I felt a rush of pride. Goodman walked slowly from the rear of the room to the front. For a few moments that seemed like an eternity, he looked at me and then asked for my paper, which of course I handed to him. Goodman examined the front page, still not saying a word. There was a strange look in his eyes. Was he going to echo the student compliments, or was he going to cut loose with one of his characteristic condemnations? The silence lingered for a few more moments. Then, with dramatic flourish, he held the paper aloft and proclaimed, “Kalb, this is a great story.” He paused. I smiled, foolishly. “A great story,” he continued, “for the wastepaper basket!” And, in one swift motion, he hurled the paper toward the basket, most of it going in, some pages ending up on the floor.
Goodman stared up at me, a weird grin on his face. A gasp of incredulity rose from the students. I stood before him and the students for only a second, then burst into tears and fled from the room, pausing only to pick up my briefcase. From the hallway, I heard Goodman shouting after me. “Kalb,” he screamed, “all you will ever be in life is a journalist.”
CHAPTER FOUR
From Cambridge to Moscow
Poor Teddy Goodman. He wanted so much for his students to blossom into models of James Joyce, to become, as he put it, “real writers.” In Goodman’s judgment, Shakespeare showed definite promise, but he was no Joyce. So if Goodman ever, for a fleeting moment, imagined that I could become a “real writer,” not just another journalist, he was to be profoundly disappointed with my first postgraduate decision. The question was the same one that had haunted me in my junior and senior years: Would I volunteer for the army, or would I first go to graduate school? Graduate school won the toss.
I could have applied to Columbia’s Russian Institute, but at this point in my life Columbia seemed too much like City College, another stop on the IRT subway. I was drawn instead to Harvard’s Russian Research Center, which specialized in offering a two-year master’s program in Soviet studies considered by many to be the best in the country. It was, I thought, good preparation for a career in journalism, or teaching or diplomacy, whichever I would ultimately choose. I always had Bernie’s advice in mind: know something! Russia and Russian seemed the right mix for me.
I loved Cambridge almost from my first day there. I shared early impressions with my parents. “I’m thrilled,” I wrote in one letter. “Harvard is magnificent.” I had a comfortable room in Richards Hall. I actually considered the meals in the nearby Harvard Law School cafeteria to be “wonderful, seconds too if you wish.” I met students from all over the country and the world, many friendly and very bright. I enjoyed walks along the Charles River as much as crisscrossing the Yard in search of a classroom.
Most impressive was the faculty. I met within days of my arrival with Professor Robert Wolff, an accomplished historian and student adviser. A large, bespectacled man, always it seemed in a dark three-piece suit serving as backdrop for a bright, striped tie, he was avuncular in manner and precise in organizing my academic program—this course in the first semester, that one in the second—always stressing the importance of language as the essential tool for understanding Russian society. Russian became my constant companion. Because I had a special interest in communism as the ideological backbone of the strategic threat to the United States, Wolff recommended that I also start studying Chinese, an undertaking that, together with my study of Russian, proved to be too formidable a task. I dropped Chinese after six weeks of headaches and frustration, but stayed with Russian. I was again open to the excitement and wonders of Russian and Chinese history, politics, sociology, and economics.
Like Wolff, Professor Michael Karpovich, who expressed enormous admiration for Hans Kohn, welcomed me into his crowded office shortly after my arrival. Karpovich had left Russia after the 1917 revolution. He was a small man, blessed with a ready smile. Amid small mountains of manuscripts, magazines, and books, he talked to me for more than an hour about his fascination with Russian history, especially Russian intellectual history. He recommended that I read Sir Bernard Pares’s 1926 classic, A History of Russia, which he considered a door opener to understanding his homeland. “Read Pares, then Vernadsky, and then Klyuchevsky,” he said smiling, bubbling with pleasure, “and then you’ll understand why I am so happy to be here at Harvard, to be able to teach Russian history.” I took his course and loved it, and, much to my surprise, he asked me to be one of his teaching assistants. He even asked me, on more than one occasion, to teach his class when he was away or ill. It was, for me, an extraordinary experience—rich, responsible, and rewarding. After a full semester as a teaching assistant, I began to think more positively about a Ph.D. and a career as a teacher of Russian history.
All of my professors were experts in pre- and postrevolutionary Russia. Each in his own way helped me develop an appreciation of Soviet society so close to the reality that very little surprised me when I first arrived in Moscow in late January 1956 on a State Department assignment. I had already read about the icy Russian winter that had stymied Napoleon and ultimately defeated Hitler’s vaunted Wehrmacht. Now, in Moscow, by visiting the peasant market in Moscow or the GUM department store in Red Square, I could see vivid examples of the unevenness of the Soviet economy, clothing of rough fabric with no discernible style and surpluses of cabbage but shortages of such basics as flour and salt. Professor Alexander Gerschenkron had provided precious insights into the strange ups and downs of the socialist economy, its ability to build massive weapons but its inability to build simple homes. Professor Adam Ulam introduced me to Kremlin intrigues, and the sociologist Alex Inkeles described the many ways Soviet citizens survived in a whacky, unfriendly society. The great writer Vladimir Nabokov was a visiting professor, an unforgettable character, and many of my friends and I rushed to enroll in his class on nineteenth-century Russian literature. He almost always arrived ten to fifteen minutes late, trailed by his pale, ascetic wife, Vera. He went through a routine before ascending to his teaching podium. He would plop down in a student’s chair, any student’s chair, as though weary from a day in the mines, while on her knees in front of him Vera would remove his galoshes. Then, as though mysteriously infused with energy, he would lecture with humor and eye-opening brilliance about such Russian writers as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Anton Chekhov. Sometimes he would stop and say to his wife, “Sweetheart, dear, write Dostoevsky’s name on the blackboard—you know, the way I like it spelled, with an iy and not the plain y others use incorrectly.” I wondered, why couldn’t he write Dostoevsky’s name on the blackboard himself? Although, to my way of thinking, he treated Vera as an aristocratic landowner might a peasant in prerevolutionary Russia, she never said a word, never fussed—at least, not in class.