Radical journalist Claud Cockburn fought successfully against the political and media establishment, writing for publications as varied as The Times and Private Eye. To Graham Greene, he was the greatest journalist of the twentieth century.
Born in China in 1904 and educated alongside Evelyn Waugh, Cockburn launched into a stellar career as a Times correspondent, first in Berlin, then New York, interviewing Al Capone in Chicago, and finally Washington. He resigned in 1932 to start The Week, an anti-Nazi and anti-establishment newsletter with an influence out of all proportion to its circulation. British officials were horrified by the scoops he published. These included stories on the political influence of German appeasers - the Cliveden Set - in the British elite and the previously suppressed news of Edward VIII's abdication.
Cockburn wrote dispatches while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, he helped W. H. Auden and clashed with George Orwell. Claud's private life, too, was eventful. He was married three times, once to Jean Ross, the model for Christopher Isherwood's Sally Bowles.
Patrick Cockburn, himself an international journalist, chronicles his father Claud's lifelong dedication to a guerrilla campaign against the powerful on behalf of the powerless. It is a biography for today's age, in which journalism is frequently suppressed, overshadowed, undervalued, and corrupted
Patrick Oliver Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent.
He has written four books on Iraq's recent history. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006 and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009.
Two journalists, Soviet Mikhail Kolstov and fellow traveller Claud Cockburn were in Spain as it was falling to fascism. Cockburn was writing for The Daily Worker as a correspondent while also building his small, independent sheet The Week, exposing the rot of interwar appeasement policy. Spain’s collapse, the Nazi annexation of Austria, and its takeover of Czechoslovakia were inevitably followed by what Victor Serge called “the midnight of the century,” when the Soviet and Nazi flags flew over Moscow. But there in Madrid, according to Cockburn, Kolstov kept an ironic grin. “Once again,” Kolstov said, “the only thing to say is that in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne.”
Kolstov was killed by his fellow Communists in 1940. But Cockburn seemed to maintain his comrade’s irony and brandish it in his writing ever after. Settling in Ireland, the second half of his life was lived as a novelist (Ballantyne’s Folly and Beat the Devil were some of his great works), reporter and memoirist.
Claud’s sons Patrick, Andrew, and Alexander Cockburn became journalists after him—all radical skeptics of the great powers. Patrick, the author of Believe Nothing Until It is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerilla Journalism is also the recipient of the Martha Gellhorn, Orwell, and James Cameron Prizes for his decades of foreign correspondence—writing that exposed the incompetence of the US occupation in Iraq, the ruinous “War on Terror”, and the Middle East’s freedom struggles.
Patrick’s book tracks his father’s double personality through 1940. A protean writer with twin tasks—Claude the polemically committed fighter at The Daily Worker and the great skeptic of interwar leaders at The Week. It was the former persona that Claud believed was more important, but Patrick’s book traces his father’s work at the latter.
The Week was a nearly one-man band, or a kind of “glider” without an engine. Its independence could expose and inform (so as not to be ignored) but also be so lightweight as not to be easily smashed. Patrick writes that Claud scoffed at the hoary old chestnut about speaking ‘truth to power’. Instead, Claud assumed the powerful already knew the truth. The task of the writer was to tell the truth to the powerless so they could get on with the business of doing something about it.
Patrick writes that his father saw the “biased nature of the media as being an inevitable fact of political life which had the advantage, from his point of view, of creating a vacuum of information.” A “pirate craft” like The Week was designed to fill such a void. As MSNBC and other liberal cable outlets experience a justifiable implosion of ratings since the disaster of the 2024 election and their efforts to prop-up corporate candidates and control primary outcomes, necessary “guerilla journalism” of Claud’s kind is the only antidote for this journalistic malpractice of the last decade. It still may not save us.
In Claud’s day the British government sought to control the media. Today, the easiest task is to ignore, defame, or undermine the public’s faith in it. Many people are rightfully angry. Hoaxes, personality, and casuistry have taken the place of the fourth estate’s responsibility to report and clearly call out the policy disasters and elevate important investigations. Izzy Stone, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, Aaron Mate, and Ryan Grim are some of the heirs persisting in this leftie legacy of independent journalism—keeping an eye on the palace so the huts could fight back.
