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Tad Szulc

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Tad Szulc

Tadeusz Witold Szulc (/ʃʌlz/ SHULZ; July 25, 1926 – May 21, 2001) was an author and foreign correspondent for The New York Times from 1953 to 1972. Szulc is credited with breaking the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Szulc was born in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Seweryn and Janina Baruch Szulc. He attended Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland. In 1940, he emigrated from Poland to join his family in Brazil; it had left Poland in the mid-1930s.

In Brazil, Szulc studied at the University of Brazil, but in 1945, he abandoned his studies to work as a reporter for the Associated Press in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1947, Szulc moved from Brazil to New York City, and in 1954, he became a US citizen. His emigration had been sponsored by United States Ambassador John Cooper Wiley, who was married to his aunt.

From 1953 to 1972, Szulc was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

In 1961, Szulc reported on preparations for a US-sponsored assault on Cuba by anti-Castro forces - the counterinsurgency that would become known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. This reporting, and the stories published in the New York Times, have become the subject of a long-standing dispute about whether the U.S. government tried to suppress the story, and whether the New York Times went along and killed it.

In The Powers That Be, David Halberstam writes that "In early 1961 Tad Szulc of the New York Times, who had very good Latin-American sources, picked up the story that the CIA was recruiting and training Cuban exiles at a camp in Guatemala." According to Halberstam, Szulc was far from the only journalist who knew about the preparations: "The training camp was something of an open secret. The Nation had written an editorial about it in 1960, but there had been an almost deliberate attempt by the rest of the American press not to know too much about it."

Halberstam reports that as word began to leak out that Szulc was planning to publish an article about the invasion preparations, "President Kennedy called Scotty Reston, the Times's Washington bureau chief, and tried to get him to kill it. Kennedy argued strongly and passionately about what the Szulc story would do to his policy and spoke darkly of what the Times's responsibilities should be.... Reston, somewhat shaken, called Orvil Dryfoos, the publisher, and passed on Kennedy's comments.... Reston suggested toning down the story and removing the references to the forthcoming invasion. Dryfoos agreed and ordered the story sanitized."

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