|
|
"AN APOLOGY THAT IS LONG OVERDUE THE PAPER
OF RECORD"
(The New York Times)
by Andrew Stuttaford
National Review Online,
15 May 2001
| |
Imagine,
if you can, Berlin in November 1938, the grim capital of a savage
ideology heading deeper into horror and cruelty. The New York
Times correspondent has just emerged from an interview with
the Fuhrer. It is an exclusive. His editor will be pleased.
On the way home the Times man passes a looted synagogue, and
the broken bodies of those who were worshiping there. Elsewhere,
homes and businesses are being ransacked, and their occupants
are under attack. Other victims are rounded up and dragged to
the concentration camps from which far too few will ever emerge.
Filing a report that night, the journalist prefers not to dwell
on such distasteful events. Instead he contents himself with
a comment that stories of a Kristallnacht pogrom had been exaggerated.
Yes, there had been some scattered excesses, but they had been
the work of a few hotheads, nothing more.
Delighted by the coverage, the Nazi hierarchy gives the correspondent
privileged access. He becomes the doyen of the Third Reich's
foreign press corps, the essential contact for every new visitor
to Berlin. In the ultimate accolade the journalist wins a Pulitzer
Prize for the "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound
judgment and exceptional clarity" of his reporting from
Germany.
In the years that follow, of course, it becomes impossible to
deny the reality of Hitler's charnel-house state. The reporter
is revealed for what he really was, evil's enabler, a greedy,
venal man, whose soothing words had done much to calm the fears
of an outside world that might otherwise have tried to step
in to stop the slaughter. Amazingly, however, more than 60 years
later his Pulitzer still stands, and with it, his distinguished
place in the history of the New York Times. Last month, the
newspaper, as it does once every year, proudly published the
honor roll of its Pulitzer-winning writers. It is not difficult
to find the name of the dictator's apologist. It is right up
there near the top, fitting company, in the view of the New
York Times for the other journalists on the list: Walter Duranty
is still, it is clear, a man with whom the Grey Lady is in love.
It is a remarkable, and disgusting, story. Sadly, it is also
true, with only one qualification. The journalist, Walter Duranty,
was a propagandist for Stalin not Hitler, the evil that he was
to witness took place in the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany.
For well over a decade, Duranty's influential reports from Moscow
described a Soviet Union run by a tough, but dedicated, elite,
who could, he conceded, be cruel, but only in the cause of improving
the lives of the people. As the Times man liked to say, "you
can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
To Duranty, Stalin ("the greatest living statesman")
represented progress and the chance of a better future for the
once benighted masses. In one typical passage he gushed that,
"Stalin and his associates have carried with them the strongest
and most intelligent elements of the Russian people, and have
created a national unity and enthusiasm which the Tsarist Empire
never knew. They have learnt by their own errors and pulled
themselves up by their own bootstraps, and the nation has followed
them. "It was, he wrote," a heroic chapter in the
life of humanity."
That this "heroic chapter" was to prove fatal for
large numbers of that same humanity did not seem to trouble
Duranty too much. "I'm a reporter," he explained,
"not a humanitarian." In fact, he was neither, something
that can be seen most clearly from his treatment of the Ukrainian
famine of 1932-3. This man-made famine, a deliberate attempt
to break the Ukrainian peasantry, is one of history's most terrible
episodes (In his Harvest of Sorrow Robert Conquest estimates
the death toll in the Ukraine and neighboring regions at seven
million). Walter Duranty of the New York Times, however, did
what he could to cover it up.
It was behavior that puts the Pulitzer winner in the same moral
category as the present day's Holocaust deniers, if not somewhere
worse. Today's revisionists, I suppose, can at least claim the
excuse that they were not there. By contrast, Duranty was right
on the spot, in Moscow and briefly, even, in the killing fields
of the Ukraine itself. He knew. Privately, he told British diplomats
that as many as ten million people might have died, "The
Ukraine," he admitted, "had been bled white."
Publicly, however, his story was very different. He claimed
that tales of a famine were "bunk," "exaggeration,"
or "malignant propaganda." There was "no actual
starvation." As other accounts of the tragedy filtered
out, Duranty was forced to backpedal a little: his reports still
avoided references to famine, but he conceded that the annual
death rate in the affected areas might have trebled from its
normal level of around one million to a total of three million.
These unfortunates had perished not so much from "actual
starvation as from manifold disease." It is an absurd distinction,
as grotesque as any made by those revisionists who argue that
many of the deaths in the Nazi camps were the product of typhus.
Typically such people will then sidestep the issue as to why
it was that those victims were in the camps in the first place.
Duranty took a simila approach. The increase in the death rate
by two million was presented to his readers as an almost passive
tense disaster: it just happened, nobody was really responsible.
In reality, of course, the famine was, as Duranty well understood,
the organized product of a murderous regime. Had he told the
truth, he could have saved lives. When today's revisionists
deny the Shoah, their lies, thankfully, have little or no impact.
They are simply irrelevant. Duranty's distortions, by contrast,
helped mute international criticism of Stalin's lethal project
at a crucial time, criticism that might, perhaps, have made
the killing machine at least pause. Instead, the "Great
Duranty" kept quiet, pocketed his Pulitzer, and crossed
the Atlantic the following year in the company of the Soviet
foreign minister, who was on his way to Washington to sign off
on U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Stalinist state. Within
four years an emboldened Stalin had launched the Great Terror.
As I said, it is a disgusting story, but not a new one. Back
in 1974, Joe Alsop used his final syndicated column to attack
Duranty's pro-Soviet stance, and Robert Conquest covered the
same ground in rather more detail a few years later. 1990 saw
renewed focus on this subject with the publication of Stalin's
Apologist, S. J. Taylor's invaluable biography of Duranty. The
New York Times responded with a favorable review of Ms. Taylor's
book and an editorial comment that Walter Duranty had produced
"some of the worst reporting to appear in [the] newspaper,"
citing, in particular his "lapse" in covering the
Ukrainian famine.
That, at least, was a start, but eleven years later Duranty's
name still features in the paper's annual honor roll of Pulitzer
winners (the only change has been that he is now described as
having won the award for his "coverage of the news from
Russia," previously he was lauded for his "dispassionate
interpretive reporting" of the news from Russia). For a
journal that prides itself on its sensitivity this is another
remarkable "lapse," one made stranger still by the
Times's understanding in other contexts that the symbols of
the past can still hurt. Its attacks on, say, the continued
display of the Confederate flag might have more moral force
if the paper could bring itself to stop its own annual celebration
of an employee who was, in effect, a propagandist for genocide.
Nobody should ask the Times to rewrite history (that's something
best left to Stalinists), but a Pulitzer Prize has, in the past,
been withdrawn. It is a precedent that the paper should urge
be followed in the case of Duranty, not for his opinions (loathsome
though they may have been) but for the lies, evasions, and fabrications
that characterized the reporting that won him his award. Beyond
that, the paper should ask itself just what else it is going
to do to make some amends to the memory of the millions of dead,
victims whose murder was made just that little bit easier by
the work of the man from the New York Times.
An apology might be a start. |
|
|
|
table of contents 
