Eddy Gilmore, the AP's man in Moscow
The man who would spend more than a decade leading the Associated Press’ Moscow bureau from World War II into the Cold War, marrying a former Bolshoi ballerina and winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process, was at heart a country boy from Alabama.
The kind of guy who would describe a German air raid on London this way: “This old house just shook like a dog after a swim.”
Born May 28, 1907 in Selma, Eddy Gilmore got his start in the business at around 12 years old, delivering the Selma Times on his bicycle. He became a reporter at the Atlanta Journal in 1929 before moving to Washington, D.C. for a public relations job in 1932. He soon returned to journalism with the Washington Daily News, the Scripps-Howard tabloid best known as Ernie Pyle’s employer.
Gilmore joined the AP’s Washington bureau in 1935 and soon established a reputation for his lighthearted coverage of a city and bureaucratic establishment known for taking itself too seriously. Though his overall tone changed when he moved to London early in 1941, his personality still managed to shine through in his first dispatches in what would become more than a quarter century as a foreign correspondent.
LONDON, April 17 — If my heart would just get out of my mouth for a few minutes, perhaps I could write this story.
Outside, the droning sounds like 50,000 bumblebees. Our phonograph is blaring “Night and Day,” but it doesn’t do any good.
There’s an ear-splitting wham from across the street — a 20-foot door blown down. All the doors along both sides of the street are open. The locks were cracked by the force of the blast.
Oh well, nothing I can do about it.
Gilmore’s ability to shrug things off was about to come in handy. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in late June 1941, the AP decided to send Gilmore to Moscow. It would take him months to secure a visa from the Soviet government, not to mention transportation.
He ultimately sailed from the UK on Oct. 12 with a Royal Navy convoy ferrying tanks and fighter planes to the Arctic port of Archangel. At some point on the treacherous journey, Gilmore and the four other Western correspondents aboard learned that the Soviet government had evacuated Moscow in the face of the increasingly dire Nazi threat and relocated to Kuibyshev, more than 600 miles to the southeast. “A grim outlook,” as Gilmore would put it.
Even worse, Soviet officials refused to let the correspondents go ashore upon arrival in Russia until a British officer finally intervened on their behalf days later. They would spend several more days idling in Archangel, awaiting permission to travel to Moscow, before beginning a roundabout train journey of more than two weeks that would eventually put them in Kuibyshev — which “seemed a lovely chunk of paradise as we arrived in a snowstorm.”
It would take more than two months for Gilmore to reach Moscow. His first story from the city that would become his home for more than a decade was datelined Jan. 24, 1942. In it, the correspondent described a capital all but devoid of rubble, comparing it to bombed-out London.
“Please show me some bomb damage,” I said to an old Muscovite.
“Let’s see,” he said, rubbing his nose to keep it from freezing, “one hit right over there, I believe.”
He pointed to the Bolshoi Theater. By looking hard you could see where something had hit, but it was so minor Londoners probably would term it a miss.
“How about some more damage?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, apologetically, “I don’t believe there’s been any more around here.”
Upon settling in, Gilmore would take on the unwieldy task of reporting the Soviet view of the war without seeing much of the fighting, but he eventually got out with the troops.
In January 1943 he and other correspondents got a firsthand look at the situation around Stalingrad, at one point going up in a transport plane to survey the area.
We reached the Abganerovo sector and got the finest sight yet of a Soviet-German battlefield after the smoke had died away. Tanks, silent, frozen, wrecked, half-wrecked and burned, were scattered out literally for miles. They pointed in all directions, giving us an idea of what a terrific battle must have gone on here.
There was a ghostly aspect about these acres of silent tanks. Snow had fallen, lightly covering the tanks, and their black guns stuck out in sharp silhouette. There was no living soul among these wrecks.
The tide had turned in the east, and Gilmore would follow the Red Army as it drove the Germans back. One story from May 1944 described a former Jewish enclave in Ukraine in which the Nazis had used tombstones from a Jewish cemetery to build a tank trap.
