Bernard Redmont, an award-winning foreign correspondent who covered Leon Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico, Juan Perón’s dictatorship in Argentina, the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the Vietnam War peace talks in Paris, and who made news himself when he was smeared during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, died Jan. 23 in Canton, Mass. He was 98.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Dennis Redmont, a former Rome bureau chief for the Associated Press.
Mr. Redmont entered journalism in his teens, working for the Brooklyn Eagle in his native New York. Later, he received a Purple Heart for wounds received as a Marine combat correspondent during World War II. After the war, he was one of the early hires of what became U.S. News & World Report.
He spent much of his career in Paris, reporting for news outlets that included Westinghouse Broadcasting and CBS News. In the 1970s, CBS posted him to Moscow, where he reported on Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner.
Politics had once nearly derailed Mr. Redmont’s own burgeoning career when his name surfaced in press reports at the start of the Red Scare.
In 1948, Elizabeth Bentley, a onetime courier for a Soviet spy ring in Washington who then turned double agent, mentioned Mr. Redmont at hearings of a Senate investigating body probing alleged communist influence in government. Bentley had encountered Mr. Redmont during his early wartime stint with the federal Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.
Bentley, an alcoholic, was an erratic witness at many hearings and trials involving alleged communists. She did not call Mr. Redmont a communist or say he was involved in espionage. But she changed her story two years later when the journalist, then working as a Paris correspondent for U.S. News, was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He was called as a witness for William Remington, a former Commerce Department official who had been accused of lying under oath to a grand jury about his communist affiliations. The two men had known each other in Washington, and Bentley had accused them of having been in the company of her former Soviet handler.
Mr. Redmont denied ever being a communist or a member of a communist front organization. He refused to name Remington as a communist.
The hearing took an unseemly personal turn when U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, who later was a federal prosecutor in the conspiracy trial of accused atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, began asking innuendo-laden questions about his background and his young son.
Saypol asked Mr. Redmont whether he had changed his name from Rothenberg and about his involvement with the left-wing American Student Union while attending the City College of New York in the 1930s.
Mr. Redmont said he changed his name based on the belief that anti-Semitism would have hindered his career prospects. Regarding his student activity, Mr. Redmont quipped, “If you’re trying to prove I was a radical at college, I’ll answer that. I was a radical at college.”
Saypol then asked Mr. Redmont if he had named his 8-year-old son, Dennis Foster Redmont, after prominent Community Party USA officials William Z. Foster and Eugene Dennis.
“I certainly did not,” Mr. Redmont said. “We named him Dennis because we liked the name. We named him Foster after his great-grandfather.”
Remington was convicted of perjury and sent to prison, where he was killed in 1954 during an assault by other prisoners. Meanwhile, Mr. Redmont was fired by U.S. News the day after his testimony. The State Department impounded his passport and, from Paris, he engaged in a years-long legal battle to get it back.
Mr. Redmont stayed in France, scrounging for work to support his family. “At one point,” he later said, “I set a record in amassing the largest number of jobs in Paris, with the lowest aggregate income.”
Eventually, he became a correspondent for Westinghouse, and his coverage of the peace talks to end the Vietnam War won the 1968 Overseas Press Club award for best radio reporting from abroad.
By the early 1980s, he was serving as dean of Boston University's college of communication. He stepped down in 1986 after refusing to endorse university president John R. Silber's agreement to provide journalism training for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
The refugees had fled Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and the effort was being financed through a government grant. Mr. Redmont said the program, if done at all, should be held in Boston to ensure it would be journalistically sound and not propaganda masking as journalism.
Bernard Sidney Rothenberg, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was born in New York City on Nov. 8, 1918. He graduated in 1938 from the City College of New York, where he edited the student paper. The next year, he received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s journalism school and was awarded a Pulitzer traveling scholarship that eventually took him to Mexico. There, he covered Trotsky’s assassination in 1940 for the United Press wire service.
That same year, he married Joan Rothenberg (no relation). She died in August. Survivors include two children, Dennis Redmont of Rome and Jane Redmont of Boston; two grandsons; and four great-grandchildren.
After leaving Boston University, Mr. Redmont worked through the International Executive Service Corps to train journalists in former Soviet bloc countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain. He also wrote a memoir, “Risks Worth Taking” (1992).
The New York Times covered the 50th anniversary of his Columbia class reunion, and he recalled a half-century earlier a piquant observation made by William L. Shirer, the CBS radio journalist who distinguished himself covering the rise of Hitler.
“The lessons I learned here were indelible,” Mr. Redmont said. “When he came to speak to us, someone in the class asked William L. Shirer how long it took to write a 1½ -minute spot from Berlin, and he said, ‘20 years.’ I will never forget that.”
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