NORTH BETHESDA, Md. — Bernard Kalb, a former CBS and NBC television reporter who quit his job as a State Department spokesman to protest the US government’s disinformation campaign against Libya, died on Sunday. Japan. He was 100.
His younger brother, Marvin Kalb, told The Washington Post that his death at his home in suburban Washington was caused by complications from a fall.
Bernard Kalb has worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, CBS and NBC, wrote two books with his more famous brother, and is the founder and panelist for the media analysis program. CNN “Reliable Sources”.
Always dressed up in an orange suit and tie often paired with an orange handkerchief, Kalb is a tireless journalist who has taken on virtually every foreign tour with five foreign friends. different leaders before moving to the other side of the podium.
He told The New York Times in 1984, when he became the spokesman for Secretary of State George Shultz under the Reagan administration: “You feel like you’ve been witnessing developments and explosions over the decades. since World War II.
“You have a historical memory to call upon and you see confidence in American foreign policy as well as in other foreign policies,” he said. “And it seems to me that the ability to define American priorities, cast, issues, etc. is very valuable in this mission.”
The disinformation campaign follows U.S. airstrikes on the former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s compound in 1986 in retaliation for a Libya-linked terrorist attack in Germany. It was designed to make Gadhafi think he was about to be attacked again. The Washington Post exposed a campaign that the newspaper said included leaking misinformation to reporters and Kalb was unaware of it.
“I am concerned about the impact of any such program on the credibility of the United States,” Kalb said at the time. “Anything that damages America’s reputation, damages America.”
New York Times columnist William Safire hailed the resignation. “In his final official act, Bernard Kalb rose above ‘State Department spokesman’ to become the spokesman for all Americans who respect and demand truth,” Safire wrote.
In 1992, Kalb became a founding mainstay of “Trusted Sources,” reporting on reporters and how they handle stories. Co-host Howard Kurtz took over the show after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
In 1997, Kalb began running a number of press conferences and lectures around the world for the Freedom Forum, a Washington-based organization for press freedom run by former executives of the Freedom Forum. Gannett Co. operating. He also serves on a panel that oversees Israeli and Palestinian media for inciting violence created as part of the failed 1998 Wye Riverland security agreement.
Kalb was born on February 4, 1922, in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants. His father is a seamstress from Poland, while his mother is from Ukraine. He attended New York City’s public schools and graduated from the City University of New York.
During the Second World War, he spent two years in the Army, working for a camp newspaper in the Aleutian Islands with editor Sgt. Dashiell Hammett, author of “The Maltese Falcon” and other detective novels.
From 1946 to 1961, he worked at The New York Times, spending four months in Antarctica in late 1955 and 1956 covering Admiral Richard Byrd’s Naval expedition, Operation Deep Freeze. Then in 1956, Kalb was sent to Indonesia, where he developed a lifelong love of Asian antiques and porcelain.
CBS hired him out of the Times in 1962 and sent him back to Southeast Asia, where he was famous. He and his brother took charge of the State Department in Washington in 1975, and together they moved to NBC in 1980.
At CBS, Marvin and Bernard were known as “The Kalbs”, but Bernard somewhat lived in the shadow of his brother.
One widely circulated, but fabricated story tells of their mother calling CBS’s foreign affairs desk in New York and saying, “Hi, this is Marvin Kalb’s mom. Can you tell me? where is my son Bernie?” But Bernard Kalb never seemed to be jealous at all, even sometimes introducing himself as Marvin’s “younger brother”.
Together they wrote an admiring biography of Henry Kissinger in 1974, “Kissinger,” and “The Last Ambassador,” a 1981 novel about the fall of Saigon.
Survivors include his wife, Phyllis, and their four daughters, Tanah, Marina, Claudia, and Sarinah.
