The Double Life of Katharine Clark: The Untold Story of the American Journalist Who Brought the Truth About Communism to the West

Gregorio debuts with a rousing and rigorously researched biography of her great-aunt Katharine Clark, a foreign correspondent for the International News Service in Eastern Europe during the early years of the Cold War. In 1955, Clark, who was married to Time-Life correspondent Ed Clark, befriended Milovan Djilas, a high-ranking Communist Party official who had been stripped of his posts “and the trappings that went with them” for criticizing the Yugoslav government and calling “for the establishment of a second party to foster freedom of expression.” Clark proposed to help Djilas get a series of articles published in the American press and offered to take dictation, “molding and shaping the words to maximize their impact in English.” (To prevent the secret police from listening in on their exchanges, Clark ran water in her kitchen sink and bathtub and played records loudly; meanwhile, her husband and Djilas’s wife played cards.) Shortly after Djilas was arrested in November 1956, Clark smuggled the second half of his manuscript for The New Class, a critique of communism, out of Yugoslavia and arranged for it and his autobiography, Land Without Justice, to be published in the U.S. Shot through with vivid sketches of 1950s Belgrade, Budapest, and Warsaw; intimate details about Clark’s marriage, and genuine awe for her courage, this is a fitting tribute to a pioneering female journalist. [em](Mar.) [/em]