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.