Correspondent's Course

Long-faced Herbert Lionel Matthews, 46, is the kind of correspondent who makes the New York Times proud of its foreign-news coverage. Seasoned by a decade of wars (in Ethiopia, Loyalist Spain, Italy, India, France), he holds a top job on the biggest staff (55 men) that any U.S. newspaper maintains abroad. His bosses know their London bureau head as a deadly serious, high-strung reporter who makes his share of wrong guesses, but strives to make sense for tomorrow's historians as well as today's cable editors.

Between wars, he has turned out workmanlike books (Eyewitness in Abyssinia, Two Wars and More to Come, The Fruits of Fascism) on the trouble he has seen. This week, in a new book (The Education of a Correspondent; Harcourt, Brace; $4) that is part travelogue, part personal history, Reporter Matthews gives a long-winded (550 pages) recital of all the hard lessons he has learned on the way up.

By his own account, he was often a dull pupil : "The lessons had to be driven in, on the spot, and almost literally by getting knocked on the head."

Ivory Tower. In 1922 Herbert Matthews, a bookish youth with a new Phi Beta Kappa key (Columbia University), answered a blind want ad in the New York Times for a secretary. The advertiser turned out to be the Times itself. After three years in the business office, he switched to the news department. A reluctant journalist, who still has a tendency to be ponderous and pontifical, he spent much of the next ten years longing to get back to his books (Dante, medieval history). Even when he became second man in the Times's Paris bureau, he writes ruefully, he stuck to his ivory tower, picked up no political knowledge that he could avoid, shut his eyes to the drama of his own century.

But a decade ago he began to learn. From Marshal Badoglio's observation post on a green African hillside, he watched Fascist bombers and blackshirts cut the Negus' forces to pieces. The Ethiopians' valor in the murderous battle of Amba Aradam made no immediate impression on his political consciousness. He came out of the campaign with an Italian War Cross, and no idea that he had witnessed a rehearsal for World War II. "The right or the wrong of it did not interest me greatly," he confesses.

But when he got to Spain, his first lesson began to sink in: Fascism was designed for export, and anybody who did not want to import it must fight it. Somewhere between Valencia, blitzed Barcelona and Madrid, his ivory tower crumbled, and Matthews stepped from its rubble to do the best reporting of his career. Because it was also optimistic reporting, he wound up feeling as sick at heart as the Spanish Republicans.

From that point on, his liberal Education was dearly bought in a series of tough schools. He stayed in Spain until the bitter-end exodus to Perpignan, then spent three years grimly reporting the decline & fall of the Italy he had once admired. He was kicked out twice, readmitted once. In India, he put in eleven months of painstaking discovery, came to no startling conclusion about "the problem," but gave Times readers a memorable correspondence course in its complexities.

No Substitute. All along the way, he was learning his lessons. Some were journalistic, like the fact that nothing takes the place of on-the-spot reporting. (He hated to see Times editors bury his eyewitness accounts from the front lines while playing "headquarters dispatches" on Page One.) Some were bigger lessons, equally obvious but harder to put into words, like one he took from India: "Freedom is not something that you can give away, like clothes or food. It . . . has to be fought for and earned. . . ."

The greatest lesson was political. Looking back over the wreckage of Europe, midway in the "century of totalitarianism," Matthews sees "the democracies and the Communist power facing each other over the stricken field of Fascism. They need not settle their differences by war. . . . But war, as we have learned to our sorrow, is not avoided by appeasement; it is avoided by possessing the strength to hold your own and by using that strength for political purposes."

If he had to choose between brands of totalitarianism Reporter Matthews--who has never been to Russia--would take Communism. His main hope: that he will never have to choose.

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