Herbert Matthews Was a Role Model for Engaged Journalism
Herbert Matthews of the New York Times was one of the great reporters of his time. US conservatives still haven’t forgiven him for his 1957 interview with Fidel Castro and even blamed him for the success of the Cuban Revolution.
Herbert Matthews, pictured second from the left, made his name covering the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, and the Allied invasion of Italy during World War II. But his sympathetic reporting on the Cuban Revolution later drew the ire of conservative critics. (Getty Images)
Whether covering international conflict in Ukraine or Gaza or reporting from the front lines of the culture wars, journalists are, we are frequently told, unreliable, biased, and motivated by partisan political agendas. It is a charge that has echoed for as long as journalists have plied their trade and has been leveled against some of America’s foremost reporters, including Herbert Lionel Matthews of the New York Times, one of the finest war reporters of the twentieth century.
Matthews had made his name covering the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, and the Allied invasion of Italy during World War II. But when he retired from the paper in the fall of 1967, following a storied four-decade career, he did so under a cloud. His sympathetic reporting on the Cuban Revolution had long drawn the ire of conservative critics.
William F. Buckley, for instance, claimed that Matthews had done more than any other individual to facilitate Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Even some of Matthews’s senior colleagues at the Times feared that he had grown too close to the story. Harboring private doubts about his judgment, they nixed long pieces that he had written, following trips to Cuba in 1963 and 1966, after concluding that to print them would do the paper more harm than good.
Engaged Reporting
While Matthews’s posthumous reputation continues to suffer from such criticisms — he was being denounced as a “dictator’s scribe” well into the twenty-first century — he serves as a powerful model of the journalist engagé: a reporter who, while emotionally invested in the story, nevertheless retains a commitment to honest reporting. It is a combination that is sorely needed in our own troubled times.
Matthews was, in fact, unusually reflective about the journalist’s craft. This was, in part, a product of his scholarly training at Columbia University during the early 1920s, and his admiration for the work of the Italian historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce, who famously claimed that “all history is contemporary history.”
It was while covering the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War that Matthews became sharply critical of his profession’s commitment to “objectivity.” For Matthews, as for many of his contemporaries, the intense suffering of Spain’s civilian population and the magnitude of the political ideals at stake meant that a position of neutrality was simply untenable.
Incensed by the censoring or altering of his reports by Catholic, Franco-sympathizing editors back in New York, Matthews also became a fierce critic of the Times’s insistence on “balanced coverage.” Too often, he explained, this “meant equality for the bad with the good . . . the tricky with the honest, the wrong with the right. I say that not only I, but the truth suffered.”
Matthews’s invocation of the truth was telling. Despite his personal political sympathies, he held fast to the view that the most fundamental job of the journalist was “to write truthfully what he sees and knows on a given day.” Among his fellow professionals, Matthews’s reputation for integrity, and for reporting based on verified facts and first-hand testimony, was second to none. It was a reputation that was tested almost to destruction by what turned out to be his single greatest journalistic feat.
“Comrade Matthews”
A story with the headline “Cuban Rebel is Visited in Hideout” hit the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, February 24, 1957. The scoop was the result of a clandestine meeting with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains, arranged by members of Castro’s July 26 Movement who had smuggled the then fifty-seven-year-old reporter past military roadblocks and accompanied him during the long and treacherous hike to the remote rendezvous spot.
In the report, which was published alongside a photograph of Castro, rifle in hand, Matthews explained how the rebel leader — tall, olive-skinned, with flashing brown eyes, a figure who had captured the imagination of Cuba’s youth — was “alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastness of the Sierra Maestra” for a free and democratic Cuba. It was a struggle that, Matthews predicted, was destined to succeed.
Matthews’s scoop was electric: it discredited the claims of the Fulgencio Batista regime, which had been assuring everyone that Fidel Castro was dead, bolstered the reputation of the rebels, and established the popular image of Fidel as a kind of Robin Hood of the Antilles. It also brought a flurry of congratulatory telegrams, enough Cuban cigars to last for a year, and the plaudits of his fellow journalists. Even the press attaché at the US embassy in Havana was moved to write to Matthews (strictly off the record) to convey his congratulations for a feat of reporting reminiscent of a bygone age.
However, during the early 1960s, as the postrevolutionary government began to nationalize US-owned businesses and draw closer to Moscow, Matthews became a target for conservatives. Anti-Castro Cubans denounced him as “Comrade Matthews,” and Time magazine claimed that he was a Castro apologist who had allowed his emotional bias to impede his judgment.
The Living Truth
There is no doubt that Matthews was enamored by the Cuban Revolution, which he privately described as a noble and heroic feat. Yet he would defend his reporting and his wider professional integrity for the remainder of his life.
“Those of us who live with history and try to relate it,” Matthews explained, “know how inaccurately it is chronicled when it happens, how much of it is colored by point of view, how many different truths there are.” Newspaper correspondents were, Matthews pointed out, human, and as such could not help being biased. But in his view, there was
only one test that means anything, only one quality that the reader has a right to demand — the truth as the man sees it and all the truth. He must never change or suppress that truth; he must never present as the truth anything that he does not honestly believe to be true.
While journalists would inevitably make mistakes, Matthews was confident that these would be corrected in the fullness of time. There was, though, the question of what he termed “the living truth.” “Those who come after,” he noted, “cannot take from us the reality of having lived the events — lived the Cuban Revolution as those who made it lived it.”
Although Matthews admired the documentary research undertaken by historians of Cuba such as Theodore Draper, he insisted that there was a critical element missing in such works — the dimension that came from direct, first-hand experience of the events in question:
A man who deals with living realities may be handicapped by his subjective reactions as a human being, but the material he deals with is true. A man who works only from speeches, articles, documents and decrees is playing a guessing game, however brilliantly he plays it.
Throughout his long and distinguished career, Matthews demonstrated an unwavering commitment to going where the action was, viewing the situation with his own eyes, and reporting the news as honestly as possible. When it came to his own legacy, Matthews explained that the “only monument I want to leave on earth is for some student years from now to consult the files of the New York Times for information about the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution, or other events and places, and find my by-line, and know that he can trust it.”
In our own age of so-called fake news and alternative facts, Herbert Matthews offers a powerful reminder that engaged, impassioned journalism and a respect for the facts are not mutually exclusive.