page_title: Louise Bryant
section_title: Further reporting
hierarchical_section_title: Louise Bryant / Further reporting
caption_attribution_description: William Christian Bullitt, Jr., American diplomat, walking toward camera. Other people in picture are unidentified.
context_page_description: Louise Bryant, an American feminist, political activist, and journalist, became best known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of November 1917. Bryant, who married fellow journalist John Reed in 1916, wrote about Russian leaders such as Katherine Breshkovsky, Maria Spiridonova, Alexander Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. Her news stories, distributed by Hearst during and after her trips to Petrograd and Moscow, appeared in newspapers across the United States and Canada in the years immediately following World War I. A collection of articles from her first trip was published in 1918 as Six Red Months in Russia. Over the next year, she defended the revolution in testimony before the Overman Committee, a Senate subcommittee established in September 1918 to investigate foreign influence in the United States. Later in 1919 she undertook a nationwide speaking-tour to encourage public support for the Bolsheviks and to denounce armed U.S. intervention in Russia.
  Born Anna Louise Mohan, as a young girl she began using the last name of her stepfather, Sheridan Bryant, in preference to that of her father.
context_section_description: After Reed's death, Bryant obtained Lenin's approval for a trip to the southern Russian border and neighboring countries. She went by train over the Kazakh Steppe, through areas hard hit by famine, to Tashkent and Bukhara and to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan, interviewing and taking notes.
  She returned to the U.S. in mid-summer 1921, and stayed for about a year, during which she first met William Christian Bullitt, Jr., then managing editor of film stories at Paramount, to try to persuade him to make Ten Days That Shook the World into a film. Bullitt, a Yale University graduate from a Philadelphia family of great wealth, had worked as a journalist specializing in foreign affairs, then as a diplomat in the United States Department of State before retiring temporarily from politics and taking the Paramount job. He later returned to politics and became the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bryant and Bullet had in common their interests in Russia, journalism, and Jack Reed, whom Bullitt greatly admired. Although Paramount did not pursue the Ten Days project, Bullitt was charmed by Bryant and began the amorous pursuit of her that two years later ended in marriage.  In August, the New York American, a Hearst newspaper, began publishing a series of 16 of Bryant's articles describing famine in Russia, Lenin's New Economic Policy, the end of the Russian Civil War, and related topics. In general, the tone of these articles was "sober and at times unsparing, in contrast to her often rapturous reporting in her 1918 stories."
  In October, she was the main speaker at a memorial for Reed in New York City, and she spent some of her time collecting Reed's papers for possible publication. She also arranged with King Features Syndicate, another Hearst agency, to return to Russia to write portraits of Russians. The first of these appeared in print in June 1922 and led to her second book, Mirrors of Moscow, in 1923. Bryant's travels in Europe this time included Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris, and other cities. By late October, she was in Rome, accompanied by Bullitt. Here in late 1922, she wrote about Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader who had just come to power and with whom she had obtained an interview. Gathering material from a variety of sources, including Madame Rachele Mussolini, Bryant wrote a feature article, "Mussolini Relies Upon Efficiency to Restore Italy", published in the New York American in early 1923. She described the future dictator this way:
  I will always think of Mussolini as one of the oddest characters in history, and I will remember him as I last saw him in the great white and gold foyer of the Grand Hotel, under a huge crystal candelabra slouching wearily into a graceful Louis XV ivory and enameled chair.
  His pale, heavy-boned face showed signs of sleeplessness. His strong body was bulging over the sides of the seat; his legs were spread wide over the pale, rose-colored velvet carpet. There was a little cup of black coffee, absurdly delicate, beside his gnarled work-warped hand.
  Leaving Rome to cover the Turkish War of Independence for the International News Service, Bryant lived with Bullitt in a villa in Constantinople in early 1923. While Bullitt worked on a novel, It's Not Done, published in 1926 and dedicated to Bryant, she covered events related to the rise of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the Republic of Turkey. From her base in Turkey, she ventured to Palermo to interview the deposed king of Greece, Constantine I, and to Athens to interview his son, George II. Shortly thereafter, Bryant suspended her journalistic career to focus on family matters.
caption: William C. Bullitt, Bryant's third husband, who in 1933 became the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.[85]
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