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Reviews
Dispatches and Dictators: Ralph Barnes for the Herald Tribune
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By Barbara S. Mahoney
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Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2002. Notes, bibliography, index, 320 pp., $24.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by David Sarasohn
Portland, Oregon
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Starting from Oregon, Ralph Barnes went everywhere. Working for
the New York Herald Tribune, Barnes was the only American
foreign correspondent to spend years on assignment in all three
totalitarian capitals: Mussolini's Rome, Stalin's Moscow, and Hitler's
Berlin. He never wrote the obvious book — "Under Three Dictatorships,"
he called it — nor became a journalistic bigfoot war correspondent,
because a British bomber he was riding in crashed in Yugoslavia
in 1940. Barnes's decade of reporting from Europe before the plane
crash clearly merits more memory than it has had, and Barbara Mahoney's
new biography recalls a reporter doing an impressive job.
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It turns out that this year is an especially good time to recall Barnes, when the reporting scandals at the New York Times have stirred more mention of Walter Duranty, Barnes's Timesman competition in Moscow. Duranty and Barnes had the same beat, but it often seemed they were covering different countries. "As for political rights, the Soviet citizen has something of the form and virtually none of the substance," Barnes wrote in 1934, at a time when Duranty, and many American liberals, felt considerably more enthused about Stalin. "... Such elementary rights as free speech, free press and free assembly have no place whatever under the Soviet dictatorship. The individual is completely at the mercy of the state" (p. 112). The passage, one of many extended quotations in the book, displays several major themes about Barnes. His frank, almost blunt assessments provided Americans with one of their clearest images of the Soviet regime, and he was equally unsparing in his reporting from Rome and Berlin; he was almost physically relieved to get himself and his family out of Germany. This dispatch, like many of his strongest, was written outside the country he was covering, where he could escape the censorship that marked many of his filings. |
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At a time when foreign correspondents such as Dorothy Thompson and William Shirer were legendary for flash and style in both writing and life, Barnes was a more straightforward writer and reporter — but a particularly dogged and determined one. "Ralph," wrote Martha Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, "was the most painstaking, nervous and maddening newspaper hound I have ever met" (p. 208). |
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Determination was the major element that got Barnes from Salem and Willamette University to the Paris Herald, with surprisingly little background or apparent writing talent. (Fired almost immediately from the New York Evening World, he refused to leave, hung on for two weeks, and used the World's stationery to get the Paris job.) More significantly, it drove him out to see the country-wide realities of his beats when other reporters were content to stay in the capitals and write from high-level interviews and press releases. |
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Barnes's biography has the strengths and weaknesses of its subject. Mahoney has found a great story and is rigorously thorough in following it. The book might have been even better with some more sweep and imagination, more overall sense of how Americans were reporting from Europe in the great age of the foreign correspondent. Focusing tightly on Barnes, drawing overwhelmingly on his reporting and family letters, the book can sometimes seem as much a compilation as a monograph. Yet, Dispatches and Dictators is unquestionably a useful book and contribution, a reminder of a voice and an experience in vital places in a vital time. |
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