Word: bigart
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What George Polk (see above) and every other Balkan correspondent yearned to do, the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart up & did. He found and interviewed Greek guerrilla General Markos in his Grammos Mountain stronghold. This week, after sitting on it for more than a fortnight (presumably to avoid competing with convention news), the Trib ran his interview as a four-part series. It tingled with some of the cloak-&-dagger thrills of an Eric Ambler novel...
...first team are some of the Trib's top reporters. Walter B. Kerr, who "has been living with Byrnes, Molotov and Bevin for months," will trail diplomats. Lanky A. T. Steele, a veteran of Far East coverage, will stick to what he knows best. Pulitzer Prizewinning Homer Bigart's assignment: trouble. As a war correspondent he got schooling for covering riots, revolutions, and world violence, lately has been doing post-graduate work in Palestine and Poland. Says Joe Barnes: "We can't use men who have been stuck in one capital for 20 years as modern reporters...
...President of Poland's coalition Government, Communist Boleslaw Bierut claims to be "above politics." Last week, reported the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart, the Polish President gave a delegation of opposition leaders from Vice Premier Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant Party a sample of this lofty impartiality, Communist style. "Change your, line. Change your tactics," he told the group "and there will be no struggle. If you don't go in with the coalition, tears will be your lot and you will be beaten. We will use all means in our power to break...
When he presented his passport, General Grosz, Poland's director of press information, said: "Ah, yes, your paper is unfriendly to us." He produced a clipping and began reading aloud. But, protested Bigart, that was an editorial from the Washington Star. "Makes no difference," said Grosz, "I know you've said bad things about us." The Communist party blamed "excitable dispatches" of foreign correspondents for the strained relations between Poland and the U.S. "Meanwhile," wrote Bigart, "the Government-controlled press faithfully follows orders to 'furiously attack' American and British correspondents whose reports are objectionable...
...poisoned atmosphere of Warsaw without developing a bias which ... is bound to color his reports, and there is no correspondent in Poland today who hasn't in his heart aligned himself with either the Communist-dominated Government or ... Vice Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant party." Bigart had, for one; he was now firmly antiCommunist. He added: "There is no middle ground, no impartial witness...