Book Description

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LEGENDARY NEWSPAPERMAN WHO IS NAMED CLAUD COCKBURN (pronounced Coburn) and who has been called many things (most of the pronounced abusively) by well-known personages all over the world for a quarter of a century. For some years before World War II he was the diplomatic correspondent of the (London) “Daily Worker.” For even more years he was a foreign correspondent of “The Times” (also of London). He founded and wrote “The Week,” a mimeographed anti-Fascist periodical which he says “was unquestionably the nastiest-looking bit of work that ever dropped onto a breakfast table.” It started with seven subscribers and in two years numbered among its readers most of the diplomats of Europe, many bankers and senators, Charlie Chaplin, King Edward VIII and the Nizam of Hyderabad. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin once listed him as one of the 269 most dangerous Reds alive. In the same week, a Czech Communist named Otto Katz was hanged in Prague after confessing that he had been recruited to the cause of anti-Communism by Colonel Cockburn of the British Intelligence Service. Here is what the man himself says about how funny, how tragic and how fascinating he found life in London, Berlin, New York and Washington in the years between two world wars. Some of these stories have appeared in “Punch,” but this is a complete text of what the author has so far written down about himself and his legend. It is full of wit, and irreverence, and surprising joyfulness. It is a little like the glass of champagne the author learned to appreciate in “the little moment which remains between the crisis and the catastrophe.”