Truth Is the First Casualty of War. These Reporters Tried to Save It.

[Nevilledog]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/books/review/last-call-at-the-hotel-imperial-deborah-cohen.html

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For Ernest Hemingway, successful writing required creating something that no one else had created before — but it also hinged on two elements beyond one’s control: luck and timing. By this standard, the historian Deborah Cohen has scored big-time: her book “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial” is bringing out disturbingly prescient material at exactly the right moment.

Cohen’s ambitious ensemble biography documents the intertwined careers, friendships and sex lives of four hugely influential correspondents and commentators primarily covering Europe in the lead-up to World War II. Like Hemingway (who occasionally barges in), the book’s four stars — John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, James Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and Dorothy Thompson — hailed from provincial America, but took Europe by storm after World War I.

It would be hard to overstate the collective power and visibility of these reporters in their heyday. When Gunther died, The New York Times wrote that he had “traveled more miles, crossed more borders, interviewed more statesmen, wrote more books and sold more copies than any other single journalist of his time.” Thompson’s “On the Record” column appeared in 170 newspapers; her late-1930s NBC radio broadcasts reached millions of listeners. She didn’t just interview Churchill; she was his weekend guest. Cohen recounts an amusing anecdote in which Thompson and her then-husband, Sinclair Lewis, were in bed one morning when President Franklin Roosevelt telephoned. Lewis “handed the phone over to her, the cord stretched tight across his throat, and there he lay for a half-hour … pinned to the bed while his wife … gabbed on with the president, making the country’s foreign policy.”

Yet like many zeitgeist-encapsulating power brokers of the past, the four have been unjustly forgotten today. Later generations of journalists owed a debt to these pioneers, who helped invent modern conflict reporting. “This was before journalism became institutionalized,” Gunther later said. “We correspondents were strictly on our own. We avoided official handouts. We were scavengers, buzzards, out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.”

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