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

The other English teacher in my hall of fame was Miss Bachner, a short, soft-spoken woman who had fallen in love with English poetry while still at Barnard and managed to retain her passion and convey it to her students many years later. We got on very well. Miss Bachner became my number one adviser. If several of my friends thought I had become her “pet,” they were right. After a while, she decided on her own that I should become a lawyer, and while I was still a junior she arranged for me to meet her brother, Lester Bachner, a successful Wall Street attorney. He had a sparkling reputation; other lawyers described him as “the lawyer with the razor-sharp mind.” He spoke crisply, smiled rarely, and dressed immaculately. In our first talk he offered me an extraordinary opportunity, starting with a part-time job, which I accepted on the spot. I held it for four years, until I was a junior in college. There was an unspoken understanding between us that once I earned my law degree, I would continue working with and for him. I would become one of his partners. Fantastic! And yet, despite the temptations he spread before me, I was not quite certain I wanted to be a lawyer. There was always the lure of journalism.

In late January 1948 I graduated from GW and promptly enrolled at City College. I never considered attending any other college, though I might have been able to get a scholarship to Columbia or Harvard. City was where my brother had gone, and so too would I.

Like a sudden storm, the Cold War came to City College on June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans invaded South Korea, puncturing a tender springtime bubble of March Madness basketball on St. Nicholas Terrace. The unpredictable Beavers had just accomplished a miracle, winning unprecedented victories in both the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). No other basketball team in college history had ever won both tournaments in the same season. Sportswriters called it the grand slam.

For the next ten months City College lived in a fairyland world of basketball championships won in tinseled gardens. Then, in the early-morning hours of February 18, 1951, everything on campus changed. Three of the team’s top stars were arrested at Penn Station for shaving points in an illegal betting scheme run by Mafia gangsters. “Impossible,” was my first reaction—someone’s idea of a sick joke, surely. But it was true. The players, treated until that morning like secular gods, had betrayed their college, besmirching their truly memorable accomplishment—their grand slam.

As sports editor of the college newspaper, the Campus , during the 1949–50 academic year, I had covered nearly every game. It was an assignment made in heaven. In their improbable march to the championship, the Beavers had beaten many powerhouse teams, but no victory was more satisfying to me than their 89–50 demolition of haughty, hugely favored Kentucky, whose coach, the legendary Adolph Rupp, known as “the Blue Grass Baron,” had boasted on his arrival in New York that his team did not have to practice to whip City College.

But now, with the news from Korea dominating the morning headlines, like so many other students I began to worry about the United States getting involved in another war so soon after World War II and, on a more personal level, about whether I would be drafted. Would I be allowed to finish my senior year? Would I be able to go on to graduate school?

The Cold War was not an unknown to us. In the alcoves ringing the ground-floor cafeteria there had been many heated debates about the origins of the Cold War: Who was responsible, the United States or the Soviet Union? Were the Red Army’s moves into Eastern Europe a defensive operation, or was Stalin positioning the Soviet Union for a dramatic drive into Western Europe? Was communism really an existential threat to the United States, or just an economic and diplomatic challenge? These questions preoccupied statesmen and commentators—and they preoccupied us as well.

City College, especially in the 1930s but also when I was there, was a hotbed of political warfare: Truman Democrats opposing Wendell Willkie Republicans, Stalinists battling Trotskyists, Social Democrats fighting Norman Thomas Socialists, Newman Society Catholics struggling to be heard, and Orthodox Jews engaging in ecclesiastical battles with Zionist Jews. Each point of view had its own alcove, everyone sounding off as if there were no tomorrow.

Irving Kristol, who had graduated from City College in 1940, eight years before I got there, a socialist while a student, a conservative in his later years, wrote nostalgically about his alcove, occupied by the Young People’s Socialist League, otherwise playfully known as the Fourth International. “It was there one ate lunch,” Kristol reminisced, “played Ping-Pong (sometimes with a net, sometimes without), passed the time of day between and after classes, argued incessantly, and generally devoted oneself to solving the ultimate problems of the human race.” And it was all taken so seriously. Joining Kristol were such academic luminaries as Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer, all later to be recognized as among the nation’s premier scholars.

I used to drop in on an alcove debate, but I was never a member. If I had joined an alcove, it probably would have been with the Truman Democrats, tough on foreign policy, liberal on domestic issues. I especially remember one organization, the Young Progressives of America. It had muscled its way into one of the alcoves, earning a measure of notoriety by always blasting Washington for any problem besetting the world. The United States was on a heartless crusade, the Young Progressives argued: instead of helping anti-imperialist forces rise up against their colonial masters, the United States was either looking the other way or, for example, helping France reconstitute her colonial rule over Indochina.

Into this hot and often intemperate climate entered a new college newspaper, called the Observation Post , which challenged the editorial line of my paper, the Campus , and espoused an essentially anti-establishment position on nearly every subject—from the college’s finances, which it found to be corrupt, to the many problems of the Cold War. It was critical of the United States, rarely so of the Soviet Union. Often, when discussing foreign policy, the OP , as it was soon called, seemed blind to Stalinist aggression, an editorial position I could not accept. During World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, the Campus had had its own flirtation with the left, but after the war the paper adopted a moderate line on most issues. A number of good reporters, including a few of my friends, wanted to do more than just practice journalism; they wanted to make a political statement. They joined the OP .

The former British prime minister, Winston Churchill, struck a depressing but realistic chord when he described the immediate postwar challenge. On March 5, 1946, during a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he scanned the European horizon and reluctantly concluded that an “Iron Curtain has descended over the continent,” creating a “Soviet sphere” of influence. Less than a year after the war had ended in Europe, he thought that a war with the Soviet Union, busy pushing into Eastern Europe, was becoming a distinct possibility. President Harry S. Truman, who shared Churchill’s gloomy assessment, saw a world split in two: half free, and the other half “bent on the subjugation of others.” Truman felt that the West, especially the United States, had no choice but to block further communist expansion in Europe and Asia. He did not want war, but he did not trust Stalin. In the face of unprovoked expansion, Truman felt he had to act. Opening the spigots of American generosity, he gave economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. He started the Marshall Plan for the economic reconstruction of Western Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for its military defense, and he launched the remarkable Berlin Airlift in 1948, ferrying food and supplies to a divided and desperate German capital. On leaving office on January 20, 1953, Truman looked back on his Cold War tenure and said, “I have hardly had a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle.”