Claud Cockburn: the original ‘guerilla journalist’ and a paragon of respectability within the trade

H.L. Mencken famously observed that the proper relation of journalist to politician should be that of dog to lamppost. This enticing observation arose from Mencken’s general cynicism – a trait that is always in danger of making the cynic as shallow as the motives he presumes limit other people. 

Claud Cockburn, whom Graham Greene called one of the two greatest journalists of the twentieth century (the other being GK Chesterton), did not succumb to that temptation, even if he was remarkably unillusioned about our rulers and those seeking power. 

A new book on the legendary muckraker by his son Patrick, himself an exceptional journalist, vividly recounts an extraordinary life which can still inspire writers today. In Believe Nothing Until It’s Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerilla Journalism we learn about a brilliant, warm, sometimes alarming and very determined man whose view of journalism should be a challenge to today’s politically engaged writers.

Liberal democratic states claim to value the “publish and be damned” kind of journalism as a necessary part of this kind of polity, yet State curtailments of journalistic activity on the plea of “national security” or “public safety” are commonplace in our liberal democracies and are all too often arbitrary (to put it very charitably).

The liberal illusion is that what matters most are activities which can be generically justified in terms of contemporary beliefs: issues of moral and political importance on which it is assumed that consensus is available.  

Such a view passes over matters of fundamental weight in life, replacing them with flattening tenets which it is hoped are “available to all”. From here, it is but a small step to a set of assumptions about how “therapeutic” education and technical fixes can “rationally” resolve disagreements and tensions. 

The liberal worldview tends to underestimate the fact that some social roles in themselves, including those of journalist and State representative, are always in inherently irresolvable tension. Claud Cockburn was under no such illusions and understood that war involves a battle of wills and that some evils can be effectively combatted through the kind of journalistic “guerilla warfare” that he helped to pioneer. 

As Patrick puts it, “He disbelieved strongly in the axiom about ‘telling truth to power’, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so that they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.”  

Claud Cockburn came into the world in China in 1904 where his father Henry was a loyal and convinced yet not uncritical servant of the British Empire. Henry was a descendant of the eminent Whig judge and literary figure and embodiment of the Scottish Enlightenment Lord Cockburn, who was also an ancestor of Evelyn Waugh. Brought up in England, as a teenager Claud saw Budapest first-hand in the wake of the shattering defeat Hungary had suffered in the Great War and while that land was experiencing the conclusion of the brutally executed Red and then White Terror following the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian empire. 

Initially more idealistic about the First World War than his father, Claud subsequently felt sympathy for the defeated nations and disillusionment over the results of the Great War for Civilisation. That sympathy was to change when he grew wary of some of the nationalistic sentiments emerging from these countries, and began to see in Germany the kind of bestial movement these sentiments were starting to give rise to.

Attending Oxford in the early 1920s, Cockburn studied alongside an extraordinary generation which included his distant cousin and friend Evelyn Waugh, his even closer friend Graham Greene, Harold Acton, Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly and John Betjeman.

From Oxford, Cockburn went on to work for the legendary Times newspaper, making connections in Berlin where he was stationed which would serve him well in coming years. He also worked for the Times in New York and was to witness close up the Wall Street Crash. Having become interested in the writings of Karl Marx while in Europe, Cockburn wanted to see for himself whether the American system of capitalism was a standing contradiction to all the predictions the bushy-bearded prophet had suggested. Yet unlike Marx, Cockburn showed no sign of being besotted by the idea of necessity in history, assuming rather that contingencies, unexpected consequences and preternatural luck account for far more than we might pretend.

Cockburn’s sojourn in the often-decadent Weimar Republic encouraged his looser and more rebellious side but also gave him a clear view of the rise of one of the most potent evils of the age, namely the neo-pagan ideology known as Nazism. And it was in relation to this, using his fluent German and high-level anti-Nazi contacts that he waged one of his most effective campaigns. 

Giving up his prestigious job at the Times, Cockburn launched, at great risk and as sole writer, his news-sheet The Week. From a small office in Victoria, London, Cockburn gathered together information not published elsewhere in an effort to expose what was happening in Nazi Germany. It is easy to forget that during the 1930s in England there was much suppression of such news on the part of the establishment since “appeasement” was the preferred policy. Patrick’s book reveals the lengths that the Times went to suppress the reports that its own German correspondent Norman Ebbutt was trying to file. It is thanks to Claud Cockburn that both the horrors of the Nazis’ rise and the behaviour of many of the “great and good” in appeasing or even sympathising with this new evil came to light.

What The Week showed was that it is possible for a determined and highly literate prose-stylist, prepared to think carefully about how to break stories and make them attractive to readers, to make a serious difference in matters of national importance. This was partly possible because Claud was prepared to take huge financial risks and suffer penury, convinced as he was that to be an effective journalist revealing matters that powerful people would like hidden meant this was the price that had to be paid. 

With great ingenuity and determination Cockburn used The Week  (a precursor to today’s Private Eye) to reveal embarrassing truth after embarrassing truth in relation to a supine government at a time when it most mattered. Gradually, with the rise of Winston Churchill and the subsequent alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler, Cockburn saw what he had so effectively campaigned become the policy of the Government. 

