Last Call at the Hotel Imperial:The Reporters who took on a World War

By Deborah Cohen 
557 pages
Random House

It sounded intimidating: 557 pages (nearly 140 of them notes and index), of surely dense and scholarly history. And the usual suspects, if one is writing a history of well-known reporters who covered the Second World War—Hemingway, Gelhorn, Murrow, Shirer—are mentioned tangentially, if at all. But the subject still intrigues, and I spilled for a copy—to my great good fortune.

The book's four main protagonists—John Gunther, H. R. "Knick" Knickerbocker, James "Jimmy" Sheean and Dorothy Thompson—are little known today. But in the years leading up to the war (and for several years thereafter) they were household names. Interviewers of Hitler, Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi. Writers of blockbuster best-sellers who not only parsed the tumultuous times for eager general readers, but by forcefully arguing for such things as an end to America's isolationism and an end to centuries of British control over India, influenced history themselves. In fact, Dorothy Thompson—who had a regular column in the Saturday Evening Post, graced the cover of Time Magazine, and whose weekly radio program on NBC reached eight million listeners—was reckoned to be, after Eleanor Roosevelt, the most powerful woman in America. Even her husband, the author Sinclair Lewis (with millions of bestselling books and a Nobel prize under his belt)) lamented that he was becoming known as "Dorothy Thompson's husband," and that if he ever divorced Dorothy, he'd "name Hitler as co-respondent."

Perhaps most fascinating of all, they were all of them close friends. They out-scooped each other, attended Goebel's press conferences together, were kicked out the same countries, and —as the subtitle suggests—liked to hold court at the elegant bar of Vienna's Hotel Imperial. John Gunther's wife Frances, a brilliant woman whose tiny frame was belied by the power of her formidable will, had so much influence over the opinions of all four, she made a formidable fifth wheel to the quartet. Who not only socialized together, but whose intimacies sometimes extended even further...

All of which the reader breathlessly follows. For the true power and fascination of this book stems from the mountains of newspaper and magazine articles, notebooks, journals and diaries, years of often passionately candid correspondence, blockbuster bestsellers and romans de clef that Cohen discovered moldering in various archives. In short, a veritable gold mine of source material from a quintet of compulsive graphomaniacs. All of which Cohen has so completely absorbed she is able to paraphrase, condense, even shed quotation marks as she joins their intimate epistolary dialogues as a ghostly and empathic third party.

A paragraph more or less at random:

Johnny is fine, said John. [Johnny being John and Frances Gunther's young son.] The apartment is fine. I am fine. Please do your work. Finish your play, write more for the News Chronicle. "I am a Penelope writer," she replied. By night she unpicked all that she'd done in the morning. She found news reporting straightforward enough: journalism was "premature emission" in her opinion. The problem came when she tried to write something more substantial. Stop making excuses, John reproached her. "I loathe it unendurably, much more than I've even told you, that you waste your talent so unendingly." No more lists of household chores, put away the cookbooks. Just wake up in the morning and start writing. I'll help you, he promised. "Talent is so damned rare, & so precious it seems to me nothing short of criminality to fritter it away."

But this was in the future, because first the book tracks our heroes through their formative years. In 1924 Frances Fineman, three years after graduating from Barnard, took a flying leap to Bolshevik Russia (characteristically, she arrived with 50 dollars in her pocket). The others too all made their starry-eyed pilgrimages (a decade later, John will score an interview with Stalin's mother), only to be bitterly disappointed by the grim reality of the socialist experiment.

Though John and Jimmy Sheean were only a year apart at the University of Chicago, their friendship only bloomed when, in 1929, they were both sent to Palestine. Almost a century ago (before Israel even existed), the place was already a tinderbox. Warned in advance there'd be a "bust-up" at the Western Wall one afternoon, they discovered that the instigators were not the Arabs (who were blamed), but Zionist settlers hoping the publicity would aid their fund-raising efforts. 

In the Spring of '35, John and Knick were sent to cover the Halo-Abyssinian War, in what is now Ethiopia. The Emperor Haile Selassie feted the foreign correspondents as they waited for  developments (which never seemed to develop); the British journalist Evelyn Waugh, writing for the Daily Mail (while collecting the material from which he would later craft his scathing journalistic satire "Scoop"), sneered at the two Americans for filing reports that—in the dearth of anything to report—were filled with "impertinent personal details." In fact, Waugh was witnessing the birth of the "Gonzo journalism" (which would blossom thirty years later in the irreverent work of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson); when Knick finally scored a plane ride to the battlefield, only to discover nothing much of interest, he turned the plane ride itself (and bullet holes they found in the fuselage when they landed) the story.

