The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures by Henry S. Bradsher (review)

During the Cold War, journalists and academic researchers who ventured abroad were bound to run into hostile situations created by the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. This posed a fundamental challenge for seekers-after-the-truth: Do you stand up for what you believe to be the case despite visa denials, arrests, and other retribution, or do you ingratiate yourself with Communist officials by being “reasonable?” As a journalist once arrested in Moscow, I favor the former approach.

This question of approach ties together for me Henry St. Amant Bradsher’s diverse reporting from the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and other spots in Asia. His first-hand account, The Dalai Lama’s Secret, presents a rich tapestry of separate adventures in far-off places and is bound to stimulate both scholars and future correspondents.

Bradsher and I overlapped in Moscow in the mid-1960s when we worked for competing news agencies. He was the Associated Press (AP) bureau chief, and I worked for Henry Shapiro in the United Press International (UPI) office. Bradsher’s method of work was simple: be serious, be insistent, even be brash, and tell the truth as you see it no matter whom it displeases. At the time, we called him “Brash Bradsher.”

From earliest days, Bradsher dreamed of becoming a journalist, studied briefly at Louisiana State University before transferring to the University of Missouri’s well-known school of journalism. He was hired by the Associated Press in 1955, after serving as an Air Force intelligence officer, and covered tumultuous events in the predesegregation South, where resistance and violence were previews of what he would find abroad.

After a stint on the AP foreign desk in New York, his first major assignment was to India, where he worked from 1959 to 1964, meeting top Indian officials; getting close to President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith; and discovering a charming Fulbright scholar in New Delhi, Monica Jean Pannwitt, who very quickly became his wife.

In 1964, AP offered him the Moscow bureau. This was an exciting period when Soviet space achievements stunned the world, when Soviet tensions with China were on the rise and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam was complicating relations with the United States. Bradsher, who did not know Russian, was determined to compensate through imaginative ideas and unusual digging. Drawing on research from the U.S. Library of Congress, he correctly identified space launches in the “Cosmos” series as spy satellites, to the intense displeasure of Soviet officials who wanted to keep their purpose secret.

Another Bradsher story that upset the Soviet Foreign Ministry concerned Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Nikita Khrushchev as the Soviet leader in a palace coup in October 1964. On important occasions, the Foreign Ministry would invite foreign correspondents to Kremlin receptions for the political elite and diplomatic corps. At one such gathering, the AP chief observed Brezhnev becoming increasingly tipsy, cruising around the reception hall, and bestowing kisses and embraces on some of the attractive female guests.

Bradsher writes: “He [Brezhnev] was obviously drunk, but none of the Soviet officials dutifully trailing behind him had the temerity to try to restrain him....Now I had a story worth filing. Without using the word ‘drunk’ . . . I tried as delicately as possible to convey the atmosphere of the occasion” (p. 187).

Inevitably, Bradsher became the object of escalating reprisals, starting with denial of access, dressing-downs at the Foreign Ministry press department, and finally a bomb explosion under his wife’s Volkswagen car. A U.S. embassy official suggested targeted intimidation. AP chief Wes Gallagher offered to withdraw him from Moscow if he and his family felt unsafe. Undeterred, Bradsher served out his assignment.

What surprised me about his Moscow recollections is the venom with which he viewed UPI and our chief, Henry Shapiro, whom he accused of “slavishly pro-Kremlin reporting.” After nearly three decades in Moscow, Shapiro had an encyclopedic memory of Soviet...