The Best Newspaperman I Ever Knew
by WALTER DURANTY
1
MY friend Norman Ebbut, the London Times correspondent, was, I think, the best newspaperman that I have ever met. When British reporters are bad or fakers, they’re bad and fakers. But when they’re good they’re exceedingly good.
Norman Ebbut was one of the best, and of course the Times has a drag which no American newspaper can ever hope to obtain. Many American correspondents stand in with powers that be, and get themselves an inside track; but the London Times is something else again. The Times is a Pillar of Empire, in a way that the New York Times or any other American newspaper never dreamed of, and is recognized as such. The Times correspondents are picked men who have no diplomatic standing but frequently count as high in the mechanism of the British Empire as, say, a Minister or Counsellor of Embassy. Which means that they have access to secrets, and all the real low-down, and play the government game, with reservations.
Ebbut was better than that, a thick-set West Country man in his late thirties, who never while I knew him missed a trick. Quiet-talking and sober, he drank nothing stronger than beer, but knew the whole German works. I first met him at the Tavcrne, a small café in the center of Berlin where the English correspondents had a Stammtisch, or reserved table, every evening, Ebbut’s interests were not confined to Germany, although that was the country he knew best. It was that which made us friends; he always wanted to know the latest dope I brought back from my travels in the Baltic, Balkans, Russia, or China; and we soon had a sort of unwritten compact that I’d wire him on the morning of my arrival in Berlin, and we’d dine together the same night.
I not only enjoyed the benefit of Ebbut’s keen comment on my own information, but an unrivaled firsthand résumé of the current line-up in Germany. That is one of the great advantages of having a roving commission, especially when it includes places most people don’t reach, like the Soviet Union. Other newspapermen, diplomats, politicians, and bankers are so anxious to hear about the Bolshevik Sphinx that they will go out of their way to meet anyone who has some inkling of its riddle. Again and again on this account I found doors open to me that otherwise would have been closed; and as the years passed I extended my “pact” with Ebbut to other countries, so that everywhere I had someone, not necessarily a colleague, who really knew what was what in his own territory, and with whom I had the same arrangement of pooling information.
Among resident correspondents, and diplomats too, it is always a vexed question how far they should “feed” roving colleagues who flick through their city at high speed, snatch up some scraps of information, and write a powerful but generally inaccurate piece for a magazine or syndicate which often pays them twice or three times the monthly salary of the men who furnished the material. Some of these visitors were careless in their use of information, and failed to realize that the wild geese they sent honking through their stories might come damnably home to roost on their resident friends and colleagues. All European countries maintained a complete service of espionage upon foreign correspondents, and many of them were infernally touchy.
I remember the case of Mike Farbman, who did a series on the Baltic States in the twenties for the Manchester Guardian. He wrote with skill, courtesy, and enthusiasm about the successful uphill light which Estonia had made to safeguard its new-won independence, to balance its budget, and generally to get on a practical working basis. In the course of his stories, Farbman mentioned somewhere that Estonia took a firm hand towards Bolshevik agitators and had not feared to send a sharp note to the U.S.S.R. when the latter protested against the arrest and expulsion of some Russian Communists. Some bright mind on the Guardian copy desk headlined this article: “The Estonian Worm Turns,” whereupon Farbman was curtly informed that he was henceforth persona non grata in Estonia, that he was an ungrateful wretch and his shadow should never darken their country again. “Call us worms, indeed! We’ll show you who’s a worm, you scavenger of a reptile press!”
2
In the middle of 1928 I had just returned from the United States, and Ebbut said, “Wall Street seems to have recovered from that setback in the spring and to be going stronger than ever; but I don’t feel easy in my mind. They’re riding for a fall, and when the bubble docs burst, as bubbles must, the effects here in Germany will be far more serious than most folks think. You hear of men living ‘on borrowed time’ after a cancer operation or something, but Germany is living on borrowed money. The world is growing smaller, and I tell you that wdien Wall Street slumps there will follow a mess in Germany.
“I am worried about this man Hitler. Most of our friends, even my own Embassy, think that he’s unimportant, or crazy, and that the Stahlhelm and Hugenberg and all that nationalist outfit are much more important than the National Socialists and will ultimately absorb them. I don’t believe it myself; in fact, I’d say just the reverse, that the Nazis know what they want and have a concrete program, which is more than the others can claim. I think Hitler’s going places, as the Americans say.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Hitler doesn’t count. American money . . .”
