George Seldes, 104; Author, Media Critic and Foreign Correspondent

George Seldes, colorful author of 21 books, foreign correspondent who interviewed Leon Trotsky and Benito Mussolini, and media critic who earned clearance as a non-Communist from Red-baiting U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy despite the liberal anti-censorship newsletter he published for 10 years, has died. He was 104.

Seldes, who lived in rural Hartland Four Corners, Vt., died Sunday in a hospital in nearby Windsor, Vt.

Active at his home office, writing on his 1937 Royal typewriter and painting Impressionistic oils until fairly recently, Seldes told The Times in 1987:

“Retirement is the dirtiest 10-letter word in the English language. People who retire are only waiting for the inevitable. You have to keep busy. Have something that occupies your time and interest.”

For the past few years, he had considered writing a final book titled, “To Hell With the Joys of Old Age.”

Born on a farm in Alliance, N.J., on Nov. 16, 1890, he began his journalism career on the Pittsburgh Leader as a $3.50-per-week cub reporter, bristling when a story he wrote on his first day was changed to please an advertiser.

Seldes attended Harvard for one year in 1912, but went back to the Leader, unable to afford more education. In 1916, he fled to Europe to become a foreign correspondent, first in London rewriting United Press wire copy.

“I was 26, and I had to get away from a girl,” he explained to The Times in 1985. “Look, in a way, she’s responsible for everything I am. If it weren’t for her, I would still be in Pittsburgh today, probably working on the paper.”

He covered World War I in the U.S. Army press corps, and then signed on with the Chicago Tribune, for which he reported from Moscow, Italy, the Middle East and Central America.

His stories included a verbatim report of a 2 1/2-hour interview with Mussolini which he memorized because an early editor taught him that taking notes only intimidated subjects. He considered his biggest story the 1918 interview with Weimar Republic President Paul von Hindenburg in which the German field marshal attributed Germany’s defeat in World War I not to the popular “forces from within” but strictly to the entry of American troops.

Jousting with a German photographer who claimed to have a monopoly as official photographer, Seldes also won Trotsky’s personal sanction to photograph him in 1922, after noting in English that Trotsky had abolished monopolies and big business with the Russian Revolution.

“So Trotsky turns to the guy,” Seldes recalled more than six decades later, “and he says, ‘Beat it, you fool,’ and then he says, ‘How do you want me to stand?’ ”

In the background, Seldes listed one of Trotsky’s companions as “unidentified officer.” The unknown man was Joseph Stalin.

Eventually, Seldes’ too-factual reporting on post-revolutionary Russia resulted in his being barred from that country, and in 1925 Mussolini kicked him out of Italy as well.

In 1928, Seldes resigned from the Chicago paper and set about writing the first of his books, about covering foreign shores despite censorship and suppression, imprisonment and even murder of foreign correspondents. Titled “You Can’t Print That,” it became a bestseller.

He considered his best book “World Panorama,” which he wrote in Spain in 1932 during his honeymoon with an American he met in Paris, Helen Larkin. (She died in 1979.) But Seldes admitted that the book “didn’t sell one copy.”

His best-known book was “The Great Quotations” published in 1961. Rejected by 20 publishers, when printed it sold a million copies worldwide.

Seldes hit the bestseller list again with his 21st book, his memoirs, “Witness to a Century: Encounters With the Noted, the Notorious, and Three SOBs” published in 1987 when he was 97.

He and his wife published “In Fact,” a weekly newsletter, from 1940 to 1950. In its heyday, the publication had a circulation of 200,000 and counted among its liberal fans Eleanor Roosevelt and Washington watchdog I.F. Stone, who later patterned his own newsletter after Seldes’. The newsletter helped bring Seldes to the attention of McCarthy.

Seldes later recalled that McCarthy attorney Roy Cohn asked him pointedly: “So if the President of the United States were to say you were a Communist, you would say the President was a liar?”

“If the President of the United States and all nine justices of the Supreme Court were to say I was a Communist,” Seldes replied, “I would say they were all a bunch of liars.”

McCarthy pronounced Seldes cleared and sent him home.

Seldes earned a round of popularity in 1981 when he had a cameo role as one of the witnesses in Warren Beatty’s film “Reds.”

Seldes is survived by a niece, actress Marian Seldes, and a nephew, Timothy Seldes.