How did The Week do this? According to Claud:
It was strenuous, stimulating work, because my function as I saw it, was to develop on the one hand the “circle” influenced by The Week—to mobilize, scare and prod into greater activity all those people who could be so prodded or assisted in what was now, evidently, a desperately critical phase. These “friends of The Week” were, for the most part, very far from being communists, and many of them were Conservatives, or their equivalents in the various capitals where The Week needed the most sensational kind of “inside news”, but above all it needed to present the news in a particular style and pattern, so that even when there was really no available “inside news” people felt that they were reading something new, getting a fresh and more exciting picture of story than they got from the newspapers, and getting it in, so to speak, a tone of voice such as they were accustomed to hear in their clubs.
While Claud and his generation of committed writers will forever be dismissed as “political romantics” by conservative outlets like The Hoover Institution and its adjacent clever-clogs in the revisionism industry, Patrick’s book clearly details how Claud was anything but a mere mouthpiece for the Kremlin. At The Week, he was a determined, ruthless, strategic and independent journalist. Above all, Claud was an inveterate skeptic of power. Hence the book’s title, a quip he never tired of reciting.
One theme that emerges from these pages is that Claud was a writer who denied the mystique of power and money, enduring shabby living and working conditions, personal failure, and accepted being slimed or ignored with a shrug and grin. He could make friends in high places and scoop his better paid rivals, earning the quick respect of editors. All of them he could drink under the table.
Patrick writes, “He saw his newsletter as but one means of harrying the authorities and was keen to mobilize the broadest-possible coalition, so resistance would not be confined to a core of radical activists.”
Claud had grown up in China, fell in love with the Danube valley, raised a family in Ireland, fought in Spain and reported from both Europe and America. He was a man of the world.
He believed, after the Popular Front, only a disciplined and organized opposition could oppose fascism. After all, he had committed himself to changing the world and preserving the Spanish republic as a young man, even writing dubious propaganda to get much-needed supplies to pro-democracy forces.
Having lost in Spain, Claud wanted to experience life in Berlin’s new tyranny. “Everything that used to be Europe is dying very, very quickly,” he wrote from inside Germany.
He had witnessed the catastrophe of American capitalism in 1929, front-line realities of fascism in Spain, the fact of Nazism in the 1930s and concluded that conservative appeasement would sail civilization into new horrors. He understood that offering an aggressor everything was not diplomacy. The desperate trick of right-wingers ever since has been to call any critic of war-mongering “appeasement”.
Claud’s enemies would likely call him a boozing cad or invariably a “Stalinist.” But the fact is Claud watched his friends killed in Spain because of Stalin’s disastrous policies and even murdered in Moscow—some, Claud believed, for the “crime” of writing to him in the West. But Claud also believed criticism of Communism, after Spain, was a betrayal. He was a man to whom commitment in times of catastrophe was linked with character and non-commitment seemed craven, the squalid and moldy quarter of the shirker.
In Crossing the Line Claud wrote about this devotion: “It seemed to me that in those dead days of the Popular Front I had had a rather easy time being a Communist, and it would be, to say the least of it, shabby to quit now.”
His style was a commitment to clarity, or as Patrick defines it, “maximum informative and persuasive impact on the readers mind.” To Claud’s credit, when Hungary rebelled against Stalinism in 1956, in his own autobiographical writings he presciently understood what it meant for the doomed system:
The crime, monstrous in its fact and its implications, was that after nearly a decade of absolute Communist power, a majority of people was prepared to die rather than tolerate the regime. That rather than the military repression—there has been plenty of that on all sides at all times—is what gives to the Hungarian events their crucial, permanent, and jolting significance.
What is amazing is how much respect Claud was given, even by the security services spying on him. In one report Patrick uncovered, “His left wing tendencies and unscrupulous nature make him a formidable factor with which to reckon.”
One police report called him “a heavy drinker” and “a daring commentator, and has also been described to me as a professional mischief maker, who delights in causing mischief” and publishing what other newspapers “did not care to publish.”
