A TIME OF CHANGE : A Reporter's Tales of Our Time

by Harrison E. Salisbury

A Time of A Reporter's Tale of Our Time

354 pages, Unknown Binding

First published March 1, 1988

About the author

Harrison E. Salisbury was a long time reporter and editor at The New York Times. Earlier in his career he had worked for the United Press, which he joined after earning a B.A. at the University of Minnesota in 1930. He began his career in journalism as a part-time reporter for the Minneapolis Journal during 1928-29. Although he served in many different positions and places during his long career at the Times, Mr. Salisbury is perhaps most famous for his work as Moscow correspondent, covering the U.S.S.R. during the early years of the Cold War. After serving as the Times' Moscow Bureau Chief from 1949 to 1954, he returned to the U.S. and wrote a series of articles for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. He spent a great deal of time concentrating on Asia during his later years at the Times, covering the Vietnam War as well as many different issues and events having to do with China.

Reviews

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

The professional life of Harrison Salisbury was pretty extraordinary. For 50 years, he seemed to be on the frontlines of every major political conflict and event in the world. Literally from covering the Great Depression and labor unrest in the 1930s to being in Europe and Asia during WWII and then Russia for nearly a decade in the war's aftermath and then to Birmingham during key civil rights boycotts, then the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, and then on to Vietnam in the late-1960s and then to China during and after the Cultural Revolution -- this guy was everywhere. Everywhere.

For anyone who wants to be a journalist, this book is a must. It's inspiring. Salisbury did so much, met so many people, had so many adventures. His productivity is unimaginable -- reporting, launching the Times OpEd page, writing nearly 30 books, traveling to every hot spot in the world. I'd say that with today's distractions of online information that nobody can match his output, as they will be too busy tweeting and making videos and drowning in useless media. Salisbury doesn't say it, but his discipline must have been extraordinary.

It's also a good view of history at a high level during the 1950s through the 1970s. However, I imagine anyone under 50 who doesn't remember that stuff as it happened will find this book impenetrable. There are so many people and incidents that seemed like a big deal at the time but which are utterly forgotten today. You'd have to been around at the time or read a lot of background (including Salisbury's other books) to really care about some of the things he discusses. But if that gets to you read up on those eras, great.

Salisbury worked for the United Press for 20 years and then moved up in prominence to the NY Times, so at both places he had as public a platform as there was in the country at the time. He seemed to use it well, as the short excerpts of his articles show that he wrote with great style and force.

In this memoir, the second of what seem to be at least three that he wrote, he covers his life from about 1959 to just before Tiananmen Square in 1989. He makes a few key points and settles more than a few scores, but mostly he's trying to give a sense of what it was like to be in the same room with people who were influencing world affairs. It's pretty cool, and Salisbury for the most part doesn't come across as too arrogant or pleased with himself. There's a ridiculous amount of name-dropping of political leaders, from US presidents to Chinese premiers to princes and rajahs. But Salisbury seems to have kept his objectivity for the most part, and to have stuck to his goal of asking tough questions and peering below the surface of what he was told. I'm guessing that Bob Woodward of today is our equivalent.

Of course, he benefited from white privilege during his entire life. Only a white man was eligible to be a WWII correspondent or to go to North Vietnam or Russia. It was a time when it wasn't even stated -- because it was so obvious -- that white men ruled the world and should. They met over fancy dinners and shared experiences, while discussing the rest of humanity as pieces on a chessboard. Salisbury fell right into that milieu, and he doesn't seem to have reflected much on how weird and terrible it was. But he does note when women started to be hired by the NY Times, and that he thought that was a good thing. On the other hand, he seems to link their presence with changes in how the Times covered the world. This comes out when he's critical of Abe Rosenthal, who became the Times editor in the 1970s, for what Salisbury deems dumbing-down the newspaper by moving away from strict news coverage to a lot more lifestyle and feature material. That stuff was (and is) hugely popular. I think it adds immensely to our lives, as we do want to know about neighborhoods and restaurants just as much as we want to understand rural life in Afghanistan or the power struggle among China's political elite. Salisbury doesn't think so, and he implies it's because the paper started to appeal to women as readers and reporters, as if women don't care about current events.

