The trigger was issues from a fall, mentioned his youthful brother, Marvin Kalb.
In a profession spanning six many years, Mr. Kalb grew to become a high-profile journalist who crossed paths with a number of the most intriguing personalities of his technology. When he was a younger Army journalist throughout World War II, his editor was the detective-story grasp Dashiell Hammett — “a bayonet of a man,” Mr. Kalb later recalled, and a “giant of an author who took a bunch of semiliterate kids and turned them into amateur newsmen.”
At the New York Times after the struggle, Mr. Kalb labored his approach from the radio desk to abroad assignments. He accompanied polar explorer Adm. Richard E. Byrd to the South Pole within the winter of 1955-1956. During the four-month expedition, Mr. Kalb later quipped, his hardest feat was discovering synonyms for the phrase “ice” and avoiding the cliche “bottom of the world.”
He coated the United Nations and the crisis-laden rule of Indonesia’s President Sukarno earlier than switching to TV journalism in 1962 and opening the CBS News bureau in Hong Kong. He gained an Overseas Press Club Award for a 1968 documentary on the Viet Cong, and he accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on his historic journey to China in 1972.
Mr. Kalb additionally was a Washington anchorman on “CBS Morning News,” amongst different assignments, however he distinguished himself most on the State Department beat, protecting 5 secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to George P. Shultz. With his youthful brother, Marvin, additionally a broadcast journalist, Mr. Kalb wrote an early biography of Kissinger.
The Kalb brothers each made the leap from CBS to NBC in 1980. Bernard Kalb then joined the Reagan administration in January 1985 as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. “This was nothing I sought to create or devise,” he instructed The Washington Post at the time, describing the provide as “an opportunity that came out of some marvelous blue.”
Lanky, darkly good-looking, bombastic, jocular, cigar-wielding and given to what The Washington Post referred to as “garish shirt-and-tie combinations” heavy on stripes and burnt orange, he was an unlikely public face of the reserved and comparatively colorless Shultz.
As spokesman, Mr. Kalb was lower than forthcoming with information (“I can’t be drawn into discussions on confidential exchanges,” he mentioned in response to 1 question) and started to develop a popularity amongst journalists for being intentionally unhelpful or else completely out of the loop.
“I had high visibility, easy access — and silence,” he as soon as instructed The Post. “I discovered that the job of spokesman is regarded as the world’s seventh-oldest profession. The other six obviously are classified.”
United Press International reported that he had “set a new record for State Department non-responsiveness” in August 1986 by saying, in impact, “I can’t give you anything on that” to 30 questions in a single 24-minute briefing.
That October, Mr. Kalb mentioned he was caught unexpectedly when Post journalist Bob Woodward revealed a secret White House plan that referred to as for the deliberate planting of false information within the U.S. media to weaken Libyan chief Moammar Gaddafi.
Quoting from a memorandum despatched to President Ronald Reagan by nationwide safety adviser John M. Poindexter, Woodward wrote {that a} key aspect of the plan was to mix actual and illusory occasions to make Gaddafi suppose “that there is a high degree of internal opposition to him within Libya, that his key trusted aides are disloyal, that the U.S. is about to move against him militarily.”
The information was planted first within the Wall Street Journal, the place White House spokesman Larry Speakes confirmed that it was authoritative, and then was picked up by different news organizations.
Mr. Kalb, who said he had known nothing of the plan, stop. His departure precipitated an avalanche of headlines and set off a public examination of media-government relations.
“You face a choice — as an American, as a spokesman, as a journalist — whether to allow oneself to be absorbed in the ranks of silence, whether to vanish into unopposed acquiescence or to enter a modest dissent,” Mr. Kalb mentioned at a news convention at the State Department. He averted criticizing Shultz, whom he referred to as “a man of integrity.”
Shultz, whereas admitting to no particular disinformation scheme, appeared to defend the disinformation coverage in precept, quoting Britain’s World War II prime minister, Winston Churchill, as having mentioned, “In time of war, the truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
It was a uncommon act for a press secretary to so publicly stop and cite moral qualms. White House spokesman Jerald terHorst resigned in 1974 after President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for Watergate-related crimes. Reagan deputy White House press secretary Les Janka stepped down in 1983 to protest what he claimed was an effort to mislead reporters in regards to the Grenada invasion.
Regarding Mr. Kalb, Hodding Carter III, who served as State Department spokesman within the Jimmy Carter administration, instructed the Los (*100*) Times that he discovered it “refreshing that in a town full of careerists, someone decided that what brought him into government was what took him out — integrity.”
Mr. Kalb went on to turn into the founding host of CNN’s media-critique present “Reliable Sources” for a lot of the Nineteen Nineties, till he was succeeded by then-Post media author Howard Kurtz.
Bernard Kalb was born in Manhattan on Feb. 4, 1922, to Jewish immigrants from czarist Russia. His father grew to become a tailor, and his mom was largely a homemaker.
After graduating in 1942 from City College of New York, Mr. Kalb joined the Army and was despatched to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, the place he labored on a newspaper beneath Hammett.
Mr. Kalb joined the Times in 1946 and spent almost a decade as a author for the newspaper’s radio station, WQXR, regardless of what friends equivalent to Arthur Gelb — later a prime editor — acknowledged as his “flair” and a burning ambition to turn into a international correspondent. Finally, in 1955, he was assigned to chronicle Operation Deep Freeze, Byrd’s closing expedition to Antarctica — Mr. Kalb’s large break in journalism.
In 1958, he married Phyllis Bernstein. In addition to his brother, of Chevy Chase, Md., and his spouse, of North Bethesda, survivors embrace 4 daughters, Tanah Kalb of Westport, Conn., Marina Kalb of Brookline, Mass., Claudia Kalb of Alexandria, Va., and Sarinah Kalb of Israel; and 9 grandchildren.
After “Kissinger” (1974), Mr. Kalb and his brother wrote a novel, “The Last Ambassador” (1981), in regards to the fall of Saigon.
The Kalb brothers have been keen on self-deprecating remarks about sibling rivalry, exacerbated by a shared career. In a be aware of their Kissinger biography, Bernard and Marvin signed a press release testifying that “my brother” was answerable for any errors.