He was described by Graham Greene as the greatest journalist of the 20th century and attacked by senator Joseph McCarthy as “one of the most dangerous ‘reds’ in the world”. In the 1930s he founded the Week, which exposed Nazi sympathisers in Britain, and interviewed Al Capone for the Times. Now the remarkable life of Claud Cockburn, who died in 1981, is being told by his son, Patrick, in a book which hails him as the inventor of “guerrilla journalism”.
Having been a rising star at the Times in the 1920s and early 1930s as a correspondent in Berlin and New York, Cockburn, the son of a British diplomat, foresaw what was happening in Germany as Hitler and the Nazis advanced and decided that the best way to combat this was through a newsletter – the Week. This would both publicise what was happening in Germany and entertain his readers with political gossip and insight. An article on what he would call the “Cliveden set”, about those in Britain who sought to appease Hitler, alerted people to what was happening in a way the mainstream press did not. The then German ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop – later to be executed at Nuremberg – complained angrily about the coverage.
