Dateline Moscow: meditations of a Cold War journalist
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Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent
By Nicholas Daniloff
University of Missouri, 436 pp., $44.95 hardcover, 24.95 paperback
Nicholas Daniloff's memoir of his life as a Cold War correspondent succeeds across the spectrum from microcosmic to cosmic, most often because the author is so charmingly, consistently not full of himself, despite his wealth of world-class journalistic and personal experiences.
Here is a person who grew up speaking French in a half-American, half-Russian family, breezed through Harvard, and covered the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, the fall of Richard Nixon in the United States, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He himself was a pawn of international politics in the closing years of the US-Soviet confrontation.
It would be no surprise, given the insecurities of journalists who hobnob with the truly powerful, if someone with such a resume tried to ennoble - or at the least pass over briefly - his inglorious route into the news business.
Not this guy. Instead Daniloff recounts with humor dry enough to be convincing how, following graduation from Harvard, he was serially rejected - for a Rhodes Scholarship, for admission to the Sorbonne, for service in the US Navy, Coast Guard, and Army, and for a job with the CIA.
Finally, he was hired by The
Daniloff made another stab at academia, trying philosophy at Oxford but loathing the gloom and the snobbishness of the English students. Then he realized that the urgings of a Russian grandmother and the encouragement of a Polish night editor at the Post had opened to him the possibility of a career in which he was deeply interested. He would pursue the magic dateline of the era: Moscow.
Daniloff is a fine storyteller, able to quickly set a scene and context. Without having to go on at great length, he delivers richly detailed and occasionally amusing accounts of the United Press-Associated Press struggle for scoops and the realities of life in the Soviet Union.
He also is a perceptive analyst, as is particularly evident in the parallels he discerns in the demises of Khrushchev and Nixon.
One of the book's most interesting topics is the Cold War-era relationship between correspondents, their Soviet sources, and the US government. Daniloff's examination of who in the press corps might have been working with the CIA and who with the Soviets is fascinating, but even more interesting is his exploration of the journalistic ethics involved in deciding whether to pass along to the US government documents from foreign sources that might have security implications.
Happily, he comes to no tidy conclusions in this and other areas of journalistic ethics, for such considerations of right and wrong will continue to be messy and situational as long as journalists are doing their job. Daniloff's recognition of this surely is a boon to students in the ethics and journalism classes he now teaches at Northeastern University.
The only real disappointment in "Of Spies and Spokesmen" comes near the end of the book, when Daniloff tries to wax broadly philosophical about the meaning of his life and of human relations generally. He does not offer any particular insight, and sums up with a flat analogy followed by a certifiable cliche.
The good news is that, following this unsuccessful meditation, Daniloff returns to his own story and experiences. His conclusion nicely draws together threads of stories - about his arrest on trumped-up spying charges, about Soviet and Russian prisons, about friends and collaborators - that he has woven throughout the fabric of this fine memoir.
Charles A. Radin, a former foreign correspondent for the Globe, works on international affairs programming at Brandeis University.
