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Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_r_01061

1531-3298

Nicholas Daniloff,

Intelligence, Security, War Strategy

When the newspaper columnist Stewart Alsop, who had been a British soldier during World War II after the U.S. Army turned hm down, was once asked how he had become a journalist, he replied: “It helps if you have a brother who already is one.” The brother he was referring to, Joseph, had already become a prominent syndicated columnist by the time Stewart left the Royal Army.Becoming a leading foreign affairs journalist was a difficult task in the United States in the 1950s, especially for anyone who had started out in another profession. About half of the new crop of reporters came to journalism through university programs (Harvard does not offer courses in journalism), and the other half progressed through the ranks, some having started as copy boys. Assignment Russia is the humorous autobiographical story of how a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in Russian history became one of the best-known U.S. journalists. To accomplish this feat, Marvin Kalb abandoned his plans to become a professor of Russian history and jumped into the untidy world of broadcast journalism in New York.Of course, he was lucky, and he had an older brother, Bernard, who was already a journalist working for The New York Times. But Marvin's rise as a preeminent journalist and foreign affairs commentator has more to do with native intelligence, energy, and extraordinary luck. The luck was provided by Edward R. Murrow, the London correspondent for CBS News during the Nazi “blitz,” who noticed an article Kalb had written about Sino-Soviet relations. Murrow made a cold call to Kalb at Harvard that opened the doors of CBS News to him.I first became aware of Marvin when he and I were students at Harvard in the 1950s. I was an undergraduate, and he was a graduate student. Both of us were steeped in Soviet and Russian history and politics when the U.S. State Department put out a call for competent graduate students to apply for positions in the U.S-sponsored Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) in Moscow. This service, funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), employed graduate students to read the Soviet press and translate key parts of the coverage. Marvin was successful in this competition, as was his fellow student Joan Afferica, who stuck with the academic world and became a professor of Russian history at Smith College. Once chosen, they spent a year in Moscow briefing English-speaking diplomats on what the Soviet media were saying day by day.This first Moscow job launched a chain of events that shaped Marvin's brilliant career. After a year working for JPRS, he left on a trip around the Soviet Union to assess the state of Soviet-Chinese relations. That journey resulted in an article, spotted by Murrow, who took Marvin under his wing at CBS News.Kalb's voice in the book is both chatty and humorous, making it a delightful and easy read. The text reveals his trepidations about not making the grade and recounts how he went about finding news and presenting it to his editors. Undertaking a Ph.D. in Russian history teaches you nothing about what is “news” or how to write it. Kalb discovered this on his first day at work in New York during the summer of 1957 when he was assigned to write material for CBS radio.On that day, word reached New York that a ferry in India had capsized and caused many casualties. Kalb, deeply interested in foreign affairs, was tempted to lead with this tragedy until his editor pointed out that listeners tuning in for the morning news in New York were less interested in casualties from a distant accident than in what the weather was going to be like in the next 24 hours.Assignment Russia reveals that Kalb was a powerful self-starter. Rather than waiting for higher-ups to assign him a potential story, he took the initiative when he spotted potential news and brought it to their attention. His initial goal was to become the Moscow correspondent for CBS News, and he prepared for that by reading insatiably about Soviet affairs.Eventually, the Soviet government hinted to CBS that the network would be allowed to reopen its Moscow bureau (which had been closed in the 1950s under orders from the Kremlin), and Kalb was given the job. The idea was for him to attend the 1961 summit meeting between President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Paris and then go on to Moscow as resident correspondent. The summit imploded when Eisenhower refused to apologize after a U-2 spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers of the CIA, was shot down over Soviet territory. U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated, and the Kalb assignment in Moscow was delayed.The next big event in U.S.-Soviet relations was the trial of Powers, which was expected to generate a great deal of news. CBS geared up for the task. Sam Jaffe, another CBS journalist covering Soviet affairs, who had already been assigned to Kalb, was given the task of traveling with the Powers family to Moscow. Before the trip, Jaffe was contacted by the CIA, which hoped he would bring back important inside information about Powers and his state of mind.Taking on the job of Moscow correspondent was more than a daily challenge, not least because Kalb had to recreate a news bureau from scratch. One of the first hurdles was to battle the Soviet bureaucracy for adequate working and living arrangements. Kalb, a tall man (6’3”, or roughly 191 centimeters), discovered that the bed the Soviet authorities had supplied for him and his wife was far too short for his frame. His account of dealing with the Soviet bureaucracy on this issue over a period of weeks underscores the unexpected difficulties confronting Moscow correspondents at the time. Not only did he have to cover the news, but he also had to create reasonable living conditions.Other challenges were even more pressing, especially during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. As the crisis reached a peak, a CBS editor in New York suggested to Marvin it might be a good idea to send his wife, Madeleine (Mady), to Stockholm on a make-believe furniture buying expedition. The idea was to keep her out of danger. The Kalbs declined.At the peak of the Cuban missile crisis, Marvin took a chance to leave his office to go to the Bolshoi Theater, where Jerome Hines, a personal friend of Mady's from South Orange, New Jersey, was singing in the opera Boris Godunov. Khrushchev was in the audience that evening. During the intermission, Marvin paid a back-stage call on the Soviet leader, who asserted that the Soviet Union would manage to disentangle itself from the conflict with the United States. Kalb was quick to report this important prediction to New York, but Khrushchev's optimistic assessment in the midst of the crisis did not seem to register with Washington. I could find no reference to Khrushchev's optimism in the classified materials released after the end of the Cold War, nor any hopeful reaction on the part of President John F. Kennedy and the bevy of his diplomatic and military advisers. In perilous times, some crucial information gets overlooked. In this case, acute fears of nuclear war persisted for nearly two weeks.Assignment Russia revisits intriguing events in the Soviet Union, above all the Cuban missile crisis, but it stands out even more as the intelligent strivings of a leading journalistic mind.