If you’re podcast-minded, I have a couple of links for you: Here is a Q&A with Marvin Kalb; here is a Music for a While, whose subject is spring (songs and arias about).
Marvin Kalb, as you know, is a veteran broadcast journalist. For 30 years, he worked for CBS and NBC. He was the last of the “Murrow Boys” — hired at CBS by Edward R. Murrow himself. In the 1980s, Kalb was host of Meet the Press. For the last many years, he has hosted The Kalb Report, which originates at the National Press Club.
I will write at some length about Kalb and his career later. For now, however — in addition to linking to the podcast — I’d like to tell you this: Marvin Kalb was born in 1930, to immigrant parents in New York. The Depression was very, very hard. I realize this is not news: but I think one may forget how bad it was. We have our challenges now, of course — the pandemic and all. People lament Zoom education. But the Depression — oh, my.
Kalb did graduate studies in Russian and Russia at Harvard. There were two professors important to him — one quite senior, the other quite junior, not much older than Kalb himself. The senior professor was Michael Karpovich (1888 to 1959); the other was Richard Pipes, who had escaped Poland shortly after the invasion of Warsaw. Kalb and Pipes would be lifelong friends.
(For my appreciation of Pipes, published after his death in 2018, go here.)
In due course, Kalb went to Moscow for CBS — and this is the subject of his new memoir, Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War. We talk about this and various other subjects in our podcast. Again, here. What Kalb has to say is highly interesting and even, at times, moving.
The heading of my latest Music for a While is “Spring, Sprung, Sung.” Look, I know it’s pretty hot in many places, but the official first day of summer is not until June 20. So I think it’s still okay to celebrate spring. From time immemorial, poets have written about spring, and musicians have sung it. In my new episode, the poets include Nashe (Thomas Nashe, not Ogden Nash), Banville, and Cummings; the composers include Saint-Säens, Rachmaninoff, and Hoiby; and the singers include Callas, Vishnevskaya, and Ella.
I think you’ll like it, a lot. Again, here.