Melvin J. Lasky, an American writer and editor who shaped opinions against communism in Cold War Europe, has died at his home in Berlin. He was 84. Lasky, a native New Yorker, was the editor of two influential European magazines. His London-based magazine Encounter, which he edited from 1953 to 1991, was one of Europe's leading intellectual journals, and in his 15 years at Der Monat (The Month), he helped chronicle the aftermath of World War II.
Lasky served as a combat historian during the war and was among the first group of Americans into Berlin, entering with Gen. Lucius D. Clay's military government contingent after the Nazi capital was taken by the Red Army. Lasky stayed on as a freelance journalist, and in the fragile postwar years raised Clay's ire for criticizing the Soviet Union. The general was close to expelling him in 1948 when Moscow imposed the Berlin Blockade. Instead, Clay reversed course and hired Lasky as an adviser. As a journalist, Lasky interviewed world leaders including interviewing Winston Churchill, President Eisenhower, former German Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt and former Czech President Vaclav Havel. He also associated with some of the world's best-known writers and intellectuals, including Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and William Faulkner.
| We need a few guys like this in the media right now. He was a staunch defender of freedom. |
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