Excerpt from the 1960 Dateline for the award for
BEST MAGAZINE REPORTING FOREIGN AFFAIRS:
BEST MAGAZINE REPORTING FOREIGN AFFAIRS
George Bailey,
The Reporter:
Germany Today
Millions of words have been written about Berlin —the postwar
world’s oldest established permanent floating crisis. To bring fresh insight
into the complexities of the German problem is a major journalistic feat, and
no one has done it better than George Bailey (photo below) in his probing,
lucid balanced articles for The Reporter. A tweedy, hulking, hugely energetic
correspondent, Bailey has covered the Hungarian revolt from Budapest, served a
stint in Moscow; he also contributes to British magazines, broadcasts free-lance
for ABC. Chicago-born (in 1919), he took his B.A. in Latin and Greek at
Columbia, his M.A. in English Lit. at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he also
developed fluency in some of the six languages he know speaks (Hungarian,
German, Russian, French, Italian, Greek). “There’s something sort of bullish
about him,” says Phil Horton, The Reporter’s executive editor. “He’s rather
noisy, a sloppy guy who’s very entertaining.” Currently, Bailey is writing a
book. Subject: Germany.
Excerpt from a piece by George Bailey:
The Berliners Make Their Choice
BERLIN LATE LAST SUMMER, during his annual vacation on the shores of
the Black Sea, Walter Ulbricht, First Secretary of the S.E.D., or Socialist
Unity (i.e., Communist) Party of East Germany, put his situation to Nikita
Khrushchev in forceful terms: “If the Soviet Union can’t get the Allies out of
Berlin, I can’t hold East Germany.” Ulbricht was not exaggerating. Since the
founding of the “German Democratic Republic” it had proved impossible to
stabilize this artificial state. Now, both politically and economically,
matters had at last reached a critical stage.
Politically, the S.E.D. had been bedeviled by an unending
series of internal crises, purges, and defections. The eight-man Politburo
(with an additional four voteless “candidates”) and the nine-man Secretariat of
the Central Committee have always been in a state of flux. The only constants
in these top echelons have been Ulbricht, President of the Republic of Wilhelm
Pieck, now eighty-two and decrepit, and Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl, a turncoat
Socialist who has just suffered a severe stroke and may be on his deathbed. The
chief reason for this chaos is a basic division of allegiance even among many
of the top Communist functionaries.