The Inconvenient Journalist: A Memoir

By Dusko Doder and Louise Branson

In The Inconvenient Journalist, Dusko Doder, writing with his spouse and journalistic partner Louise Branson, describes how one February night crystalized the values and personal risks that shaped his life. The frigid Moscow night in question was in 1984, and Washington Post correspondent Doder reported signs that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov had died. The CIA at first dismissed the reporting, saying that "Doder must be smoking pot." When Soviet authorities confirmed Andropov's death, journalists and intelligence officials questioned how a lone reporter could scoop the multibillion-dollar US spy agency. The stage was set for Cold War-style revenge against the star journalist, and that long night at the teletype machine in Moscow became a pivotal moment in Doder's life.

After emigrating to the United States from Yugoslavia in 1956, Doder committed himself to the journalist's mission. He knew that reporting the truth could come at a price, something driven home by his years of covering Soviet dissidents and watching his Washington Post colleagues break the Watergate story. Still, he was not prepared for a cloaked act of reprisal from the CIA.

Taking aim at Doder, the CIA insinuated a story into Time magazine suggesting that he had been coopted by the KGB. Doder's professional world collapsed and his personal life was shaken as he fought Time in court. In The Inconvenient Journalist, Doder reflects on this attempt to destroy his reputation, his dedication to reporting the truth, and the vital but precarious role of the free press today.

The Inconvenient Journalist is a powerful human story and a must-read for all concerned about freedom of the press and truthful reporting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501759116

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The Assassination

Assassinations come in different guises. Mine was in the form of a phone call, its unfamiliar British ring echoing through the rented house on London’s outskirts. My second wife, our two sons, and I were pre-Christmas snowbound. I remember picking it up, wondering who could possibly be calling us. Who even knew this number? The agent who had rented us the house?

Yes, I said, looking through the gap in the chintz curtains at snow blanketing the neighboring houses ranged along the narrow Barnet streets.

Daddy, look at me, little Tommy said. He was firing a cap gun. Bang, bang, he said, pointing it at me, laughing as his baby brother looked on, a little bewildered. After two years of reporting and writing about the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, it was paradise to be on vacation in this warm and quiet house; I thought there was nothing better in the world than to sit with Louise and watch our two boys play.

Dusko? Have I tracked you down? The voice on the phone startled me. Bob Kaiser, the new managing editor of the Washington Post, didn’t fit into this time, this place. His next sentence divided my life in two. Time magazine, he said, was preparing a story for the 1992 Christmas issue suggesting I had become a Soviet agent while serving as the Post’s bureau chief in Moscow.

What? This did not make sense. That’s total bullshit! I shouted into the telephone receiver. A lump rose in my throat; I could barely breathe.

Kaiser interrupted me."I know. I think we can still stop the story, but you’ve got to talk to Time. They’re insisting."

I have nothing to talk to them about, I said.

What’s going on? Louise was trying to calm Nicholas as I hung up the phone. He seemed to react to my bewilderment and rage. His wail grew louder, louder, as if he were screaming at the world, at his impotence as more powerful beings took control of his life.

The phone rang again. Ben Bradlee, the former Post editor, was offering encouragement. You sure got some friends at Langley, pal, he said. His hunch was that the CIA was behind this. Retribution, he said, before breaking the trans-Atlantic connection, is not carried out unconsciously or unknowingly, and they sure know how to do it.

His words affirmed what my gut was already telling me. This was about the scoop that had embarrassed the top CIA brass, the story I had filed from Moscow on February 10, 1984, indicating that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov might have died. I had chosen my words carefully at the time, listing sudden TV programming changes, a switch to funereal classical music, lights blazing at midnight at KGB headquarters and other strategic buildings. Bradlee, excited but jittery in his Washington office, had asked top US officials for more information and then scheduled the story for page 1. Instead of validating it, the CIA checked with its operatives in Moscow, who said, Doder must be smoking pot. It was late at night by the time this was relayed to a Post editor, and Bradlee had already gone home. Without consulting Bradlee, the editor removed the story from the front page but kept it deep inside the paper for its later editions. After the story proved correct, the Post and other newspapers ran stories praising my reporting and questioning the competence of US intelligence.

