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LESSONS FROM CLAUD COCKBURN
On Patrick Cockburn’s ‘Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied’
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I came to the world of journalism with many different role models. In the early years of the Vietnam War, it was those reporters—David Halberstam, Homer Bigart, and Neil Sheehan of the New York Times—who stood up to the powers that be in Saigon and Washington and reported early on about America’s failures in the war.
Later it was Patrick Cockburn, writing for the Financial Times, the Independent, and the London Review of Books, who after 9/11 was telling the world that the US colossus, with its billions of dollars and huge standing army, had got it wrong everywhere in the Middle East. Patrick was one of three Cockburn brothers who followed their complicated and brilliant father, Claud, into the reporting world. His quixotic older brother Alexander, a sometime media critic who delighted in skewering pompous fellow journalists, including me, died, much too young, at age 71 in 2012. Andrew, the middle son, is now the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. All shared their father’s passion for telling like it is, and his skill at being constantly on point.
In Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied, a loving memoir of his father published last week by Verso, Patrick doesn’t tell us much about his father’s later years, when he turned out to be a mellow husband and father. Instead he focuses on the lead-up to World War II, as Claud emerged from a traditional and very drunken upper class education to be hired as a reporter for the stolid Times of London. He sounded early warnings about the coming war with Nazi Germany. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, it was a message that many in London and Europe did not want to hear. After he resigned from the Times in 1933, much of his writing was done under a pseudonym for the Communist-financed Daily Worker in London, the only paper that would have him, and for his self-published investigative newsletter The Week, which had few clients but a lot of clout. Claud, Patrick writes, “was a serious revolutionary who wanted to improve the world.”
MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, was constantly monitoring Claud’s ties to the Communist Party before the war, but the agency’s fear of a “Cockburn machine” was, as Patrick puts it, “comically out of keeping” with his father’s self-professed “distaste for organization and discipline.”
His father joined the party, Patrick writes, because he was convinced that it “was the one serious political movement” when “capitalism was in a crisis and fascism was sweeping across Europe.” He believed it was the only group in Europe with the “commitment and organization capable of fighting with any hope of success” in what he saw as the coming war with Germany. He also was early in warning, as did many others in the mid-1930s, that Spain was on the verge of being a test case for future fascist domination in a war of Republicans against the Nazi-supported Nationalist troops soon to be led by General Francisco Franco. His army had been airlifted by German and Italian planes from Spanish Morocco to join the war. Poorly equipped and untrained Claud also would join the fight, with other equally unprepared leftist journalists and writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, in the losing war against Franco’s German-supported troops.
“Ironically,” Patrick writes, “the greatest change of which Claud was insufficiently aware was that almost everything that he had campaigned for since fleeing Berlin”—he left one day before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany—“was by the summer of 1941 official government policy. He had wanted Britain to fight an all-out war against the Nazis and Italian fascists, and this Britain was doing to the limits of its strength. He had advocated a British military alliance with Moscow against Germany, and this too was in place after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.”
Claud had successfully taken on the pro-German upper class social set in England which he “reviled” in an influential weekly mail-order newsletter he self-published before the war known as The Week. He was constantly criticizing his old newspaper, the Times, for its pre-war support of appeasement, and the newspaper, Patrick writes, “never wholly regained its pre-appeasement influence and prestige.”
Nonetheless, Claud’s “suspicion of those in authority ran too deep for him to readjust to a postwar British government carrying out policies of which he approved.” He later reflected, Patrick recounts: “I don’t have, I think, the qualities that go to making a ‘good communist’ . . . or a good party man of any denomination.” He told his son of a lunch he had in wartime Algiers with General Charles de Gaulle, whom Patrick describes as the leader who elevated the Free French into “punching far above their weight.” The general asked Claud why he was a communist and after getting an explanation, said: “You don’t think your view is somewhat romantic?”
