A Portrait of a Journalist as a Cold War Expert

Abstract

In 1949 Harrison E. Salisbury moved to Moscow—the capital city of Communism—to report on the goings-on of the enemy for the New York Times, and thus began an illustrious career, which became closely associated with the Cold War at home and abroad. Using archival sources, and close reading of contemporary publications, this article focuses on the early years of Salisbury's work as a prism on the changes that occurred in American reporting from Moscow with the advent of the Cold War. It demonstrates how in the late 1940s and the early 1950s the boundaries of journalistic objectivity were redrawn to accommodate the Cold War agenda, leading to an evolution of a new style of writing on Soviet affairs that Salisbury pioneered in his work. While the new style seemingly moved away from the sphere of politics and ideology and stressed the importance of neutral historical and cultural analysis of Russia, it naturalized the Soviet-American confrontation and cemented the link between journalistic impartiality and anti-Communism.

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Dina Fainberg

DINA FAINBERG teaches East European and American history at the University of Amsterdam. She is completing a manuscript on American and Soviet foreign correspondents in the Cold War. The author would like to express her gratitude to David Foglesong, Jochen Hellbeck, Brian Becker, Simon Huxtable, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Tal Zalmanovich for their generous comments. Early drafts of this article were presented at the Center for the United States and the Cold War at Tamiment Library, New York University, and Cold War History Research Seminar at the London School of Economics. The author is grateful to the participants of these seminars for their stimulating remarks and rigorous discussion of her work. Finally, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at Journalism History for their helpful suggestions.