The Decatur-Moscow Road
Hurst knows Washington too. If Decatur is his hometown and Moscow the city that haunts him, Washington helped him decide to leave journalism. At an early age he was the city editor of the Decatur Herald & Review, then moved on to the AP, which sent him to Moscow in 1979, then to NBC and to CNN, for which he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993 CNN rotated him to Washington, and last year Hurst retired at 52. “I think there are Washington journalists, and then there are other journalists,” he says. “And I think I’m certainly the other. I’m certainly a Moscow journalist. I’d go back in a second if I could find the right kind of job.”
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“The other possibilities are that the technology Russians have gets into what we’d call the wrong hands. They have an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials and, I’d assume, bacterial and biological weapons, chemical weapons. All of those things can certainly find themselves spreading throughout the world. I’m not a doomsday scenarist, so I can’t even think the worst. But certainly the potential’s there for a lot of nasty stuff.”
But for all Decatur’s woes, the interstate connects it to Springfield, Urbana, and the rest of America. “Russia’s a place where there is not even a very good road between Moscow and Saint Petersburg,” Hurst says.
“I can’t imagine that it is. To think that because you apply market capitalism as we understand it and the rules of democracy as we understand them to Russia, and that you’ll turn around and find out it’s France, or Germany, or England, is a ridiculous assumption. But it’s the assumption on which our policy is based.”
While they were there he and Kathy remodeled two houses. They rebuilt the first just the way they wanted it–first-class all the way–and no one bought it. It turned out there’s no market in Decatur for the kind of houses they wanted to do. The second one, they slapped some plastic siding over 75-year-old shingles and sold it immediately. “With all of the business acumen a journalist has, you can imagine the smashing success we’ve had,” says Hurst. “If you took all of the journalists in the world and put them together they couldn’t run a popcorn stand successfully.”
March: “JFK Jr. gets personal with George.” April: “Head to Head [Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric] Their fight for your morning.” May: “GOSSIP–How the World’s Hottest Gossip Column Really Works.” June: “Op-Ed Vixen.”
