On the evening of September 10, 2001, Marie-Jeanne and I joined a group of celebrants on the private yacht of the owner of Forbes Magazine as the guests of Robert Lenzner, an old college friend who was a Forbes columnist then, for a cruise around New York Harbor. It was a very rainy night and we both remember looking up and admiring the World Trade Center not far off shore. I awakened normally the next day and was having breakfast…..
I had just taken over as Moscow bureau chief when I went with my new bride, Marie-Jeanne to the residence of Jacob Beam, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union for the annual July 4 party. It was one of the few occasions in those cold war days when prominent Russians could mingle easily with Americans. And sure enough I struck up a conversation with Andrei Solzhenitsyn, the poet,[who died in 2010 in Mpscpw] whose popularity in Russia was akin…..
In the late summer of 1942, my family moved from an apartment in a two family house on Rosedale Avenue in the east Bronx to an apartment at 3235 Grand Concourse in the west Bronx. I was seven years old and starting the second grade at PS 80, having transferred from PS 46. Our apartment was on the third floor and I soon became friends with the other boys in the building. My best friend in those years was Garry…..
In the early 1950s, when I was in high school in New Rochelle, N.Y., I saw Humphrey Bogart’s film, Deadline-USA, about an intrepid newspaper editor, whose paper, The Day,” was being sold by the children of the late founder. This comes at a time, when the paper is closing in on a major crook in the town. In the end, the paper succeeds in printing evidence of his crimes. The film has the feel of a newspaper office at that…..
At the beginning of June 1969,I became the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. I had also married Marie-Jeanne Marcouyeux on April 19, in Washington and after a brief honeymoon in London and Paris, we were beginning our married life in Moscow, No sooner had I assumed command of the bureau when Henry Kamm departed for his next assignment in Asia. My “big story” was obviously going to center on the Soviet reaction to the planned launch of…..
In a corner of my office at home, there is a photocopy of a poster that correspondents traveling with Henry Kissinger had produced to honor his 50th birthday on May 27. 1973. It is a parody of a well-known Braniff Airways poster of the time, which featured a beautiful hostess waving and saying: “I’m Dorothy, Fly Me to Miami.” Our poster had Kissinger waving, saying “I am Henry, Fly Me to Damascus.” At the bottom of my copy, Kissinger wrote:…..
Mike Pompeo is listed as the 70th secretary of state. Dean Rusk was the 54th in the long list that goes back to Thomas Jefferson. And Rusk was the first Secretary that I covered. I was working at that time in the 1960s for the Washington Evening Star, then the leading afternoon newspaper in D.C. Rusk had been chosen by John F. Kennedy after having served as head of the Rockefeller Institute. I began covering the State Department full time…..
The firing of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State has led me to recall the various secretaries of state I have known as a reporter and editor from roughly 1961 to 2002. The first was Dean Rusk, who ended up being Secretary for the entire Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the longest of any secretary since Cordell Hull. Hull was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary but really played no significant role, particularly during World War 2. I had been assigned by The…..
In the spring of 1961, I was promoted to the job of writing the foreign section of The Star’s Week-in-Review section. That section was a rough imitation of The New York Times’s section. In my many years at The Times later in life, I enjoyed writing for that section immensely with my analyses of world events. Now, unfortunately, The Times does not bother using the Review to cover recent events, but buys free-lance pieces of varying quality. L.Edgar Prina, a…..
My first visit to the Soviet Union was in the summer of 1959. At that time I was a graduate student in Harvard’s Russian Studies program, and I received my M.A. the next year. I had already worked for a year at the Washington Evening Star, then one of the leading afternoon newspapers in the country, but because of my interest in Soviet affairs, fanned by Stalin’s death just six years earlier, I decided to go to graduate school. While…..