I spent much of that evening in December 1992 on the phone. Kaiser called several times. He was trying to persuade Time executives that their reporter had been set up, played. You have to talk to them, Kaiser said during our last conversation. I still hope we can stop them.

OK, I said, grasping at the straw Kaiser held out. Journalism was about the truth. I just had to refute everything, point by point.

But Kaiser’s I think had now become I hope. I had an awful foreboding that nothing was going to work out, that Time merely wanted to create the appearance of fairness by entertaining my account of events in 1984. A million silent arguments rattled around in my head. Why now? Who? I could think of no more grievous blow to myself, to any journalist, than impugning his or her patriotism and integrity. The attack was especially painful for an immigrant like myself who had worked long and hard to achieve the American dream I had fantasized about, and that had motivated my escape from Communist Yugoslavia.

As I played out scenarios in the now ominous quiet of the London rental, I resolved to sue Time for libel. The truth would be told, if not in the magazine then in court. But Louise, I thought, didn’t deserve to be dragged into a long legal fight against Time Warner, with its vast legal and financial resources. That night I told her that she must take the two boys and separate from me. She was young, successful in her career with the London Sunday Times. If I live to be a hundred years old, I’ll never forget her quiet grace, the way she looked at me and shook her head. What are you talking about? I’m your wife. We fight this together. She, like me, understood that all we had, as reporters and people, were our reputations.

In the morning I did what I had to do. I phoned my attorney in Washington, Mitchell Rogovin, and instructed him to immediately serve notice on Time that I would sue them for libel if they printed this false story.

The next few days were a blur. Bradlee called a few more times. I had long talks with Rogovin. Post colleagues, scandalized because they knew my work, started collecting money for my legal defense fund. When I heard this my heart leapt, momentarily. Yet I felt oddly restless and dislocated. My self-doubt, my lack of faith in my own capacities, had grown quickly, like a tumor. I was beginning to fear I’d be unable to cope. I realized that I was at severe risk of losing my good name.

Days before Christmas, Kaiser faxed an advance copy of the Time story. I was shocked. A photo of me, smug and arrogant, had been selected to make a clear editorial point. I knew a hatchet job when I saw one. I felt myself being killed, not by an assassin’s single bullet, but slowly, the poison of the falsehood starting to spread throughout my body. I anticipated the weeks and months of predictable awfulness that would follow. I’d cease to exist for my friends and colleagues.

We celebrated Christmas with Louise’s parents at their home in her family’s ancestral village in the Buckinghamshire countryside. In turmoil inside, I went through the motions: pulling British Christmas crackers, nodding as my father-in-law, a conservative local politician, lamented Princess Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles that year. Daddy, don’t be sad, three-year-old Tommy said as he climbed onto my lap. He was a lovely boy; I was touched. I’d be able to tell him my story one day, I thought—how I had dedicated myself to journalism, believing that telling the truth, no matter where it led or who it exposed, was my calling. I would share with Tommy and his brother Nicholas that I had always held in my head and my heart what Thomas Jefferson wrote: that if he had to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would choose the latter. I had reported the truth in service of that mission, and out of a belief in American values and the First Amendment that protects the freedom of the press and free speech. Always I had been certain I was both special and protected.

How wrong I had been.

1

THE STORY THAT DIED

Twenty-four years earlier, long before I could imagine working for the Washington Post, let alone being the target of a reputational hit job, I stepped into the bar of the Sheraton Carpenter Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire. At the time I was a young reporter still married to my first wife. Warmth enveloped me. I felt grateful to be out of the swirling February New England snow. I scanned the room for my friend Bill Dunfey. His family owned this hotel. The bar was where I usually found him.

The barroom still felt familiar, with its sleek, modern, recessed lighting, scattered tables, the smell of whiskey and cigarette smoke. I was passing through Manchester now, but I had worked here, months earlier, as a reporter for the Associated Press wire service. As I sought out Dunfey, the way I held myself, with an incongruous mix of hesitancy and cockiness, no doubt conveyed who I was: a journalist who was chafing at being in a junior role. Though I had moved up a notch from New Hampshire to the bigger AP bureau in Albany, I was impatient to fulfill my outsized ambition of becoming a famous journalist.

