Bernard Kalb, Veteran Foreign Correspondent, Is Dead at 100

“My resignation does not endow me with sudden freedom to act on what may be or not be secret and what can be classified or what cannot be classified,” Mr. Kalb said. But he added, “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.”

Bernard Kalb was born in Manhattan on Feb. 4, 1922, His parents, Max and Bella (Portnoy) Kalb, were immigrants — his father from Poland and his mother from what is now Ukraine. The family moved to Washington Heights when Bernard was a teenager. His father worked principally as a tailor in the garment district, but at nights he also did tailoring at a dry cleaner in Washington Heights that his mother ran by day.

After graduating from the City College of New York in 1942, Mr. Kalb spent two years in the Army, mostly working on a newspaper published out of a Quonset hut in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. His editor was Sgt. Dashiell Hammett, the author of the detective novels “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man.”

In 1946, Mr. Kalb joined The Times. He originally wrote for the radio station WQXR, which at the time was owned by the company. He went on to write for the newspaper; he was a metropolitan reporter and covered the United Nations before being sent to Southeast Asia as a correspondent.

His first overseas assignment, in late 1955, was to accompany Adm. Richard E. Byrd on a mission to Antarctica. He once mused that on some days his most difficult task on that assignment was to come up with variations on the word “ice.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/business/media/bernard-kalb-dead.html