Claud Cockburn

Francis Claud Cockburn (born April 12, 1904 in Beijing , China , † December 15, 1981 in Cork , Ireland ) (pseudonym James Helvick, Frank Pitcairn) was a British journalist.

Life and activity

Earlier career

Cockburn was born as the son of Henry Cockburn and his wife Elizabeth Gordon, b. Stevenson, born in the British Embassy in Beijing, where his father worked as a diplomat at the time (he later made it to the Consul General in Korea). His paternal great-grandfather was Judge Henry Cockburn. Evelyn Waugh was one of his cousins .

Cockburn attended Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire and then studied at Keble College, Oxford University, where he earned a BA. He then went to Berlin on a travel grant from Queen's College, where Norman Ebbutt , the local correspondent for the London daily newspaper The Times, took him under his wing. Ebbutt, as his mentor, enabled Cockburn to publish much of his work in The Times by submitting it under his own, already established name. In Berlin, Cockburn came into contact with such diverse personalities as the then Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann , the communist newspaper and propaganda leader Willi Munzenberg and the diplomat Wolfgang Gans zu Putlitz (diplomat) . After getting a regular job with the Times on Ebbutt's recommendation, Cockburn reported for a few years from 1929 onwards as a foreign correspondent from the United States, where he had his headquarters in New York City. At that time he reported u. a. about the big stock market crash of 1929 and about the presidential election of 1932. He also interviewed the legendary king of the Chicago underworld, Al Capone .

Editor of the Week

In 1933 Cockburn resigned from the service of the Times because he - after his views had gradually developed further to the left since the stock market crash of 1929 - considered the political orientation of this paper to be too right. Instead, he started his own journalistic business: a weekly journalistic newsletter, which he called The Week . The Week he produced since March 1933 on their own in a top floor apartment in the Victoria Street in Whitehall, where he both the content in one person designed as publisher and editor-in only. He also took care of the printing himself by making all copies of his newsletter with a mimeographic duplicating machine in his editorial offices.

Cockburn was one of the best networked journalists in Great Britain at the time and received numerous informants in important places. As a result, the week often contained important inside information that could not be found elsewhere. From 1933 to 1934 , Herbert von Bose , the press chief of the German Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen , provided him with internal information about the plans and measures of the Nazi government in office since 1933 as well as numerous atrocities committed in the German Reich under the aegis of the National Socialists tried to keep this secret from the public (especially from abroad). The former Ullstein journalist and Olympic rower, Heinz Alex Natan , who had lost his position in the German press in 1933 due to his Jewish descent and who commuted between London and Berlin from 1933 to 1934 , acted as intermediary between Cockburn and Bose . Bose was murdered by the SS in his office in the summer of 1934 because of sensitive information about the situation under the National Socialists in Germany, which he had leaked to foreign journalists such as Cockburn and foreign press editors. Hitler justified this act against Papen, according to whose testimony at the June 18, 1946 session of the Nuremberg Trials of Major War Criminals , with the fact that he was "involved in a matter of passing on information to the foreign press". In the 1970s, Cockburn and Bose, because of their educational work about the crimes of the German government in 1933 and 1934, therefore met the American journalists Bob Woodward and Bernstein - who made the public about the misconduct of the US government in the context of Watergate -The affair through their investigative stories in the Washington Post - or compared with the anonymous informants of Woodward and Bernstein within the US government apparatus, then only under the code name " Deep Throat " (later revealed as Mark Feldman ). Bose, which Jessica Mitford , a Cockburn colleague in the 1970s, referred to in retrospect as the “Deep Throat of the Third Reich”, has therefore been referred to by recent research as a whistleblower at a time when this word did not yet exist.

Other informants of the week were the permanent undersecretary of state in the British Foreign Office Lord Vansittart and Cockburn's old friend Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who was then employed as a secretary at the German embassy in London. In addition, there were former Cockburn colleagues from the Times, who passed on important news to him that they could not accommodate in their own - mostly conservative - organs.

The week was not available in regular sales, but was purchased from a narrow group of customers using the subscription process. The issues were sent by post without the newsletters in stores, e.g. B. at kiosks was available. So should u. a. the most effective tool of British press censorship at the time (the liability of periodicals sellers in the event of defamation or other lawsuits being brought against the content of publications they sold) would be circumvented and at the same time the aura that Cockburn wanted to give the Week - namely that it was an organ that would only be accessible to an exclusive circle of "initiated" who would be able to enjoy the explosive arcane information that could be found in it - and in this way to strengthen the interest that one would show in his work and to increase the importance one would ascribe to the information it provides.

