Clark, Gerald

Gerald Clark was born in Montreal in 1918. He died in 2005. He was married and had a daughter, Bette. In 1939 he graduated from McGill University, where he had been editor of the college daily.

In 1940 he began his newspaper career working for The Standard of Montreal as a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa. In 1943 he went overseas as a war correspondent and covered the Allied invasion of Normandy (D-Day) and the entry of Paris by the Free French. He was one of the 15 correspondents representing the world's press at the signing of the German surrender in Reims. Later he covered the Nuremberg and Pétain trials. A series of articles on the Soviet Union, accompanied by his own photographs, won a National Newspaper Award (1953). Gerald Clark took photographs on many of his trips, which served to illustrate his articles. For two years he was The Montreal Star's correspondent in New York, covering the United Nations. As the Star's Chief Foreign Correspondent, 1955-1960, he was based in London and traveled widely in Europe and the Iron Curtain countries. He was a frequent contributor to Weekend magazine. In 1954 he made a lecture tour of Canada under the auspices of Weekend, describing his experiences in Russia. He became the editor of the Montreal Star, retaining the post until 1979 when the paper ceased publication. He contributed many articles to the Reader's Digest.

Among many other travels, in 1955 he joined the Hon. Lester B. Pearson, then Minister of External Affairs, on a round-the-world flight which included Asia, Russia, the Middle East, and Europe. In 1956 he covered the NATO Foreign Ministers' Conference in Paris and the Poznan riots in Poland. He also visited Budapest and Prague and wrote a series on Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In 1957 he reported from Brussels, Algiers and Cairo. In 1958 he traveled to Red China; he was one of only two Western correspondents reporting on Communist China from the inside. His dispatches ran in newspapers in Canada and the United States, including The New York Times. Upon his return, he wrote Impatient Giant: Red China Today. It was translated into Danish and German. He won an Emmy and a Sylvania award as the co-author of the hour-long CBC documentary The Face of Red China.

His other books were The Coming Explosion in Latin America (1964); Canada: The Uneasy Neighbour: A Lucid Account of the Political Manoeuvers and the Social and Economic Pressures Which Shape Canada's Future (1965); Montreal: The New Cité in English and French editions (1982); and For Good Measure: The Sam Steinberg Story (1986). His memoir No Mud on the Back Seat: Memoirs of a Reporter was published in 1995 by Robert Davies Publishing.

Created by the Records Management and Archives Department September 2010. Input by Concordia University Libraries 2015-06-17.