Safe Passage Travels Through the Twentieth Century

A veteran writer's adventures in a tumultuous century. Bitten by the urge for travel and adventure, Donald MacKay went to sea as an apprentice sailor on an oil tanker in the Second World War. After the war, he became a reporter in Canada and then a foreign correspondent based in Europe during twenty-five years of the Cold War. He covered the birth of NATO, the tragedy of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the building of the infamous Berlin Wall, the May 1968 Paris student insurrection, and assignments in China during the Cultural Revolution and in Africa and India when colonial empires were falling apart. He reported on the last years of Sir Winston Churchill, interviewed Lord Bertrand Russell when the ban-the-bomb philosopher was imprisoned for civil disobedience, met Dr Albert Schweitzer on the revered missionary's journey from Africa to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and covered the 1970 Montreal FLQ crisis. Since retiring from journalism in 1975, Donald MacKay has written ten books of Canadian social and industrial history.