On Harrison Salisbury

[ni...@glasnet.ru]

From: "nikst" <ni...@glasnet.ru>

New York Times
May 11, 1997

Opening a Door to a Distant, Tumultuous Era
By CLYDE HABERMAN

Harrison E. Salisbury did not report on the Russian Revolution in 1917.
No
doubt he would have, if given the chance, but he was only 8 at the time.
As things turned out, it was one of the few epic events of this turbulent
century that Mr. Salisbury did not cover as a reporter, writer or editor.
He did try, though, even then. In 1919, he wrote his own "History of the
Great War," an ambitious enterprise for a 10-year-old schoolboy in
Minneapolis. "All Europe was astire," he began, shaky spelling and all.
The notebook containing this history is part of an exhibition at Columbia
University on Mr. Salisbury's long and remarkable journalistic career, a
show that runs through June 27 in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
That
library, in the university's Butler Library, received thousands of Mr.
Salisbury's manuscripts, notes, letters and photographs after his death in
1993.
The display is called "Reporting the 20th Century." Fair enough. The life
of Harrison Salisbury, one of American journalism's greats, spanned
virtually the entire century. Little of it escaped his pen.
Along the way, says Sondra Venable, the show's curator, he saved almost
every photograph and scrap of paper, from correspondence with hundreds of
celebrated figures to a 1943 ration card in war-torn London. Intriguing
samples are on display, both the serious and the quirky. There are some of
his censored dispatches from Moscow and his press pass to Stalin's funeral,
a copy of a 1958 article on juvenile delinquency for The New York Times
Magazine and the unhappy written response from street-gang members, a
letter
of praise from Erskine Caldwell and a critical newspaper column by John
Steinbeck.
What you soon learn is that Mr. Salisbury saw it all.
As a United Press reporter, he covered domestic events like Al Capone's
trial and the New Deal before going off to World War II in Europe. As a
correspondent and editor with The New York Times from 1949 through 1973, he
chronicled Stalin's Russia, the civil-rights movement, John F. Kennedy's
assassination and the Vietnam War. As a prolific author -- he produced 29
books in all, including a novel -- he watched China up close from Mao's
last
years to the Tiananmen repression in 1989.
Mr. Salisbury's reporting often stirred controversy. Lean and tall,
somewhat stern in appearance, he tended to hold opinions with dead
certainty, and more than once they ran against the popular tide.
When he was based in Moscow for The Times during the depths of the
McCarthy era, critics accused him of passing off Communist propaganda as
news. They did not know, or deliberately ignored, that every one of his
dispatches went through the Soviet censor's wringer.
The censorship was so severe that in a 1949 letter to his editor,
included
in the exhibition, he complained that it amounted to "a fraud on the
American public." He proposed that his reports carry a warning label of
some
sort. But that was not done, and the soft-on-Communism attacks continued.
Not until he left Moscow could he write, unexpurgated, on the brutal
realities of Soviet life, a series that won him the Pulitzer Prize for
international reporting in 1955.
No Salisbury controversy was bigger than the one created by his coup of
gaining entry to North Vietnam in December 1966, a time of mounting protest
against the Vietnam War. His reports from Hanoi on the civilian damage
inflicted by American bombers directly contradicted United States
Government
claims that only military targets were being hit, in surgically precise
strikes.
Mr. Salisbury stood accused -- shades of Moscow -- of being a dupe of
Hanoi's propaganda machine. In that charged atmosphere, he lost his chance
for a second Pulitzer in 1967. A jury of journalists recommended that he
get
it, but the Pulitzer advisory board, a higher-ranking body, said no.
(Letters and articles reflecting the anger of the time are on display, but
not the fact that the Pulitzer was, and is, administered by Columbia
University.)
Later events would prove that on the big issues he was right far more
often than wrong. He wrote that the Russians and the Chinese were drifting
apart when most experts insisted that all Communists were the same. They
indeed split. When he wrote in 1960 that Birmingham, Ala., had become a
racial caldron, city elders sued The Times for libel, unsuccessfully.
Birmingham erupted. American bombers, we were to learn, killed many
Vietnamese civilians.
But the point of this exhibition is not to revive ancient disputes. Its
strength is in serving as a window on a journalistic era long gone, when
there were no satellite phones or laptop computers to make the world so
small that foreign correspondence is robbed of much of its mystery. Here,
we
can grab once more onto that past of cables and teletypes, before it slips
through our fingers for good.
There are also lessons to be gleaned.
One is that there is no such thing as too old. After retiring from The
Times, and into his 80's, Mr. Salisbury wrote more than a dozen books. A
photo shows him by the wheezing Remington portable that he used for
decades.
Another lesson: Being there counts, a useful reminder for modern
reporters
who prefer surfing the Internet for information or watching CNN. They could
have learned from this man who at 75 -- as displayed excerpts of a
typewritten diary show -- recreated the Chinese Communists' Long March of
1949.
Perhaps the most important lesson is that epic events are not necessarily
what they're cracked up to be, a point Mr. Salisbury raised with me in 1990
in Rome, where I was The Times's correspondent and he was at the American
Academy.
He lamented, at 81, his belated realization that he had followed the
wrong
revolutions, that the one that ultimately mattered most was to be found not
inside the Kremlin or the Forbidden City but inside the Pitti Palace. In
Florence he came to understand that the revolutions of his day in Russia
and
China were merely "summer squalls on sand-saucer lakes compared to the
oceanic force of the Renaissance." That was how he put it in "A Time of
Change," a memoir represented in the exhibition with a manuscript page.
A life deemed at the end to have been misspent? Hardly. Just a reminder
from an old pro that a good journalist keeps his eye on what really counts.

