11.23.2003
Was Walter Duranty ’credulous’?
[Posted 9:07 AM by Roger Kimball]
Walter Duranty, star reporter for The New York
Times, Pulitzer Prize winner, stooge of Joseph Stalin:
was he too credulous, poor chap? That’s what David P.
Kirkpatrick, writing in the Times, said yesterday.
Reporting on the Pultizer Prize Board’s decision not to
rescind Duranty’s award, Kirkpatrick described Duranty as “credulous” but not
culpable. Really?
In the early 1930s, when he was head of the Times’s
Moscow Bureau, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer for a
series of 13 articles on the Soviet Union. In 1932, the
great famine began. The horror and brutality of that episode
can hardly be exaggerated. The famine was not simply a
natural disaster: it was planned and prosecuted by Stalin
and his goons. Millions died in lingering agony. The whole
story is ably told in Robert Conquest’s classic The
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the
Terror-Famine.
With peasants dropping like flies
everywhere around him, Duranty cheerfully cabled back to New
York that although there were some occasional food
shortages, there was “no actual starvation.”
That’s good news, Walter! Just what we wanted to hear.
Have a Pulitzer. We knew we could count
on you to tell the people back home about the wonderful
strides Joe Stalin is making–no need to exaggerate the dark
side of things. Progress is hard work: idealists need all
the help they can get!
There was some hope that Duranty’s mendacity might finally
have caught up with him. Recent protests in the Ukraine reached
the Pulitzer Board. They convened. They deliberated. They
decided. In an official statement, the Pultizer Board said
that although Duranty’s work fell short of
“today’s standards for foreign reporting,” there was
“no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”
It took me a while to stop laughing, too.
Two whoppers in a single statement! One: as if “today’s standards”
of Pultizer-Prize winning reporting were something to write home about
and, two: as if it were not patently clear that Duranty was a
mendacious philo-Soviet hack who deliberately twisted the truth
to suit the demands of the Kremlin.
This is not esoteric
knowledge. The Pulitzer Board needn’t have deliberated long to discover this fact.
Malcolm Muggeridge knew Duranty in Moscow and described him as
“The greatest liar of any journalist I have met
in fifty years of journalism.” In his memoir Chronicles of Wasted Time, Muggeridge noted that Duranty’s
“subservience to the Party Line was so complete that it was
even rumored that he was being blackmailed by the Soviet
authorities.” He wasn’t, as it happens, but blackmail was
hardly necessary. If we make allowances for a change of nationality,
Humbert Wolfe’s little poem about covers the case:
You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there’s
no occasion to.
Walter Duanty was not credulous, he was mendacious. There is a difference, and it beggers credulity–or does it?– to suppose that a reporter for The New York Times is unaware of the difference.