I picked out Dunfey’s tall, gaunt figure through swirls of cigarette smoke seconds before he saw me. It was time enough for me to register that he was in a heated argument. Dunfey was gesticulating, his finger jabbing at the air. That was so unlike him, I thought. It must be something serious. I recognized the distinguished-looking man with receding iron-gray hair who was the subject of his anger: Senator Tom McIntyre, Dunfey’s fellow Democratic Party grandee and fellow Irish American.

Dusko! Dunfey beckoned me over. He bear-hugged me, and his face lit up. You know Senator McIntyre, of course.

Of course. We shook hands. Their tension remained.

I sat down, ordered a Scotch. Their argument picked right back up.

Dunfey resumed pressing McIntyre. He insisted to him that the Vietnam War was lost, a mistake, just look at the Tet disaster. McIntyre, who was President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign manager in New Hampshire at the time, sounded more and more defensive, his voice growing louder. At that time, Johnson was claiming Vietnam was all but won. The country disagreed. Protesters were chanting, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Campus radicals were blowing up ROTC buildings. Polls showed Johnson’s antiwar challenger, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, making an extraordinarily strong showing against him. And the presidential election was just ten months away. MacIntyre did not have the political space to accommodate Dunfey’s opinions.

I looked at Dunfey, his lean face growing redder beneath his thinning blond hair as his passion mounted. Dunfey had once been the New Hampshire campaign manager for President John F. Kennedy in his 1960 campaign. Unlike McIntyre, I knew what lay behind Dunfey’s passion. Weeks earlier, he had shared a secret with me. He had told me that he was turning against the Vietnam War, and—something that would be deeply shocking to McIntyre—that he was poised to openly back a far more serious potential challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination: Robert F. Kennedy.

Dunfey’s Vietnam War doubts, shared over a Scotch at this same bar late one night, had matched my own. I had confided back that I, too, was turning against the war. I had escaped from Communist Yugoslavia and was still convinced we had to fight Communists everywhere. But Vietnam, I had concluded—and Dunfey had enthusiastically agreed—was different and did not fit the Cold War mold. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who had become one of my heroes, had said something in his recent Riverside Church speech in New York that had resonated with me: it was morally indefensible to send African American troops to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. The Tet Offensive of early 1968, too, had shaken my sense of the United States’ military superiority. The months and years of distressing pictures—the self-immolating Buddhist monks, the napalmed children, the defoliated forests—had made it more difficult to say something positive about the war or the president. All this was on my mind as I sipped my Scotch, feeling a little excluded as Dunfey and McIntyre squared off in the Carpenter Hotel.

McIntyre then shrugged, a defeated look creeping over his patrician face as he looked at Dunfey. His next words made my hair stand on end. What could he do, the senator said, now that General Westmoreland had asked the president for an extra 206,000 US troops?

I could scarcely believe what I had heard. Johnson already had 550,000 troops in Vietnam, and he was insisting the war was nearly won. Asking for 206,000 more was all but admitting that the US was defeated. The senator, seeming to remember I was there, turned to me, his face slightly shiny from drink, and said, This is completely off the record, you understand. Do I have your word?

I nodded. Of course.

So what are you going to do? Dunfey asked McIntyre, shaking his head as mild shock registered on his lean face.

I can tell you for sure he’ll not get more than forty thousand, McIntyre said in a resigned manner that led me to think that he thought the whole business was a lost cause. That’s what most members of the Armed Services Committee think.

I was no longer following the conversation. How could I take back my commitment to McIntyre? Both men were now sunk in gloomy silence, cradling their drinks. I cleared my throat to get their attention. I said that I felt this was an important story and that I would like to write it without mentioning the source, provided the senator agreed.

It’s going to come out anyway, Dunfey said, philosophically, turning to me. As long as he’s not mentioned, he added, pointing at the senator. In fact there should be no mention of the state of New Hampshire in any way, shape, or form. Write it under an Albany dateline. He’s now based in Albany, New York, Dunfey told McIntyre, pointing at me.

No, McIntyre said. I can’t risk it. My heart sank. But after some back and forth the senator agreed.

Excitement gripped me. I could already see this sensational story, with my byline on it, being transmitted to news outlets around the country and the world over the AP wire. It would draw attention to me. I allowed myself to imagine the faces of the senior New York Times executives who had interviewed me two weeks earlier and rejected me. I still felt humiliated just thinking about it. This would show them just who they had turned down.