For consumers of the news it is important to remember the absurd game played by official legacy media and those in political power. There is an inevitable corruption involved in the daily dance of news cycles and sources. Much is forgotten and much elided. The importance of this book is to show how those who do real journalism rarely are recognized for their often invisible efforts at exposing journalistic malpractice.
Though, despite the calumny and lies, the brave writers do endure through books like these. Claud is no exception.
In one of the finest anecdotes of this fine book, a former Popular Front photographer named Vic Drees had gone with The Evening Standard’s Paul Callan to interview Claud.
When Claud seemed to recognize Vic he said, “Haven’t we met somewhere before?”
Drees glanced briefly at him and replied: “Yeah. It was in that bleeding cell near Barcelona during the Spanish war. They were going to shoot us in the morning, but you talked them out of it.”
Claud looked thoughtful and just said: “Oh yes, I’d quite forgotten”
Patrick Cockburn is the son of Claud Cockburn and here chronicles his father's lifelong dedication to campaigning for the powerless against the powerful. The book is also incredibly useful to people who enjoy history.
Claud Cockburn started out working for The Times newspaper in London, but resigned in 1932 to start the anti-fascist newspaper The Week. British secret service officials were shocked at the scoops Claud Cockburn published and he was followed for many years by MI5 as they suspected he had connections that might mean he was betraying his country, whereas he was just an oustanding journalist. Cockburn really skewered the Cliveden Set, the close knit collection of friends who gathered at the home of Nancy Astor and Waldorf Astor, who owned The Times newspaper. These people wanted to appease Adolf Hitler and tried to back politicians who favoured the same policy.
This anti-fascist interest inevitably led to his fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. Here he came across the famous Anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti and was almost killed before having a heated 'discussion' with Durruti who nevertheless wrote a note, in effect a visa, indicating to all the people on The Republican side that Cockburn should be treated with 'consideration'. Cockburn also clashed with George Orwell though he was somewhat kinder to WH Auden, who may or may not have been kicked by the mule he was riding on.
On the historical side, I never knew German and Italian planes flew Franco's Army of Africa from Morocco to mainland Spain to start off the war. Also, between December 1936 and April 1937, Mussolini sent 80,000 troops to Spain who were expecting to go to Abyssinia. Cockburn was in Malaga and warned his fellow journalist Arthur Koestler (yes that one) to leave, but Koestler didn't heed this warning and was almost shot as a result.
Finally, I had no idea that 'Robert Capa' was an entirely fictional American photographer and was in fact the collective nom de plume of Gerda Taro, Andre Friedman, and David Seymour.
“Yet media platforms, big and small, are not the only weapons of those who seek to break the media monopoly of the powerful and wealthy.
Personal courage and resolution count for much, as does a willingness to endure poverty and danger. Claud believed that professional journalistic skills of a high order were essential if journalistic guerrilla warfare, of which he was an arch-exponent, was to be fought with any chance of victory.
He disbelieved strongly in the axiom about ‘telling truth to power’, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.”
Really interesting read in the time of social media censorship.
A really informative read - yielding a real sense of what was happening at a period in history which I know little about but which as so shaped the modern world. Sadly, many parallels with our world today as well.
Claud seems a fascinating character - brilliant defiant risk taking journalist and individual with so many connections and so much passion and determination try and change the world for teh better and empower the powerless with knoweldge.
I just finished listening to This is Water by David Foster Wallace. He talks about choosing what you focus on, the power of intention.
This book was disappointing because the author wasn’t selective enough with his content. It felt like every potential fact was written here with no effort to build a story with a So What for the reader. This book about what seems like a potentially fascinating figure wound up being a slog.
An interesting insight into the mid 20th century politics and journalism. So journalists can fabricate eyewitness accounts of battles to influence policy! Unfortunately believable and true. Entertaining and readable
Great snapshot of a man who showed that a individual can make a difference and that shows a less seen side of Weimar / Nazi era for the perspective of a lone journalist.
“He disbelieved strongly in the axiom about 'telling truth to power', knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.”
Read this if you look biographies of journalists—a reminder of the power of journalism and how courageous, resolute, tenacious individuals can make a difference in the world.