And that’s the way it isn’t: An embarrassing anecdote about Walter Cronkite’s years in Moscow

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend M. Gessen’s essay in The New York Times opinion section about their grandmother’s work as a censor for the Stalin regime. Among other things, she had the task of bowdlerizing Harrison Salisbury’s Times dispatches, a source of endless frustration for Salisbury.

One detail that caught my eye was this slam of Walter Cronkite, the saint of broadcast news, who was the Moscow bureau chief for United Press in the late 1940s.

Gessen writes of her grandmother:

Salisbury, she told me, was a real writer. She compared him favorably with one Walter Cronkite, who had been the United Press bureau chief in Moscow from 1946 to 1948. She said Cronkite never filed anything but a regurgitation of Soviet press items.

Well, now. The only defense I can think of is that the purpose of a generic wire service like the UP was to crank out official news, whereas the Times’ role was to go deeper, providing analysis and context. Then again, what was the point of wire-service copy if it was mainly devoted to spitting out Stalinist propaganda?

Gessen’s piece is tied to the Times’ ongoing commemoration of its 175th anniversary, and so they get into a lot of Times history, including Walter Duranty, who reported on the Soviet Union before Salisbury and became an admirer of Stalin, covering up for the dictator’s profligate crimes against humanity. Gessen also gets into Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz’s groundbreaking critique of how the Times covered the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, which was marked more by wishful thinking than clear-eyed reporting. Merz later became a high-ranking Times editor.

Just before Stalin’s death, we learn, there were signs that the regime was about to launch a campaign of persecution against Jews — or “rootless cosmopolitans” as they were labeled by the regime. Stalin died before that could come to pass, thus sparing Gessen’s grandmother. Gessen writes:

My grandmother left the Central Telegraph office a little later, after she had written up a report on her shift. She walked home from work, enjoying the deserted streets, taking detours to shop in the shops, which were, for once, empty of people. The constant roar of truck engines was unsettling, but for the first time in a long time, perhaps the first time since Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union a dozen years earlier, she felt hope. A new era was beginning.

Unfortunately for Russia, it seems that for every Khrushchev, Gorbachev or Yelstin there’s a Brezhnev or a Putin. Gessen themself is an exile from Russia, leaving in 2012 to escape persecution of the LGBTQ community. According to PEN America, Gessen was sentenced in absentia in 2024 to eight years in prison for writing about Russian war crimes in Ukraine. We are lucky to have their voice.

As for Walter Cronkite, maybe we should regard his Moscow days as one blight on an otherwise admirable career.