The Reporter Who Knew Too Much

Davis (emer., Illinois State Univ., Normal) and Trani (emer., Virginia Commonwealth Univ.), both historians, contribute a highly significant volume, one covering the career of one of the US's leading foreign correspondents. Harrison Salisbury (1908-93) was almost an institution at The New York Times. In a career that spanned his entire adult life, starting at age 20, he had one significant beat after another, covering, for example, Louisiana in the wake of Huey Long's assassination; London during the blitz; wartime and postwar Moscow; the American South during the civil rights struggle; North Vietnam's resistance to American bombing; and the ruthless suppression of demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The "great gadfly" wrote 21 books, including two novels and histories of 20th-century Russia, China, and the Wehrmacht's siege of Leningrad. This careful study, as thorough as it is readable, is grounded in the Salisbury papers at Columbia University, though the authors also rely on other manuscript collections and contemporary dispatches. Particularly revealing is the authors' account of infighting among the Times's top echelon and the politics that deprived Salisbury of a third (well deserved) Pulitzer Prize. Given the attention to Salisbury's first marriage, one wishes for some background on his second. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.