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 had written. I eventually was able to win a job in New Rochelle, N.Y. where my family had moved when I had entered the ninth grade in 1950. The job was sports reporter for New Rochelle High School for the New Rochelle Standard-Star. In those days every large city in Westchester County, N.Y. had a daily newspaper. And since my high school was the largest, covering sports for the paper was like covering the Yankees for The New York Times.
I might add that at that time New York was blessed with famous newspapers which would die soon. The Times’ main competition was the New York Herald-Tribune. It also had two tabloid competitors, The Daily News and the Daily Mirror, as well as a liberal tabloid called PM. But it were the afternoon papers which dominated. The Sun, the World-Telegram, the NY Post, the Journal-American all were hawked by news stands throughout the city. I was so imbued with a lust for journalism that I only applied to colleges that had daily newspapers. I eventually was accepted off the waiting list by Harvard and in the fall of 1953 entered as a freshman. The Crimson in those days saw itself as a major journalistic force. It bred several eventual Pulitzer Prize winners (Not me), such as David Halberstam, J.Anthony Lukas, Arthur Langguth in those years. I remember being asked by McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences what graduate school I was going to. I was by then, in 1957, Managing Editor of the Crimson, and I replied, “None.” I was going into the army for six months active duty, and then starting work in January 1958 for the Washington Evening Star, a long-established newspaper in the Nation’s Capital.
Bundy smiled and said, “Well if you change your mind, let me know, and I will give you a recommendation.”
I eventually moved to Washington and began work in January 1958 for the Star, first as a reporter-trainee and then as a reporter. But by the summer of 1958, I decided I wanted to go back to Harvard graduate school and become a Soviet specialist. In part, this decision was made because Russian-U.S. news dominated the headlines, and also because I had met Marshall Shulman, who was the deputy director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard at the time and who told me that he hoped to get journalists into his two-year program. I also hoped to strengthen a fading romance I had then with a Radcliffe girl. The Star was not happy with my decision to go back to school but it turned out to be a great decision for me personally (no, I did not get the girl back) because it led to my spending the summer of 1959 in the Soviet Union with a delegation of American youth, writing about it for The Star, and eventually returning to The Star as a reporter in 1960.
(To be Continued)
