To mark the OPC’s 75th anniversary, Dateline magazine has assembled a look-back through the decades with some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business who have sent us their memories of the biggest stories of their respective eras. We’ve broken it down by decade: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013
When I arrived in Berlin in 1958 as the Associated Press bureau chief, the city was a smoldering flashpoint. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was attempting to force American, British and French forces out of the sectors assigned to them under the Potsdam Treaty.
Khrushchev’s purpose was to merge Soviet-controlled East Berlin with the sectors under Allied occupation into the capital of East Germany. In West Berlin, then isolated within East German territory, I was called upon almost daily to cover some crisis along the the rail and autobahn links to West Germany. The 11,000 troops garrisoning the West sectors were on constant alert against the possibility of Soviet tanks crashing into their enclave. At the same time, East German forces tried to halt the flow of refugees out of drab East Berlin. By comparison, Free West Berlin was thriving with good hotels, casinos, nightclubs and a vibrant cultural life.
In June, the United States confronted the East German regime over its detention of nine American servicemen whose helicopter had strayed over East Germany and had been forced down. The East Germans were demanding direct negotiations with Washington for their release, something Washington was refusing to do since it would constitute official recognition of East Germany. I pestered Communist officials for an opportunity to see the Americans. Late on the evening of June 30, there was a phone call to the bureau. “Please come to the Foreign Ministry in East Berlin tomorrow morning,” a disembodied voice intoned.
When I turned up at the appointed hour, there was a bevy of correspondents there, but all the others were from Communist media. We were taken to a villa near Dresden, a two hour drive south of Berlin, where I was led to a room where the Americans were held. Before I could be silenced I tipped them off that they would soon face a show press conference. We were then herded before press cameras. In the question period, I tried to convey to the American servicemen that they were being held for ransom, the price being diplomatic recognition. Instead of appeals for Washington to pay the price, the serviceman ended the conference by shouting denunciation of their captors as kidnappers. When I filed my story upon my return to West Berlin, the world-wide negative publicity it generated prompted the Communists to release the Americans.
Observing Khrushchev’s maneuvers in Berlin, prepared me for my posting in Moscow in 1960 for The New York Times . Khrushchev’s reckless tactics leading to the Cuban missile crisis in October, 1962, therefore did not come to me as a total surprise. Covering Moscow in the 1960s was an arduous but an extraordinarily rewarding assignment since you were reporting major history in the making. I flew to the Soviet capital on June 1, 1960 to replace Osgood Caruthers and Max Frankel as the chief correspondent of The New York Times. I would be followed several weeks later by Audrey, my wife, freelancing for the magazine section of The Times, and our four daughters. When The Times offered me a job in 1959, with the obvious intention of posting me abroad, I accepted with the proviso that I would go anywhere except Moscow since no correspondent had ever gone to the Soviet capital with four kids. Yet here I was in Moscow not anticipating that the kids would be wonderful sources for inside feature stories, or that events in Moscow during my three-year tour would serve to radically change the world.
The day after my arrival, I attended the funeral of Boris Pasternak, the Nobel Prize winner in literature who had been a symbol of resistance to Soviet oppression. About 1,000 mourners stood outside his little cottage at Peredelkino near Moscow to render homage. Within, as I passed the bier of the seventy-year-old poet, who lay in an open coffin surrounded by flowers, I saw that KGB security agents were taking photographs of the invited mourners. It was the first of many times I was to be under KGB surveillance.
The pace of news coverage was intense in Moscow and very competitive when faced with correspondents like the highly experienced Henry Shapiro of United Press. I wrote at a battered desk in a tiny office, sitting opposite my fellow correspondent, initially Caruthers, and later Ted Shabad, an expert on the geography and resources of the Soviet Union. There was always a Russian police guard at the gate of the shabby building who kept check on our visitors. All news copy to be sent back to The Times, whether by wire or telephone, had to be passed through rigorous censorship at the telegraph office. You would push your copy onto the censor’s green curtained desk and eventually receive in return a marked up version that had been arbitrarily edited and transmitted.
Whitman Bassow of Newsweek was expelled from the Soviet Union in August, 1962, for writing “crudely slanderous dispatches.” Whit never knew the real reason for his expulsion but believed that it was due to a joke comparing Khrushchev’s rule with Stalin’s dictatorship.
Our family lived in a walled compound, one of the so-called diplomatic ghettos for foreigners, with a militia guard at the gate, in a four room apartment. Audrey and I slept in a small bedroom. One night, the lighting fixture at the foot of our bed exploded. We found a listening device in it. The KGB had been listening to some choice pillow talk.
On November 7, 1962, we were at a diplomatic reception in the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. This was the first time that Americans had been invited to the Kremlin since the eruption of the Cuban missile crisis. In the gilded hall, Khrushchev and other members of the Soviet politburo stood at a long table exchanging vodka toasts. Suddenly, I saw Audrey walking to a spot directly in front of Khrushchev, take a Leica out of her evening bag and begin photographing the Soviet leader. She had ignored the KGB order to check all cameras at the door. A swarm of KGB agents converged on her. But Khrushchev waved them off and posed smiling for Audrey. When Khrushchev began to mingle with the guests, I approached him. Asked about the missile crisis, he said: tension had not completely eased, “but our rockets are out of Cuba. We were very close—very, very close to a thermonuclear war.”
The next morning—Audrey’s photographs of Khrushchev were on the front page of The New York Times above my story on the end of the Cuban missile crisis.