During this period, the main attraction felt by Cockburn to the communists was that they did not, like the moderates, simply talk and do nothing else when it came to Hitler, but possessed a real determination to confront those prone to make “peace” an absolute value, even when that meant surrender to barbarism. That communism was itself barbarous was felt by him less strongly. Cockburn was to grasp the reality of Europe under communist regimes when he reflected on the 1956 uprising in his beloved Hungary, noting that, “The crime, monstrous in fact and in its implications, was that after nearly a decade of absolute Communist power, a majority of people was prepared to die rather than tolerate the regime. That rather than the military repression…is what gives the Hungarian events their crucial, permanent, jolting significance.”

The title of Patrick’s book is a neat summation of an approach to journalism that looks wiser by the year. The other saying which Claud Cockburn liked to live by (though he did not coin it) is that governments do as much harm as they can and as much good as they must. And as Patrick reminds us in his magnificent book, it is in the “must” that journalists can and should try to exert all their means of intelligence-gathering and persuasion to ensure that the second half of the statement is not a dead letter.

In describing how he saw journalism, Claud Cockburn reflected that there was always a naïve view abroad that “facts” lie about like pieces of gold waiting to be picked up. As he noted, 

“Such a view is evidently and dangerously naïve. There are no such facts. Or if there are, they are meaningless and entirely ineffective; they might, in fact, just as well not be lying about at all until the prospector – the journalist – puts them into relation with other facts: presents them in other words. Then they become as much a part of a pattern created by him as if he were writing a novel. In that sense all stories are written backwards – they are supposed to begin with the facts and develop from there, but in reality they begin with a journalist’s point of view, a conception…All this is difficult and even rather unwholesome to explain to the layman, because he gets the impression that you are saying truth does not matter and that you are publicly admitting what he long ago suspected, that journalism is a way of ‘cooking’ the facts.”

Approaching a story with an idea of one’s own, and (in the case of some journalism) with a wish to influence governments does not mean that one is making up the facts. By anchoring one’s story in hard-to-get-at facts which someone somewhere wants hidden, one makes proper use of them while marshalling prose to draw attention to the importance of the revelation. It is an irony of our news-saturated age that, despite all of the commentary, very few are prepared to do the difficult and sometimes dangerous work of both finding out these truths and, most importantly, painting a picture which gives them their proper weight. In an age lacking in hope, it is all the more crucial that today’s journalists seek out truth bringing with them a clear idea of what they are trying to do. 

Claud Cockburn was finally to settle in Ireland and bring up his family in the county of Cork, producing writing of other kinds, including an autobiography and several novels. The last of the novels, Jericho Road, is a re-imagining of the parable of the Good Samaritan. A series of politically-inspired disasters befall a man who has, rather reluctantly, helped the victim by the wayside. The novel has a strong sense of place and sensitively refers to a figure known as “the Essene” (Christ). It is by turns an examination of sordid political motivations and of the inability of corrupted men to allow for the possibility that some motivations may be beyond their all-too-narrow horizons.

One of Claud Cockburn’s close friends later in life was the great satirical journalist and Catholic convert Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge had earlier been a communist until he saw with his own eyes what Soviet reality meant. Claud was to write the following reflection on his friend’s increasingly religious views:

“A person’s reaction to Christ, or the idea of Christ, can still often enough offer a convenient shorthand of his more general attitude to life and its phenomena. Christians are sometimes even vexed by the fact that this should be so among non-Christians or possibly anti-Christians. But in reality this fact simply emphasises that the creation and elaboration of the Christ-myth (I use ‘myth’ in its exact and neutral sense), was a necessity of the Mediterranean, and subsequently European, mind and was one of its most profoundly characteristic achievements…unawareness of the Christ-myth would in reality…inhibit communication. This is not always self-evident to non-Christians who – sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes as a result of anti-clerical wishful thinking- under-estimate the role of the Christ-myth in the consciousness of the Western world.”

An insight such as this, honestly expressed, reveals a generosity of mind of which too many would-be radicals seem incapable. Claud Cockburn was certainly a radical, who had some of the vices as well as the virtues of such figures. Patrick’s book deals with his early “guerilla journalism” and all the exciting adventures it involved him in, not neglecting to mention more dubious episodes including an occasion during the Spanish Civil War where his father purveyed an entirely fictitious story put out by communists in an effort to gain military aid the Republican side. 

His later life in Ireland saw him bring up, with his wife Patricia, three sons all of whom have become important journalists. His autobiography and now his son’s biography should be essential reading for anyone seeking a career in journalism, especially those not too attached to respectability and a pompous view of themselves as the “Fourth Estate”, as though they were part of the constitutional structure of a society. 

If you believe that journalists should be, at some level, outsiders who are a thorn in the side of corrupt earthly government, then read this book by Patrick Cockburn. He told me that in researching it – including going through thick MI5 files on his father –he grew in admiration of what Claud had managed to achieve. Patrick himself, whose triumphs over adversity and clear-eyed reporting of the Middle East over many years, has honoured his father through his own writing and reporting, upholding the nobility of the trade of journalism. Patrick Cockburn’s deeply researched book into his father’s early life presents to us a complex and attractive figure whose attitude and methods can still teach us something about what journalism can and should be.

Believe Nothing Until It’s Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn is available to buy here

(22nd May 1968: Journalist and broadcaster Claud Cockburn with his wife Patricia | Photo by Victor Drees/Evening Standard/Getty Images)

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