Back to the Balkans

"Until last week I was a respectable columnist. But--well, foreign correspondents are like dancers and prostitutes. There is something bad in the blood."

In his New York hotel room last week, merry-eyed M. (for Marcel) W. (for William) Fodor, 53, one of the oldest and ablest of U.S. foreign correspondents, smiled happily and rubbed his hands. After a six-year absence he was going back to his Balkan beat, on which, he is perhaps the world's top expert, and he expected great things.

"By the time I reach the Mediterranean, I am convinced the Germans will have evacuated the Balkans. When this happens I will be pleased to come in with our troops." He stopped smiling. "I should be miserable writing a column in Chicago* when in the Balkans it was being decided whether the United States, Great Britain and Russia can live together."

Twenty-five years ago, in the wake of World War I, Hungarian-born Marcel Fodor set out for the Balkans with equal zest. An engineer, fluent in five languages, he had been grumbling along as manager of a steel mill in the English Midlands. Postwar retrenchment shut the mill, freed Fodor. The Manchester Guardian liked his occasional letters from Middle Europe, asked for cables, soon hired the shy, whip-smart, "relentlessly honest" little man as a fulltime correspondent. Thereby, the Guardian conferred a major boon on U.S. foreign correspondence.

The Balkans have been the training ground for more foreign correspondents than any other area in the world. And of those trained there in the last quarter century, most have learned from Fodor. Says John Gunther. one of his star pupils: "Fodor is one of the true good men of this earth. ... He has the most acutely comprehensive knowledge of Central Europe of any journalist I know. Half the good work that has come out of the Danube countries since 1920 or thereabouts has been Fodor's, not only his direct correspondence, but--indirectly--the work of other people whom he educates and influences. . . . He educated Dorothy Thompson and me practically from the cradle. . . ."

* For the Sun.

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