Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied

September 15, 2024
Throughout Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied, author Cockburn writes of his journalist father's ever-present skepticism and dogged dedication to fact above spin. For readers, it will feel like Claud Cockburn's life often strained credulity. A contemporary of Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and George Orwell, Claud was a clarion voice of the time, including through his own publication, The Week, where he aimed his pen at both Nazism and the capitalist establishment. Claud lived, wrote, and romanced across the globe, meeting history where it was being made, including on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War and in New York City during the Wall Street crash of 1929. Patrick Cockburn writes with a playful flourish and, despite his closeness to the subject, avoids presenting a hagiography. Claud is shown as complicated and stubborn while also being a wholly magnetic figure who was dogged in both holding his beliefs and finding the central truth. A ruminative biography that firmly situates the power of independent, on-the-ground journalism.

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September 9, 2024
A son revisits his father’s anti-Nazi journalistic exploits in this admiring biography. Independent reporter Cockburn (War in the Age of Trump) recaps Claud’s early career reporting for the Times of London from Berlin and New York during the Great Depression, as well as his decision to quit in 1932 to start a newsletter with the aim of fighting ascendant fascist regimes. Despite a tiny circulation, the Week made a splash exposing and denouncing the Nazis’ brutal antisemitism and the complicity of the British government in appeasing Adolf Hitler. Cockburn’s colorful, elegantly written account extols Claud’s charisma, courage, and daring (he risked arrest and worse by going to Nazi Germany in 1934 on a fake passport to retrieve the young children of an exiled dissident, and was almost shot by both sides while reporting on the Spanish Civil War). Unfortunately, Cockburn soft-pedals the ethical conflicts of Claud’s work for the Communist Party. For instance, he dismisses Claud’s decision to fabricate a story for the Party newspaper about a mutiny among Francisco Franco’s soldiers as “a politically inspired practical joke” rather than a breach of journalistic ethics. Though Cockburn views his father through rose-colored glasses, he nonetheless succeeds in capturing Claud’s verve and staunch political principles. Photos.