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.
Оглавление
Marvin Kalb. Assignment Russia
CONTENTS
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. JOINING A “BAND OF BROTHERS”
2. CBS’S “SPECIALIST ON SOVIET AFFAIRS”
3. BROADCASTING’S ONE THING, WRITING’S ANOTHER
4. A BOOK, A DOCUMENTARY, AND A NEW IDEA
5 “THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING”
6. THE SINO-SOVIET ALLIANCE: MYSTERIES, PUZZLES, AND ENIGMAS
7. AROUND THE WORLD IN 100 DAYS—PART ONE
8. AROUND THE WORLD—PART TWO
9. A DREAM COME TRUE
10. THE PARIS SUMMIT: IKE VS. NIKITA
11 … AND, FINALLY, MOSCOW
12. CENSORS, CIRCUITS, AND DOUBLE BEDS
13. BARGAINING WITH BUREAUCRATS
14. THE “PIGEON” LOST IN MY PASTERNAK ADVENTURE
15 “DO SVIDANIIA”
16. SAYING NO TO MURROW?
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
OTHER BOOKS BY MARVIN KALB
Eastern Exposure
.....
No star at CBS News burned more brightly than Murrow’s, even though at the time he was beginning to feel disillusioned with television news, a fact he probably confided to very few others except his wife, Janet, and his executive producer, Fred Friendly. Whenever he walked into the newsroom, usually after lunch, wearing no jacket, his head down, his tie loose, a cigarette in his hand, looking like a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, the writers and editors would stop talking and instinctively pull back, opening a path for him to the tickers. It was like a scene from the Bible, Moses making his way to the Red Sea. As the new kid on the block, though one whose job at CBS Murrow, more than anyone else, had helped create, I too would pull back, as ignorant of his deepening unhappiness as everyone else in the newsroom.
I was to learn of it only a year later, on October 15, 1958, when he addressed the annual convention of the Radio Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) in Chicago. And he made news. “This nation is in mortal danger,” he began, stunning the audience with this startling message, stating in public what he had feared in private—that television, though profitable and in many ways satisfying, was actually failing to do its job, not helping a nation trapped in the global challenges of the Cold War. He painted a grim picture: if you watched primetime television for one solid week, he posited, you would find only “evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world.” He respected the potential of television. “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, it can even inspire,” he noted. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.” (Murrow had his doubts, and he was now prepared to express them.) “Otherwise,” he concluded, using a phrase many others would later echo in their criticisms of television news, “it is merely wires and lights in a box.”
