Download issue (PDF) - Nieman Foundation - Harvard University

BooksAn Enduring Story—With Lessons for Journalists TodayDuring the time of ‘the disappeared’ in Argentina, when Robert Cox edited TheHerald, the newspaper ‘became the most reliable source of information abouthuman rights violations in Argentina.’BY GRACIELA MOCHKOFSKYDirty Secrets, Dirty War: The Exileof Editor Robert J. CoxDavid CoxEvening Post Publishing Co. withJoggling Board Press. 232 Pages.It might be argued that “Dirty Secrets,Dirty War: The Exile of Editor RobertJ. Cox” should have been written threedecades ago, most likely in 1981, whenCox was enjoying, as I do now, a NiemanFellowship. He was then on hissecond year of exile, the bitter prizehe had been awarded for making theEnglish-language newspaper BuenosAires Herald into one of the mainadvocates against state terrorism inArgentina.The military junta was still in power,backed by the Reagan administration,and Latin American politics were amatter of public concern for a broadU.S. audience. Robert Cox’s bookwould have come out as a powerfulindictment against the human rightsviolations taking place in Argentinaat the time.But he could not write this bookthen, neither can he today. “I havealways believed in impersonal journalism,the reporter in a shabby raincoatthat nobody notices who writes hisstories without a byline,” he explainsin the prologue to “Dirty Secrets, DirtyWar.” Modesty, he concedes, was onlyone reason; it was too painful a storyfor him to write. 1Twenty-eight years later, with BuenosAires now a favorite Americanexpat destination, the past Argentineantragedy awakens little interest ina country that’s beginning to cometo terms with its own government’shuman rights violations in the “waragainst terrorism.” But it is now whenCox’s son David, at last conquering hisown arduous distance from the countryin which he was born and raised,writes the book his father couldn’twrite. Significantly, he does it in theyear in which his father, 75 years ofage, retired from journalism.Is this story being told too late?Or is the ordeal of a man who sawhorror when most people around himwere in denial still an important oneto tell?Cox’s Time and PlaceIn 1959, at 26, seeking to escape a dullmiddle-class existence in his nativeEngland, Cox answered a classifiedadvertisement for a newspaper job inBuenos Aires. The Buenos Aires Herald,founded by a Scotsman in 1876as a shipping news single sheet, was,83 years later, a small daily newspaperfor the equally small English-languageArgentinean community. Cox saidgoodbye to his homeland and boarded aship that traversed the Atlantic towarda life of adventure and exoticism.He got much more than that. Aftertwo years as a reporter at the Herald,he was promoted to news editor andsoon afterwards he married MaudDaverio, an Anglo-Argentine whoseprosperous family claimed an aristocraticBritish lineage. Cox’s Argentinawas quite different from that of mostArgentinean journalists. Bob and Maudlived in a wealthy, Parisian-like neighborhood,owned a weekend villa in anexclusive country club, sent their fivechildren to an elite English school, andspent their vacations in Europe. Coxentered a fraction of the Argentinesociety that was, for the most part,fiercely anti-Peronist (mostly for classreasons, Peronism being the partywith which the working class identi-1Robert Cox, a 1981 Nieman Fellow, finally did write about what happened to him andhis family—the dangers and strains they faced—during the time of “the disappeared”in an article, “When Death Seems Inevitable,” which appeared in a collection of storiescalled “Journalists: On the Subject of Courage,” in the Summer 2006 issue of NiemanReports, www.niemanreports.org.Nieman Reports | Summer 2009 91