Outside the Beltway

Bernard Kalb, 1922-2023

The longtime journalist is gone at 100.

James Joyner · Monday, January 9, 2023 · 6 comments

Washington Post (“Bernard Kalb, journalist and commentator, dies at 100“):

Bernard Kalb, a journalist and author who covered global affairs and later cast a critical eye on the media as a commentator for CNN, but who may be best remembered for his resignation in 1986 as State Department spokesman to protest a government disinformation campaign, died Jan. 8 at his home in North Bethesda, Md. He was 100.

The cause was complications from a fall, said his younger brother, Marvin Kalb.

In a career spanning six decades, Mr. Kalb became a high-profile journalist who crossed paths with some of the most intriguing personalities of his generation. When he was a young Army journalist during World War II, his editor was the detective-story master Dashiell Hammett — “a bayonet of a man,” Mr. Kalb later recalled, and a “giant of an author who took a bunch of semiliterate kids and turned them into amateur newsmen.”

At the New York Times after the war, Mr. Kalb worked his way from the radio desk to overseas assignments. He accompanied polar explorer Adm. Richard E. Byrd to the South Pole in the winter of 1955-1956. During the four-month expedition, Mr. Kalb later quipped, his hardest feat was finding synonyms for the word “ice” and avoiding the cliche “bottom of the world.”

He covered the United Nations and the crisis-laden rule of Indonesia’s President Sukarno before switching to TV journalism in 1962 and opening the CBS News bureau in Hong Kong. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for a 1968 documentary on the Viet Cong, and he accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972.

Mr. Kalb also was a Washington anchorman on “CBS Morning News,” among other assignments, but he distinguished himself most on the State Department beat, covering five secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to George P. Shultz. With his younger brother, Marvin, also a broadcast journalist, Mr. Kalb wrote an early biography of Kissinger.

The Kalb brothers both made the leap from CBS to NBC in 1980. Bernard Kalb then joined the Reagan administration in January 1985 as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. “This was nothing I sought to create or devise,” he told The Washington Post at the time, describing the offer as “an opportunity that came out of some marvelous blue.”

Lanky, darkly handsome, bombastic, jocular, cigar-wielding and given to what The Washington Post called “garish shirt-and-tie combinations” heavy on stripes and burnt orange, he was an unlikely public face of the reserved and comparatively colorless Shultz.

As spokesman, Mr. Kalb was less than forthcoming with information (“I can’t be drawn into discussions on confidential exchanges,” he said in response to one query) and began to develop a reputation among journalists for being deliberately unhelpful or else utterly out of the loop.

“I had high visibility, easy access — and silence,” he once told The Post. “I discovered that the job of spokesman is regarded as the world’s seventh-oldest profession. The other six obviously are classified.”

United Press International reported that he had “set a new record for State Department non-responsiveness” in August 1986 by saying, in effect, “I can’t give you anything on that” to 30 questions in one 24-minute briefing.

That October, Mr. Kalb said he was caught by surprise when Post journalist Bob Woodward revealed a secret White House plan that called for the deliberate planting of false information in the U.S. media to weaken Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.

Quoting from a memorandum sent to President Ronald Reagan by national security adviser John M. Poindexter, Woodward wrote that a key element of the plan was to combine real and illusory events to make Gaddafi think “that there is a high degree of internal opposition to him within Libya, that his key trusted aides are disloyal, that the U.S. is about to move against him militarily.”

The information was planted first in the Wall Street Journal, where White House spokesman Larry Speakes confirmed that it was authoritative, and then was picked up by other news organizations.

Mr. Kalb, who said he had known nothing of the plan, quit. His departure caused an avalanche of headlines and set off a public examination of media-government relations.

“You face a choice — as an American, as a spokesman, as a journalist — whether to allow oneself to be absorbed in the ranks of silence, whether to vanish into unopposed acquiescence or to enter a modest dissent,” Mr. Kalb said at a news conference at the State Department. He avoided criticizing Shultz, whom he called “a man of integrity.”

Shultz, while admitting to no specific disinformation scheme, appeared to defend the disinformation policy in principle, quoting Britain’s World War II prime minister, Winston Churchill, as having said, “In time of war, the truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

It was a rare act for a press secretary to so publicly quit and cite ethical qualms. White House spokesman Jerald terHorst resigned in 1974 after President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for Watergate-related crimes. Reagan deputy White House press secretary Les Janka stepped down in 1983 to protest what he claimed was an effort to mislead reporters about the Grenada invasion.

Regarding Mr. Kalb, Hodding Carter III, who served as State Department spokesman in the Jimmy Carter administration, told the Los Angeles Times that he found it “refreshing that in a town full of careerists, someone decided that what brought him into government was what took him out — integrity.”

Mr. Kalb went on to become the founding host of CNN’s media-critique show “Reliable Sources” for much of the 1990s, until he was succeeded by then-Post media writer Howard Kurtz.

CNN (“Bernard Kalb, founding CNN ‘Reliable Sources’ anchor, dies at 100“):

Bernard Kalb, the long-time journalist and founding anchor of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program, died on Sunday at his home in North Bethesda, Maryland, his family said. He was 100.

[…]

According to a CNN biography, Kalb traveled the globe for more than three decades as a correspondent covering world affairs for CBS News, NBC News and The New York Times. Kalb then became the first anchor of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program from 1992 to 1998.

In a statement, CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht hailed Kalb as a pioneering journalist.

“Bernard Kalb was an important figure in journalism, and his pioneering efforts to hold our profession to account are immeasurable. Everyone at CNN is sending our deep sympathies to his wife, children and the whole Kalb family,” Licht said.

“Reliable Sources” aired in various iterations for 30 years until CNN canceled the show last year. The program reported on the business of the media industry as well as its journalistic integrity. Hosts would often examine various media outlets’ coverage decisions and debate journalism with guests.

Former CNN executive vice president of news standards and practices Rick Davis, who launched the “Reliable Sources” program with Kalb, called him a true professional.

“We were so fortunate to have Bernie host Reliable Sources from its launch and during all those years. We learned so much from him as he was a walking, talking history professor of journalism in the second half of the 21st century,” Davis told CNN.

“As he said at the start of every program, ‘welcome to Reliable Sources where we turn a critical lens on the media.’ And he meant it. On the program, Bernie was passionate about holding journalists and news organizations accountable. Bernie was a real pro, a gentleman to all the young staff and he never failed to look just right in his striped dress shirts and orange ties. Our sympathies to his wife, his daughters and his brother Marvin and whole Kalb family.”

Both Bernard and Marvin are figures that seemed to have always been around. I must confess that, even though I was quite politically tuned in and followed foreign affairs rather closely in the mid-1980s, I did not remember that Bernard held that post in the Reagan administration, much less his resignation. I was and avid watcher of “Reliable Sources” during his tenure and well into Kurtz’.

He’s been more-or-less retired since 1998. It doesn’t seem like he’s been out of the spotlight so long.