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When Marvin Kalb covered the Soviet Union for CBS News, he was so tall and angular that Nikita Khrushchev dubbed him “Peter the Great.”
He worked that into his first book. He’s written a lot more books since then but his most recent is a retrospective memoir about those early days in Russia: “Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War.”
Kalb is a legendary figure among serious reporters of the last half century. He grew up in New York of Eastern European parents and his goal was to cover the Soviet Union. By the time he got out of Harvard, he spoke good Russian and, at 27, went to Moscow as a translator for the U.S. Embassy. Within a year he was hired away by the famed newsman Edward R. Murrow for CBS News – the last of the “Murrow Boy” hires.
And what a time to be in the Soviet Union: the U.S. U2 spy plane had just crashed over Russia. Kalb had many face-to-face encounters with Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders. Decades later, he switched to NBC and was a stalwart on “Meet the Press.”
Today, he is a senior fellow at Brookings’ foreign policy program, an expert on national security focused on Russia, Europe and the Middle East.