Kalb covered international affairs for more than three decades at
CBS News,
NBC News, and
The New York Times. For nearly half of that time he was abroad, based in
Indonesia,
Hong Kong,
Paris, and
Saigon. Near the end of his tenure at the
Times, Kalb received a fellowship from the
Council on Foreign Relations—awarded annually to a foreign correspondent—and took a leave from the newspaper for a year. Bernard Kalb and his younger brother, journalist
Marvin Kalb, traveled extensively with
Henry Kissinger on diplomatic missions and they later wrote a biography titled
Kissinger. The brothers also co-authored
The Last Ambassador, a novel about the collapse of Saigon in 1975. In 1984, Kalb was appointed
Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and spokesman for the
U.S. State Department. It was the first time that a journalist who covered the State Department had been named as its spokesperson. Kalb quit this post two years later to protest what he called "the reported disinformation program" conducted by the
Reagan Administration against the Libyan leader Col.
Muammar al-Gaddafi. Kalb said, "you face a choice, as an American, as a spokesman, as a journalist, whether to allow oneself to be absorbed in the ranks of silence, whether to vanish into unopposed acquiescence or to enter a modest dissent. Faith in the word of America is the pulse beat of our democracy". In his later career, Kalb traveled as a lecturer and moderator. He was the founding anchor and a panelist on the weekly
CNN program
Reliable Sources from 1993 to 1998. Kalb made a cameo appearance in the 1993 film
Dave. ==Awards and honors==