Monthly Archives: April 2017
Looking back now, 1961 and 1962 were probably the most tense years in Soviet-American relations. Khrushchev as a result of his meeting with Kennedy in Vienna, clearly believed that Jack Kennedy was a very weak president and therefore he was free to put pressure on him to recognize East Germany and to accept an arrangement in which Moscow would turn over control of the access routes to Berlin from the West to the East Germans. In my Memoirs, I quoted…..
When I returned to Washington in the summer of 1960, I found my salary had been raised from $68 a week to $85. I know that such sums seem paltry today, but in 1960 you could buy a dinner for $1, and three shirts at a upscale men’s clothing store for $10. The Star at first was unsure what to do with me. The editors knew that I was now an “expert” on the Soviet Union, having spent the summer of…..
I’m often asked: How did you get into journalism? Did you always want to be a journalist? Well the answer is that ever since I was about ten years old, living in my family’s apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, I was fascinated by a radio program called, “The Big Story.” It featured each week a reporter for a newspaper who would win a $500 award granted by Pall Mall cigarettes for some muckraking article he or she…..
Currently there is great concern in the West about the media in Russia. Particularly, whether it is able to be objective at all. This is of course quite different from the time when I was a correspondent in Moscow from 1969 to 1971. In those days, of course, there never was any objectivity. And so I approach Russian media today with a curiosity to see how close it comes to an objective reporting. I have been intrigued by the reports…..