Bernard Kalb, a veteran correspondent for CBS, NBC and The New York Times who also made a brief and unfortunate foray into government as a State Department spokesman, died Sunday at his home in North Bethesda, Md. He was 100.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Claudia Kalb, who said his health deteriorated after a fall on January 2.
In his many years on television, Mr. Kalb’s sonorous voice, thick eyebrows and mastery of detail became known to millions of viewers. He reported on wars, revolutions and the diplomatic breakthroughs that heralded the end of the Cold War.
He reported for The Times from 1946 to 1962, for CBS for the next 18 years (during which he joined his brother Marvin on the diplomatic beat), and as NBC’s State Department correspondent from 1980 to 1985. After that, nearly two years long, he served in the State Department of the Reagan administration – a period that ended controversially.
As a CBS correspondent in 1972, Mr. Kalb accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on the trip to China that proved to be an important step in normalizing relations between the two nations. He also made virtually every overseas trip with Henry A. Kissinger, Cyrus R. Vance, Edmund S. Muskie, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and George P. Shultz during their tenure as Secretary of State.
“You have the feeling of being a kind of eyewitness to the evolutions and eruptions of the decades since World War II,” Mr. Kalb said in November 1984 when President Ronald Reagan announced his appointment as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. It was the first time that a journalist covering the State Department became the spokesman.
But Mr Kalb resigned in October 1986 to protest what he called a “reported disinformation program” – he stopped acknowledging its existence – carried out by the government against Libyan leader Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The Washington Post reported that the program included plans to spread false press reports about internal opposition to Colonel Gaddafi and US military plans against Libya. When asked about Mr. Kalb’s resignation, Mr. Reagan said, “No one on our side has lied to anyone.”
“My resignation does not suddenly give me the freedom to act on what is or is not secret and what can or cannot be classified,” said Mr Kalb. But he added: “You face the choice — as an American, as a spokesman, as a journalist — whether to merge into the ranks of silence, whether to disappear into unfettered acquiescence or to express a humble dissent.”
Bernard Kalb was born in Manhattan on February 4, 1922. His parents, Max and Bella (Portnoy) Kalb, were immigrants – his father from Poland and his mother from what is now Ukraine. The family moved to Washington Heights when Bernard was a teenager. His father worked primarily as a tailor in the garment district, but he also did evening tailoring at a Washington Heights dry cleaner that his mother ran during the day.
After graduating from the City College of New York in 1942, Mr. Kalb spent two years in the military, working primarily on a newspaper published from a Quonset hut in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. His editor was Sgt. Dashiell Hammett, the author of the detective novels “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man.”
In 1946 Mr Kalb joined The Times. He originally wrote for the radio station WQXR, which was owned by the company at the time. He went on to write for the newspaper; he was a metropolitan reporter and covered for the United Nations before being sent to Southeast Asia as a correspondent.
His first overseas assignment, in late 1955, was to Adm. Richard E. Byrd on a mission to Antarctica. He once mused that his hardest job some days was to come up with variations on the word “ice cream.”
More difficult was his coverage of the reign of President Sukarno of Indonesia. In 1958, Mr. Kalb was arrested and detained for a short time after revealing that Soviet-built aircraft had been supplied to the Indonesian military. The arrest sparked protests from Western correspondents and he was soon released.
After leaving The Times in 1962, Mr. Kalb joined CBS as a Hong Kong correspondent. He was regularly dispatched from there to cover the Vietnam War, and was the network’s reporter on the ground for a one-hour documentary in 1964 in which he warned that the war was unlikely to end anytime soon. Four years later he won an Overseas Press Club Award for a documentary about the Vietcong.
When he returned to the United States in 1970, Mr. Kalb the Washington newscaster for the CBS Morning News. In 1975, he joined his brother on the diplomatic beat, and they both moved to NBC five years later. Bernard Kalb reported for the State Department until he became its spokesperson in 1985.
In addition to his daughter Claudia, Mr. Kalb is survived by his brother; his wife of 64 years, Phyllis (Bernstein) Kalb; three other daughters, Tanah, Marina, and Sarinah Kalb; nine grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren.
From 1992, Mr. Kalb was the moderator for six years of the weekly CNN program “Reliable Sources,” which analyzed the objectivity of the news media and interviewed journalists from print media and broadcast. He continued to lecture on journalism and foreign affairs into his 90s, including as an occasional panelist on “The Kalb Report,” a live televised lecture series hosted by his brother at the Washington National Press Club.
In 2004, a young boy on a street in Romania sold Mr. Kalb a souvenir for $16: Soviet-era binoculars etched with red stars, hammers and sickles, and crossed Kalashnikov rifles. Days later, Mr. Kalb was sitting with his wife in a hotel room in Athens. In the distance lay the Parthenon. With little time to spare before heading to the airport, the Kalbs peered through those binoculars to view that symbol of democracy from a distance.
“The Cold War had come to the rescue and finally produced a piece of redemptive value,” Mr Kalb wrote in an essay for The Times. “RIP, Cold War. It wouldn’t have been possible without you.”
Dennis Hevesi, a former obituary writer for The Times, died in 2017. Alex Traub contributed to the reporting.
