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Claud Cockburn invented guerrilla journalism

In Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied, Patrick Cockburn explores the fascinating life of his father, journalist Claud Cockburn, whose cutting prose spoke truth to power with charm and wit.

As he once put it to Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, it wouldn’t matter “ if all the civilians get killed.” Patrick Cockburn notes in the introduction that pictures of bombed children in Gaza can now be instantly communicated to the rest of the world, but the established press itself is no less conformist than in Claud’s time — it largely relies on official information even as it prides itself on being a “crusading profession.” Cockburn believed political leaders without ‘fixity of purpose’ were ‘sensitive to pinprick criticism,’ so that with the right kind of pressure, they’d ‘prove more malleable than they pretended.’ Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied takes its title from a Fleet Street saying that Claud popularized, having heard a senior representative of JP Morgan, on the day of the Great Crash of 1929, say everything would be fine in spite of “a little distress selling on the stock exchange.” Claud had a knack for being in the right place with the right people: he traveled to the occupied Ruhr with his schoolmate Graham Greene; he went to Oxford with his cousin Evelyn Waugh but spent his time outside term in-between Budapest and Berlin, where he learned politics rather more radical than that of the panelled rooms of Keble College; he met Al Capone in Chicago; he fled Hitler’s thugs in Germany, but then returned to rescue the children of a comrade; and he fought Franco’s forces in Spain, where he hung out with Arthur Koestler, met Ernest Hemingway, and helped W. H. Auden, who had traipsed through the countryside on a mule, reach Valencia by car. His book, Reporter in Spain, written on the orders of the British Communist Party, is far better than one might suppose, given that it was completed in one or two weeks’ time; but nonetheless, some passages read like hammed-up lines from a mob play: “very swell,” he has a waiter say of a Francoist “big shot.” Patrick Cockburn says of the spat with Orwell that it ultimately mattered little.

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