My last days in Washington were pretty hectic. The Washington bureau chief Max Frankel and his wife Toby were kind enough to throw me a farewell party in early February, 1969 at their home. I had a surprise for everyone because on January 26, Marie-Jeanne’s birthday, I proposed marriage to her, and she accepted. Neither her parents nor mine were bothered by the intra-religious aspect. She was and is a devout Catholic, a graduate of Trinity College (now university) in Washington, and I am Jewish, although not a very practicing one. We agreed to get married in April. We drove up to New Rochelle, N.Y. so my parents could give us an engagement party. All my friends and relatives as well as Marie-Jeanne’s New York friends showed up for the party. Unfortunately, a big snowstorm hit New York, but MJ and I did find time to go into the city and pick out a nice engagement ring. I left New York for London on February 13 to spend a few days with the London bureau, which at that time was located in the London Times’ building. That bureau at that time was crucial to The New York Times because many correspondents, including those in Moscow, usually filed their stories through the London bureau, which in those days was open 24 hours a day.
In those pre-satellite phone days, the Moscow correspondent’s fastest way to file was to pick up the phone in the Moscow office and say to the operator in Russian “Ya Ka-Choo (I want) Pa-Zvonite London00” (I want to call London) “Srochno” (It is urgent). I do not remember the numbers. The London office had excellent and fast typists who would take the story and then put it on a high-speed cable to New York.
But I am a bit ahead of myself. I flew to Moscow a few days later and was met at the airport by Henry Kamm, who was then the bureau chief. Henry was one of the best Times’ correspondents in that era. After Moscow he went on to Southeast Asia where he covered the exodus of boat people from Vietnam in the early 1970s and won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his articles about the boat people in 1978. He is now 92 and living in retirement in southern France. Later, when I was foreign editor in 1989-1995, Henry who had been born in Germany, was a key correspondent helping cover the upheavals in East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Henry drove me to our building in Moscow, 12-24 Sadovo-Samotechnaya, a solid apartment house, which at that time was one of “foreigners’ houses” in Moscow. In “Sad-Sam” as we liked to call the building were only Western correspondents and diplomats. There was a police guard in a a cubicle at the one entrance to the building and his job was to keep out people trying to enter who had not been cleared ahead of time. This kept us safe from thieves but made it hard to just invite Russian friends over because they would be screened and questioned. My apartment was No. 1, on the ground floor of entry No. 1. It was fairly spacious, with a large living room, and two bedrooms and even a small dining room. It had a decent enough kitchen and bathroom, and the apartment also came with a full time maid, named Shura, She spoke only Russian, and I jokingly used to refer to her as “Col. Shura” on the assumption she had to report regularly to the KGB what we were doing in the apartment.The Times’ office was in another entry on the second floor. We had two long-time employees, Boris, the office manager, who would come to work in the morning, and Sara, a multi-lingual expert who did a good deal of translation for us. And we had a driver named Ivan, who took care of the office’s Chevrolet Impala and the Soviet car we also owned, a Volga. He was able to use the facilities of the American Embassy’s garage to service the Impala.
My first winter in Moscow turned out to be a very combative one in Soviet-Chinese relations. On March 7 and 8, both Soviet and Chinese news outlets reported clashes and deaths along the Ussuri River in the Far East. This led to a considerable outpouring of patriotism in Moscow. On March 7 and 8, thousands of Russians held a protest march near the Chinese Embassy in Moscow. I can still remember how startled I was when a gentleman, looking like a regular factory worker, came up to me as I was watching the demonstration and said in good English: “What do you think Gwertzman of the reaction here?” I guessed he as a local KGB man keeping tabs on me. I answered: “Very impressive.” By early April, the crisis had diminished and was no longer a big story.
My wedding in Washington was scheduled for April 19 and I spent a good deal of time with the foreign office making sure Marie-Jeanne’s visa would be approved, I flew to Washington on April 12, and reconnected with MJ. After the wedding on April 19 which was held in her local church, St. Thomas Apostle, we had a great reception at the International Club, to which many of my friends and others, including Senator J. William Fulbright and his wife, attended. Haynes Johnson, then on The Star, and I had written a biography of Fulbright, “Fulbright The Dissenter” which was published soon after I joined The Times. On Monday morning, we were able to get a brand new passport, with her married name, the Soviet visa stamped in it, and that afternoon we flew to London for a whirlwind honeymoon at the Savoy Hotel in London and the Crillion in Paris, before flying to Moscow. We were met at the airport by Ivan and Henry, and driven to “Sad-Sam,” for MJ’s introduction to Moscow.
We hired a Russian teacher through the Soviet agency that handled our living needs to help MJ learn the language. Since she already spoke French fluently and Italian not badly, she quickly learned the language and by the time we left, her spoken Russian was well ahead of mine.
When June rolled around, Henry left for his next assignment in Asia and Jim Clarity and his family arrived to be my deputy. What I still remember graphically is my first real run-in with the KGB or the local police—I never could tell which. One morning I received a phone call in the Times’ office from Andrei Amalrik, who at that time was a fairly prominent Soviet dissident, who had gotten a fair amount of publicity for an article: “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” Actually, it lasted until 1971. Amalrik had met Kamm, but I had not met him. He then invited MJ and me to dinner at his apartment in Moscow the next Saturday night.
When we showed up at his apartment in the Arbat section of Moscow—a fairly upscale area at the time—we were met at the door by a middle aged gentleman wearing a tweed jacket. I assumed this was a cooperative apartment with many different families, But Amalrik also came to the door and whispered to me “Obisk,” “Obisk.” At first I didn’t know the word, and then remembered it mean “Search.” His apartment was undergoing a search by some sort of plainclothesmen. I answered questions, telling them we had been invited to dinner, which of course was true. I also turned over a bottle of Scotch which I had brought as a gift. I refused to sign any documents, without the U.S. consul present, and was told to leave. I did so. I asked Clarity to do a profile on Amalrik which the Times published late in the year. Meanwhile, Amalrik was arrested, sent to a labor camp, exiled, and eventually made his way to Western Europe. He died in a car accident in Spain in 1980.
The summer of 1969. of course, will forever be known as the summer of Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. Buzz Aldrin was his co-pilot on the space ship. There was of course great interest in the Soviet Union, the country which in a way launched the space race.
