Covering the Cold War and Other Shadows in the Land of the Midnight Sun
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"It was about this time that I met Gus Svendson, a tall, lanky Swede about my age, who was a reporter in the Stockholm AP bureau. Besides being a good reporter, he was also quite a linguist. He wrote for the AP in ideomatic Englsih and was also fluent in Russian. His room was layered in copies of Pravda, the then leading Russian newspaper. Gus's favorate linguistic ploy was to attend news conferences for Russian delegations where interpreters handled questions in Swedish for local reporters. Gus would suddenly ask unexpected and provocative questions in Russian. He always got a Russian to give a vociferous respose in Russian, thus bypassing the interpreters. The other reporters were completely left out of the exchange and complained loudly. Gus would keep his questions in Russian going until the interpreters intervened but by that time, he would have gotten a story all his own..."
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About the Book
A young reporter wants so badly to be a foreign correspondent that he leaves his job in the U.S. and heads for Scandinavia to try his luck. He encounters a weird, white world and quickly finds himself covering the Cold War between Finland and the Soviet Union, for which he is denounced in Pravda. He finds himself writing for a journalistic giant, The New York Herald-Tribune, but which pays a pittance for his stories. He covers events in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, meeting such people as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a Norwegian war hero, a singer/movie actress, a Prime Minister and a host of other interesting characters. He also meets and marries the girl of his dreams. Then, just as his money is about to run out, he unexpectedly wins a prestigious and lucrative journalism award that brings him back to the U. S. and recognition as a full-ledged foreign correspondent. Told in letters and rememberances, it is a story of suceeding against the odds in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
About the Author
Harry Heintzen has been a newspaper reporter, a foreign correspondent, a Foreign Service Officer in Africa, Chief of the Voice of America broadcasting to Africa and the initiator and director of a VOA program that brought some 7000 foreign journalists to the U.S. for study and training at universities and the VOA. He lives with his wife in Washington, D.C.