In Estonia that fall, he described the remnants of the Klooga concentration camp, with half-burned corpses littering a field after hundreds were killed in the final days before the Germans fled ahead of the advancing Soviets.
On the evening of May 2, 1945, Gilmore walked the streets of Moscow after news of the fall of Berlin reached the city.
The people laughed and cried and babbled incoherently. They shouted, they bowed in prayer, they hugged and kissed one another. They danced and they sang and they revelled in the news — for to most of them, apparently, the long awaited fall of Berlin meant that the end of this war which has brought them such suffering was in sight.
Within days, their war was indeed over, but Gilmore wasn’t going anywhere.
Early in his time in Moscow, Gilmore had met and fallen in love with a 15-year-old dancer named Tamara Chernashova.
They were married in 1943, but only after Wendell Willkie intervened on their behalf to smooth things over with the Soviet government Gilmore had gotten to know Willkie when the former Republican presidential candidate went to London in 1941 to serve as an envoy for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Willkie had met with Joseph Stalin on another foreign tour in 1942.
Stalin would play a key role in Gilmore’s life for years to come, for better and for worse. The correspondent won international acclaim in the spring of 1946 when he wrote the Soviet leader asking him three questions about the nascent United Nations and finding ways to preserve the peace worldwide and Stalin actually answered the letter. Gilmore’s AP story was on front pages around the world, and that reporting coup led to his Pulitzer Prize in international reporting that year.
In the summer of 1946, Gilmore took three months off and traveled to the United States with Tamara and their 2-year-old daughter Vicki. Not long after they returned to Moscow that September, the walls began to close in.
Eddy and Tamara had another daughter, Susanna, in January 1950, and by then Gilmore was more than ready to move on to another assignment. But the Soviet government decreed that Russian women who had married foreigners could not leave the country.
As an American citizen, I could leave any time, but not with my wife and two girls. It was a case of sticking with them in Moscow, or abandoning them. The latter was too monstrous to even think about. I stuck with them. And Tamara stuck with me in times when it was anything but pleasant to be the Russian wife of an American in Moscow.
A jail doesn’t have to have bars and stone walls. I could look out over the rooftops of Moscow to the horizon out on the Muscovy Plain and realize pretty well that our world ended at that not too distant cloud.
To maintain his sanity, Gilmore — always musically inclined — became a drummer in a local jazz group. “I believe that band saved me,” he would write later.
A dramatized version of Eddy and Tamara’s love story formed the basis of a 1953 film called Never Let Me Go in which Clark Gable plays American foreign correspondent Philip Sutherland, who falls for a Russian ballerina named Maria Lamarkina, played by Gene Tierney.
Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953 finally opened the door for the Gilmores to leave Moscow, and in late July the entire family of four sailed from Le Havre for New York, where they arrived Aug. 4.
After spending several months in Alabama, the Gilmores returned to London in the spring of 1954 so Eddy could get back to the work he knew best. He found a city far different than the one he had departed nearly 13 years earlier, but settled in and made it his home.
“I don’t like London; I love it,” he would write. “Next to Selma, Ala., it’s the greatest city in the world, but being bigger than my hometown, it has a lot more to offer.”
That summer saw the publication of Gilmore’s first book, Me and My Russian Wife, which chronicled his time in Russia and of course his life with Tamara. They welcomed a third daughter, Natasha, in London in 1957.
Gilmore eased back into the type of coverage he had excelled at decades earlier in Washington, blending hard news with pieces spotlighting the lighter side of politics and world affairs. The family settled into a historic, if drafty, home in East Grinstead, Sussex, called the Porch House.
On Friday, Oct. 6, 1967, Gilmore took the train home after another day on the AP desk in London. He was stricken by a heart attack that evening and died a few minutes after midnight. He was 60 years old.
The following year, Tamara Gilmore published a book entitled Me and My American Husband. She continued to live in London through her death from cancer in 1980 but visited Selma nearly every year.