A Reporter's Notes
HOWE, QUINCY
A Reporter's Notes The Big Thaw. By C. L. Sulzberger. Harper. 275 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Quincy Howe ABC news analyst and commentator; author, "A World History of Our Own Times" The man who...
...The new Rumanian generation seemed sharp, shrewd and cynical...
...It isn't what we had before the war...
...Let us attempt by every means to stimulate it...
...It isn't what you seem to think...
...We know what we want," one young non-Communist supporter of the regime told the author...
...Ours does...
...Inside the Soviet Union, he was struck by the headway the Communists have made in breaking down the Moslem faith in Central Asia...
...It was not within the purview of this book to dwell on our weaknesses in the Middle East, the dangers threatening us from the Far East, and the illusions that President Eisenhower and his administration encourage us to entertain about ourselves...
...History moved so fast that The Big Thaw had its publication date moved up from middle to early November, and yet by the 10th of the month the author noted in his column: "The cold war is back again with a vengeance...
...The result: a model of factual, readable reporting that blends information, interpretation and opinion...
...But, just as he has covered his assignment in such detail that he sometimes does not see the forest for the trees, so he has focused so closely on the forest that he does not always take in the surrounding landscape...
...Things will evolve...
...Poles and Hungarians have longer traditions of national resistance, but the Poles fear the Germans more than they fear the Russians...
...Sulzberger's book, and even more in subsequent events, to suggest that the consequences of the Big Thaw may be as dangerous to us as to the Communists...
...He sees India in clear if not present danger of attack...
...Moscow," he says, "has with great audacity decreed a Big Thaw in its empire...
...You Americans should not ignore it...
...We have seen pitiful things...
...On the other hand, this method sometimes leads the reader to suspect that the author has not made up his own mind on some of the subjects covered...
...The Czechs will be among the last to revolt...
...But there is much in Mr...
...Some of the most valuable pages of The Big Thaw deal with the satellites...
...In the case of Yugoslavia, he stresses that it has remained a nation of small peasants...
...Concerning the Middle East, he recalls that Molotov told Hitler in 1940: "The area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf should be recognized as the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union...
...This government came in with terror...
...Perhaps this is the price he must pay for strict adherence to the reporter's craft...
...Everything goes to show that America cannot come to terms with other countries because they are separated by a profound economic rift, because America is richer than the others...
...Although subsequent editions might be retitled The Brief Thaw, the text requires no changes, for Mr...
...On the one hand, Mr...
...Sulzberger more than anything he saw in the satellites was Tito and Titoism...
...Bulgaria, on the other hand, has collectivized 80 per cent of its agriculture...
...Sulzberger stands in no need of instruction on these points, he perhaps assumes that his readers share his awareness...
...Should this prove meaningful, its consequences to the Communist system are far more dangerous than to ourselves...
...author, "A World History of Our Own Times" The man who writes three columns a week on foreign affairs for the New York Times has reworked and reorganized into book form several dozen of his recent dispatches from the Soviet Union and its satellites...
...Time will go on...
...In this connection, Mr...
...This is a reality...
...Yet, the book's title and its closing paragraph make the author's fundamental convictions and purposes clear...
...But we are on the path of progress...
...Moscow's aim of world revolution remains unchanged, but confidence and tranquility have begun to replace fear and suspicion...
...I have no use for bloodshed and class war...
...Sulzberger takes pains to explain how and why each satellite differs from the others—and from Russia...
...Because Mr...
...The Big Thaw reads like a miniature edition of the New York Times and differs from other topical books on world affairs as the Times differs from other newspapers...
...For instance, in writing the columns from which this book is drawn, the author visited all the Soviet satellites, traveled widely in the Soviet Union itself, talked to important and not-so-important people, made notes, and used his eyes not only to take in the sights but to read books of history, biography and reminiscence...
...Sulzberger offers so wide a selection of facts and so great a variety of opinions that the reader feels free to make up his own mind...
...they have had long experience in adapting themselves to foreign rule...
...Sulzberger has mastered that type of daily journalism which makes the New York Times of so much greater permanent interest than most magazine articles or books on world affairs...
...What impressed Mr...
...Sulzberger found "competitive coexistence" more dangerous than Stalinism...
...People are free only when their inner spirit demands it...
...Under the Communists as under the Tsars, Russia's history zigzags between nationalism and internationalism, and Russia's present masters of course express their purposes in the language of Lenin: "America cannot come to terms with Europe—that is a fact proved by history...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 50
