A couple of weeks ago my phone rang—12:25 a.m. The assignment editor, Molly Hunter, was on the line. “This Benghazi thing may be a lot worse than we’d thought,” she said. “We’re wondering about moving a team there.”

We spoke long enough to get the mind whirring: What were the options? How grave the danger—to the Americans there, and to reporters who might head that way? What about Libyan visas?

A few hours later, just before five in the morning, Molly called again. “So sorry, Tom. But thought you needed to know. The ambassador’s been killed. We’re preparing a special report.”

I took a shower, whispered goodbye to my wife, and headed for West 66th Street, my desk in the ABC News newsroom. It was a big story, to be sure, another globe-turning event. And these things have an effect on reporters and editors, on all of us who carry the news gene. Others might hear the news and wonder, ask questions, perhaps worry about the consequences. For us it is different: We carry the synaptic wiring that produces the adrenalin, that zero-to-sixty firing of questions and plans when a bulletin hits.

And for me, there was a wrinkle: This story—and all these middle-of-the-night calls—would in all likelihood be my last.

I was leaving journalism after 28 years. It seems strange even to write that sentence, but there it is. Leaving the news. I am headed for the Asia Society, just across town but a world away. Whatever challenges await, one thing is clear: I shouldn’t worry much more about news—at least not in the manic, adrenalin-filled way I have worried about the news for all these years. Put differently, those synapses ought to stop firing.

Somehow though, I don’t think it will be easy. Just a week before the current Arab fury began, I had spasms of angst on other fronts: Why aren’t we at the refugee camp in Jordan? I wondered, reading a print reporter’s account from there. Just because the Democrats and the GOP didn’t touch foreign policy at the conventions shouldn’t mean we don’t either. Then there was the bulletin from Southeast Asia: 7.9 quake off the Philippines—tsunami alert issued. Do we need to go to Manila? Somewhere else? Who would go? Even now, though I’m technically a “former journalist,” news that bombs have gone off at a Damascus military compound set off that spark. What am I doing about it?

So it has gone. Coups, crises, global figures in frail health. Nelson Mandela in the hospital; Fidel Castro not seen in months; the Pope looked poorly, coming down those steps… Are we ready?

My wonderful, tolerant wife has observed this sort of reaction since we were in Russia together two decades ago. Back then I was sent racing from Moscow—not just to other parts of Russia, but to western Europe, the Middle East, and even, on one occasion, to Somalia. When I was overseas it was always like this. My colleague Terry Wrong (now the producer of the ABC News series, N.Y. Med) advised me, on my arrival in Europe in early 1990, to look at the Herald Tribune each day and imagine that I might be sent to any of the paper’s front-page datelines at a moment’s notice. “You’ve got to be prepared for everything,” he said. Terry wasn’t far off. In those days a page one story—or more likely a wire-service bulletin—meant you had to be on the next flight.

Later, working on World News Tonight, with Peter Jennings, we boarded flights only for the really major stories, but the adrenalin pumped anyway; an earthquake or revolution, assassination or suicide attack—whatever it was, you couldn’t just read or listen to the story; you had to do something.

TAGS: , ,

Thomas Nagorski is executive vice president of the Asia Society.