The Cold War Fifties
SHUB, ANATOLE
Analyzing a Divided World The Cold War Fifties By Anatole Shub When I came to work at The New Leader as an associate editor in February 1949, shortly after graduating from the City...
...Though the editors attempted to improve domestic political coverage and cultural criticism, it was the many-sided international coverage that commended the magazine to policy makers and distinguished it from mainstream newsweeklies and from competitive journals of opinion (such as the New Republic, the Nation and the Progressive...
...A major symposium on "Alternatives to the ?-Bomb" was launched in the issue of June28,1954, with a provocative essay by Lewis Mumford, who strikingly argued that "to contain Russia, we must include her...
...While some favored the proposed European Defense Community as a means of rearming West Germany, others hailed French Prime Minister Pierre MendèsFrance for helping to scuttle the EDC and instead concluding the London agreements that admitted West Germany to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...Robert M. Hutchins and other civil libertarians disagreed...
...I was eventually expelled from Moscow for contacts with Soviet dissidents, one of whom, Andrei Amalrik, wrote a prophetic book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984...
...it was a bestseller for years to come...
...Occasionally they were joined by such old foes of Communism as Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine...
...G.E.R...
...On May 6, 1950, however, it appeared for the first time as a 32-page weekly magazine, designed by Life art director Bernard Quint...
...When Khrushchev's "secret" speech at the 20th Communist Party Congress in February 1956 became known in the West, The New Leader published an English language text, with annotations by Nicolaevsky (translated by Louis Jay Herman), as a paperback-size special section of the July 23 issue...
...Unsure of his command of English, he did not venture to edit the articles, but he did solicit most of them and he recruited the editors...
...Both my father, David Shub, and my brother Boris wrote for the paper...
...In the December 24-31 issue a special section that I wrote, "Labor in the Soviet Orbit," reviewed the stormy history between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956...
...The New Leader was practically unique in its close attention to the Moscow power struggles in Josef W. Stalin's last years and the early post-Stalin period that saw the rise ofNikita S.Khrushchev...
...Hudson, Karl A. Wittfogel and Richard L. Walker tracked events in mainland China...
...My sister Mona had managed its library and bookstore...
...Myron Kolatch joined the staff after James left at the end of 1953 and I moved into his slot, which I occupied for the next five years...
...and Mary V. Greene, who solicited book reviewers (among them Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts) as well as publishers' advertising...
...Nicolaevsky himself was a brotherin-law of Aleksei I. Rykov (Lenin's successor as Soviet prime minister...
...and for serving as Central European and Moscow correspondent of the Washington Post in the early years of Leonid I. Brezhnev...
...These included Daniel James, the managing editor, who found correspondents for a regular "National Reports" section before departing to freelance in Latin America...
...and "Communist China: Fact and Myth" by CM...
...As for Communism in the U.S., heated discussion swirled around "Freedom in American Culture" (April 6,1953), an essay by Sidney Hook arguing that Communist Party members were unfit to be teachers in public schools...
...In 195253, there were spirited discussions of "containment vs...
...Tito responded by jailing Djilas for the first, but not the last, time...
...Implacable as it was in its opposition to Communism foreign and domestic (as well as to the depredations of the junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy), the magazine took pride in airing a wide variety of views on how to deal with such phenomena...
...As a student, I had attended lectures at the school by Bertrand Russell, Max Eastman and Sidney Hook...
...liberation," and in subsequent years on the significance of "peaceful coexistence...
...Gedye and Peter Meyer reported on Eastern Europe...
...The NL was then a tabloid newspaper, as it had been for the previous five years...
...Chang (September 24...
...The new format reflected deeper change...
...Louis Jay Herman, a meticulous copy editor, proofreader and translator from Russian, French and German...
...In retrospect, it was less surprising that I was expelled than that I had been admitted in the first place...
...L. Arnold") and Walter Z. Laqueur ("Mark Alexander") covered the Suez debacle in the Middle East...
...Menshevik scholar Boris I. Nicolaevsky was the recognized grand master of Kremlinology, illuminating intrigues involving not only such Soviet grandees as Andrei A. Zhdanov, Lavrenti P. Beria and Georgi M. Malenkov, but also Stalin's secretary Aleksandr N. Poskrebyshev and even more obscure apparatchiki...
...Reports from the United Nations by Richard C. Hottelet of CBS News helped clarify the diplomatic background...
...Most of Nicolaevsky's insights into Soviet politics after World War II—based on close scrutiny of Soviet media, plus what Edgar Allan Poe called "ratiocination"—were confirmed during the glasnost era by surviving relatives and associates of the Kremlin insiders...
...it was translated into several foreign languages and distributed worldwide by an international labor committee for the release of labor leaders and Social Democrats imprisoned in the Soviet empire...
...As the editor who signed the telegram requesting his views, I felt guilty about landing him irijail...
...Sol Levitas was the chief architect of this shift...
...Three other special sections were published in 1956: "Conserving Our Great Outdoors" by Senator Richard L. Neuberger of Oregon (February 20...
...The disillusion among American Communists after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt was expressed in personal essays by the novelist Howard Fast and John Gates, former editor of the Daily Worker...
...Along with Nicolaevsky— and special contributors like Djilas—David J. Dallin, Bertram D. Wolfe and William Henry Chamberlin also wrote regularly on Soviet affairs...
...But when I met him in Belgrade after his release, he said he had the piece in the typewriter and was waiting for someone to ask for it...
...New Leader writers differed in evaluating various local and regional Cold War struggles...
...for securing a grant from the Institute of Current World Affairs that enabled me to live in Yugoslavia and travel throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the last years of Khrushchev...
...A 1957 mail-in survey of 1,087 readers found that their favorite writers were the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the philosopher Sidney Hook, and William E. Bohn, the nominal editor and columnist who wrote as sensitively about baseball and the trial of Alger Hiss as about the radicals and rebels he knew long ago...
...While some were skeptical about French military efforts in Indochina and the truce established by the 1954 Geneva Conference, Ed Hunter, Joseph Buttinger and others thought South Vietnam could be stabilized under Ngo Dinh Diem...
...and Edward Hunter served as a roving correspondent in East Asia...
...From London and Jerusalem respectively, George Lichtheim ("G...
...Contributors to the symposium— most of which was later published as a book by Beacon Press—included Niebuhr, Chester Bowles, Norman Thomas, Salvador de Madariaga, Hans Kohn, Phillip Rieff, Michael Karpovich, Eugene Rabinowitch, and W. Averell Harriman...
...In the November 19,1956 NL, an exclusive article by Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas declared that the Hungarian Revolution marked "the beginning of the end of Communism generally" and the failure of Marshal Josip Broz Tito's "nonaligned" policies...
...Although The New Leader had not yet formally identified itself as "an independentjournal of news analysis and opinion," it was clearly moving in that direction, away from the partisan affiliations of its Socialist past...
...But by the time I took over the managing editorship in December 1953, the magazine was already becoming more of an international publication, with a larger number of foreign or foreign-born contributors reporting and analyzing world—and especially Soviet—affairs...
...Paris correspondents Sal Tas and George Boswell reported on the tensions that undermined the Fourth Republic and led to General Charles de Gaulle's return...
...Analyzing a Divided World The Cold War Fifties By Anatole Shub When I came to work at The New Leader as an associate editor in February 1949, shortly after graduating from the City College of New York, neither the publication nor the Rand School building that housed its offices was unfamiliar to me...
...The Rosenberg-Sobell Case" by Nathan Glazer (July 2...
...For me, The New Leader was an invaluable training ground—for becoming a staff writer at the New York Times' Sunday "Week in Review...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
