Interesting people; engaged reporting

Historian Deborah Cohen's Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War strikes me as an odd but charming picture of a coterie of journalists who were significant interpreters of the wide world -- so foreign, so exotic -- for middle Americans in the 1920s and '30s -- and who have nearly disappeared from our, always feeble, historical memories. These people were part of my parent's mental furniture in the 1930s.

Cohen's core subjects are HR (Knick) Knickerbocker, Vincent (Jimmy) Sheean, Dorothy Thompson, and John Gunther. They lived within an "outer circle" of people whose fame has proved more enduring: the playwright and novelist Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy's brilliant, unhappy alcoholic husband; William Shirer, the author of the magisterial Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; in Britain, the literary Bloomsbury Group; and in India, the anti-imperial movement leader and later president, Jawaharlal Nehru.

They ventured from the American midwest to the old world, young and brave after the Great War of 1914-18. They checked out Moscow, open to seeing a new sort of human being raised up in the Soviet Union after the horrors of war and revolution. Disillusionment in the person of Stalin and with his dictatorship came by the end of the 1920s, as one man and his apparatus replaced the creative moment they had welcomed.  

The United States was not yet much of an empire, so an instinctive anti-British, anti-colonialism came easily. Some of them developed real connections to the Indian National Congress movement; Jimmy Sheean was visiting Gandhi in 1947 when that mystical and mysterious figure was murdered. In the interwar period, Zionism in Palestine also seemed to some of them an anti-colonial cause, a struggle against the British mandate authorities who had been imposed on the land by the Peace of Versailles in 1919. Others were alert to Zionist fascism, an exterminationist force frighteningly akin to American treatment of our continent's native peoples.

But the center of their reporting was Europe, especially fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the European states -- Austria, Czechoslovakia, Spain -- where the rising authoritarian moment played out. They worked for whatever newspapers and syndicates would pay them and chased interviews with heads of state and political leaders, who to an extent amazing today, often took them up on their invitations to talk.  Gunther boasted of having landed British Prime Minister Lloyd George, President Mazaryk of Czechoslovakia, and King Carol of Romania while Knickerbocker one-upped his friend by getting to Mussolini and Francisco Franco. Dorothy Thompson was the first American woman to head a major news bureau in Berlin -- and the first American to get an interview with Hitler in 1931. The Nazi leader had not yet come to power, but his party's popularity was surging.

She was all prepared, she would write, to be bowled over by Hitler. But less than a minute in his presence, and what struck her was his "startling insignificance." "I Saw Hitler!" was scathing. "He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she began, noting the dictator's boneless face, his awkward gestures, his shyness. ... Could such a man rule Germany? He was "an agitator of genius," Thompson judged. Of course his theories made no sense, but she well knew too, that "reason never yet swept a world off its feet."

Thompson was the first U.S. correspondent expelled from Berlin when the Nazis came to power. And with time she became ashamed of how lightly she'd taken Hitler's potential for evil. All Cohen's subjects were viscerally anti-fascist by the late 1930s. Knickerbocker and Sheean served in the American military in World War II; Thompson broadcast for NBC from Britain under the German bombs of the Blitz.

They make fascinating subjects for biography because they were interesting people as well as interesting as journalists. They were premature practitioners of a loose, if often tortured, culture of sexual exploration, their biographies a chronicle of complicated marriages, affairs, and gender fluid liaisons. As proper interwar moderns, they had a faith that they should understand themselves (and fuck better) by undergoing Freudian analysis. They were seldom very happy.  

Their journalism was emphatically not fair and balanced. They brought fixed principles, which they thought of as American and democratic, to their subjects and reported what they observed through a moral lens. Their journalistic employers let them get away with discarding any pretense of objectivity because, I think, the wide world to which they introduced Americans seemed so exotic. How could you be "objective" when writing about a mystic like Gandhi and monsters like Hitler and Stalin? 

We do not, I think, see their like today. Reporters and pundits are required to nod to "one the one hand, on the other hand." We could use more of such free spirits; if we're to preserve American democracy, we need them.