The Killing Season Uncut Read Online Free PDF

request for Harvard. In October 2014, we had three interview slots over three days and a short period of time to film a scene placing him in his location.
    Rudd’s instincts for how the media works were as sharp as ever. He foiled all our attempts to film him by himself, unwilling to be depicted as a lonely exile. Most of the time we were in Boston, Rudd was accompanied by a young Chinese PhD student called Jing. It’s an established pattern of Rudd’s to surround himself with youthful advisers: chief of staff Alister Jordan, press secretary Lachlan Harris and economic adviser Andrew Charlton were all in their late twenties when they joined the Prime Minister’s office. We filmed Rudd walking through the elegant alleyways of Harvard Yard, the oldest part of the university campus, where the maple and chestnut trees bore the last brilliant leaves of the New England autumn. Students milled around Australia’s former Prime Minister, oblivious. It should have been a perfect scene. But Rudd insisted on having Jing alongside him in every shot and talking to him in Mandarin, even though Jing spoke good English. It made the scene unusable.
    We got Rudd alone once, in a car on the way to a train station, but even then he insisted on sitting next to the driver and talked most of the way. At the station, he chatted to some tourists from New Zealand who approached him on the concourse, then sat amicably in a café with our cameramen, Louie Eroglu and Dan Sweetapple. By the time he boarded a train to New York we had managed a single shot of him in repose, in the car removing his glasses. At least that shot made it into the series’ beautiful opening titles.
    Tony Burke watched the way Rudd tailored his media performance as Opposition Leader.

    In the morning he’d be joking around with Joe Hockey on
Sunrise
and by night he’d be talking foreign policy on
Lateline
. You had somebody who was just completely spanning every aspect of communications in a way that no other politician in the country could.
    Lachlan Harris agreed.

    Kevin Rudd did TV better than any politician in the country. Better than John Howard, better than Peter Costello. It was a combination of his capacity for discipline but also his capacity to broadcast warmth, and it was an incredible skill to watch … the brutality of the civil war in Labor robbed him of that greatest talent.
    Rudd asked me to meet him in New York for breakfast the day before our interviews began, which would have meant a seven-hour round trip by train for a half-hour meeting. I wondered if Rudd understood how his crazy plans alienated people. We met instead, the night before the interview, at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. I sat in a deep leather armchair in the lobby, watching what looked like a Secret Service detail muttering into earpieces, waiting for some more-current leader than Rudd. After reading and thinking about him for so long, when Rudd appeared it was a shock to see him in person. He was alone except for Jing: no security or minders. I thought of the vertiginous fall from power felt by all our former prime ministers, but surely more acutely by Rudd, Gillard and Tony Abbott for the untimeliness of their removal.
    We sat in an empty faux-rustic café in the rear of the hotel, to the chagrin of a waitress who said we were not supposed to be there at that hour. Rudd wouldn’t move. She was rude and he was stubborn. Again I wondered if he noticed the effect he had on people. Jing sat with us, wide-eyed at the relaxed conversation; he may have thought I lacked deference. I explained Australia’s flat hierarchy but he looked unconvinced.
    We ordered tea and cake. It was late, and what I really wanted was a whisky, but that seemed overfamiliar. I laughed when Rudd made an oblique joke about Julia Gillard. Humour is an effective technique for establishing rapport, but in this case it felt wrong, like a betrayal of the rules of