In 1944, he published his first book The Russian Army: Its Men, Its Leaders, and Its Battles (21 editions), which was a factual description of the Soviet Army during the war, covering in detail the Battle of Moscow and the Battle of Stalingrad, and contained a chapter on Soviet-Japanese relations.[16][17] It received a warm welcome in the Soviet Union.[18] In this book, he first explored the question of how the Soviet Army managed to stop the German invasion, first in Moscow and next in Stalingrad.[19]
In 1946, he returned to The Herald Tribune as a diplomatic correspondent and covered all the major post-war conferences.[20] In 1947 he became chief of the Herald Tribune's Paris Bureau.[20] In 1947, Kerr joined a four-man team of Herald Tribune reporters who spent ten weeks behind the Iron Curtain, covering life in the occupied Eastern European countries.[21] According to The Post-Standard, in 1948 he was awarded the Legion of Honour award from the French government.[20] In late 1948 he was recalled to New York to become foreign editor of the Herald Tribune.[20] As of 1949, he was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[22]
In 1950, Kerr returned to Paris to become editor for both the Paris and the European editions. In 1954 he was appointed Washington bureau chief.[20] Kerr left The Herald Tribune in March 1956.[9]
From 1956 to 1961, together with his wife he published The American Abroad Magazine in Zürich.[3] From 1962 to 1965 he was the general manager of The New York Times International edition in Paris.[5][3] On June 1, 1967, Kerr was elected the president of The New Mexican, publisher for The Santa Fe New Mexican and several other newspapers.[3] He knew Robert M. McKinney, The Santa Fe New Mexican owner, since the days when he was an Ambassador to Switzerland under John F. Kennedy.[23] Having moved to Santa Fe, he also became a political adviser to Republican Governor David Cargo.[23] He left Santa Fe in 1990.[23]
In the 70s, Kerr started to work on a book about the Battle of Stalingrad and made several visits to the Soviet Union to gather information.[24][25] He was granted access to previously classified Soviet documents and came to the conclusion that Stalin had millions of troops concealed both from Hitler's generals and from the Allies, but deliberately chose not to use this resource at once.[26] Kerr published his finding in 1977 in a book titled The Secret of Stalingrad (15 editions). It gained good press in the United States, but it was poorly received in the Soviet Union where it was labeled as "imperialist propaganda".[27][28][10][2]
In 1982, he published his last book The Shabunin Affair: An Episode in the Life of Leo Tolstoy (7 editions) and visited the Soviet Union one more time the next year.[29]
Personal life
Vivianne Lovell and Walter Boardman Kerr (family archive photo)
William L. Shirer (1940). Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent. Knopf. pp. 121, 126, 129, 411, 428.
Gilenson, Boris (1985). Дорога на Смоленск: американские писатели и журналисты о Великой Отечественной войне советского народа 1941-1945 [Smolensk road: American writers and journalist on the Great Partiotic War of the Soviet people 1941-1945] (in Russian). Progress Publishers.
Kluger, Richard (1986). The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (1st ed.). Knopf. ISBN978-0394508771.
Mashtakova, Klara (2009). Легенды и были Кремля. Записки [The legends and tales of Kremlin] (in Russian). AST. ISBN978-5-17-058056-9.
^Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai; Gilenson, Boris; Maslin, Mikhail (1987). Взаимодействие культур СССР и США XVIII-XX вв [Cultural interaction between the USSR and the United States of America XVIII-XX вв.] (in Russian). Nauka. p. 53.
