"Marvin Kalb is a great storyteller with a great story to tell."-Dan Rather

The chilliest years of the Cold War marked the entrance of a young man who would go on to become one of America's preeminent diplomatic correspondents. Handpicked by the legendary Edward R. Murrow to join the ranks of an esteemed news network that was just beginning to enter a new world of televised news broadcasting, Marvin Kalb takes readers back to his first days as a journalist, and what also were the first days of broadcast news.

The world in the late 1950s was a tense geopolitical drama of Eisenhower's America, Khrushchev's Russia, and Mao's China. Mistrust and strategic calculation governed international relations. Kalb, who had left his graduate work in Russian studies at Harvard at Murrow's call for him to join the ranks of CBS News, brought a scholar's appreciation for history and objective research to his new role as a journalist who explained and explored this new postwar world.

It was also a new world of journalism, brought by camera into viewers' homes. The difficulties of conveying news not only by image but by word-and doing so on deadline, with minimal resources, and in a hostile environment-are alive in Kalb's engaged and vivid writing. He calls his book a "long letter home" and Assignment Russia reads with that kind of color and honesty.

Kalb joins a cast of legendary figures in telling this story of the early days of the Cold War and broadcast news, from Murrow to Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, Richard Hottelet, Charles Kuralt, and Daniel Schorr, among many others-men like himself who became household names and trusted guides to a tension-filled world.