At CNN in Washington, Jim Sciutto’s dimly lit office is both man cave and shrine to a foreign correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries. A typewriter he bought on Portobello Road during a decade in London. Photos he took in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
A Vietnamese newspaper account of the time he rode over the South China Sea on a US spy plane. A corked bottle of water from his trip to the north pole in a US nuclear submarine. A fragment of the Black Hawk helicopter destroyed in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. “I’m not sure I should have that,” Sciutto confesses, “but I do.”
There is also an important fragment of newspaper, a gift from Sciutto’s grandfather containing a quotation from the author and journalist Eric Sevareid: “What counts most in the long haul of adult life is not brilliance or charisma or derring-do, but rather the quality the Romans called ‘gravitas’: patience, stamina and weight of judgment. The prime virtue is courage, because it makes all other virtues possible.”
When Sciutto’s father died, the quotation was on the funeral mass card. It was during an assignment that the idea for a book came to Sciutto, 54, CNN anchor and chief national security analyst. As Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border and missiles fell on Kyiv, he sensed a clean break from the post-cold war world he grew up in. He remarked, live on air, that this was a “1939 moment”. What did he mean by those ominous words?
For the rest of this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/10/jim-sciutto-return-great-powers-book