“Precisely,” Ebbut checked me. “American money’s the trouble. The Germans have used those billions of dollars to put their industry, especially their metallurgical industry, far ahead of anything in Europe. Steel today, more than gold, is the real sinews of war. Supposing the source dries up, the golden flood of Pactolus ceases to flow from New York. You will see a sudden slump here and general unemployment. That will be Hitler’s chance.”
I shook my head. “You’re wrong,” I said. “All the nationalists are a decreasing force in Germany. Stresemann and Briand have cut the ground from under their feet.”
Norman frowned. “ Stresemann’s a dying man,” he said somberly. “Chronic kidney disease — I doubt if he lasts a year. When he goes . . . if Wall Street bursts as well . . . I don’t like the prospect at all.”
I don’t believe there were a dozen men in Berlin at that time who knew about Stresemann’s condition; but he died some fourteen months after our conversation, and within another six weeks came the market crash in New York, and about a year after that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party increased its seats in the Reichstag from twelve to one hundred and seven. You can see why I said before that Norman Ebbut was good.
3
I am sure that no small part of Hitler’s success has been due to the way in which he induced German and world opinion to believe that Bolshevism was a disease for which Nazi Fascism was the cure. Not only “Cliveden sets,” but bankers and men of business in London and New York and Buenos Aires looked fearfully under their bed of nights to see if there lurked in hiding a horrid hairy Bolshevik with a knife between his teeth. To me it was slightly comic that Bolsheviks in Moscow also looked under their beds in fear of lurking Fascists.
Fear was Hitler’s more potent weapon than tanks or Stuka bomb-planes. I saw how Hitler worked it one evening in Berlin as I was driving across the Tiergarten, when suddenly the ugly rotunda top of the Reichstag (Congress) Building became a pillar of smoke with leaping jets of flame. That was one of the most mortifying experiences of my newspaper career. I was in at the death, so to speak, of democracy in Germany and the birth of Nazi tyranny. Only the night before, my friend Ebbut had said Hitler would pull some coup. “The elections are next week, but I am by no means sure that Hitler has the nation behind him. If he means to win, — as he does, — he must drag a rabbit from a hat.”
The sight of that flaming roof rang in my head like a bell. I knew it was Ebbut’s rabbit. I was less than two hundred yards from the building, but the only sort of official document or form of accreditation I had with me was a press card from the Soviet Foreign Office. I don’t mind taking chances, but . . . Reporters have to take chances; it’s part of their charming job, but ... I mean that thanks to Ebbut I’d caught, what was going on, but could not fail to know that any attempt on my part to enter the Reichstag would be suicidal.
For the only time in my life I “gnashed my teeth in rage,” and told the taxi driver to speed to the nearest phone. Two foreign newspapermen did manage to get into the Reichstag while it was burning, and saw enough to be sure that the fire was a phony fake: Douglas Reed, of the London Times, and a boy named Ross, who worked I think for Hubert Knickerbocker, then correspondent of the International News Service. Whatever they saw and knew and wrote was not published in Germany; and a week later Hitler and his Nazis won the election hands down. The Bolshevik bogey again, with arson instead of knives!
Berlin was seething that night. I met Norman Ebbut about eleven at the Taverne after he had written his story, and to show you how good he was, he didn’t say “I told you so.” All he said was “Well, the —— won the rubber.”
It was late and we were sleepy and tired, but sometimes in a state like that you find a greater clarity of mind than when you are fresh and awake. We saw, as it were, in a flash, that a doom hung over Europe, that henceforth our personal lives mattered no more than confetti. In comparison with the storm that was going to break, our own lives and our affairs had small interest or importance. I did not foresee it completely, but that night I saw enough to fill me with horror and dread. Later the pattern grew plain, with one event after another fitting into its place, to complete the picture.
It was then I began to feel that, unscathed by the First World War, in which most of my friends had been killed, I was living on borrowed time, which I ought to use for a purpose above and beyond myself. I can put it differently and say I was caught in a net of circumstance over which I had no control, or that I shared with a handful of my colleagues in Europe, and with a few score other men who did not work for newspapers, a secret that must be told, the knowledge that war was coming. Since 1934 we knew it with gospel certitude, but the dreadful thing was that none of us seemed able to impart our knowledge, to convey it to our readers or to anyone who would believe it. That makes you small to yourself and humble as a mouse.
It did something worse to Ebbut. The Nazi press department blocked him at every turn. The Gestapo made fake raids on the house where he lived, in an effort to break his nerve. The British Embassy pooh-poohed his foresight and warnings. His newspaper, the Times, considered him an alarmist and killed half his copy. His strain was too great to be borne, and at the early age of forty he had a breakdown which left him unable to work. Except for the death of Bolitho, I have known no such personal sorrow. In both cases not only I but the world lost something good.