I headed to the pay phone in the hotel to alert Earl Aronson, my boss in Albany. No matter that it was a Saturday evening, no matter that he had decreed that he never be bothered at home, this was big, a national—no, an international—scoop. He would be as proud as I was. His bureau would earn kudos.

As I prepared to dial Aronson’s number, with plenty of quarters and dimes in my hand ready to push in and pay for the call, I could not help reliving that New York Times humiliation from a month earlier. I was again, in my mind, driving to New York in my battered Volkswagen Bug through late January sleet for a day of interviews. It had gone so well at first. Shaking with nerves, I had entered the stucco New York Times building on Forty-Second Street and taken the elevator to the third floor. A no-nonsense secretary, who wore a black pencil skirt, a pink blouse, and low-heeled black pumps, showed me into my first interview with Seymour Topping, the foreign editor, who greeted me warmly. He was a handsome man in late middle age, dressed in an expensive navy-blue jacket and a blue polka-dot bow tie. I mentioned that I had followed his dispatches from Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that seemed to please him. We discussed the issues of the day—Vietnam, the beginnings of the Prague Spring, Communism in general, and Soviet leadership in particular. He and my mentor, Clyde Farnsworth, had been colleagues. It was Clyde who had arranged the interview. Clyde had introduced me to Topping, by letter, as having just the kind of background and profile the Times needed to report from Moscow, the heart of the United States’ Cold War opponent. I was, he had told Topping, a hardworking young journalist with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, plus two other degrees. I had been cutting my journalistic teeth with the AP. I spoke fluent Russian. I understood Communism in a way few Americans could.

As the interview with Topping continued, he seemed to agree with Clyde’s assessment of me. Before we adjourned for lunch, he instructed his secretary to prepare the paperwork for me to complete after the afternoon formalities, which meant separate interviews with three senior executives.

Too excited to eat lunch and already picturing myself in the Times newsroom, I weaved around shoppers and sightseers in Times Square. That afternoon, I met separately with three elderly assistant managing editors. The first was Emmanuel Freedman, Topping’s predecessor as foreign editor. Dressed like a banker in a pinstriped suit, he was pleasant and inquisitive, asking about my academic credentials and knowledge of Communism. I no longer remember the name of the second interviewer.

The third one-on-one meeting was with the legendary Times journalist Harrison Salisbury, who was famous for his Moscow reporting. I had read his books, followed his reporting, and watched him on television. He was a handsome man with a trim mustache and sleek salt-and-pepper hair. We exchanged pleasantries. Feeling intimidated, and eager to impress him, I switched to Russian, which I assumed he spoke after so many years in Moscow.

Let’s continue in English, he said, cutting me off. He smiled and stubbed out his cigarette. The atmosphere suddenly seemed less casual. I knew at that moment that I had made a mistake. But what was it? I tried to recover, saying, I just wanted to say that the way you wrote about Moscow in diary form was quite revealing.

Thank you, he replied, a little curtly. We can talk about it on another occasion.

We chatted briefly about Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the Politburo, and then he abruptly ended our meeting. He was exceedingly polite and wished me good luck, but I knew I had somehow failed.

I waited for Topping in his office. And I waited. I ran the conversation with Salisbury over and over in my mind, still hoping I was wrong. It must have been an hour later when Topping’s secretary walked in. Apologizing profusely, she said Topping had been detained in a meeting and would be in touch with me in the next couple of days. She did not mention the paperwork. Only years later did I find out that Salisbury, the famous Moscow correspondent, did not speak Russian.

With the New York Times humiliation still preying on my mind, I dialed my boss’s home number from the pay phone in the New Hampshire hotel. My fingers trembled with excitement. I was writing the story in my head. Coming after the Tet Offensive, the request for such a huge number of additional troops amounted to General Westmoreland’s acknowledgment that we were losing the war. This was so obvious that it didn’t need to be emphasized. But how to pitch the story to Aronson?

Aronson picked up. Clumsily, my fingers still trembling, I slotted dimes into the pay phone.

Hello? Who is it? The line was bad, crackly.

It’s Dusko. I’ve got a big story. A scoop. Westmoreland’s asking . . . I knew that I needed to calmly lay out the particulars of fact and make clear the reliability of my source. But the magnitude of the story made me excitable and almost inarticulate.

