Special JTA Washington Bureau Chief Going to Moscow with Nixon to Cover Summit

The White House announced today that Joseph Polakoff, Chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Bureau in Washington, will be among the nation’s top newsmen who will accompany President Nixon to Moscow for his meetings with Soviet Union leaders beginning May 22. The four-day discussions are expected to include Arab-Israeli and Soviet Jewry issues.

The JTA will be the only world-wide Jewish news agency to cover the historic US-USSR summit conference. A total of 240 American and foreign newspaper, television, radio, weeklies and news magazine correspondents stationed in the nation’s capital will form the press contingent covering the conference.

JTA MAKING SPECIAL ARRANGEMENTS

Special arrangements have been prepared by the JTA’s international headquarters in New York for its European Bureau in Paris to be on standby to receive Polakoff’s reports from Moscow and other cities Nixon will visit for speedy transmission to all JTA clients in the United States, Israel, Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Australia and Asia.

Besides Moscow, Nixon will visit Leningrad, Kiev, Teheran and Warsaw in that order before returning to Washington June 1, according to official reports of his itinerary. The President will leave for Moscow on Saturday and stop overnight in Salzburg, Austria, before proceeding to Moscow the following day.

Polakoff joined the JTA as its Washington Bureau Chief on August 18, 1970 shortly after retiring from the US Information Agency’s Foreign Service. He served for 28 years in the USIA, its predecessor organizations in the State Department and the Office of War Information as an information specialist and policy advisor. Before entering the OWI in 1941 he was a reporter and editor for the Scranton Tribune in Scranton, Pa.