Despite its relatively small number of readers, the Week made a significant impact on public opinion in the UK because the majority of its subscribers were either corporate bodies (newspaper offices, news agencies, etc.) or individuals (journalists, editors, publishers, etc.) who had a decisive influence on the formation of public opinion (or who sat in decisive positions within organs relevant for the formation of public opinion) - and therefore by taking over and affirming the information contained in Cockburns Week within their organs of the mass press as multipliers of this information for a wide range To make the public known and in this way to influence the public accordingly - or that they were persons who, due to their position within the political establishment or state apparatus (ministers, members of parliament, high officials in ministries, etc.) Influence on the policy of the British government or the British state - or at least on individual measures by the government and / or the state. The - at least occasionally - readers of the Week demonstrably included u. a. the actor Charlie Chaplin , the British King Edward VII, the French Prime Minister Léon Blum and the German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels . In addition, the week was attended by numerous members of the House of Commons as well as American congressmen. At the height of its importance, the edition of the Week is said to have been, according to later estimates, at 40,000 copies per issue (with an issue comprising about 8-12 pages).

Friedrich Stadtler wrote: "And this week was, so to speak, part of the compulsory reading of every editor-in-chief of the largest newspapers, which was an award to look into. And that was not only true for England, but also for the continent. Every newspaper had a subscription to the week, if you wanted to be informed about the background of the political events. "

Because of their political thrust, which was sharply directed against the Nazi regime, Cockburn and his Week soon came under the German government's sights: The German ambassadors in London, Hoesch and Ribbentrop , complained several times to the British Foreign Office about Clockburn's newsletter. The National Socialist police officers also classified him as an important target at the end of the 1930s: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be in the case a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the special SS commandos following the occupation forces with special priority. It is noteworthy that Cockburn was recorded twice on the special wanted list: once under his real name and once under his pseudonym Frank Pitcairn. The double listing of Cockburn under his real name and his pseudonym indicates the possibility that the Reich Security Main Office was not aware that both target persons were identical.

Under the pseudonym Frank Pitcairn, Cockburn contributed numerous articles to the communist newspaper Daily Worker from 1935 to 1946 . In 1937, at the request of Harry Pollitt , he went to Spain as a special correspondent for the Daily Worker , where at that time the Spanish civil war was raging between the supporters of the republican government and the putschists around General Francisco Franco. For a short time he even took part in the civil war himself as a member of the republican militia (the predecessor organization of the International Brigades).

In 1938, in the essay "Britain's Cliveden Set", Cockburn coined the term "Cliveden Set", which later became a catchphrase : With this he initially referred to the family of the newspaper magnate Astor and his wife Nancy , who had been MPs since 1918 Ordered by the House of Commons, an allegedly existing group of members of the British upper class who allegedly sympathized with National Socialist Germany, its politics and its ideology and who, due to their great influence, would have managed to change their political line to the secret and not so secret foreign policy orientation of the make British government. The clique of feudal schemers in Cliveden is therefore something like a second British Foreign Office ("An informal but powerful pro-German group constitutes a second British Foreign Office"). Later, the term changed to a cipher that no longer referred to a specific group of people, but with which the supporters of that political school of thought in Great Britain in the last years before the Second World War, who had an alliance with National Socialist Germany, or at least one, were generally described Leaning towards this or a benevolent neutrality towards him or who advocated such an attitude at least insofar as they declared that it was at least worth considering. The factual justification of the term "Cliveden Set" for the specific group of people originally attacked with this word as well as a term for the proponents of appeasement policy in general (or for the elite supporters of appeasement as the center of this political direction) is in the specialist literature controversial, but the term as such has become widely used. In addition to the Astors, Cockburn counted on the Cliveden Set u. a. Cockburn's senior manager at the Times, George Geoffrey Dawson, and politicians Lord Halifax, Lord Lothian Samuel Hoare, and (less often) Neville Chamberlain .

During these years, Cockburn acquired the reputation of an enfant terrible of British journalism because of his methods and his disrespect for established institutions and views : he combined great skills as an investigative reporter and a brilliant writing style - whereby he was particularly good at polemics - with a joy in provoking and breaking with the conventions of his time and profession. A colleague later described him in retrospect as an " endearingly reprehensible " journalistic bully. Characteristic in this sense was z. For example, after an anecdote that has been told over and over, he once asked a friend who was the most admired man of their time and when he mentioned the name of the philanthropist and jungle doctor Albert Schweitzer , Cockburn replied "Then we want to fire a few broadsides at the good old Schweitzer" ("Right. [Then] Let's have a go at old Schweitzer.") Cockburn's working motto "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied has been quoted a lot ", which was later adapted by many journalists as a guideline for dealing with declarations and information that come from government agencies or officials.

