary, I went to Ground Zero and felt the powerful emotions that are still there for all Americans when they think about what happened that day.

For me, September 11th opened a long 7-year journey of reporting in Afganistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and then in Madrid for the train bombings and in London for the underground bombings. I reflected back on that reporting journey and I thought about how many of my colleagues who worked — or are still working — in Afghanistan and Iraq are now struggling to find work as foreign correspondents.

So many news organizations have cut back on or in many cases abandoned their mission to cover the world. And it makes me realize that Global News Enterprises has an incredible opportunity to fill a void in international news coverage for Americans that is glaring. The challenges before us in creating a new web-based international news organization are extraordinary, but we are pulled along by the feeling that what we are trying to do is important.

And the team we are building is all passionately dedicated to making it a success. It won’t be easy, but I feel a hell of a lot better trying than I did at a newspaper where every day you could feel the energy draining from the mission. It’s a big decision to have left my life in newspapers and to have taken on this new startup, but it is also exciting as hell. I think we have a real chance to radically redefine international reporting in the digital age. There is a revolution going on and I guess I just want to be out there — and want to build a team that wants to be out there — whipping molotov cocktails and storming ramparts for the cause. (Not literally, of course.)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

THE LAST DAY OF A GREAT RIDE IN NEWSPAPERS …

I guess the first post on this blog should be about the last day of what I call one of the “last great rides in newspapers.”

On my last day in the newsroom of The Boston Globe, the huge rolls of newsprint pounded off the trucks onto the loading docks down in the press room as they always do at the end of the week before the big Sunday run. The thud shakes the newsroom. I always loved that sound. It represented the heft of a big city newspaper. The weight of the organization and the importance of what it does.

But on that last day in March of 2008, that thud sounded more like distant thunder. It sounded ominous. And there are indeed dark clouds on the horizon for the newspaper industry, and an ominous feeling is setting in in far too many newsroom. It is a pervasive feeling from the highest realms of management to the cubicles of reporters in the newsroom that the current economic model simply cannot sustain the level of excellence in journalism that it always has. I hope that is not the case, but the feeling in newsrooms like the Globe is palpable. It is felt most intensely at going away parties for veterans. And at the Globe there had been far too many of them in recent years. They usually are a congregation in the middle of the newsroom of editors and reporters huddled around a sheet cake and coffee where stories are told — funny, touching, heartfelt stories — about the work of a great reporter. Lots of talk of the good old days. They felt like Irish wakes without the drinking. The metro editor Brian McGrory said the rectangular sheetcakes had in his mind come to resemble “tiny coffins.” I didn’t want to have one of these maudlin gatherings and I , like just about everyone at the Globe, had grown to hate sheetcake. So instead we gathered at Doyle’s, a great old pub in Jamaica Plain, and raised pints of Guinness and I listened to my editors and colleagues rip me apart with great humor. Some of them were true.

When I joined the Globe in early 1994, the paper was flush with cash. It was truly in the heyday of newspapers which had soared in revenue and circulation throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. They had come of age out of big cities like Boston with a brash confidence. The newsrooms had swagger, and they had solid revenue to back it up. I grew up in Massachusetts and the Globe was a part of my daily life. In many ways, my family was the core of its readership. Every morning, the Globe was on the breakfast table and there was push and pull over the sports page. We were a typical Boston Irish family that through one generation after the next had drifted out to the suburbs. And in so doing we mirrored the demographic sprawl of the paper and we embodied the solid readership that the paper sought for its advertisers.

I came to the Boston Globe from the New York Daily News and for me it was truly a homecoming. It was the paper I had always wanted to work for. And a big part of the draw to the Globe — beyond the obvious hometown pull — was that it was a news organization that had foreign bureaus and where I could live out a long-held dream to become a foreign correspondent. I got the chance in 1997 when the Globe named me the Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem. My wife, Julie, and I went to Jerusalem together with our newborn son, Will. he was only three months old when we left in the summer of 1997 to move into an old stone home in Jerusalem. The title “Bureau Chief” looks good on a business card, but it’s a preposterously grand title considering I was the only Globe correspondent in the Middle East. My wife, Julie, would tease me about this. She’d say, “Whoa! You’re the bureau chief … and (pause for ironic effect) you’re the entire bureau!” Or she would call me in the office and quip, “Is this the bureau chief? Sorry, am I interrupting you in the middle of a meeting with all of your personalities?”

Behind the humor was , of course, truth. The Globe was a small paper to have seven foreign bureaus. But I loved that it aspired to be a paper that covered the world for its readers. And in doing so, it punched above its weight class. We had a tradition of great foreign correspondents form Curtis Wilke and David Greenway to Ethan Bronner and David Filipov. Often, our correspondents were known as the best reporters and most talented writers in their patch. I was very proud to be part of that tradition.

I was the Globe’s Middle East “bureau chief” for four years and covered the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through the height of its greatest hopes and good intentions. And I was there when it all came crashing down and the two sides descended back into violence. I covered the intifada on the frontlines from the moment it began. And through it all our family was growing. We had two children born in the Holy Land. Riley was born in Jerusalem in 1999. And Gabriel was born in Bethlehem in 2000. When Palestinian suicide bombers would strikes Israeli buses or the Israeli tanks would pound a Palestinian village, we would hear the carnage in our garden. The bombings in particular would rattle the windows they were so close. When this happened, birds that would congregate in a lemon tree in our yard would flutter up out of the three and fly away. And our oldest son, Will, would ask, “What’s that Dad?” We would always tell him it was thunder. One day after a bombing and the usual question and the answer which was a lie, he asked, “Dad, if that’s thunder how come it never rains?”

That moment underscored a growing and undeniable feeling that Julie and I shared that having a family in Jerusalem was becoming untenable for us. We felt great sadness and great guilt at the idea of leaving a city we loved and friends on both sides of the conflict behind as we prepared to leave. We arrived in London in early September of 2001. Our moving truck dropped our boxes on September 11, 2001. I was unpacking my office when the news came on the radio that changed the world forever.

I spent most of the next five years covering the dramatically unfolding events of September 11 and its aftermath through the start of the US air strikes in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Qala-i-Jangi unprising in Mazar-e-Sharif which was probably one of the most wild battles of the first war of the 21st century. That was the place where hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda being held in prison, rose up and seized the prison and fought against US and British special forces for several days. It was the battle where the American Taliban John Walker Lindt emerged from a basement of the fortress to tell a tale of how a California kid ended up taking part in a “jihad” against America.

After Afghanistan, I covered the trans-Atlantic divide that led up to the war in Iraq and then I covered the war itself. I was in the north waiting for the war to begin and covered it from the north down as Baghdad fell and the front lines pushed from Kirkuk and the Mosul and Tikrit and finally the entire regime of Saddam Hussein. For the next several years, I would be in and out of Iraq and covering a spate of bombings in Madrid and London and then looking back and realizing that I had become a war correspondent. I never thought of myself that way, but indeed that was we were covering.

By 2005, I was fairly burned out and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, which is an extraordinary opportunity to have one year to explore literature and history and art and music and to throw open all the doors of learning that Harvard has to offer. It was a great year.

But in the spring of 2006 I returned to the Globe and could feel that it was a changed place. It was battered by the economic realities of running a big city newspaper and was struggling to find its way. Within a year, the Globe made the decision to cut its entire foreign staff After 22 years in the daily newspaper business and 14 years at the Globe, I have left traditional media and set out on a new venture.

And so now, as you know if you have been reading this blog, we are starting the first fully web-based international news agency. The company is called Global News Enterprises and we will announce the domain name of the website closer to the launch which is set for February 2009.