THE VERY FIRST REPORTING of Nelson Mandela‘s death sparked in me a sharp flash of disappointment with journalism, along with inevitable sadness over losing the great man himself.

The disappointing journalism was all the worse for coming from my own home-town paper, The New York Times, one of the finest news organizations in the world — most of the time.   

At 4:47 p.m. (New York time) on Thursday, December 5, the Times‘ smartphone app pinged its subscribers with the newsflash “Nelson Mandela, South African Icon of Peaceful Resistance, Dies.”

I’ve rarely read such depressing evidence of a headline being written by someone who doesn’t know the story. In what Mandela himself, when titling his autobiography, described as his “Long Walk to Freedom” there was doubtless somewhere a point along the way by when he became seen as an icon — but it was assuredly not for representing “Peaceful Resistance.”

Mercifully, within a few hours the Times saw sense and pulled that ridiculous headline. In its app, in its online and finally in its printed versions of the news it then consistently described Mandela in less naive terms – and indeed much more appropriately – as “Liberator” and “Conqueror of Apartheid.”

The politically difficult but unavoidable turn away from peaceful resistance is a fundamental element of the Mandela history. And of the policy carefully pursued by the African National Congress in which Mandela reaffirmed himself, immediately after his 1990 release from prison, to be a “loyal and disciplined” member. Mandela’s position in the movement when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 was Commander-In-Chief of the ANC’s military wing.

Umkhonto We Sizwe (meaning “Spear of the Nation”) had been formed in 1961 to plan and enact paramilitary attacks after the ANC’s peaceful protests against the white supremacists’ apartheid policy had proved entirely ineffective. Mandela in fact called those non-violent efforts “useless and futile,” almost spitting out the words in an angry interview with British television, recorded in hiding while he was on the run.

It does Mandela’s life-story no service, nor the movement’s — nor to sheer historical accuracy — to canonize him as some one-dimensional Man of Peace.

He unquestionably led the nation in avoiding recrimination, vengeance and violent upheaval once the white minority regime had bowed to the inevitable in the early 1990s, and had started negotiating a transition to majority rule. But by then the ANC was no longer a resistance movement. It was, as everyone could see, effectively in charge of the future.

My own one-and-only, and very short, interview with Mandela came when I ambushed him as he took a supposedly secret route through the Johannesburg Carlton Hotel‘s kitchen. He and his handlers were trying to avoid the world’s press on the day before May 1994’s historic election – which would confirm that the new presidency was his, completely and overwhelmingly. After some brief Q & A-ing, I had the temerity — and banality — to wish him “Good luck, Sir, for tomorrow.” He had of course no need for any luck. It was all the outcome of his and his movement’s unrelenting work, in both the political and military realms.

MANDELA WAS ONE AMONG a group of very hard-headed, pragmatic idealists, and none of them would have considered such a description to be in any way paradoxical. I’m thinking in particular of Mandela’s early mentor Walter Sisulu … his effective international spokesman Oliver Tambo, the ANC’s official President through the years when Mandela himself was imprisoned  … and Joe Slovo, his military Chief of Staff in Umkhonto.

Slovo used to tell me hair-raising stories about their army’s early efforts at bomb-planting, and both he and Tambo would painstakingly expound to me the rationales that guided their strategic use of violence. Sisulu’s widow Albertina Sisulu told me that even before the start of what Slovo frankly acknowledged to me was ‘a violent campaign‘ of guerrilla sabotage, her husband had prophesied to her that “one day I’ll go to Robben Island.” And indeed he did, serving time alongside Mandela in the regime’s Alcatraz-style prison.

Today, though, I have cause to remember especially the Slovo family, given what South Africa’s current President Jacob Zuma said this week about Mandela’s death, employing a common and pretty unarguable figure of speech: “Our people have lost a father.”

Joe Slovo died of bone marrow cancer in 1995 after only a year in government, having been Mandela’s choice, to both men’s delight, for Minister of Housing. Slovo had lost his wife, fellow activist Ruth First thirteen years previously, assassinated by agents of the apartheid regime. Mandela came to sit at Slovo’s bedside, holding his hand as he lay dying.

After his friend’s death, Mandela told the now twice-orphaned Slovo daughters something about his relationship with his own daughters. He recalled in some pain that during a very rare family visit during his 27-year incarceration, he had attempted to hug his eldest, Maki, only to feel her flinch from him. “You may be Father of the Nation,” she said, “But you have never been a father to us.”

It’s worth acknowledging, amid our gratitude for what Mandela achieved, that enormous contributions to world history, radically changing the fate of nations, will probably always come at some painful individual human cost … no matter how colossal the public human being.

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