Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War Kindle Edition
by Marvin Kalb (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 out of 5 stars 17 ratings
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A personal journey through some of the darkest moments of the cold war and the early days of television news
Marvin Kalb, the award-winning journalist who has written extensively about the world he reported on during his long career, now turns his eye on the young man who became that journalist. Chosen by legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to become one of what came to be known as the Murrow Boys, Kalb in this newest volume of his memoirs takes readers back to his first days as a journalist, and what also were the first days of broadcast news.
Kalb captures the excitement of being present at the creation of a whole new way of bringing news immediately to the public. And what news. Cold War tensions were high between Eisenhower’s America and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Kalb is at the center, occupying a unique spot as a student of Russia tasked with explaining Moscow to Washington and the American public. He joins a cast of legendary figures along the way, from Murrow himself to Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, Richard Hottelet, Charles Kuralt, and Daniel Schorr among many others. He finds himself assigned as Moscow correspondent of CBS News just as the U2 incident—the downing of a US spy plane over Russian territory—is unfolding.
As readers of his first volume, The Year I Was Peter the Great, will recall, being the right person, in the right place, at the right time found Kalb face to face with Khrushchev. Assignment Russia sees Kalb once again an eyewitness to history—and a writer and analyst who has helped shape the first draft of that history.
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Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
“Marvin Kalb is a great storyteller with a great story to tell.”—Dan Rather
The chilliest years of the Cold War marked the entrance of a young man who would go on to become one of America’s preeminent diplomatic correspondents. Handpicked by the legendary Edward R. Murrow to join the ranks of an esteemed news network that was just beginning to enter a new world of televised news broadcasting, Marvin Kalb takes readers back to his first days as a journalist, and what also were the first days of broadcast news.
The world in the late 1950s was a tense geopolitical drama of Eisenhower’s America, Khrushchev’s Russia, and Mao’s China. Mistrust and strategic calculation governed international relations. Kalb, who had left his graduate work in Russian studies at Harvard at Murrow’s call for him to join the ranks of CBS News, brought a scholar’s appreciation for history and objective research to his newrole as a journalist who explained and explored this new postwar world.
It was also a new world of journalism, brought by camera into viewers’ homes. The difficulties of conveying news not only by image but by word—and doing so on deadline, with minimal resources, and in a hostile environment—are alive in Kalb’s engaged and vivid writing. He calls his book a “long letter home” and Assignment Russia reads with that kind of color and honesty.
Kalb joins a cast of legendary figures in telling this story of the early days of the Cold War and broadcast news, from Murrow to Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, Richard Hottelet, Charles Kuralt, and Daniel Schorr, among many others—men like himself who became household names and trusted guides to a tension-filled world.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Review
“A fascinating memoir of Marvin Kalb’s Cold War adventures as he sought to penetrate the mysteries of Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Russia while building his career as one of broadcast journalism’s legends.”
—Jack Matlock, U.S. ambassador to Russia (1987–1991)
“Marvin Kalb’s great new book Assignment Russia is a rollicking and engaging memoir that takes you to the front lines of the Cold War, to a mic in the early days of broadcast news, and into the mind and career of one of ‘Murrow’s Boys.’ It’s an important book from a legend in journalism, a book you can’t put down.”
—Jake Tapper, CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent
“In Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, Kalb, now 90 years old, effectively transports the reader to a historical period that will soon be lost to living memory. His narrative offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into the functioning of journalism and diplomacy in a three-year period when both were undergoing sea changes.”
—Kathryn J. McGarr, The Washington Post
“Kalb’s fond, generous memoir, which vividly delineates a bygone era of early journalism, will appeal to students of 20th-century American history as well as aspiring broadcast journalists. The author was involved in many significant Cold War moments, and he brings us directly into that world.
Hopefully Kalb is back at his desk; readers will be eager for the next volume.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A nostalgic treat for older readers. . . a wake-up call for younger ones.”
—Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal
“Marvin Kalb’s engaging Assignment Russia is like Hamilton’s ‘The Room Where It Happens.’ It is a delightful narrative of Kalb’s personal encounters with some of the most famous characters of the 1950s and 1960s, like CBS’s legendary Edward R. Murrow, who hired Kalb, or Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who nicknamed him ‘Peter the Great.’ It is also an engrossing memoir of a foreign correspondent’s adventures in the enemy camp during the Cold War. I loved it, I learned from it, and, I dare say, had fun reading it.”
—Lesley Stahl, co-anchor, CBS’s 60 Minutes
“It is impossible to put this engrossing book down—it illuminates so many dark corners of the Cold War. With a master correspondent’s insight, skepticism, sensitivity, and great clarity, Kalb brings vividly to life all the hopes and fears of the most consequential foe this nation has had.”
—Ken Burns, filmmaker
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press (April 13, 2021)
Publication date : April 13, 2021
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An earnest young correspondent in Cold War Moscow
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Marvin Kalb, then CBS News’s one-man bureau in Moscow, covers the arrival in August 1960 of Barbara Powers, center, wife of pilot Gary Powers whose U-2 spy plane crashed in Soviet territory, raising tensions between Moscow and Washington. (AP Photo)
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By Kathryn J. McGarr
Kathryn J. McGarr is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of "The Whole Damn Deal: Robert Strauss and the Art of Politics." Her forthcoming book is about Washington foreign policy reporters in the early Cold War.
