Taking Sides
'The Man Who Invented
Fidel,' by Anthony DePalma
Review by Jonathan Alter,
The
New York Times, April 23, 2006.
In August, Fidel Castro will turn 80, with
no final reward in sight. The small island
nation he has tyrannized for an astonishing
47 years has played an outsize role in modern
history, from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,
which brought the superpowers "thisclose"
to nuclear war (in the words of Robert McNamara),
to the Elián González case,
which helped tip Florida and thus the 2000
presidential election to George W. Bush.
At a deeper level, Castro has influenced
the American culture wars of the last half-century.
The beard and fatigues he presented to the
world in 1957 anticipated the rebellious
romanticism of the 1960's. The curdling
of the Cuban revolution offered at least
some vindication to the American right,
while extending the ferocity of American
ideological combat long past the end of
the cold war. And, as we learn in Anthony
DePalma's fascinating and admirably dispassionate
book "The Man Who Invented Fidel,"
today's tussles over the "liberal media"
in general, and The New York Times in particular,
are merely an extension of an old story
from the precomputer age - a story that
helped create Castro and, even now, illuminates
the enduring power of bias and myth.
The explosive consequences of reporters
growing too fond of their sources are all
on display in the case of Herbert L. Matthews,
one of the most famous - and infamous -
men ever to write for this newspaper. Born
in New York in 1900, Matthews barely missed
combat in World War I and thought about
becoming an academic. Instead, he drifted
into secretarial work at The Times and by
the 1930's was a foreign correspondent -
"brave as a badger," in the words
of his friend Ernest Hemingway. Matthews's
journalistic hero was Richard Harding Davis,
the swashbuckling turn-of-the-century correspondent
known as Theodore Roosevelt's "personal
publicist" for creating the myth that
T.R.'s charge up San Juan Hill was a pivotal
battle in the Spanish-American War.
Matthews's first big story for The Times
was the 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia,
where he openly sympathized with Mussolini's
Fascists. In Spain the next year, he switched
sides and drew close to the Loyalist cause.
Hemingway's wife, the journalist Martha
Gellhorn, believed Matthews was the model
for Robert Jordan in "For Whom the
Bell Tolls." To the end of his life,
members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
made up of American leftists and Communists
who took part in the Spanish Civil War,
considered him a sympathetic friend.
In 1957, Matthews was an aging Times editorial
writer whose strong relationship with the
publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, allowed
him to double as a roving straight-news
reporter, an arrangement that was a departure
from Times policy. After The Times and other
newspapers reported that the young Cuban
rebel leader Fidel Castro was dead, Matthews
- always a resourceful, enterprising correspondent
- decided to go see for himself. Posing
as tourists, he and his wife made their
way through the dictator Fulgencio Batista's
military lines before Matthews alone completed
the difficult journey into the Sierra Maestra
on foot.
The front-page scoop that followed and
two additional articles predicted "a
new deal for Cuba" if Castro's insurgency
won and reported that the romantic revolutionary
was no Communist; in fact, the local Communists
opposed him. [From the archives: Cuban Rebel
Is Visited in Hideout.] The exclusive was
a sensation at the time and transformed
Castro's image from a hotheaded Don Quixote
into the youthful face of the future of
Cuba. Unfortunately for Matthews and The
Times, it didn't age well.
By 1958, Times editors were already growing
uncomfortable with Matthews's pro-Castro
bias, and by 1959, when Castro credited
the articles with helping to bring him to
power, the remarkable access afforded Matthews
began to boomerang. On a celebrated visit
that year to the United States, the charming
new Cuban leader bragged that when Matthews
met him in the mountains two years earlier
his movement was down to 18 soldiers - one
bedraggled column that walked in circles
to fool the reporter. DePalma shows that
this was almost certainly untrue - one of
Fidel's cruel jokes - and that Matthews's
larger estimates of Castro's troop strength
came from careful reporting in Havana. But
the damage to Matthews's reputation was
done. For all the years since, conservatives
who distrust everything coming out of Castro's
mouth have chosen to believe their enemy
on this single point, so as to make a fool
of Herbert Matthews.
His career did not crater all at once.
In 1961, John F. Kennedy asked him to the
Oval Office after the failure of the C.I.A.-backed
invasion at the Bay of Pigs. A candid president,
trying to learn from his mistakes, had earlier
told The Times's managing editor, Turner
Catledge, that "you would have saved
us from a colossal mistake" if the
paper had gone ahead and printed what it
knew about the operation beforehand - a
sharp contrast to President Bush's attitude
toward critical reporting. In his private
chat with Matthews, unearthed by DePalma,
Kennedy told the reporter that if it hadn't
been for the failed invasion, "we might
be in Laos now - or perhaps unleashing Chiang."
In other words, the botched invasion of
Cuba may have spared the United States a
much more disastrous invasion of mainland
China.
DePalma shows that Matthews was a determined
liberal but not a faker like Walter Duranty,
the Times correspondent who won a 1932 Pulitzer
Prize for his fawning coverage of Stalin
and was probably in league with the Soviet
secret police. Matthews's articles were
for the most part factually accurate. But
he comes across as a self-righteous and
credulous analyst who sided with those who
gave him access and then refused to reassess,
whatever the changing facts. While other
reporters who also misread Castro toughened
their coverage after he began ordering summary
executions, Matthews stuck stubbornly to
his original myth.
While his pacing and historical context
are first-rate, DePalma - himself a correspondent
at The Times - might have quoted more extensively
from the many rationalizations of Castro
that Matthews undertook in books and articles
in the 20 years between the famous interview
and his death in 1977. Did he ever go beyond
comparisons to Oliver Cromwell and John
Brown and call Castro by his proper name
- dictator? Apparently not, though DePalma
doesn't say.
The Matthews story is about the power of
myths. The most enduring on the left are
that the United States drove Castro into
the hands of the Soviets (DePalma explores
documents from the Soviet archives that
suggest the Soviets offered to send military
trainers into Cuba well before the relationship
with the United States deteriorated) and,
most perniciously, that there is still something
romantic and appealing about the Cuban revolution.
The most persistent myths on the right are
that a trade embargo makes sense (it actually
helps perpetuate Castro's power) and that
the dictator is just a garden-variety Communist;
in fact, he has always been an original
and unpredictable chameleon whose only commitment
is to his own survival.
Herbert L. Matthews didn't invent Castro,
as he initially claimed with characteristic
self-regard. As DePalma suggests, Castro's
charm and will to power were such that he
most likely would have triumphed without
Matthews's notorious articles turning him
into a romantic hero. The rabid Cuban exiles
who continue to revile the reporter nearly
30 years after his death simply wanted to
shoot the messenger. (Some literally: the
F.B.I., while spying on Matthews, also reported
a death threat against him.) But Matthews's
critics were more right than wrong, and
his career is an object lesson to anyone
with aspirations to being an accomplished
reporter. Passion for sources and causes
can make you famous, but they often pull
you farther from the brambled path of truth.
Jonathan Alter, a senior editor and columnist
at Newsweek, is the author of "The
Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and
the Triumph of Hope," to be published
next week.
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