Bernard Kalb, a veteran reporter for CBS, NBC, and The New York Times who also had a brief and unhappy foray into government as a spokesman for the State Department, passed away. died Sunday at his home in North Bethesda, Md. He is 100 years old.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Claudia Kalb, who said his health had deteriorated following the fall on January 2.
During his years on television, Mr. Kalb’s high-pitched voice, bushy eyebrows and detailed commanding abilities have become familiar to millions of viewers. He addresses wars, revolutions, and diplomatic breakthroughs that heralded the end of the Cold War.
He reported for The Times from 1946 to 1962, for CBS for the next 18 years (during which time he joined his brother, Marvin, in diplomacy) and as NBC’s State Department correspondent. from 1980 to 1985. Then, for nearly two years, he served in the State Department of the Reagan administration – a time that ended in controversy.
As a CBS reporter in 1972, Mr. Kalb accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on his visit to China, an important step in the normalization of relations between the two countries. He also made almost every foreign trip with Henry A. Kissinger, Cyrus R. Vance, Edmund S. Muskie, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and George P. Shultz during their tenure as secretary of state.
Mr. Kalb spoke in November 1984 when President Ronald Reagan announced his appointment as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. This is the first time that a journalist who has covered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has become a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But Mr. Kalb resigns in October 1986 to protest what he called a “reported disinformation program” – he did not confirm its existence – waged by the authorities against the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The Washington Post reported that the program included plans to fake news in the press about internal opposition to Colonel Qaddafi and US military plans against Libya. Asked about Mr. Kalb’s resignation, Mr. Reagan said: “No one on our side is lying to anyone.”
Mr Kalb said: “My resignation does not give me sudden freedom to act on what may or may not be confidential and what may or may not be classified. But he added, “You are faced with a choice – as an American, as a spokesperson, as a journalist – whether to allow yourself to wallow in the queues. silence, or disappear into unchallenged concurrence or engage in a modest dissent.”
Bernard Kalb was born in Manhattan on February 4, 1922. His parents, Max and Bella (Portnoy) Kalb, were immigrants – his father was from Poland and his mother was from present-day Ukraine. The family moved to Washington Heights when Bernard was a teenager. His father worked primarily as a seamstress in the garment district, but at night he also sewed clothes at a dry cleaner in Washington Heights run by his mother during the day.
After graduating from the City College of New York in 1942, Kalb served two years in the Army, primarily working for a newspaper published from a Quonset hut in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. His editor is Sgt. Dashiell Hammettauthor of the detective novels “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man.”
In 1946, Mr. Kalb joined The Times. He originally wrote for the radio station WQXR, which at the time was owned by the company. He continued to write for the newspaper; he was an urban reporter and covered the United Nations before being sent to Southeast Asia as a reporter.
His first overseas assignment, in late 1955, was to accompany Admiral Richard E. Byrd on a mission to Antarctica. He once mused that on some days his most difficult task in that exercise was to come up with variations of the word “ice”.
More difficult was his coverage of President Sukarno’s rule of Indonesia. In 1958, Mr. Kalb was arrested and briefly detained after he revealed that the Soviet-made plane had been delivered to the Indonesian military. The arrest prompted an outcry from Western reporters, and he was soon released.
After leaving The Times in 1962, Mr. Kalb joined CBS as a reporter in Hong Kong. He was regularly sent from there to cover the Vietnam War, and he was the network’s field correspondent for an hour-long documentary in 1964 that warned that the war was unlikely to end. Soon. Four years later, he won the Overseas Press Club Award for a documentary about the Viet Cong.
Returning to the United States in 1970, Mr. Kalb became the host of “CBS Morning News” in Washington. In 1975, he joined his brother in diplomacy, and five years later, both moved to NBC. Bernard Kalb was in charge of the State Department until he became its spokesman in 1985.
In addition to his daughter Claudia, Mr. Kalb is survived by his brother; his wife of 64 years, Phyllis (Bernstein) Kalb; three other daughters, Tanah, Marina and Sarinah Kalb; nine grandchildren; and four stepchildren.
For six years starting in 1992, Mr. Kalb was the host of the weekly CNN program “Trusted Sources”, which analyzed the media’s objectivity and interviewed print and radio journalists. . He continued to lecture on journalism and foreign affairs into his ’90s, including occasionally participating in seminars on the “Kalb Report”, a series of live televised talks by His brother hosted at the Washington National Press Club.
On a Romanian street in 2004, a boy sold Kalb a souvenir for $16: a set of Soviet-era binoculars engraved with a red star, hammer and sickle, and captured Kalashnikov rifles Cross each other. A few days later, Mr. Kalb was in a hotel room in Athens with his wife. In the distance is the Parthenon. With little time left before heading to the airport, the Kalbs family peered through binoculars to see the symbol of democracy from afar.
“The Cold War came to the rescue, finally creating a piece of redeeming value,” Mr. Kalb wrote in an essay for The Times. “RIP, Cold War. Couldn’t have been done without you.”
Dennis Hevesi, former obituary writer for The Times, died in 2017. Alex Traub contributed reporting.
