Traveling through history with John Paul

In-flight press conferences
But the coolest thing about being on that plane was the fact that this was the only place the pope made himself available to the media for questions. About an hour into the flight the overhead lights would come on and the curtain to the entourage section would stir with activity. 

The benign anarchy in the press section snapped into a crush of bodies. The huge RCA video cameras of the time were hauled onto shoulders, 50 bodies pressed against each other with microphones poking through, and hand recorders stretched forward.

A reverential self-restraint took over the pack, while elbows were still jammed into the ribs of the next guy if he tried to get into your shot. 

Into that fracas dived John Paul, with a big smile on his face and his deep voice saying, “Calmi, calmi” (calm yourselves).

And then the banter began in earnest. He responded to a rain of questions in a multitude of languages, shifting effortlessly from Italian to English, German, French, Spanish and Polish.

I stood right behind him throughout; my job there to hold up one of those obnoxiously bright TV lights up at the ceiling to provide adequate light for all the TV cameras. With my other hand I held up my Nikon to record the moment!

He answered everything. Politics, religion, morality, philosophy rolled off his tongue and if he thought somebody was pushing it, he would wag a finger with a twinkle in his eye, but he would still answer the question, if only to sidestep it or turn it back on the reporter.

Stephen Weeke / NBC News NBC News' Stephen Weeke with Pope John Paul II on a flight returning from a papal trip to Kazakhstan and Armenia on September 27, 2001.

That trip was unforgettable for me and would influence many of my choices in life. After that I spent a dozen years in America for college, and years in local news in San Francisco.

When NBC hired me in 1996 and sent me back to Rome to cover the pope again, I found a much older man. 

History overshadowed by scandal
The Parkinson’s disease was beginning to kick in in earnest. The early nineties had seen him hospitalized several times: a broken hip, a fractured shoulder, and worst of all a benign tumor in his colon the size of an orange.  Soon after I arrived he was hospitalized again for an appendectomy and the removal of intestinal adhesions caused by the scarring from the shooting in 1981. 

But he kept on traveling. The days were shorter and he didn’t squeeze six or seven different events into a day like he could in the 80’s, but he drew the crowds and covered the miles.  

I went on almost all the trips of the last nine years and was impressed with the huge physical effort it now took him to do the simplest things.

There were still some memorable trips in these latter years, like Cuba to meet President Fidel Castro.

That was a fateful trip because when we took off in the plane that morning in Rome the event we were covering was the biggest story on the planet. But when we landed the sound technician who was wiring me up for my first network live shot said to me, “Did you hear about Clinton?”  I said I hadn’t. “He had sex with an intern.”

The famous Jim Lehrer interview with the former president had broken while we were airborne. History gave way to scandal in short order as Lear jets were scrambled for the network anchors — Tom Brokaw, Dan  Rather and Peter Jennings — to fly to Washington just hours after the pope landed.

What was supposed to be full network coverage and the first-ever live anchoring from Havana was quickly reduced to voice-over status.

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