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The Man Who Invented Fidel: Cuba, Castro, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times, by Anthony DePalma, New York: Public-Affairs, 308 pages, $26.95 Aha! Finally we've discovered the missing ingredient in American journalism, the vitamin deficiency that's been shrinking newspaper circulation and TV newscast audiences all these years. What Americans clamor for is not information but passion. The heroes of the coverage of Katrina were not the reporters who got the most accurate stories but the ones who shouted the loudest or cried the hardest. CNN's Anderson Cooper acquired the most accolades. "For the last four days I've...

The late New York Times journalist Herbert L. Matthews is now an almost forgotten name, except, perhaps, among journalism students and those who remember the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution...Matthews’s front-page story altered the fortunes of Castro and his beleaguered rebels. Opponents of Batista’s regime smuggled copies of the banned paper into Cuba, and within a short time Cuba’s people learned that Castro had not been defeated, and that he had more troops and followers than anyone had believed...

The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthewsof The New York Times, by Anthony DePalma (PublicAffairs, 320 pp., $26.95) A Dictator’s Scribe RONALD RADOSH The late New York Times journalist Herbert L. Matthews is now an almost forgotten name, except, perhaps, among journalism students and those who remember the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution. It was Matthews who, while covering Cuba for the Times in February 1957, got the scoop of a lifetime. Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s authoritarian ruler, had announced that Castro and his small band of rebels had been killed by Batista’s troops three...