An Accidental Journalist: The Adventures of Edmund Stevens, 1934-1945

305 Pages·2007·1.71 MB·English

by  Cheryl Heckler

000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page i
An Accidental
Journalist
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page ii
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page iii
An Accidental
Journalist
The Adventures
of Edmund Stevens
1934–1945
Cheryl Heckler
University of Missouri Press
Columbia and London
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page iv
Copyright © 2007 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heckler, Cheryl, 1959–
An accidental journalist : the adventures of Edmund Stevens, 1934–1945 /
Cheryl Heckler.
p. cm.
Summary: “Stevens was the longest-serving American-born correspondent
working from within the Soviet Union. In his career, which spanned half a century, he
distinguished himself as a war reporter, analyst, and cultural interpreter. Heckler
focuses on Stevens’s work, especially his reporting for the Christian Science Monitor,
and his life from 1934 to 1945”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8262-1770-7 (alk. paper)
1. Stevens, Edmund. 2. Journalists—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN4874.S6867H43 2007
070.92—dc22
[B] 2007028963
This paper meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Designer: Stephanie Foley
Typesetter: BookComp, Inc.
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Minion and Eurostile
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page v
To Brady, in celebration of History and
Truth and his own military service.
This book has been written in honor of
the World War II veterans I love best:
Carl Sickles, Albert, Edward, and
Dale Heckler.
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page vi
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page vii
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: An Accidental Journalist 1
Part 1. An American in Russia
1. The Early Years in Moscow 29
2. Kirov’s Death and the Purge 45
Part 2. Covering World War II
3. Russia and Germany against the Baltics, Norway, and
Finland 67
4. Italo-Greek War 97
5. Ethiopia with Selassie and Wingate 137
6. Desert War of 1942 163
7. With Churchill in Moscow 193
8. Wendell L. Willkie, Iraq, Iran, Victory in North Africa 211
9. A Moscow Correspondent Once Again 231
Appendix. An Inevitable Journalist: Samples of
Stevens’s Reporting 257
Bibliography 281
Index 285
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page viii
000 FM (i-xiv) 9/18/07 5:57 PM Page ix
Acknowledgments
I was introduced to Edmund Stevens’s work while researching Italian
journalist Indro Montanelli in Fucecchio in 2002. I had unearthed a
remarkable set of correspondence between Montanelli and Stevens, and
although I knew nothing of Stevens at that moment, Montanelli’s admi-
ration for Stevens was clear—and unusual. I began researching Stevens,
a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Christian Science Monitor,
who worked in Russia most of his life and died there in 1992. After meet-
ing his son, Edmund Stevens Jr., and his son’s wife, Shari, in Boston in
2003and discovering the unpublished memoirs, I set to work bringing
back the voice of the late journalist. The original manuscript was both
compelling and frustrating. Clearly, Stevens had had a remarkable
career, but he left too many unanswered questions. Then came fourteen
boxes filled with Stevens’s papers, which had been shipped from Moscow
in the spring of 2005to Edmund Jr.’s home in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
The materials ranged from personal letters to more than one hundred
recipes that his wife, Nina, had collected with thoughts of publishing a
cookbook. While the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting
itself wasn’t among Stevens’s possessions, a simple certificate from the
Pulitzer committee was found tucked in between some correspondence
with his editors at the Christian Science Monitor and a brochure
announcing his upcoming speech at the Cincinnati Rotary Club. His
presentation, “The Next Stage in the War,” happened just three weeks
before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Stevens had developed his memoirs over time, and I located several
versions of the text, from an initial forty-page outline to a more than
four hundred–page collection that ranged from his earliest childhood
memories (walking down a flight of stairs in his mother’s shoes) to the
ix