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| Alvin Moscow | |
Alvin Moscow, who wrote a bestselling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election, died February 6, the New York Times reported. He was 98.
Moscow was a reporter for the Associated Press when he covered court hearings focused on determining the cause of the tragic collision between the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, in dense fog about 45 miles south of Nantucket Island, on July 25, 1956. Moscow's book, Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm (1959), was a New York Times bestseller for 15 weeks. Walter Lord (A Night to Remember), praised it as a "magnificent analysis of the accident and sinking" in a Times review.
Moscow left the Associated Press after the book's publication, and within two years was working with Nixon, who was running an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for governor of California in 1962.
This experience resulted in the book Six Crises (1962), in which Nixon recalled challenges he had faced during his political career. Nixon did not credit Moscow as his co-writer (he thanked him in the book for "directing research and organizing material"), but Kenneth McCormick, the book's editor, told the Times in 1979 that Moscow wrote all but the last chapter.
After Six Crises, Moscow moved between collaborations and books written under his own name, including Merchants of Heroin (1968), about an international narcotics operation; The Rockefeller Inheritance (1977), an examination of the wealth bequeathed to the five grandsons of John D. Rockefeller; and As It Happened (1979), which he ghostwrote for William S. Paley, the influential builder of the CBS broadcast empire.
Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote the Paley biography In All His Glory (1990), told the Times that Moscow's book "provided the scaffolding for my book--it had lots of dates and places--but it was very much sanitized.... There was a lot in As It Happened that was only partly as it happened."
Moscow also wrote Every Secret Thing (1981) with the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who had been abducted in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army. His other books include Managing (1984), a collaboration with Harold Geneen, longtime CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph; and Twice in a Lifetime: From Soap to Skyscrapers (1988), co-written with Charles Luckman, the architect who was also the president of Lever Brothers.