Assignment Russia

Assignment Russia is the second volume of Marvin Kalb's memoirs of his early life, following The Year I Was Peter the Great, in which being the right person in the right place at the right time brought him face to face with Khrushchev. Here the award-winning journalist looks back at the young man he once was, chosen by the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to join the group known as the Murrow Boys.

The book returns to Kalb's first days as a reporter, which were also the first days of broadcast news. He conveys the excitement of being there as television and radio created a new way of delivering news to the public almost instantly. The news itself was weighty: Cold War tensions ran high between Eisenhower's America and Khrushchev's Soviet Union, and Kalb, a student of Russia, held a unique position explaining Moscow to Washington and to the American public.

Along the way he keeps company with major figures of the profession, including Murrow himself, Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, Richard Hottelet, Charles Kuralt and Daniel Schorr, among many others. He is assigned as CBS News Moscow correspondent just as the U-2 incident, the downing of a US spy plane over Russian territory, is unfolding, and he recalls the tension of that event and the reporting that helped explain it.

As in the first volume, Kalb appears as an eyewitness to history, and as a writer and analyst who helped shape its first draft.