Unleashed Memoir #5: Dusko Doder, RIP

A great figure of reportage on the Slavic speaking world, he has passed now at the age of 87….we first crossed paths nearly a half century ago.

To commemorate Dusko's passing, another moment from my own past, frozen in time, you will find here an excerpt from my memoir, "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter,” which is still being written. From time to time, Unleashed Memoir will present excerpts from this work where and when they resonate especially. I pick up the story in Washington, where it’s the Summer of 1977….

I've been blessed throughout my career so often to have been helped by the great or near-great or followed in the footsteps of greatness. One of those pairs of feet belonged to the inimitable Dusko Doder, for years with The Washington Post where he made a true mark for himself, first as their brilliant Balkan correspondent (where he was born), then in Moscow where he parlayed his virtually bilingual accomplishments in the Russian language to building an unparalleled collection of sources often at the very pinnacles of Soviet power, leading to world-breaking scoops.

Dusko died this past week at the age of 87 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the vast sweep of his career chronicled in his obituary by the paper he loved so deeply, The Washington Post.

In the summer of 1977, as I was preparing to head to Belgrade to take up my post as the East European bureau chief of The New York Times, Dusko had just returned from Belgrade to Washington and was himself preparing to move on to Moscow. So, when I paid my obligatory pre-departure visit to Washington, I built into my schedule a stop at The Washington Post to touch base with two of my friends there.  I pick up my story in these excerpts from my memoir-in-progress……

I finished up the afternoon over at The Washington Post with Peter Osnos and Dusko Doder on the competition’s foreign desk. Peter I would come to know much better during a fraught two weeks in Poland two years hence when we followed a new Polish Pope around his first return visit to his homeland. Dusko I knew by reputation. And he was the person I found most intriguing of all those whose paths I crossed during my preparations for my new beat.

Dusko (pronounced dush-koh, though he was often known as duss-ko) was as thoroughly Balkan as any American journalist might be—short, powerfully-built, with a shock of black hair and just the faintest hint of a Slavic accent to give a certain mysterious, other-worldly quality to his otherwise impeccable English. Linguistically, culturally, socially, he knew and understood the region better than any other observer—inside or outside. Dusko was fluent in Serbo-Croatian, and by extension Russian, later serving with distinction as the Post’s Moscow correspondent, breaking the news of the death of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov not long after the CIA, to its considerable embarrassment, had assured the United States and the world that his health was just fine. Not surprisingly, Dusko had great spook connections, so the final question I asked him was the identity of the CIA station chief in Belgrade. There was a pause. Dusko, methodical, tenacious, the reporter’s reporter, confessed that it had been some months since he’d been in Yugoslavia, so he wanted to be sure of his facts. A few days later, he rang me back. “All I can tell you,” he began mysteriously, “is think ‘baby food.’”  Baby food? Had Dusko finally lost what was left of the mind with which he’d returned from the Balkans? That’s all he’d say.

I dismissed the whole exercise and completed my rounds in Washington.

…………

At 7:45 pm on Thursday, September 29, 1977, I boarded Lufthansa Flight 401 from Kennedy Airport to Frankfurt where I changed planes to an onward flight to Belgrade, and by three o’clock in the afternoon, my taxi pulled up to the Hotel Moskva.

The Moskva, which stands to this day, overseeing the entry to the stately Stari Grad, or old city, of Belgrade, was a relic of a bygone era, frozen forever in time—the nearly century-old dark stone matching much of its surrounding urban landscape.

[My work would begin the next morning in The Times bureau in Belgrade.]

On Saturday, October 8, I received an invitation from Larry Eagleburger for a reception he was giving at his residence for Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and Congressman Dante Fascell, the veteran Dade County, Florida Democrat and member of Congress. Both were in town for the launch meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Goldberg was the head of the American delegation.

In 1962, President Kennedy had appointed Goldberg, serving at the time as Secretary of Labor, as a Justice of the Supreme Court.

Less than three years later, though, he’d been bushwhacked by President Johnson who wanted his friend, Abe Fortas, on the court, figuring that he’d get a heads-up from Fortas if the court seemed on the verge of declaring any of Johnson's Great Society programs unconstitutional. Adlai Stevenson, serving then as the Ambassador to the United Nations, had just died, and Goldberg reasoned that in that job, which Johnson offered him, he would enable him to “persuade Johnson that in Vietnam we were fighting the wrong war in the wrong place [and] to get out," and would then ultimately be re-appointed to the court.

In his memoirs, Goldberg later confessed that he’d "had an exaggerated opinion of [his[ capacities” And Johnson’s duplicity. Now his career was entering its twilight phase. But he was determined not to go out without one final blast. And that was to serve as the United States ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe which was set to open in Belgrade the week I was due to arrive there. Goldberg thought he’d be able to have a major impact on the course of human rights in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but as I would discover and events would prove, his impact turned out to be more a punchline than a knockout.

Larry Eagleburger was the American ambassador to Yugoslavia—long before he rose to the pinnacle of the State Department as Secretary of State. The ambassador, his assistant told me, was having a party at the “residence” in Dedinje—the leafy green suburb where many of the finest ambassadorial homes clustered. So, Saturday evening, I made my way up to the American residence. It was a beautiful old baronial mansion that once belonged to a venerable Serbian politician, Nikola Uzunovic, who served twice as Yugoslavia’s prime minister a decade before the communists took over in Belgrade and seized all former royalist properties.

It was located just across the street from the compound of Tito, the aging communist strongman who ran the country. The building, at Uzicka 44, was designed by a student of the architect of the White Palace, the grand residence of the Serbian kings, the Karadjordjevic family, which it indeed resembles on an only slightly reduced scale. It was given to the Americans as the embassy residence in 1951, three years before Uzunovic died, no doubt of a broken heart or worse. At the time, Tito was trying to curry favor with Washington as a counterweight to the Soviets with whom he remained perpetually in varying degrees of conflict in his efforts to pursue a “non-aligned” path outside the Comecon economic system and the Warsaw Pact military alliance. The residence consists of a vast compound including the mansion and two smaller houses and contains a swimming pool and tennis court.

I approached the house through the gardens, mounted the massive stone double staircase to the terrace and walked in the open front door. The party was in full swing, and Larry, as he insisted I call him, was in full fly, playing the match-maker between Americans and Yugoslavs and a host of other nationalities, his laugh carrying broadly propelled from the depths of his large, barrel-chest. His barrel-chest, I later discovered, was a tribute to his lifelong affliction with the same asthma that afflicted me, carrying an inhaler with him everywhere, something we shared and that would eventually form a bond between us. So, I took the opportunity of his preoccupation to wander from one room to another on the ground floor.

Eventually, I found myself in a large library with a fireplace. Leaning against the mantle was an interesting-looking youngish man with a tweed jacket, leather patches on the sleeve and dark-rimmed glasses. He was smoking a pipe. Just my kind of fellow—an intellectual, no doubt. I approached him, stuck out my hand and introduced myself.

He smiled, took my hand and said, “Hi. I’m the embassy’s Labor Attaché. Burt Gerber.”

Bingo. Thank you, Dusko.

[ PS:  Burt would have quite a 39-year career with the CIA, from Station Chief in Belgrade to the same post in Moscow in the depths of the Cold War….eventually running all of Europe, east and west from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. ]