My Amazon Review of Alan Philps' "The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, The Metropol Hotel......."

A Failure of Journalism 

We last ran into the Metropol Hotel in Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow.” (See:        My Amazon Review of Amor Towles' "A Gentleman in Moscow")  Here we revisit the hotel as the home of foreign journalists covering the Eastern Front during World War II. We meet such stalwarts Quentin Reynolds, Margaret Bourke-White, Walter Kerr, Cyrus Sulzberger, and Edgar Snow among others. They are all there to cover the war under the very strict hands of Soviet censorship. Hence, for the most part, they have become organs of Soviet Propaganda.

 

The journalists are aided by a corps of female interpreters who in addition to there nominal duties are there to spy, influence and sometimes perform sexual services for mostly male reporters. One of those interpreters was Nadya Ulanovskaya who with her husband Alex are the true protagonists of the book. Both Nadya and Alex as teenagers were revolutionaries in 1917 and, in fact, they met Stalin. After the revolution both move up in nomenklatura and by 1926 they are working as GRU agents in China under the legendary master spy, Richard Sorge. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Owen Matthews' "An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent )

 

By 1932 Alex had moved over to the NKVD and worked as its rezident in New York. In that capacity he recruited Whitaker Chambers who years later would blow the whistle on the Soviet spy ring in the United States. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Calder Walten's "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West" )

However, by the late 1930’s both are disillusioned with communism and are initially saved from the purges by an old friend from the NKVD. Nadya worked for Australian journalist Godfrey Blunden. She travels with the journalistic crew to see what the Soviets want them to see at the front. The journalists live high on the hog while all of Russia is starving. Author Alan Philps gives us a great sense of the fear in Moscow as Hitler’s armies approached as the journalist were evacuated further east.

 

Nadya’s luck runs out in 1948 when she is arrested. It seems the KGB figured out that she was the protagonist in a novel Blunden wrote. She spends time in Lubyanka, Lefortovo and the Gulag and serves eight years. She is released early under Khrushchev's general amnesty. I didn’t realize what a big deal that was. Also released were her husband and daughter.

 

She immediately acts as a rebel by being a leader in “samizdat” movement which published previously forbidden tracts. Ultimately, she and her daughter move to Israel.

 

What we learn from Philp’s book is that journalists working under dictatorships cannot really do an honest job. In this case the journalists in Russia lived on their expense accounts, paid no taxes and eagerly awaited writing books that would bring them a royalty stream. To write out of line would mean having their visas revoked. Thus, in no way could they be considered independent. This is a lesson for a reader of reports emanating from Russia, Iran, China, and Palestine. Take all of them with more than a few grains of salt. Witness what happened to Evan Gershkovich now imprisoned in Russia.

 

Alan Philps has done a great service to the memory of Nadya Ulanovskaya and has written a work of history that today’s journalists should not forget.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Failure of Journalism (amazon.com)

 

My Amazon Review of Katy Tur's "Unbelievable: My Front -Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History"

In the Eye of a Political Hurricane

In the spring of 2015 Katy Tur was living large as an NBC correspondent in London. She had a French boyfriend with whom she was going on a Mediterranean vacation in July.  However on a home trip to New York, of a sudden, the powers that be at NBC/MSNBC drafted her to cover the nascent Trump campaign. All the parties involved thought it would be a short term assignment. Little did they know it would last for 17 months and lead to a Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism for Tur.

In a very personal, candid and breezy style Katy Tur tells us of her getting caught up in a Category 5 political hurricane that was the Trump campaign. From the beginning she is attacked by Trump and as the campaign goes on she legitimately fears for her safety. So much so that NBC hires a security detail for her. Through her eyes we see Trump’s love/hate relationship with the press. He hates them personally but he is validated by them.

She gets very personal about her life on the campaign trail. She changes clothes in a car and falls in the snow while racing to catch a plane out of LaGuardia Airport. She lives on a diet of junk food and alcohol that makes it difficult for her to zip up her pants and look in the mirror. By reading her book I got to appreciate the hard work that journalist do to bring the news to me.

Although she does not like Trump, she is very respectful of his voters. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, she feels their pain. She recounts a vignette about a middle-aged woman who happens to be a hair dresser helping her with a curling iron in a restroom. Later that woman would be cheering Trump on with his personal attacks on the press. Tur gives a real sense of how decent people can get caught up in the madness of crowds.  Further, she practically alone at NBC sees Trump winning.

I have previously written what great team of female reporters NBC has put together. I call them Oppenheim’s girls, after Noah Oppenheim, NBC’s current news director. (See https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2017/09/from-murrows-boys-to-oppenheims-girls.html)                                                                                                                       Along with Katy Tur, there is Kasie Hunt, Hallie Jackson and Kristen Welker. I honor them by calling them “girls” because they are the modern day equivalent of Murrow’s Boys. They truly represent an all-star team in any journalism league.

I have one last and very personal point. While she was growing up she had a family dog named Daisy. My three children who are roughly Katy’s age also grew up with a dog named Daisy. She was the best dog.

I highly recommend “Unbelievable” for anyone interested in the 2016 election and the role of journalist in the hothouse of a presidential campaign.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3D3WG5U2JR36I/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of George Melloan's "Free People, Free Markets: How The Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages Shaped America"

The Making of an Editorial Page

Because I have been reading The Wall Street Journal since I was a kid I looked forward to reading “Free People, Free Markets..” George Melloan did not let me down and as a former reporter, columnist and deputy editor of the editorial page has written a definitive history of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. He covers the page’s evolving politics and personalities during it’s over a century history. He is particularly adept at chronicling the roles of Vermont Royster and Robert Bartley in shaping the page from the 1950s to the dawn of the 21^st Century. It was those two editors who catapulted the page into a major force in conservative thought and American journalism. And Melloan had a ringside seat in writing those editorials and serving as Bartley’s deputy.

To me the highlight of the book was Melloan’s recounting his commute from New Jersey into Manhattan on 9/11. I made the same commute on a different New Jersey Transit line and witnessed the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. I worked next door to the then WSJ headquarters and immediately went home. Melloan had a paper to put out and by the efforts of their heroic staff the WSJ was put together at their Princeton printing plant. It was journalistic grace under fire.

What perhaps made the editorial page was their walk on the supply-side in the late 1970s where fiscal orthodoxy was abandoned in favor of broad-based tax cuts. The results came a few years later with the Reagan revolution.

I have a few quibbles though. Sometimes the book reads like a very long newspaper article. I would have liked to see full reprints of a dozen or so editorials that Melloan considers to be the most important. Lastly Melloan leaves out the views of the editorial board prior to America’s entry into World War II. My guess he was not proud of them, but they should have been discussed for the sake of history. 

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon

.com/review/R3RELX0IF7PBD7/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Hiding in Plain Sight: Mass Unemployment

Last night I attended the annual Loeb Awards dinner sponsored by the UCLA Anderson School which honors the best that business journalism has to offer. You can call it the Pulitzer Prizes for business journalism. All of the main characters from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, CNBC, etc were there.

To be sure all of the awards were relevant and they honored stories, among others, on the BP blowout in the Gulf, the scandal at Remington Firearms, and a significant book on hedge funds, but just like last year there was nary a mention on the unemployment crisis facing America. We are now in the third year of the worst unemployment crisis since the 1930s and nobody seems to care.

It seems that politicians of both parties and the journalists who cover them are in a conspiracy of silence. Maybe no one has any real solutions or maybe too many of the unemployed are out of sight and out of the minds of the policy elites, but make no mistake our country is being destroyed worker by worker. Unless there will be a dramatic change, this is one story that will end very badly.