Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia

Abstract

In 1944, William Lindsay White accompanied the president of the US Chamber of Commerce to the Soviet Union. White's account of the trip, Report on the Russians, detailed the Katyn Forest Massacres, a raid on an American air base at Poltava, slave labor, and the Russian retreat from Moscow. The book stayed on the bestseller lists from March to September. However, it attracted bitter criticism from such diverse groups as the State Department, the National Council of Soviet–American Friendship, and well-known foreign correspondents. This article examines the interrelated issues of media objectivity, the role of the reporter during wartime, and the desire of reporters to be considered credible by their own government and by intellectuals considered fashionable at a given time.

Notes

For criticism by John Hersey, see Louis Fischer, John Hersey, and Maurice Hindus, “W. L. White on the Russians,” Saturday Review, April 14, 1945, 21–22. For criticism by Harrison Salisbury, see exchanges between Salisbury and W. L. White: Salisbury to White, January 13, 1944, March 21, 1945 and May 29, 1945; White to Salisbury, April 7, 1945. The author viewed these papers initially in the White home and interviewed the late Kathrine White in 1981. Citations for all correspondence cited in this article are to the collection now housed in the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas (hereafter referred to as W.L.W. Collection). The above correspondence is in Box 20, Folder 22. See also Lucille Giscome, “Davies Unmasks W. L. White as Liar: Sent to the USSR to Do Slander Job,” Canadian Tribune, p. 2, December 30, 1944, and W. L White to Jane Cadwell, October 16, 1951, Box 21, Folder 4, W.L.W. Collection.

W. L. White to Henry J. Haskell, May 3, 1945, Box 21, Folder 9, W.L.W. Collection.

Kathrine White, interview by the author, 1981. Kathrine White was convinced the criticism of White's book was a plot organized against him by the Communist Party.

Ibid.

Kathrine White, interview by the author, 1981; Richard Lauterbach to W. L. White, March 19, 1945, Box 20, Folder 16, W.L.W. Collection; W. L. White to Salisbury, April 7, 1945, Box 20, Folder 22, W.L.W. Collection; “W. L. White on the Russians,” Saturday Review, April 14, 1945; “Emporia Goes to Moscow,” New Republic, March 19, 1945, 391–392; Kathrine White to Bill Stroock, January 24, 1949, Box 20, Folder 23, W.L.W. collection; “Johnston Defends Reds,” New York Times, March 15, 1945; Francis Hackett, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, March 15, 1945, 21; Harry Hansen column, New York World-Telegram, March 15, 1945; Michael Karpovich, Yale Review 34 (Summer 1945): 759–760; Markoosha Fischer, “Report on the Russians,” Nation, April 14, 1945, 160.

John Maxwell Hamilton, Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009), 194–195. For general descriptions of foreign correspondents, see also Michael Emery, On the Front Lines: Following America's Foreign Correspondents across the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1995) and Michael Sweeney, The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006.

Hamilton, Journalism's Roving Eye, 195–197.

Giovanna Dell’Orto, American Journalism and International Relations: Foreign Correspondence from the Early Republic to the Digital Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 108.

Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

Robert L. Willett, Russian Sideshow: America's Undeclared War, 1918–1920 (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2003).

James K. Libbey, “Liberal Journals and the Moscow Trials of 1936–38,” Journalism Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 85.

Ibid., 86.

Ibid., 88.

Marco Carynnyk, “The Famine the ‘Times’ Couldn't Find,” Commentary 76, no. 5 (November 1983): 32.

Jacob Heilbrunn, “The New York Times and the Moscow Show Trials,” World Affairs (Winter 1981): 87–101. See also Sally J. Taylor, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Walter Duranty, I Write as I Please (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935).

Donald O. Dewey, “America and Russia, 1939–41: The Views of the New York Times,” Journalism Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 1967): 63, 66.

John A. Lent, “Foreign News in American Media,” Journal of Communication 27 (Winter 1977): 46–51.

James Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Film-making, and Broadcasting in America since 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See also Jeffery Smith, War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 33.

Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941), 511.

Life, March 29, 1943.

New York Times, April 4, 1944.

Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War, 42.

