Marvin Kalb - The Year I Was Peter the Great - 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

Meyer, a brilliant refugee from Nazi Germany, taught a course in communist ideology. He knew about my interest in journalism when I enrolled in his course. Because he, too, was a daily reader of the Times , he knew about Harry Schwartz’s analyses of Soviet policy. He thought Schwartz was making an important contribution to educating the American people about the Soviet Union. He wanted to help me. Like Pipes, he produced an original formula that satisfied both Harvard and me. Every two weeks Meyer would arrange the following scenario: an imaginary secretary of state had a sudden and serious problem, and of course he would turn to his chief analyst of Soviet affairs (that was me) for advice. I would write a four-page recommendation and then, orally, present it to Meyer and the class. I did eight such papers, enjoying the challenge of each one and learning a great deal about different aspects of the Soviet strategic challenge and possible American responses.

Both Pipes and Meyer had adjusted Harvard’s normally procrustean rules to satisfy my interests and needs, and I was indebted to them for these absorbing, valuable exercises in journalism and scholarship.

Over this two-year period, in all of my course work, my Russian-language skills improved considerably and my appreciation of Soviet politics, economics, and foreign policy deepened in meaningful ways. Throughout I was aware that I would soon face a critical crossroad: to go on for a doctorate, allowing me to avoid the draft (that issue hung over all of us, an almost constant reminder of the war in Korea), or to preempt the draft by joining the army now, not waiting for an official draft notice, serve the required two years, and then make up my mind about next steps. I chose the army, in large part because I felt it was the right thing to do. I wanted to “give something back” to the country that had opened its doors to my father and mother and provided all of us with a chance for a better life. In those days, a sense of old-fashioned patriotism was felt with pride; it was not something mentioned with a trace of embarrassment, as happened during the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. My father understood my decision and supported it. Not my mother.

In July 1953 I visited the neighborhood selective service office, explained my thinking, volunteered for immediate service, and in early September 1953 began my two years in the army (actually twenty-one months) at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I was offered the option of attending officers training school, which would have meant three years of active duty and seven years of reserve duty, and I declined. A two-year tour was enough, especially since the war in Korea was winding down to an unhappy truce. Had the war continued, I might have made a different decision and gone to OTS. As it happened, I spent only four weeks at Fort Dix. Basic training was tough but, in an odd way for me, satisfying. I met people I would not otherwise have met—southerners who had never exchanged a word with a black or a Jew, westerners who had trouble adjusting to eastern ways, and Californians who seemed to live in their own world. I enjoyed singing rhythmic songs during endless marches, and I found kitchen patrol—KP—usually considered so onerous soldiers would feign illness to avoid it, to be an entirely natural chore. I had often done the dishes at home.

My commanding officer during this rigorous four-week program was a tough, wiry Floridian who had only recently returned from Korea. His full name was James Todd Warner, but he was always to be addressed as “sir” or “Sergeant Warner.” He was always lighting up a cigarette, or so it seemed, inhaling slowly and then exhaling even more slowly, while quite deliberately flicking cigarette ash on floors that had just been washed. He cursed in ways I had never heard, while demanding absolute propriety from all of us. “You’re in the army now, you assholes,” he’d say. “You’re representing the United States of America. No cursing allowed. Show respect, you fucking recruits.” He wore his uniform with enormous pride, as though he were parading before the company commander, and he demanded the same of us. He was, in every imaginable respect, an impossible person—always angry, impolite, rigid, rarely bowing to even the smallest measure of humanity, and yet if I ever had to go to war, I wanted an SOB like Warner to lead my platoon into battle. He exuded a sense of total self-confidence, and I’d have followed him anywhere.

I was, though, quickly detached from Warner and Fort Dix and dispatched to the Army Security Center at Fort Meade, Maryland, where I found myself in an elite unit of Russian-speaking soldiers who had studied Soviet communism. They knew the enemy. Several were teachers, others lawyers, and some were hoping to become diplomats, Foreign Service officers. For the better part of the next two years I worked as an intelligence analyst focusing on the Korean War, in particular the cruel, inhumane treatment of American POWs. If I had not been an anti-communist before my time in the army, I would have become one as a result of my training as a POW analyst in the Korean War.

One way the North Koreans got intelligence information from an American POW was to put him in a box, doubled-up, knees to his chin, in absolute blackness, and then raise the box off the ground, no more than a few inches, tilting it slightly so the POW would slide into a corner—and then leave him there for twelve hours, or twenty-four hours, or even longer if he was still unwilling to disclose more than his name, rank, and serial number. Then, in bright light, they would suddenly pull a cord and the bottom of the box would snap open, and the POW would drop to the ground, startled by the light, frightened, embarrassed, covered in his own excrement. Most of the boxed POWs told the North Koreans whatever they wanted; several did not and they were returned to the box for thirty-six hours or longer. Almost everyone talked.

Another one of my responsibilities was lecturing to senior officers about communism. I did a four-lecture course at the Pentagon. My own commanding officer, a tall, resolute, Virginia-born colonel named Lively, admitted to me that I was not his choice for this assignment—I had been selected by more senior officers who had reviewed my résumé and had made the call. I was a PFC, a private first class, meaning among other things that I had a single stripe on my uniform, and apparently Lively did not want someone from his unit, a PFC no less, lecturing to field-grade officers, many of whom were his friends. He recommended that I lecture in civilian clothes. It was not an order. In fact, my orders noted my rank. Something inside me went into revolt, and I mischievously responded that I was “very proud of my uniform” and would prefer lecturing in uniform. By implication, I was saying that he was not proud of my uniform, nor of me. For a moment I thought he was going to punch me in the jaw, but he controlled his temper and signed my orders.

My first lecture started one Monday at exactly 8:00 a.m. I arrived at 7:45 a.m., more than a few butterflies dancing in my stomach, checked that my handouts had been distributed, went to the men’s room when I didn’t have to, watched as the auditorium gradually filled up with majors and colonels, and, with only a minute to go, I walked briskly to the podium. The officers, obviously not expecting their lecturer to be a PFC, saw me but kept right on talking. I said nothing but stood my ground behind the podium. Slowly the thought must have dawned on them that I was the lecturer. I started as the minute hand hit eight. According to unofficial army protocol, lectures begin with two jokes, everyone relaxes, and then the serious stuff begins. In defiance of protocol, I started with substance.

“Good morning,” I said, “this is a course on Soviet communism,” and off I went, the large auditorium descending into silence as I launched into a lecture about Marx and Engels and, later, Lenin and Stalin.