Kuh's Coups

Dark, undapper Frederick Robert Kuh (pronounced coo) last week could stick another large feather in his old beret. As he pedaled his creaky bicycle down to London's Whitehall he could expand his slight chest over the almost unanimous judgment of his colleagues: Freddie Kuh is the best U.S. foreign correspondent.

Marshall Field's quiet Chicago Sun and shrill New York PM were cooing over another London scoop: Kuh had cabled the story of Bulgaria's peace terms a good twelve hours before his competitors came across the story. It is beginning to be news when Kuh is not ahead of a major European story by hours, if not by days. His recent record: the time, scene and dramatis personae of the Hull-Eden-Molotov Moscow conference, some three weeks before it was announced; Italy's surrender, four days before it happened; the basic Allied conditions for peace in the Far East, eight months before the Cairo conference; the European Advisory Commission's working model of terms for Germany; Russia's Polish border manifestos, one to three days ahead; the Finnish peace terms, now coming true.

Pedals and Plaudits. Intense, 48-year-old Freddie Kuh's competitors are among the best of U.S. newsmen, but in the field of international politics none challenges him. As a military reporter he ranks at the top with the United Press's Edward W. Beattie, the Chicago Daily News' s William Stoneman, the New York Times's Drew Middleton. On British foreign policy and relations with its Allies, on Russia's moves, Kuh crowds the top rung with the New York Times's James B. Reston.

Some crack London correspondents only grudgingly admit that Fred Kuh is best in their craft; none will deny he is the hardest working. He never takes a day off. He has some 50 assorted sources he taps regularly by pedal work or phone. It has been said that the difference between a good reporter and a brilliant one is that the latter has known his sources more than 20 years. Kuh has been a correspondent in Europe most of 24 years. Says he: "At least one man I knew 24 years ago was then just above a male charwoman in rank; now he is quite high up in an Allied government." Kuh apparently never forgets a casual scrap of information.

Onions and Bombs. About the only time he relaxes is on Sunday, when he has friends in for lunch at his small apartment for a Kuh-cooked concoction of noodles, bacon, onions and sauces. Even his kitchen is stacked with books. Mrs. Kuh is Renata Boern, a dancer frequently off on military camp tours.

Freddie Kuh wanted to be a newspaper man "from the time I quit wanting to be a streetcar conductor." At the University of Chicago "I ran the college paper and studied billiards." He was in Vienna in 1919 when the London Daily Herald made him its Balkans reporter. United Press got him four years later, sent him to Moscow and Berlin. When the Nazis made it hot for him after he had reported their Reichstag arson plot as just that, he moved on to London. Marshall Field lured him in 1942.

Kuh has been in riots in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, never got a scratch. In London a bomb passed through his apartment down to the basement; there were no casualities. No Pulitzer or other prize has ever come to him. Says he: "But once I won a Kewpie doll, throwing rings around a cane at Berlin's Luna Park."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.