**********
Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 11:08:07 +0200
From: Stanislav Menshikov <mens...@globalxs.nl>
Subject: Re: Harrison Salisbury

>May 11, 1997
>Opening a Door to a Distant, Tumultuous Era
>By CLYDE HABERMAN

Dear David:
I knew Harrison Salisbury for three decades and feel good every
time
he is remembered, which is too rare.
We first met in Khruschev's (mid-50s) Moscow when, apart from
teaching I was working for the "New Times" weekly magazine, and we
immediately became friends. The last time we corresponded was in the late
80's. He struck me as very different from the typical US reporter (then and
now). He always wrote what he thought but also wrote and said the truth
(not
necessarily the whole truth, but nobody does that anyhow even when
testifying in court). Truth about the Soviet Union, truth about China,
Vietnam, and most importantly, about America. Who remembers now his
"Shook-Up Generation" - truth about the then pre-revolutionary American
youth?
Many times I visited his country home in Taconic, north
Connecticut,
where he kept m,uch of his enormous library. Every time after we talked I
knew more important things about what was coming in the world - more than I
could ever imagine and forecast myself. A man who said once that he hated
both elites-establishments - Soviet and American - without preference for
any of them and fought them both in his quiet but effective way.
When he was editor of the Op-Ed page in the NYTimes I always had a
chance to express my own views which was quite often. When he left the
paper, nobody (not even my acquaintances there) asked me to write for them
any more. He introduced me to the Princeton University Center of
International Affairs where I spent months and wrote a large part of two of
my books and read so much anti-Soviet literature (without becoming either
anti-Soviet or anti-Russian) that most anti-Soviet dissidents never dreamt
of knowing at that time or later. Being well informed lays a basis for
being
objective and loving without having illusions.
When Harrison was away I would call his beautiful wife Charlotte
and
talk and even occasionally meet for tea somewhere around town. Full of
charm
and wisdom - on the mountain-high Salisbury level.
Harrison Salisbury deserves to be written about much more than he
is. I wonder if there is a book printed about him yet. He should become an
object of emulation by his younger colleagues and, perhaps, an inspiration
for setting up a SALISBURY PRIZE FOR TRUE AND NON-IDEOLOGICAL REPORTING.
Perhaps, the "free market" is not quite prepared for that yet. To write the
truth means being courageous and making enemies of too many people.

JRL, 11.05.97
**************