April 16, 2021 at 9:30 p.m. GMT+9:30
In 1957, when Marvin Kalb joined CBS Radio in New York to write local news, television was called “electronic journalism,” and the backdrop for the “CBS Morning News” was a cardboard sign hanging above a desk on the fifth floor of the Grand Central Terminal building. The United States had yet to recognize what it referred to as “Red China” diplomatically, and Edward R. Murrow still worked for CBS.
In “Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War,” Kalb, now 90 years old, effectively transports the reader to a historical period that will soon be lost to living memory. His narrative offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into the functioning of journalism and diplomacy in a three-year period when both were undergoing sea changes.
Despite the title, Kalb does not take up his Russian assignment until Page 221. We spend the first act of the book in New York, where Kalb navigates the legendary world of CBS Radio and gets a crash course in news-writing and old boys’ networking after leaving his PhD program in Russian history at Harvard. The book’s second act is a months-long trip through Europe and East Asia as Kalb tries to answer a question that he thought U.S. diplomats were overlooking: Was the Sino-Soviet alliance weaker than it appeared? The travelogue includes stops in New Delhi, Jakarta, Bangkok and Hong Kong and is a fascinating primer on Russian-Chinese power relations.
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(Brookings Institution Press)
With his wife, Mady, who had been pursuing a PhD in Soviet studies at Columbia University, Kalb arrives in Moscow in May 1960 to reestablish a CBS News bureau. His predecessor, Daniel Schorr, had been denied readmission to the country two years earlier after the Soviets took umbrage at CBS airing a “Playhouse 90” teleplay titled “The Plot to Kill Stalin.” By 1960, the Soviet government was allowing CBS News to send a new correspondent to be the one-man bureau. Kalb landed in Moscow at a particularly fraught moment in U.S.-Soviet relations, just weeks after Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane crashed in Soviet territory. The site of his first news story as a foreign correspondent is Gorky Park, where the crash detritus is on display as evidence of American duplicity.
The Kalb of the book is so young, earnest and anxious about making good in his new field that every assignment manages to inspire genuine suspense. Will the legendary CBS correspondent Blair Clark like Kalb’s one-minute-and-30-second commentary on Soviet moves in the Middle East, enough to read it on the air? (He will!) Will Kalb’s first book, about his recent time in Moscow working for the U.S. Embassy, be well-reviewed? (It will!) Will Nikita Khrushchev, in Paris for the 1960 four-power summit, take his early-morning walk so that Kalb won’t have dragged a camera crew to the Soviet Embassy at 6 a.m. for no reason? (Of course! The Soviet premier not only takes the walk, he takes it with Kalb and both their entourages in tow, and in a charming anecdote Kalb stops at a boulangerie to buy croissants for the lot of them.)
Indeed, everything works out for Kalb, who — despite some stubbornness — remains a likable narrator. He complains incessantly to the Soviets that he can’t fold his 6-foot-3 frame into the 5-foot-10 bed in his lodgings at the Metropol Hotel. To his glee, his CBS bosses finally save his sleep by shipping his own bed from his in-laws in New Jersey. “CBS airmailed our bed from South Orange to Moscow,” he writes. “That’s right! The bed was airmailed, wrapped like a big holiday gift, including sheets, pillows, and pillowcases, from a small town in New Jersey to the capital of the Soviet Union.”
From the preface, the reader knows to expect a hagiographic treatment of Murrow, as well as an abiding faith in the power of journalism and a romantic view of American democracy. “It was a major, important assignment for me and CBS, and I hoped that I would be able to perform in the Murrow tradition of serious, fearless, and enlightening journalism, so essential for the functioning of American democracy,” Kalb writes.
That faith no doubt captures the feeling that many reporters had in the early 1960s, or at least it captures the nostalgia for that era so common in memory. But given Kalb’s background — in addition to having started in academia, he was founding director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy — there is a bewildering lack of critical distance. Instead, he tends to whitewash U.S. intentions and journalistic norms without much interrogation of the inherent conflicts of interest in foreign policy reporting. For instance, in Kalb’s telling, the Russians saw cultural exchange as “a weapon in the Cold War,” while the Americans “saw it as a way of gently opening each society to the other’s charms and maybe, one day, ending the Cold War.” Perhaps many did, but a gesture toward the more complicated story of Cold War policy and journalism that historians have since told would have added some critical nuance.
Kalb makes the disclaimer in his preface that “memoirs, by definition, are not works of history — no footnotes, no bibliography.” But some of the best memoirs do include detailed endnotes — Katharine Graham’s exquisitely researched “Personal History” comes to mind — and the journalists and scholars to whom “Assignment Russia” will especially appeal would surely appreciate a more thorough accounting of Kalb’s source material. Reading conversations that occurred 60 years ago already requires a leap of faith from readers. Could we not be told whether Kalb discussed these conversations with the sources who are still living? Did he take notes at the time? When did his and Mady’s memories differ?
The book ends in the spring of 1961 with Kalb turning down Murrow’s request to join him at the U.S. Information Agency. Kalb decided to remain in Moscow, his dream assignment, for two more years. And that, he promises, is the subject of the next memoir.
Assignment Russia
Becoming a Foreign C
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