One can only wonder what clear and convincing evidence might be for those idiots!
One also wonders if Pinch Sulzberger knows his own paper's history, since the
Timeshad been nothing but critical of its former Moscow correspondent for long years after
Duranty finally left the
Times, and since Pinch's own father offered to return
the prize if such evidence should continue coming forth. Which, of course, it did;
a second book about Duranty directly,
Not Worthy: Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize
and the New York Times, was published in 2004. And in 1990, shortly after
the publication of
Stalin's Apologist, Pinch's pop ordered one member of the
paper's editorial board, Karl Meyer, to write a signed editorial about Duranty:
On Christmas Day in 1933, Joseph Stalin conferred this orchid on his favorite Western journalist:
''You have done a good job in your reporting the U.S.S.R., though you are not a Marxist, because you try to
tell the truth about our country . . . I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had
no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.''
The reporter was Walter Duranty, then The New York Times's Moscow correspondent, who is credited with
coining the term ''Stalinism.'' He was fascinated, almost mesmerized by the harsh system he described. And
having bet on Stalin's rise in the 1920's, Mr. Duranty remained loyally partial to his horse. The result was some
of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.
He worked at a time when foreign correspondents traveled fast and light in well-worn trenchcoats. Before World
War II, the best of the bunch tended to be self-trained and self-promoting. Eccentricity was indulged; so was
special pleading.
Arguments about Mr. Duranty have gone on for years, and the essential facts were set forth in 1980 by Harrison
Salisbury in Without Fear or Favor. Now his lapses are freshly detailed in Stalin's Apologist, a biography by S. J.
Taylor [see today's Book Review] . The biggest Duranty lapse was his indifference to the catastrophic famine in
1930-31, when millions perished in the Ukraine on the heels of forced collectivization. He shrugged off the famine
as ''mostly bunk,'' and in any case, as he admonished the squeamish, ''You can't make an omelette without breaking
eggs.''
A reader of Ms. Taylor's book may reasonably ask why The Times employed the fallible Mr. Duranty full time in
Moscow from 1921 to 1934, and part time until 1940. Initially, he owed his rise to chagrin. The Times had been
faulted in a famous 1920 article by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz for biased and erratic accounts of the new
Bolshevik state. They found it had reported the state's collapse, or imminent collapse, on 91 occasions in two
years. This was a case, they wrote, ''of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.''
Embarrassed, The Times turned to Walter Duranty, a quirky Briton with a vivid pen who had covered the carnage
of World War I. Once in Moscow, Mr. Duranty became convinced (1) that Communist rule was irreversible; (2)
that its excesses arose ineluctably from ''the Slavic soul''; and (3) that Stalin, the ruthless Man of Steel, would
transform Russia, at whatever cost, into a powerful modern state.
In these convictions, Mr. Duranty led the pack but was scarcely alone among his Western colleagues. Capitalism's
plunge into global depression lent credibility to bogus Soviet statistics claiming success for Five-Year Plans. And fear
of expulsion added to reporters' reluctance to examine the grisly underside of Stalin's paradise.
An exception was Malcolm Muggeridge, who did report on the great famine in The Manchester Guardian. He found
his dispatches unwelcome; they were not what his editors wanted to see. That a state would deliberately starve
millions of its people seemed shockingly implausible. Bernard Shaw expressed a common view in saying he found
it impossible to believe Stalin was only a ''vulgar gangster.''
Even so, Mr. Duranty's slanted reports provoked consternation among his editors and furious protest from readers.
The editorial page vigorously dissented from his accounts. Yet his tenure was prolonged by the traditions of a different
era. Nor did it hurt that he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for what his judges called ''scholarship, profundity, impartiality,
sound judgment and clarity.''
His new biographer finds Mr. Duranty was neither a Communist nor swayed by Moscow gold. Instead, his failings
reflected a more mundane affliction: he succumbed to a thesis. Having bet his reputation on Stalin, he strove to
preserve it by ignoring or excusing Stalin's crimes. He saw what he wanted to see.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-trenchcoats-then-and-now.html
Remember that, ladies and gentlemen, the next time particularly rabid supporters of
anycandidate who (they think) will upend whatever (you wonder now whether it was so about
supporters of, say, George Wallace, Jesse Jackson, or H. Ross Perot) apply to him (or her) the
Durantian observation that you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.
