[msb-alumni] Bernard Kalb, 100, Who Covered Wars And Revolutions, Dies
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2023 17:15:16 -0500
BlankBernard Kalb, 100, Who Covered Wars And Revolutions, Dies. By Dennis
Hevesi.
He covered wars, revolutions and diplomatic breakthroughs for CBS, NBC and The
New York
Times. He also served, briefly and unhappily, as a State Department spokesman.
Bernard Kalb, a veteran correspondent for CBS, NBC and The New York Times who
also made a
brief and unhappy foray into government as a State Department spokesman, died
on Sunday at
his home in North Bethesda, Md. He was 100.. His death was confirmed by his
daughter Claudia
Kalb, who said his health had declined after a fall on Jan. 2. In his many
years on
television, Mr. Kalb's sonorous voice, thick eyebrows and command of detail
became familiar
to millions of viewers. He covered wars, revolutions and the diplomatic
breakthroughs that
presaged the end of the Cold War. He reported for The Times from 1946 to 1962,
for CBS
during the next 18 years (during which he joined his brother, Marvin, on the
diplomatic
beat) and as NBC's State Department correspondent from 1980 to 1985. Then, for
nearly two
years, he served in the Reagan administration's State Department -- a stint
that ended
contentiously. As a CBS correspondent in 1972, Mr. Kalb accompanied President
Richard M.
Nixon on the trip to China that proved to be a major step in the normalization
of relations
between the two nations. He also made virtually every overseas trip with Henry
A. Kissinger,
Cyrus R. Vance, Edmund S. Muskie, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and George P. Shultz
during their
tenures as secretary of state. 'You have a sense of being something of an
eyewitness to the
evolutions and eruptions of the decades since World War II,' Mr. Kalb said in
November 1984
when President Ronald Reagan announced his appointment as assistant secretary
of state for
public affairs. It was the first time a journalist who had covered the State
Department
became its spokesman. But Mr. Kalb resigned in October 1986 to protest what he
called a
'reported disinformation program' -- he stopped short of confirming its
existence --
conducted by the administration against the Libyan leader Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi. The
Washington Post reported that the program included plans to plant false reports
in the press
about internal opposition to Colonel Qaddafi and American military plans
against Libya.
Asked about Mr. Kalb's resignation, Mr. Reagan said, 'No one on our side has
been lying to
anyone. 'My resignation does not endow me with sudden freedom to act on what
may be or not
be secret and what can be classified or what cannot be classified,' Mr. Kalb
said. But he
added, 'You face a choice -- as an American, as a spokesman, as a journalist --
whether to
allow oneself to be absorbed in the ranks of silence, whether to vanish into
unopposed
acquiescence or to enter a modest dissent. Bernard Kalb was born in Manhattan
on Feb. 4,
1922, His parents, Max and Bella (Portnoy) Kalb, were immigrants -- his father
from Poland
and his mother from what is now Ukraine. The family moved to Washington Heights
when Bernard
was a teenager. His father worked principally as a tailor in the garment
district, but at
nights he also did tailoring at a dry cleaner in Washington Heights that his
mother ran by
day. After graduating from the City College of New York in 1942, Mr. Kalb spent
two years in
the Army, mostly working on a newspaper published out of a Quonset hut in the
Aleutian
Islands of Alaska. His editor was Sgt. Dashiell Hammett, the author of the
detective novels
'The Maltese Falcon' and 'The Thin Man. In 1946, Mr. Kalb joined The Times. He
originally
wrote for the radio station WQXR, which at the time was owned by the company.
He went on to
write for the newspaper; he was a metropolitan reporter and covered the United
Nations
before being sent to Southeast Asia as a correspondent. His first overseas
assignment, in
late 1955, was to accompany Adm. Richard E. Byrd on a mission to Antarctica. He
once mused
that on some days his most difficult task on that assignment was to come up
with variations
on the word 'ice. More difficult was his coverage of the rule of President
Sukarno of
Indonesia. In 1958, Mr. Kalb was arrested and briefly detained after he
revealed that
Soviet-built aircraft had been delivered to the Indonesian military. The arrest
prompted a
protest from Western correspondents, and he was soon released. After leaving
The Times in
1962, Mr. Kalb joined CBS as a correspondent in Hong Kong. He was regularly
dispatched from
there to cover the Vietnam War, and he was the network's on-scene reporter for
an hourlong
documentary in 1964 warning that the war was unlikely to end soon. Four years
later he won
an Overseas Press Club Award for a documentary on the Vietcong. Returning to
the United
States in 1970, Mr. Kalb became Washington anchorman for the 'CBS Morning News.
In 1975 he
joined his brother on the diplomatic beat, and five years later they both moved
to NBC.
Bernard Kalb covered the State Department until he became its spokesman in
1985. In addition
to his daughter Claudia, Mr. Kalb is survived by his brother; his wife of 64
years, Phyllis
(Bernstein) Kalb; three other daughters, Tanah, Marina and Sarinah Kalb; nine
grandchildren;
and four step-grandchildren. For six years starting in 1992, Mr. Kalb was the
moderator of
the weekly CNN program 'Reliable Sources,' which analyzed the news media's
objectivity and
interviewed print and broadcast journalists. He continued lecturing on
journalism and
foreign affairs into his 90s, including as an occasional panelist on 'The Kalb
Report,' a
televised series of live talks hosted by his brother at the Washington National
Press Club.
On a street in Romania in 2004, a young boy sold Mr. Kalb a souvenir for $16: a
set of
Soviet-era binoculars etched with red stars, hammers and sickles, and crossed
Kalashnikov
rifles. Days later, Mr. Kalb was in a hotel room in Athens with his wife. In
the distance
was the Parthenon. With little time left before they had to get to the airport,
the Kalbs
peered through those binoculars to view from afar that symbol of democracy.
'The Cold War
had come to the rescue, finally producing a scrap of redeeming value,' Mr. Kalb
wrote in an
essay for The Times. 'R.I.P., Cold War. Couldn't have done it without you.
Dennis Hevesi, a
former obituary writer for The Times, died in 2017. Alex Traub contributed
reporting.
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