Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent

This memoir is increasingly grating in its Sunday-morning pulpit anti-Communism, and disappointing in failing to convey the climates and events that distinguish the work of first-rate reporters. Levine describes his immigration to the U.S. as a young Russian Jew in 1911, and his success in getting back behind the Civil War front to write relatively unbiased news about the Revolution -- he was anti-Bolshevik but also opposed to the allied intervention. A long section is then devoted to the ""atrocious regicide"" of the Czar's family. From a gossipy review of people met (Mrs. Trotsky, an argument with Lincoln Steffens about Mussolini, correspondence with Einstein), the book moves on to forthright Red-hunting. Levine edited a militant anti-Communist monthly, Plain Talk; he ran around boosting Whittaker Chambers before World War II; he clued Bobby Kennedy on the Soviet minorities; he pumped Lee Oswald's wife for proof that Oswald was a Soviet and/or Castro agent; and he dipped into writing apologetics for the tyrannical Shah of Iran. The book concludes, predictably, that no detente is possible with the horrid Soviets and Chinese. Not a true autobiography, but a puffed-up, shrill credo.