Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War by Marvin Kalb (review)

When the newspaper columnist Stewart Alsop, who had been a British soldier during World War II after the U.S. Army turned hm down, was once asked how he had become a journalist, he replied: "It helps if you have a brother who already is one." The brother he was referring to, Joseph, had already become a prominent syndicated columnist by the time Stewart left the Royal Army.

Becoming a leading foreign affairs journalist was a difficult task in the United States in the 1950s, especially for anyone who had started out in another profession. About half of the new crop of reporters came to journalism through university programs (Harvard does not offer courses in journalism), and the other half progressed through the ranks, some having started as copy boys. Assignment Russia is the humorous autobiographical story of how a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in Russian history became one of the best-known U.S. journalists. To accomplish this feat, Marvin Kalb abandoned his plans to become a professor of Russian history and jumped into the untidy world of broadcast journalism in New York.

Of course, he was lucky, and he had an older brother, Bernard, who was already a journalist working for The New York Times. But Marvin's rise as a preeminent journalist and foreign affairs commentator has more to do with native intelligence, energy, and extraordinary luck. The luck was provided by Edward R. Murrow, the London correspondent for CBS News during the Nazi "blitz," who noticed an article Kalb had written about Sino-Soviet relations. Murrow made a cold call to Kalb at Harvard that opened the doors of CBS News to him.

I first became aware of Marvin when he and I were students at Harvard in the 1950s. I was an undergraduate, and he was a graduate student. Both of us were steeped in Soviet and Russian history and politics when the U.S. State Department put out a call for competent graduate students to apply for positions in the U.S-sponsored Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) in Moscow. This service, funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), employed graduate students to read the Soviet press and translate key parts of the coverage. Marvin was successful in this competition, as was his fellow student Joan Afferica, who stuck with the academic world and became a professor of Russian history at Smith College. Once chosen, they spent a year in Moscow briefing English-speaking diplomats on what the Soviet media were saying day by day.

This first Moscow job launched a chain of events that shaped Marvin's brilliant career. After a year working for JPRS, he left on a trip around the Soviet Union to assess the state of Soviet-Chinese relations. That journey resulted in an article, spotted by Murrow, who took Marvin under his wing at CBS News.

Kalb's voice in the book is both chatty and humorous, making it a delightful and easy read. The text reveals his trepidations about not making the grade and recounts how he went about finding news and presenting it to his editors. Undertaking a Ph.D. in Russian history teaches you nothing about what is "news" or how to write it. Kalb discovered this on his first day at work in New York during the summer of 1957 when he was assigned to write material for CBS radio.

On that day, word reached New York that a ferry in India had capsized and caused many casualties. Kalb, deeply interested in foreign affairs, was tempted to lead with this tragedy until his editor pointed out that listeners tuning in for the morning news in New York were less interested in casualties from a distant accident than in what the weather was going to be like in the next 24 hours.

Assignment Russia reveals that Kalb was a powerful self-starter. Rather than waiting for...