“I feel defeated,” he confided. This was not the Sabam Siagian I knew.

Men don’t cry, and editors don’t betray their emotions. Yet here he was sitting slumped and worn in the editor’s office which represents the core of The Jakarta Post’s little universe he helped create three decades earlier.

He could stop the presses. Make reporters scurry to their cubicle and even outlasted one of the world’s most media-spiteful regimes. But the strain of dialysis over the past months and the passing of time had caught up with him.

Journalist, editor and ambassador Sabam Siagian was laid to rest on Sunday by family and friends, after passing away late Friday afternoon at the age of 84.

When they pass, editors are either remembered or revered. Sabam was one of the few who will be both.

But just like old soldiers, graying, or in this case bald editors, never die. They just fade away – either expiring quietly in some corner desk watching a new breed of reporters repeat their mistakes and do what they used to excel at, or patiently awaiting their final byline on a headstone to be immersed in wreaths and prayers.

In the book Reporting Indonesia: The Jakarta Post Story 1983-2008 by Bill Tarrant, there is an unforgettable story of Sabam’s first day on the job. He strode, pipe-in-hand through the editorial floor and straight into his office as someone quipped: “That’s our new chief editor. How arrogant he is!”

Sabam was part of that timeworn tradition of hard talking, chain smoking editors who were tough, occasionally hard drinking, supercilious even condescending at times, with an eye for the story and a craving for the byline.

“If you can only be humble, go join a priesthood,” he told me once as we clinked our glass of Glenfiddich.

To say Sabam was arrogant was a misunderstanding of an era, a misjudgment of demeanor and misappreciation of destiny. His hubris was not conceitedness, but a requirement that obligated both haughtiness and tact to survive the authoritarianism of the day.

Personally Sabam was perhaps not for everyone. But then again definitely not everyone is worthy to be the editor.

Editors who became bigger than the newspaper they led. Editors who shaped the newsprint in their own image and, helped define Indonesian journalism in the process.

Editors you will always remember, the kind you are bound to revere.

As the Post’s first chief editor, Sabam certainly set the bar. His successor, the late Susanto Pudjomartono, set the political direction. Raymond Toruan was a steady hand in a period of troubled transition, while Endy Bayuni gave the Post its dignity and value.

Those who inherit their legacy are acolytes in a proud institution that became irreverent to power, a parable to the pitiable, and a voice of reason in the bedlam of democracy.

Just like any good journalist, he was close to everyone yet rarely friends with anyone. And as many in this profession can attest, those he loved most were made to suffer the heaviest — editorial, headline and the byline, the only trinity holier than God, family or country.

In his later years, Fikri Jufri — fellow editor and founder of Tempo magazine — was his closest partner as they raided receptions and meetings like Don Quixote and Sancho with their charm, discourse and journalistic spoofs.

When the toxic twins entered, you just knew the room would never be the same.

Despite his many hats, which to some undermined his fidelity to journalism, Sabam was actually a simple man who knew when and where to don which hat.

In the newsroom he was the almighty editor. On the field he could treat the greenest reporter as an equal. As a diplomat and politician he could rise to even the most challenging adversary.

It is ironic that Sabam’s passing marks a sign of the times in a changing of world of digital information, which may ultimately help define his legacy.

Two things he was most passionate and loved unconditionally: Journalism and the Post. Both of which are in a time of change.

The crux is not the change itself. As a man who could project many roles Sabam was as much a reformist as he was an ideologue.

The challenge is whether from that change emerges something that someone of his caliber would be proud of, or find completely detached in its essence that even he would not recognize.

Like Don Quixote, Sabam was ultimately never defeated. Not by time, diabetes nor dialysis.

The old man that Cervantes wrote about, standing alone in a time of change may have been in psychosis, but the values he fought for were monuments to truth nonetheless, not just windmills in the mind.

Old men will dream dreams, but it is for the young to realize them. So long Pak Sabam. Let us continue to live your dreams for you.
______________________________

The writer is president director of the Antara state news agency, and former editor-in-chief of The Jakarta Post

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