In all of this history, Patrick doesn’t shy from the truth about one of his father’s worst gaffes. Late in the doomed Spanish Civil War, he was asked by a colleague to help write a fake newspaper dispatch about a revolt against Franco’s forces that did not take place. The unabashed Cockburn would later acknowledge the lie, and write a “long and detailed story of the battle, with the outcome still uncertain.” He was advised by a colleague who assisted in the lie “not to claim too much of a victory.” Two decades later, Patrick writes, Claud publicly told the story of the lie and “was astounded when many people expressed shock that a professional journalist should not only have fabricated the mutiny but openly admitted to doing so.”
“In fact,” Patrick writes, his father “was convinced that all wars were information wars and this was inevitable since people who are trying hard to kill each other will not hesitate to tell lies about each other.” The criticism from his colleagues was brutal.
Patrick is also unsparing about his father’s personal life. He was a relentless womanizer who fathered and abandoned two daughters, one by an American woman who later divorced him, and the second with a woman he lived with but never married.
After the war, Patrick writes, Claud recognized that “the type of journalism which he had pioneered was no longer feasible. He had no choice but to shift from news-driven investigative reporting . . . to humorous and satirical writing.” His novel, “Beat the Devil,” was sold for five thousand pounds to director John Huston and actor Humphrey Bogart. It was released in 1953 and became a cult classic. He had moved in 1947 to Ireland with his third second wife, Patricia Byron, with whom he lived until his death in 1981. Their three sons followed in his footsteps.
There’s a moment early on in Patrick’s book that especially grabbed me. After his Oxford University years of hard drinking and last-minute cramming with chums including Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Claud found his way, almost inevitably, into journalism. He was fascinated by the poverty and chaos of Central Europe after the First World War and somehow found his way in 1927 to an unpaid job as the German-speaking assistant to the bureau chief for the Times office in Berlin. He happened to be in the office, Patrick writes, when there was a report of a flood in the Alps of Saxony, near Dresden. He wanted to cover it, but since he was not a staff member, there was no expense money to be had. He raised enough money, so Claud told his son, to travel all night via a series of fourth class trains to Dresden.
When he arrived on the scene at dawn, Claud discovered there had been a tragedy. More than 100 people had died in the flood that overflowed mountain streams in torrents. His account, as relayed later by phone from a hotel in Dresden by the mud-caked wannabe reporter, dramatically described the impact of the floodwaters carrying “uprooted trees, which smashed whatever came in their way, or caught in the arches or bridges.” The bridges turned into dams, forcing the water to rise up the sides of the valley and sweeping away people as it broke through the walls of buildings and tore up railway tracks. As Claud walked through the remains of villages, he wrote about homes with their fronts torn off: “in the upper rooms one can still see clothes and pictures hanging on the walls.” He told of forty-two people who had “saved their lives by taking refuge on the top floor of a hotel.” Realizing the hotel was about to collapse, they made ropes out of sheets and repelled from the hotel’s roof to a sturdier building next door.
With its compassion for the victims and its vivid details, the story was a hit in London, and along with Claud’s later reporting it earned him the respect of the newspaper’s senior editors. He became a full-fledged correspondent. He was sent to America in 1929 and reported on the collapse of the stock market later that year.
In the introduction to his memoir, Patrick, who has won many prizes for his brilliant work, gives his own account of what reporting is all about. He writes: “in some ways it is easy to be a journalist, but it is very difficult to be a good one. Most movies about journalism are hopelessly misleading, as true to reality as Western movies are to the real life of cowboys, or detective fiction to that of criminal investigation. Many of the obstacles facing Claud when he was producing his anti-Nazi newsletter in an attic in London in the 1930s are the same as those facing somebody today producing their podcast in which they promise to tell people significant information that they did not know before. Most news in the media comes from governments and officially sanctioned sources, so publishing it poses no problem. But publishing information that powerful institutions and people do not want publicised is far more difficult than it looks. Unless they are under pressure from those with legal powers to put them in prison, few people impart information damaging to themselves or their interests. What they say to damage others will be partisan or unlikely to be wholly true. Many will refuse to speak at all, and none will blub and confess their sins.”
Don’t we know it?