When Salisbury gets too deep into his interest in palace intrigues, the book lags. The weakest chapters of Salisbury's book, by far, are several sections about the purges by Stalin of educated elites, especially when Stalin felt they failed him by not limiting the success of China's communist party. These were matched with equally boring sections about US experts on China who Joseph McCarthy and others hounded out of their jobs. I found the endless names of people Salisbury met in Russia who were China experts and were they harmed by Stalin to be the sort of thing that mattered to almost nobody even when they were happening, and which seem to be little more than cocktail party chatted. (This is not to say these weren't immense tragedies for those people and their families, but to say that all of them were traveling in rarefied air that was irrelevant to the average Soviet citizen or US citizen, so who cares?)

On the other hand, the big point Salisbury makes in those sections is fascinating. He claims he and a few other independent thinkers saw as early as the 1950s that Russia and China had serious differences with each other, and they they were not a unified Communist bloc. Salisbury says he tried to explain this to US administration leaders, but they ignored him, and they therefore missed opportunities to treat the countries differently. Had this been done, maybe Vietnam wouldn't have happened, or at least wouldn't have lasted long. Cambodia surely wouldn't have happened. And China's emergence as a superpower would have been acknowledged much earlier, with policies worked out to deal with it --- policies we still don't have in place. Salisbury is writing in the late 1980s, and he states bluntly that the 21st century will be Asia's century, and that it had already started. He was right on target on that stuff.

This isn't the only remarkable insight for a book written 35 years ago. He decries the low caliber of news and the time everyone wastes on worthless gossip-news. He laments the loss of trust in government and authority that, he notes, began way before Richard Nixon's treachery, but was boosted so seriously by the lies in Vietnam and then Nixon. He scorches Ronald Reagan for being an idiot and for the Iran Contra scandal, which he says was way worse than Watergate (and I agree).

Ironically, Salisbury's other big observation has not come true. And this is a tragedy for us today. Salisbury ends the book by expressing an optimistic view that the can-do attitude of Americans and the energy of the new breed of smart journalists (the 1970s were really the first time that there were a lot of university-trained journalists available) can return the country to a healthier, smarter, more righteous path. Obviously, this didn't happen. While referencing the rising use of technology, Salisbury didn't anticipate the internet or what it's done to national discourse. Nor did he anticipate the emergence of a right-wing media built entirely on lies and the resilience huge swaths of Americans who use it to reinforce their racism, fear, and anger. Salisbury would be utterly destroyed by watching how Fox and right-wing talk radio and the insanity spewed online distorts reality. He spent his career trying to figure out the truth from people who were experts at deception, and he did a really good job. Today, any idiot with a keyboard can float any idiotic idea, and ten thousand followers will repeat it and bring it into the public sphere. We need fewer racists out to make a quick buck, and we need more Harrison Salisbury's.

[Brian Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noted NYT reporter Harrison Salisbury began his professional career during the Great Depression and covered most of the big events of the 20th century. That alone is reason enough to read A TIME OF CHANGE. For much of this period he was a foreign correspondent with great expertise in Russia and China. His great coup was reporting from Hanoi during the American war in Vietnam; and that story occupies a good chunk of the book. There are times when the writing seems, as Salisbury himself notes, that “I seem like a know-it-all, a Cassandra forever finding things out, making shrewd deductions, breaking secret enigmas, exposing the daze and laze of the Government.” (p. 227) However, altogether AToC reads like a swan song where Salisbury is desperately trying to pass on to the next generation all that he has learned from a lifetime of reporting. It’s not an easy book to read. You need to have a good grasp of 20th century world history. The names come fast & furious, not all of whom may be sufficiently introduced. It is to his credit that he holds the reader to a high standard.