But it was their investigations and interviews in the run-up to what most everyone realized would be another terrible world war that made the reputations of the formidable quartet; the book includes a set of maps, detailing the staggering extent of their travels as they criss-crossed Europe and Asia chasing the developing story. In John Gunther's case, it made his fortune as well when his book, "Inside Europe," became a best-seller. His thesis that "unresolved personal conflicts in the lives of various European politicians may contribute to the collapse of our civilization" proved fascinating to the general public. The others, too, had their takes on various leaders. Dorothy, after interviewing Hitler in 1931, found him "the very prototype of the Little Man," and opined that if he came into power "he will smite only the weakest of his enemies." But Knick, interviewing him only a few months later, found Hitler—despite looking like "a rising young district attorney in a second class county in Texas”—to be a talented and dangerous demagogue, and thought it was only a matter of time until he came to power. (When he did come to power, Hitler had not forgotten Dorothy's slight; on her next visit to Germany, she was informed she had 24 hours to leave the country. Back in the U.S., she framed the Order of Expulsion and hung it on her wall.)

 Already by 1933, all four correspondents—despite rebukes from nervous editors to "tone down all the stuff about Nazi mistreatment of the Jews”—had no trouble tracing the main line: Jews were facing economic and social annihilation, as well as a systematic campaign of physical violence. And when war finally broke out six years later, Knick discovered evidence that—in case things went south—Nazi leaders had acquired extensive illegal foreign assets. The news made worldwide headlines and left heavily-implicated propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels "snorting like a bull" at the press conference where he kicked Knick out of the country. 

Even as war raged, India was in the throes of an anti-imperialist frenzy that threatened to erupt in revolution. John and Frances Gunther traveled there to interview Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi, with his retinue of doting females, did not impress. But urbane, Cambridge-educated Nehru, giving a lecture with the Gunther's in attendance, called imperialism "the skeleton in the cupboard of western civilization. Is it possible," he added slyly, "that like all civilized men, John Gunther too is superstitious about exposing it in public?"

But Frances wasn't at all shy about exposing that "skeleton in the cupboard" in an impassioned diatribe of a book, "Revolution in India." And she was instrumental, in 1944, in the establishment of the War Refugee Board, which would end up saving 200,000 Jews. At the same time, she  had been smitten by Nehru's charm, and they began an epistolary relationship that spilled over the bounds of propriety. "I wanted so much to sleep with you," she wrote him of the one evening they'd managed to spend alone together. "Don't write me polite drivel like 'Is it always desirable to achieve one's heart's desire?' You know damn well it is..." 

It's one of many times the personal in this book overwhelms the political, and if Cohen has a fault, its a gossip-monger's delight in the many scandalous liaisons that spiced the lives of her protagonists over their many decades together (and all of them thoroughly detailed in the archives). When Knick's young wife, Agnes, aborts a child she insists is actually John Gunther's, Cohen is able to include soap-operatic touches, like Knick "accidentally" discovering a letter from John to Agnes in one of his jackets, and pillow talk between John and Agnes—because John had helpfully transcribed it all in one of the potboiler novels he churned out between  weighty political tomes. But it's this same gossipy intimacy that makes this book such a rich feast of vicarious experience, and brings all its actors to such vivid life. 

The post-war years were, perhaps inevitably, an anti-climax, as old-school scribblers were supplanted by broadcasters like Ed Murrow, Roger Mudd and Eric Sevareid. "Our time is done," Jimmy announced mournfully to John, on yet another booze-soaked evening. But John had one last blockbuster book to write—the one that secured his legacy, the one still in print—due to his own personal family tragedy. Frances was planning another trip to India when she got a call from the private school of their son, 15-year-old Johnny. Seems his eyes weren't coordinating and, according to a neurologist, "the pressure in his skull was abnormal.” She and John rushed to their son's side—and thus began the tragic ordeal that John narrated in what he and Frances ended up calling "Johnny's Book" (but was published as "Death Be Not Proud"). In its frank portrayal of the inexorable, heartbreaking progress of their son's brain cancer, it was revolutionary, and became the template for what is now an entire genre. 

It's the moving capstone to a brilliant book that Cohen, writing less like some fussily footnoting historian than a psychic breathlessly channeling the various personae of her fascinating protagonists, has crafted into a narrative so intimate and compelling that the reader is swept up in its protagonist's lives as completely as they themselves were by history.