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THE MAN WHO INVENTED FIDEL: CUBA, CASTRO, AND HERBERT L. MATTHEWS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Anthony DePalma
PublicAffairs
308 pp. $26.95

The title suggests that this might be still another dismemberment of beat-up old Herbert Matthews of The New York Times, in his grave for nearly thirty years. But it was Matthews himself who asserted that he was the inventor, having created Fidel Castro in a dramatic and admiring interview with the insurgent leader, previously reported dead, in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra on February 17, 1957. The interview, published in the Times, helped set Castro on his road to power, and made Matthews an easy scapegoat for America’s troubles in Cuba. For his part, Matthews refused to turn against the Cuban revolution, and insisted, against increasing resistance within his newspaper, that it be reported fully and understandingly. The embarrassed Times placed Matthews in a kind of working exile that lasted until his retirement in 1967. Anthony DePalma of the Times became interested in restudying the Matthews story after preparing an obituary-in-waiting of Castro. He has found new veins of drama and complication in the old story and presents Matthews in a sympathetic but not exculpatory light, seeing in him both the courage and the flaws of the old-fashioned correspondent, to whom objectivity is just an eleven-letter word. In a memorandum just before the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, Matthews wrote that judgment on what he had done might take fifty years. DePalma’s study should help make that judgment more just.

HORACE GREELEY: CHAMPION OF AMERICAN FREEDOM
by Robert C. Williams
New York University Press
424 pp. $34.95

There was only one Horace, but there have been many biographies. This new one comes, refreshingly, from outside journalism. It was written by a veteran historian whose starting point was his interest in understanding the words “liberty” and “freedom,” and the distinctions between them. Williams found that much of the nineteenth-century discussion of these concepts flowed through a single figure, Horace Greeley (1811-1872). Not only did Greeley himself contribute to the discussion, but the New-York Tribune, the newspaper he founded in 1841, was a sluice gate through which flowed streams of debate. Williams captures Greeley not only as the white-haired, badly dressed odd duck, but also as a formidable presence — outspoken but not quarrelsome, ambitious but principled, fearless but not reckless. Greeley started as a Whig, migrated through pseudo-socialism, aligned himself with the new antislavery Republican Party, and finally ran for president as a dissident in 1872 when he thought, correctly, that the Republicans had become corrupt. Weeks after losing the election, he died and received the honors of a great statesman. Williams faces heavy going in stuffing this book with Greeley’s many opinions and positions, and sometimes he seems to be gasping, but for the most part he conveys well an era in which politics was many-hued, rather than merely red and blue.

WOMEN AND THE PRESS: THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY
by Patricia Bradley
Foreword by Gail Collins
Medill School of Journalism/Northwestern University Press
355 pp. $22.95 paper

Patricia Bradley, a communications professor at Temple University, seeks to sail through more than 250 years in this relatively short book, one of a new series on the press to be issued by the Medill School. Bradley defines what she sees as the woman journalist’s agenda: “seeking economic parity, establishing individual worth, and fulfilling a responsibility to women at large.” Obviously, some of the hundreds of women she mentions favored one goal or another — that is, prosperity, or celebrity, or virtue. A few managed to balance all three. Curiously, the book ends with a bouquet to Judith Miller of The New York Times, who “remains in jail to protect one of the profession’s most valued principles.” Bradley adds: “We may consider that any one of the women who preceded her would have willingly gone in her stead, and the same can be said for the many more women who now follow.” Line up over there.

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

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