Memories Galore
Salisbury, Harrison E.
BOOKS Memories Galore A JOURNEY FOR OUR TIMES by Harrison E. Salisbury Harper & Row. 534 pp. $22.50. This long autobiography, which is subtitled "a memoir" but is a good deal more, gets going on...
...The cigarette I smoked in the library vestibule plunged me into fifty years of turbulent world history...
...I owed them more than I could ever repay...
...Something is wrong...
...Since Salisbury is now more than seventy-five, I found his delicacy admirable...
...His research into the bits and pieces of his life is meticulous, and he acknowledges that he has "drawn on many resources to refresh, correct, and extend my recollections...
...He had good assignments: Chicago in the last Al Ca-pone era, Washington in the New Deal's palmiest days, London during the Blitz, and finally Moscow in 1944...
...Here this autobiography comes alive...
...He alludes to his unhappy marriage and to what seems to have been an active extramarital life, though he never comes right out and says what this was all about...
...What Salisbury has done is to show the making of a first-class reporter...
...He writes about his aunts and uncles, romantics in his boyish eyes, and about his father's failed career...
...He is not a particularly graceful writer, and sometimes he is windy...
...ambassador but old Russian hand, and his perspective on the Cold War...
...Certainly no one could have the detailed memory of events that took place fifty and sixty years ago without a lot of refreshing...
...To be a reporter is no slick or easy task...
...In 1930, Salisbury went to work for the United Press in St...
...He discusses the Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in his family's neighborhood and made it a kind of "ghetto...
...Salisbury did what only the best reporters do: He used his feet, wandering BOOKS Moscow's streets for hours, waiting and watching...
...The final chapters are more reflective, summing up conventional wisdoms about the Soviet Union that bear repeating...
...He has a marvelous chapter about the country dacha that Salisbury shared with Tom Whitney of the Associated Press and his Russian wife...
...From that page onward, A Journey for Our Times picks up pace and becomes more and more engrossing, as Salisbury relates his impressions of the Soviet Union, the Soviet people, and such public figures as Bernard Pares and George Kennan...
...It's the full story...
...He remembers the "fear and intrigue" at the Kremlin in Stalin's last years, the agony of censorship, the difficulties of getting news and interpreting it so that it would have meaning for readers of The Times...
...If you are getting too many bouquets, too many words of praise-watch out...
...Paul...
...For the next nineteen years Salisbury hacked away for the UP and churned out feature pieces for magazines...
...This long autobiography, which is subtitled "a memoir" but is a good deal more, gets going on Page 310, when Harrison E. Salisbury returns to the Soviet Union for The New York Times...
...I can't ask for more than that...
...He writes: "I could plot the rise and fall of the economy by shortages and surpluses in the stores...
...And Salisbury was in Moscow for Stalin's death in 1953 and the aftermath...
...But he comes across as an honest man...
...The academic bureaucrats "had done me the favor of my life," he says...
...The dacha chapter is redolent of another side of Russian life which, as Salisbury says, "had nothing to do with Marx or Pravda...
...There are youthful incidents and memories galore, but not until Page 78 do we find Salisbury, a University of Minnesota dropout for lack of money, landing his first newspaper job on the old Minneapolis Journal...
...Salisbury tells Russian jokes and reports Soviet crimes...
...Something else was happening to Salisbury...
...If you are telling it all, and like it is, there will be brickbats mixed in with the bouquets...
...At any rate, his inner conflicts sent him to a shrink, and then to The Times post in Moscow...
...You are not getting the whole story...
...Salisbury tells of growing up in a middle-class Minneapolis family...
...Salisbury is a world-class name-dropper, and these chapters are studded with the era's greats, near-greats, and many journalists...
...In A Journey for Our Times, Salisbury's trip from a post-Victorian boyhood to his "long Russian experience," the distinguished reporter has told nearly all he knows, I believe...
...He discusses the KGB and his own exclusive stories...
...He learned Russian well—a feat for a man past forty—and he remembers the "shpiks," the shabby plainclothesmen who kept track of foreigners in Stalin's Russia...
...I stayed at the Metropol twenty-seven years later but for the life of me can't recall my room number...
...On the final page Salisbury writes something I think every journalist should engrave on his heart: "Nothing is more difficult to report than the truth, and few, indeed, are those who want to read the tough, harsh words of reality...
...When he returned to school the next year, he became editor of the university daily, ran a series of exposes, and got himself expelled for breaking a university rule against smoking in the library's vestibule...
...He describes George Kennan, the new U.S...
...He remembers the heavy mahogany furniture in Room 393 at Moscow's Hotel Metropol...
...William Steif (William Steif is a former national andforeign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
Vol. 48 • May 1984 • No. 5