Melvin Small, “How We Learned to Love the Russians: American Media and the Soviet Union during World War II,” Historian 36, no. 3 (May 1974): 461–462.

William L. White, Report on the Russians (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 179–197.

White, Report on the Russians, 179–197. For retrospective analysis of Poltava, see John T. Correll, “The Poltava Debacle,” Air Force Magazine, March 2011, http://;www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2011/March2011/0311Poltava.aspxand.

Whitman Bassow, The Moscow Correspondents (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 111.

White, Report on the Russians, 164–165. For other accounts of Moscow in 1941, see K. I. Bukov, “The Anxious October of ‘41,” Russian Studies in History 31, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 30–48; Alexander Hill, The War behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941–1944 (London: F. Cass, 2005).

W. L. White to Henry Haskell, May 3, 1945, Box 21, Folder 9, W.L.W Collection.

Maurice Hindus, Mother Russia (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1942), ix.

Eric A. Johnston, “W. L. White on the Russians,” Saturday Review, April 14, 1945, 66.

Bruce Bliven, “Emporia Goes to Moscow,” New Republic, March 19, 1945, 392.

D. Fedotoff White, review of Report on the Russians, by W. L. White, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 240 (July 1945): 152, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1025771.

W. H. Lawrence, Wireless to the New York Times, “Pravda Charges White Lied in Book,” New York Times, December 10, 1944 (1923–Current File), http://search.proquest.com/docview/106910250?accountid=14244. See also William Henry Chamberlin, “W. L. White and His Critics,” American Mercury, May 1945, 625. Bassow, in The Moscow Correspondents, reports the Pravda comment as the “usual standard production of a Fascist kitchen, with all of its smells, calumny, unpardonable ignorance, and ill-conceived fury,” 115.

The Truth about W. L. White: The Book the Nazis Like (New York: National Council of Soviet-American Friendship, 1944).

Arthur Capper to W. L. White, March 6, 1945 and March 23, 1945, Box 2, Folder 1, W.L.W. Collection. Letterhead used by National Council of Soviet–American Friendship and Massachusetts branch. See also W. L. White to Arthur Capper, May 30, 1945, Box 2, Folder 1, W.L.W. Collection, and Denise Akey, ed., Encyclopedia of Associations, vol. 1, 16th ed. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1981), 1005.

Frederick Woltman, “Red Pressure Group Hits White Soviet Book,” New York World-Telegram, May 21, 1945.

W. L. White to Capper, May 30, 1945, Box 2, Folder 1, W.L.W. Collection.

W. L. White to Capper, July 16, 1945, Box 2, Folder 1, W.L.W. Collection.

W. L. White to Edmund Wilson, November 27, 1945, Box 21, Folder 19, W.L.W. Collection.

Arthur Capper to W. L. White, July 13, 1945, Box 2, Folder 1, W.L.W. Collection.

Harold Ickes to W. L. White, January 14, 1949, Box 3, Folder 9, W.L.W. Collection.

Dirk Struik to Lambert Davis, January 12, 1945, W.L.W. Collection; Dirk Struik to Reader's Digest, January 12, 1945, W.L.W. Collection.

Kathrine White to W. L. White, n.d., W.L.W. Collection; J. Donald Adams, “Speaking of Books,” New York Times, April 29, 1945, BR2.

Reader's Digest to Struik, n.d., Box 20, Folder 24, W.L.W. Collection.

White refers to the group by the name listed in the text. Bassow, in The Moscow Correspondents, refers to the group as the Anglo-American Press Association. The name could not be verified.

George Moorad to W. L. White, March 8, 1945, Box 20, Folder 19, W.L.W. Collection.

Text issued by National Council of Soviet–American Friendship.

Henry Cassidy to W. L. White, n.d., Box 20, Folder 24, W.L.W. Collection. Information on this group is scarce and how many journalists were members could not be determined.

Chamberlin, “White and His Critics,” 629. The list also included James Aldridge, Jerome Davis, John Fisher, John Gibbons, Alexander Kendrick, Robert Magidoff, and David Nichol.

Alexander Werth, Russia at War (London: Barrier and Rockliffe, 1964), 179, as cited in Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 266.