What? Speak up, man. Aronson sounded annoyed to be disturbed. I continued to make my pitch, keenly aware that I was not doing it properly, and that made me even more flustered. He cut me off.

I’ll check on it, call you back. What’s your number there?

I stood by the phone for twenty minutes, perhaps longer, fear and excitement mounting in equal measure. Then the phone rang, echoing into the corridor by the bar.

Dusko?

Yes.

My source in Washington says it’s a crock of shit.

His words paralyzed me. How could he say that? I had an impeccable source. Yet my boss was telling me he did not believe me. I had to convey to him that my source, McIntyre, was not only Johnson’s campaign manager but also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and, above all, a decent person. But the more I talked the more incoherent I seemed to become.

My source says it’s a crock of shit, Aronson repeated.

I should have fought harder for the story. I should have gone over his head and contacted someone higher up in the AP. But I wasn’t resourceful or confident enough. I let my scoop die on the crackling telephone line between Manchester and Albany.

Two weeks later, on Sunday, March 10, 1968, the New York Times carried the front-page headline Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration, splashed over three columns. The appearance of the story ignited self-righteous anger in me. My good work had not been recognized. The AP, my boss, had not believed in me. The paper that also had not believed in me, the New York Times, had gotten my scoop. I resolved to do the only thing in my power: quit. I handed in my notice. I did not say why; I would not publicly humiliate myself further. I was the one with journalistic standards, not them, I thought to myself as feelings of humiliation churned inside me.

Do you realize how petulant you are? Foolish? Childish? my wife at the time, Karin, chided me, flicking her blond hair back in the way she did when she was upset. We had become engaged in haste months earlier when she thought she was pregnant. The idea of marriage, and commitment, had scared me, but the code of honor drilled into me by my father dictated that you marry a girl if you got her pregnant. When it turned out to be a false alarm, I felt it would be dishonorable not to follow through. Karin was Danish, and I was beguiled by her Scandinavian beauty. Though she was my opposite in every way—sensible, modest, without grand ambitions, uninterested in pursuing higher education—I reasoned that she would be a grounding force in my life. She saw in me someone adventurous, knowledgeable, driven to pursue an exciting future that would open up new horizons.

But her common sense right then could not shake me out of the self-righteous state she had correctly diagnosed. I lay on our bed, feeling hopeless, playing Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, and telling Karin she could not possibly understand. The walls of our one-bedroom apartment that Karin had painted ochre, telling me she wanted our first home together to be special, seemed to close in on me. I had dreamed of working for the New York Times for years. I had secretly hoped, before Earl Aronson betrayed me, that its editors would see my scoop and reconsider. But now they had the story and I didn’t even have a job. I wasn’t any kind of journalist anymore.

I was thirty years old. David Halberstam had won a Pulitzer at that age, and Max Frankel had been three years younger when he became the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent. But I didn’t envy anyone so much as the person I had been before the disastrous job interview and this fresh blow. I now saw myself twenty years hence, sitting on the copy desk of the Nashua Telegraph or some similar provincial newspaper, wearing shabby clothes and thick glasses, and sporting a pot belly from too much beer. Whenever I now found a job opening in Editor & Publisher, I’d sit behind the typewriter unable to complete a simple application letter.

At least they considered you seriously, which is amazing, given your background, Karin said about the Times interview, not giving up on her mission to shake me out of my self-pity.

Yes, I grumbled. And I failed.

She persisted. It’s all in your head, she said, again flicking back her hair. "The New York Times is not the be-all and end-all of journalism. There are other newspapers."

The more she talked, the more I resented her. My new wife didn’t understand me. She wanted me to be content with a smaller life than the one I had aimed for, that I felt I was born for. And she was signaling that she would be perfectly happy with that. Was this the moment to abandon my dreams altogether and pursue a kind of psychological reconstruction now that my life, my dreams, my short journalistic career, were over?

For weeks I wallowed in self-pity. And then, in early April of 1968, a blue airmail letter with postage stamps from Vienna, Austria, arrived. It was from my mentor, Clyde Farnsworth. The veteran US foreign correspondent had taught me the fundamentals of journalism ten years earlier, and then, in 1959, had helped me escape to the United States. He was coming to New York, he wrote, and he proposed that we meet up. And so, later in April, Clyde, his wife Dolly, and I rendezvoused in one of the many pastry-and-coffee shops on Madison Avenue.

