The Gadfly Journalist Who Punched Far Above His Weight

BELIEVE NOTHING UNTIL IT IS OFFICIALLY DENIED: Claud Cockburn and the Rise of Guerrilla Journalism, by Patrick Cockburn

One hundred years ago, Claud Cockburn was in his third year at Oxford. He would grow up to become a merry and piratical left-wing journalist, a horsefly on England’s body politic. For now, he was merely the most charming person many people had ever met. Friends and family competed to introduce him to well-known bores, knowing he could draw out anyone.

At Oxford, Cockburn’s hard-drinking social circle included his cousin Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, with whom he intrepidly traveled when they were 19. Cockburn (pronounced KO-burn) edited Oxford’s student magazine The Isis. He was a bookish young man on the make. After his graduation, he drifted into journalism.

He was a star correspondent for The Times of London in Berlin, where he picked up inklings of Germany’s drift into fascism, and then in America, where he arrived in time to witness the stock market crash of 1929 and the early years of the Great Depression.

His antifascist and anticapitalist politics, informed by his experiences, drifted left and then hard left. He joined the Communist Party. When he resigned from The Times, the paper’s editor wrote to him: “Rather bad luck that you of all people should have gone red on us.”

In his deft and fond new book “Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Rise of Guerrilla Journalism,” Cockburn’s son, the journalist Patrick Cockburn, notes that his father demonstrated “how those in authority can be challenged and harassed by a determined and skillful journalist, even one almost entirely without resources.”

Cockburn met his moment in 1933, when he founded a weekly newsletter in London called The Week. He was its sole writer. He printed it, crudely, on a mimeograph machine.