Pozner said, "So you see, Here's an American who's saying everything that we want him to say. And he's doing it in an American way. And that's very effective."
I asked, "Do you still have an American passport?"
"I never did," he said.
Vladimir Pozner's cultural coding was quintessentially cosmopolitan. Survival was bred in the bone. His father's family were originally Spanish Jews who migrated to Poznan' in Poland, and then to St. Petersburg. In order to enter a university, which was forbidden to Jews, they converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1922, Pozner's grandfather left St. Petersburg in the wake of the Revolution; in 1940, his father fled Paris as the Nazis marched in.
The family settled in Greenwich Village. Vladimir was six, and sometimes kids at school called him Bill because William was the nearest equivalent of Vladimir in English. He grew up during World War II, when America and Russia were allies, and his two heroes, he said, were Joseph Stalin and Joe Di Maggio. All his life, Pozner's father nurtured dreams about the romantic Revolution of his youth and the importance of the socialist enterprise, and he instilled them in his sons, Vladimir and his brother, Paul, too. Pozner's father worked in the movie business. With the onset of the anti-Communist frenzy that began in the late 1940s, his boss offered to obtain US citizenship for him. Otherwise, he was told, he would be fired. The father refused. He took the family East, first to East Berlin, where his job was to restore the film industry.
Vladimir, aged fifteen, hated Germany. It was gray and oppressive. In 1952 the family moved on to Moscow. Under Stalin, the Pozner family, part Jewish, part foreign, would almost certainly have been labeled Enemies of the State and sent to a gulag. But, in 1953, Stalin died.
Vladimir settled down with his family, but after a while he grew homesick for New York. A group of young Americans came to Moscow in 1959, when under Khrushchev things opened up a little, Pozner remembered.
He remembered how it had been in New York, how free and friendly and easy, and he said to his father: I'm going to leave. I'm going back. His father said to him: If you try to defect, I'll report you to the KGB.
Pozner adapted to life in Moscow. He passed his exams. He became a journalist. He joined the Communist Party.
"It is easier to believe if you are ideologically motivated. I've always been very political," he said now in his apartment in Moscow.
In 1979, Pozner first appeared on American television, and he was cool. Cool for a cool medium. In a perverse way, ordinary Americans admired him because he was loyal. He was also very good-looking.
The mistake, I realized after I got to know Pozner better and he became a friend, was to think of him out of context. Just because he looked like a Western journalist didn't make him one. It didn't make him a Soviet dissident, either. He was a man doing his job. He was a survivor. And what I also realized was he was the kind of true believer I'd known all my life, a New Yorker, a man of the left but for whom the true tune, more than that of Marx or Lenin, was that of Pete Seeger, who had been the music teacher at his school - and mine - in Greenwich Village.
Vladimir Pozner was fifty-four and he had the perfect face for a messenger between cultures: the good cheekbones, which the cameras loved, gave the face a Slavic cast; the fast-breaking all-American smile warmed it up; the receding hairline made it accessible. Like all of the great TV performers, Pozner was both aloof - as befitted a media royal - yet so knowable that people in the street thought he was their cousin.
In the 1980s, Pozner set up a television "Spacebridge" with Phil Donahue in the US. This allowed citizens in both countries to talk to one another on camera. Pozner and Donahue became friends and Donahue invited Pozner to New York City.
In 1986, Pozner went back to New York for the first time after thirty-eight years. Although he had been a good Soviet citizen, a faithful and loyal Party man, he had never quite been trusted. He had not been allowed to travel to the West, and it had eaten at him for decades. It was the worm in the whole of his life. Doors had opened and shut, permission given and withdrawn, and for a while he drank too much because of it. But now he was back. He was home. New York City.
On the 59th Street Bridge in the taxi coming in from the airport, he suddenly saw the city.
He said, "In the distance, I saw New York. And my heart stopped." In the streets, he stared at people and he knew them all, knew how they felt, who they were; he was one of them.
"I wanted to cry out, Hey, you, all of you, look, it's me, I'm back ... I love you."
I could never shake the feeling that Pozner was an American.
"Of course I am," he said. "I got my idealism there. Tom Paine was my hero."
And like Art Troitsky, Pozner identified with Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.
"When I read Catcher in the Rye," he said, "I thought: Holden Caulfield is about me."
As he headed down Fifth Avenue on his first day in New York, he looked around him with the possessive ease of a man who had come home. "This is my town!" he thought. Eventually, he got a US passport, though subsequently he went back to Moscow and became a TV star in the post-Communist era.
On that winter's day in Moscow, though, putting away the school newspapers, purple with the ink from the ancient mimeograph machine that I knew too well, Pozner drank his Scotch thoughtfully.
"To be honest," he said, "I thought Dean Reed's music was junk. I thought he was plastic Hollywood beefcake. The first time I saw him, to tell you the truth, my hair rose up at the sight of that hustler. He wasn't stupid. But he wasn't politically sophisticated either. Who else have you seen in Moscow?"
I said that I had seen Nikolai Pastoukhov.
"No shit. How is the old hack?" Pozner asked.
"He's editing Pravda Country Life."
"How the mighty have fallen."
I said, "He says he discovered Dean Reed when he was walking in a park in Helsinki.'"
"Pastoukhov, never took a walk in his life," Pozner laughed. "I'll tell you something. Dean Reed lived here for a short while. He couldn't be a star anywhere else. Nothing really worked for him. He went from Hollywood to South America, to Italy, where I think he even made Spaghetti Westerns with Yul Brynner, and finally to the Soviet Union. He came here to milk a very naive cow. Drink?"
I nodded. Pozner poured.
"I couldn't stand him," he said again. "You think of Paul Robeson, or Vysotsky, or Pete Seeger, for that matter, who stood up for their beliefs... Dean Reed just took it where he got it. He was very good-looking, that's true, so he was a big star with women, and he also fulfilled the image of people who knew America from films we grew up on. Dean was certainly used by the Soviet regime."
"Who do you think killed him?"
"Frankly, as I said, I don't think he was important enough for anyone to bump off," said Pozner. "Unless he knew something important by chance. But the US Embassy wasn't interested. A lot of people said there was a woman involved. Well, cherchez la femme," Pozner said.
"Didn't he sort of bring rock and roll to the Soviet Union?" I said.
"He had no talent: that's why no one has heard of him in America. And he didn't bring rock and roll to the Soviet Union. The Beatles brought rock and roll. When Pastoukhov and his sort discovered Dean Reed, they thought they were giving the kids something." Pozner shrugged contemptuously. "They thought they bought the Beatles and they didn't even buy Pat Boone."
It was Friday evening and, as I walked away from Pozner's house and into the Arbat district, I felt I could hear a million voices chattering, gossiping. Moscow felt like a huge cafe where everyone knew everyone and everyone chattered all the time. Everyone had a story to tell. Information was like cash in Moscow; it was often the only commodity worth having. Information was still so carefully controlled by the state even in 1988 that, although the telephones were free, there were no telephone books at all.