THE MEDIA AND OUR COUNTRY'S AGENDA
579
I went back to New York the day after the speech pretty upset. I
worked very closely with Arthur Gelb and Abe Rosenthal in those days,
and they didn't even know I had been to Washington. They thought I
had just come in from my assignment in Ca lifornia. So Arthur Gelb
came up to me in the newsroom and said, "How was California?" And
then, "Gee, You look very upset about something." And I said, "Never
mind about California; I've just been in Washington." I told the story
about Solzhenitsyn's speech and the difference between the way the
Washington Post
covered it and the way the
Times
was covering it.
Well, Arthur, who is himself very much a liberal, but a man of tremen–
dous journalistic instincts, instantly understood that this had been a
huge blunder if not something worse. He said, "We'll do something
about it. Don't ask me what, but we'll do something about it." A few
days later he came striding into my office and said, "The AFL-CIO is
putting on a big luncheon next week for Solzhenitsyn in New York and
you're going to cover it for the
Times."
I had been at the
Times
for quite
a while then and I had never done a spot news story. I was writing about
art exhibitions or editorials. But I obviously couldn't say no. So I went
to this banquet and almost put my wrist out taking notes as fast I could
follow the speech. Of course, it couldn't appear on the front page, that
would have been asking too much, but it was on the front page of the
second section with a lot of pictures and so on . Since I had been intro–
duced to Solzhenitsyn in Washington, I met him again in New York, and
he invited me to come and visit him.
Well, when I first went up to Cavendish, Vermont, I went with Patri–
cia Blake, who, as some of you may know, worked for
Time
magazine
and was a Russian specialist. On that occasion we wanted to talk about
the book that had just been published by Olga Carlisle called
Solzhen–
itsyn and the Secret Circle,
about the people who were responsible for
smuggling Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts out of the Soviet Union.
It
was a
perfectly awful book, because Olga Carlisle was taking credit for all
kinds of things that she had no basis taking credit for. There was also
some funny business about Solzhenitsyn's royalties being siphoned into
accounts for her and her husband, who was involved in the dreadful
translation. Well, I wrote about that in the
Times,
and from then on I
was in touch with the Solzhenitsyns. The big event for me was that
when Solzhenitsyn published
The Oak and the Calf,
his great memoir,
his publisher, Harper
&
Row, was trying to get him to do a lot of inter–
views, and he said, "I will only do one ." And they said,
"If
you're going
to only do one, then of course it will have to be with the
New York
Times."
Solzhenitsyn said,
"If
it's going to be in the
New York Times,
the