Kinghtley, The First Casualty, 266.

Jesse D. Clarkson, “Russia at War, 1941–1945,” Journal of Modern History 38, no. 4 (December 1966): 449–450; accessed July 13, 2014.

Fitzgibbon, Crime without Parallel, 183.

W. L. White, “Report on the Critics,” Saturday Review, October 5, 1946, 15–17, 38.

Small, “How We Learned to Love the Russians,” 471.

Quentin Reynolds, Only the Stars Are Neutral (London: Cassell, 1942), 200, as cited in Knightley, First Casualty, 251. See also Stanley Jaspon Kunitz, Twentieth Century Authors, 1st suppl. (Bronx, NY: H.W. Wilson, 1967), 823–824.

Knightley, First Casualty, 251.

Kunitz, Twentieth Century Authors, 1st suppl., 934.

Kunitz, Twentieth Century Authors, 1st suppl., 440; W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), 246.

“W. L. White on the Russians,” Saturday Review, April 14, 1945, 21.

Alexander Kendrick, “Bill White's Bazooka,” Nation, April 7, 1945, 384.

Harrison Salisbury to W. L. White, March 21, 1945; White to Salisbury, April 7, 1945; Salisbury to White, May 29, 1945, all Box 20, Folder 22, W.L.W. Collection.

Salisbury, New York Star, January 9, 1949.

Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World Publishing, 1969).

White, Report on the Russians, 24, 25.

“W. L. White on the Russians,” Saturday Review, April 14, 1945, 23; Kunitz, ed., Twentieth Century Authors, 1st suppl., 184–185.

Kunitz, ed. Twentieth Century Authors, 1st suppl., 184–185.

Gabriel Javsicas to W. L. White, March 28, 1945, Box 21, Folder 10, W.L.W. Collection.

Francis McCullagh to W. L. White, May 13, 1945, Box 21, Folder 12, W.L.W. Collection.

Joseph H. Baird to W. L. White, May 9, 1945, Box 21, Folder 3, W.L.W. Collection.

John Dos Passos to W. L. White, April 26, 1945, Box 21, Folder 7, W.L.W. Collection. For a description of Dos Passos as a disillusioned former radical, see Kunitz, Twentieth Century Authors, 1st suppl., 284 (see previous notes): “Inevitably, evaluations of Dos Passos’ writing have become confused with evaluations of his politics—his anti-Communism, his steady drift from the political Left to the Right, his bitterness and his pessimism.” For a complete account of the Popular Front, see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961). See also John Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich), 1976), 86–89.

Michael Karpovich, “Three Books on Soviet Russia,” Yale Review 34: (Summer 1945): 759.

Henry Cassidy to W. L. White, n.d., Box 20, Folder 24, W.L.W. Collection. See also Kunitz, Twentieth Century Authors, 1st suppl., 148–149.

James L. Wick to W. L. White, April 16, 1945, Box 21, Folder 19, W.L.W. Collection.

W. L. White to Jane Cadwell, October 16, 1951, Box 21, Folder 4, W.L.W. collection. There is no further evidence of State Department pressure in the White Collection.

Robert S. Nyburg to W. L. White, February 3, 1949, Box 21, Folder 13, W.L.W. Collection.

Clyde D. Ware to W. L. White, January 27, 1945, Box 21, Folder 17, W.L.W. Collection.

Captain Irving Reis to William Henry Chamberlin, May 31, 1945, Box 21, Folder 15, W.L.W. Collection.

W. L. White to Henry Haskell, May 3, 1945, Box 21, Folder 9, W.L.W. Collection.

Eugene Lyons to W. L. White, March 18, 1945, Box 21, Folder 12, W.L.W. Collection.

Knightley, First Casualty, 250.

Fitzgibbon, Crime without Parallel, 201.

W. L. White to J. Donald Adams, May 3, 1945, Box 21, Folder 3, W.L.W. Collection.

W. L. White to June Hamilton Rhodes, March 16, 1948, Box 21, Folder 15, W.L.W. Collection.

White, “Report on Critics,” Saturday Review, October 5, 1946, 38.

Ibid.