Dusko, my God, don’t look so glum, Dolly exclaimed as she and Clyde arrived and caught my nervousness and shame as I braced myself to tell Clyde I had let him, and myself, down. We found a corner table with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth next to a window through which fingers of April sunshine played. Looking at our reflection in the window, I fantasized, not for the first time, that this gray-haired, distinguished-looking American in a green and brown tailored tweed jacket and I were father and son, and that the glamorous Dolly was my mother.

We ordered coffee and spinach-and-cheese pastries. I launched into the tale of my failure with the Times and my reasons for quitting the AP. Yes, of course, Clyde said. It looked so promising. He thumbed some of his favorite Dunhill tobacco into his pipe and tamped it down. It’s not the end of the world. I’m sure something else will turn up. You were merely unlucky. That happens from time to time. We’ll work something out.

I was flooded with gratitude. Around us, everything seemed to signal a fresh hope: the hubbub of conversation, the clatter of forks and knives, the scent of fresh pastries and strong coffee. Unlike my real father back in Yugoslavia, Clyde had not criticized me or made moral judgments. Dad had died two years earlier, of a heart attack, at age fifty-three. Until six months before his death, he had angrily kept me excommunicated from my family for becoming a journalist, a profession he despised, and for escaping to the United States without his blessing. Then, in a series of letters to me, he had ended our seven-year estrangement but continued to condemn me. Newspapering is nothing, he wrote. Journalists are merely traveling gypsies. He told me I should give it up, get a teaching job at a small college and live comfortably with your family. He still felt justified in his anger at me. According to God’s laws, he wrote, children have the right to choose their life’s path but only by heeding the advice of, and in agreement with, their parents. You made your choices alone, and if anyone has the right to be angry, that certainly can’t be you.

Now, in the coffee shop on Madison Avenue, I listened, gratefully, as Clyde laid out some options. I felt my belief in myself, in journalism, start to revive. There’s a new editor at the Washington Post, he said. "Ben Bradlee. They’re talking about him at the Times as an exceedingly ambitious new broom." Clyde had no contacts at the Post, but he would cast around. He did know a few editors at the Los Angeles Times. We could try there too.

Don’t look so worried, for God’s sake. It will be all right. Dolly looked up at me through her mane of jet-black hair, a wry smile on her scarlet-painted lips. We had now finished our pastries and Dolly called over a waiter to order Sachertorte. Yes, I thought. Yes, it will. With Clyde and Dolly in my corner, things would work out.

What happened next was extraordinary. As Clyde, Dolly, and I left the coffee shop to take a leisurely walk, it started to rain. Dolly and I took shelter in a shop doorway and watched Clyde shouting and waving at the passing cabs, then chasing one up the street in vain. He rejoined us, soaking wet. Oh, let’s have a drink, Dolly said. She pointed to a green shamrock sign indicating an Irish bar two doors down.

Just as we settled into a booth with red faux-leather seats, a man in a khaki trench coat approached us. Handsome, with curly black hair and a Mediterranean complexion, he was shaking his head in disbelief, a wide smile on his face. He exclaimed, Dolly! Clyde! My God!

Roger! the Farnsworths responded in unison.

It took a while to establish when the last time was that they had seen one another. Sometime in the aftermath of World War II. But had it been in Rome? London? Or Hong Kong? As they sorted out memories and reviewed geopolitical developments, I was introduced to Roger Tatarian of United Press International. Tatarian was friendly and clearly accomplished. Left unsaid was the fact that he had since become editor in chief and vice president of UPI, the competitor wire service to the AP.

By the time we had ordered a third round of drinks, Clyde had begun telling the story of how I’d quit my job with the AP. This caught Tatarian’s attention and he turned to me and said, quite seriously, You should have called us. He took out a cigar and offered me one. I accepted. That could have never happened at UPI. At least I hope not.

Before I could say anything, Clyde asked, Any job openings in your shop?

As a matter of fact, Tatarian said, we have a vacancy in Moscow.

Moscow! Clyde exclaimed. I got a candidate right here. He pointed at me and launched into a