The writer George Orwell criticized Cockburn in his 1938 book My Catalonia , which deals with his experiences in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, blaming him for his communist sympathies and the way he reported the siege of Barcelona and him referred to as agents and journalistic water carriers of the Moscow government.

World War II and Later Life

The Week was temporarily banned by the British government during World War II due to its communist sympathies. Politically, Cockburn turned, u. a. under the influence of Charles de Gaulle , abandoned communism during the war years, but continued to regard himself as a Marxist.

In 1947 Cockburn settled in Ardmore, Ireland. He continued to write articles for newspapers and magazines, among others. a. a weekly column for the Irish Times , but also for Private Eye .

In later years Cockburn wrote a number of novels, some under the pseudonym James Helvick. He accepted this after the American Senator Joseph McCarthy "identified" him as number 84 in a list of the most dangerous communists in the world during the sharply anti-communist mood of the 1950s ( McCarthyism ). The Beat the Devil , which was filmed by John Huston in 1953 , was best known . Cockburn initially worked on the script for the film adaptation of his work, but the layout of the same was eventually taken over by Truman Capote .

Cockburn died in 1981, and despite numerous illnesses (including larynx cancer) and lifelong excessive alcohol consumption, he was in good health until shortly before his death and was productive as a writer and commentator until his death.

At that time he had the reputation of one of the most important journalists in the English-speaking world of the 20th century. In an obituary , the writer Graham Greene even called him the most important representative of his guild in the 20th century alongside GK Chesterton .

In the 1990s, the files that the British domestic secret service MI 5 had opened about Cockburn were released. These show that Cockburn and its activities were systematically monitored by agents and informants from 1924 to 1953. In total, the surveillance reports and other materials collected for him comprise twenty-six volumes.

family

Cockburn was married three times: First marriage to Hope Hale Davis, with whom he had daughter Claudia Cockburn. Second marriage to Jean Ross, with whom he had the daughter Sarah Caudwell Cockburn. Un in third marriage to Patricia Evangeline Anne Arbuthnot (1914–1989). With this he had the sons Alexander Cockburn , Andrew Cockburn , and Patrick Cockburn .

A granddaughter of Cockburn, a daughter of his son Andrew, is the American actress Olivia Wilde .

Fonts

• Reporter in Spain , 1936. (under the pseudonym Frank Pitcairn)
• Aspects of English History , 1957.
• Bestseller. The Books that Everyone Read 1900-1939 , 1972.
• The Devil's Decade , 1973.
• Union Power , 1976.
• Beat the Devil
• The Horses
• Ballantyne's Folly , 1970.
• Jericho Road , 1974.
• Cockburn in Spain. Despatches from the Spanish Civil War , London 1986. (Collection of reports for the Daily Worker from the Spanish Civil War)

Memoirs:

• In Time of Trouble , 1956 (published in America as A Discord of Trumpets )
• Crossing the line. Being the Second Volume of an Autobiography , London 1958.
• A View from the West , 1961
• I, Claud ... The Autobiography of Claud Cockburn , Harmondsworth 1967. (Revised new edition of earlier volumes of memoirs; abridged reissued as Cockburn Sums Up , 1981)

literature

• Patricia Cockburn: The Years of the Week , 1985.
• "Claud Cockburn. My father the MI 5 Suspect", in: The Independent of May 30, 2005. ( digitized version )
• Richard Ingrams: "Cockburn, (Francis) Claud (1904–1981)", in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography .

Obituaries:

• Claud Cockburn, British Writer and Social Critic, is Dead at 77 , in: New York Times, December 16, 1981. ( digitized version )
• Alexander Cockburn: "The Greatest Radical Journalist of His Age", in: Counterpunch of April 10, 2004 ( digitized version )

Web links

• Biography of Cockburn at Spartacus Educational

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Rainer Orth: The official seat of the opposition ?, 2016, pp. 392–394.
2. ↑ Friedrich Stadtler (Ed.): Expelled Reason II. Emigration and Exile of Austrian Science 1930-1940 , Part 2, 2004, p. 839.
3. ^ Entry on Cockburn on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
4. ^ Entry on Frank Pitcairn on the special wanted site GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
5. ↑ As a student, Cockburn consumed one and a half bottles of whiskey a day.