Reporting Under Fire (11 page)

In days they became engaged, despite the neighbor's candid warning that Red (whose family called him “Hal”) Lewis was a drunk. The gifted Lewis was a complicated man, delightful when he chose to be and a skunk when he didn't, as Thompson well knew. Still, as she wrote to Rose Lane, at the mature age of 34 she had a new view on love and on loving Hal Lewis:

I approach life with more humor…. I am not nearly so much “in love”—whatever that may mean. I cannot stretch my imagination to believe that SL is the most beautiful person in the world. I know him to be compounded of bad habits, weaknesses, irritabilities, irritancies. But … he amuses me: the first requirement of a husband. He heightens my sense of life. He opens a future for me, so that for the first time in years, I dream of tomorrow, as well as enjoy today. Thus, he gives me back a gift of youth.

Dorothy and Hal set up housekeeping on a Vermont farm with two homes. Thompson claimed to be delighted when baby Michael was born in 1930, and she also acted as stepmother to Wells Lewis, Hal's son from his first marriage. But in Thompson's imperial view of life, giving birth was one thing, and caring for a newborn baby quite another. She had work to do, not to mention that a squalling child would annoy Hal. The solution, she decided, was to lodge Michael and his trained nurse in another house on their farm. That winter, the family lived in New York, and Thompson left for a “fast trip” to Germany and Russia, which to her meant two months on the road. Rose Lane came to run the household.

Dorothy Thompson, nicknamed “The Blue-Eyed Tornado” and “The American Cassandra,” was a household name in the late 1930s.
Dorothy Thompson Collection, Special Collections Center, Syracuse University Library

For Michael Lewis, life with “Mother” was always a series of fast trips for her and long months for him moving from one boarding school to the next. For many boys in well-off families, childhood was like that: a series of boarding schools and summer camps, broken up by family holidays with nursemaids and nannies in tow. Sometimes these boys achieved real intimacy with their parents, but many like Michael seemed more like symbols of children than real kids with scraped knees,
chicken pox, and homework. Michael, though bright enough, didn't share his parents' gifts for intense study and showed a lack of trying that puzzled his mother. He never seemed to fit in. Michael never achieved his goal to be a respected actor; he had inherited his father's affection for alcohol and was hard to work and live with.

Michael Lewis was barely walking when his mother interviewed Adolph Hitler in 1931. Three years later she returned to Berlin. As she wrote for
Harper's
magazine, Germany was a different country than the one she'd left in 1931. When she motored from Austria into Bavaria, she spotted flags hanging from all the houses—bright red with a white circle bearing a black swastika in the middle. Election banners spanned the streets, but they touted only one candidate: Adolph Hitler.

Dorothy stopped in Garmisch and chatted up a tourist from Chicago. He had been at the Passion Play in Oberammergau and had harsh words for the Germans in the audience. “‘These people are all crazy,' he said. ‘This is not a revolution; it's a revival. They think Hitler is God. Believe it or not, a German woman sat next to me at the Passion Play, and when they hoisted Jesus on the cross, she said, ‘There he is. That is our Fuehrer, Our Hitler.'”

German kids were assembled into the Nazi machine as well. Dorothy drove past a large camp for Hitler Youth, which could have looked like any Boy Scout camp but for an enormous banner that stretched across a hillside. It was so huge that 6,000 campers could see it from anywhere. “It was white,” she told her
Harper's
readers, “and there was a swastika painted on it, and beside the only seven words, seven immense black words:
WE WERE BORN TO DIE FOR
G
ERMANY
!”

Dorothy had been back in Germany only 10 days when the Nazi government expelled her. The expulsion hit American
newspapers with a giant splash. D
OROTHY
T
HOMPSON EXPELLED BY
R
EICH FOR ‘SLUR' ON
H
ITLER,
roared the
New York Times
on August 26.

If anything, Hitler's act made Dorothy even more of a celebrity among Americans. In 1936, the
New York Herald Tribune
asked her to write a thrice-weekly column to explain the political climate to women readers. Syndicated to 150 newspapers, Dorothy became a household name, writing about everything that crossed her mind. Her second job working as a commentator for NBC Radio also helped propel her to popularity. In 1939,
Time
magazine named her the second most popular woman in the United States. The top spot was owned by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1939 Dorothy Thompson told a Senate committee that the United States had no business remaining neutral in the face of a menacing Nazi Germany.
Library of Congress LC-DIG-hec-26561

Dorothy Thompson became known as “the American Cassandra.” Like the cursed Greek princess who could see into the future, she predicted that Adolph Hitler would bring the world to war. As in Cassandra's tale, few listened to what Dorothy had to say. Not until 1941, when Japan destroyed the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, did the United States join the Allies to battle both Japan and Hitler's Germany in World War II.

Dorothy continued to rail against Hitler as Germany carried out its program of isolating its Jewish citizens. She began a campaign to expose the plight of Jewish refugees trying to flee Europe, people turned away by immigration laws in Britain and the United States. She captured the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who seemed to heed her warnings about the dangers of Nazi Germany, and she became his advisor. Her support of a Democrat in the White House infuriated her publishers, Helen Rogers Reid and her son Ogden, owners of the
New York Herald Tribune,
both steadfast conservatives and isolationists. The Reids did not renew Dorothy's contract, and she moved on.

Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis divorced in 1940. Her career had risen ever brighter; his star among American authors had fallen long before. Dorothy met her third and final husband, the Czech artist Maxim Kopf, when he came to paint her portrait. Kopf was on his third marriage, one more of convenience than love, and it took Dorothy $30,000 to convince his wife to set Maxim free to marry her. In 1943, Dorothy got her wish and embarked on the happiest years of her life. Maxim sensed that Dorothy needed security and a steady hand so as to keep up her nonstop public persona. After all, she was known as “the Blue-Eyed Tornado.”

As happy as her new husband made her, Dorothy's stellar career started a slow trek downhill after World War II. She had been a strong supporter of Zionism long ago on her first sailing to Europe, but now the movement for a Jewish homeland distressed her. As Great Britain made plans to carve out the nation of Israel from its territory in the Holy Land, it left open the question of where one million Palestinian Arabs would live. Their abandonment went against Dorothy's strong sense of fair play.

When the United Nations recognized the state of Israel in 1948, Dorothy feared that Israel would become a members-only club. In her book
On the Record,
she criticized the UN for ignoring “the opposition of the whole Arab and Moslem world,” and grew even more strident as she traveled to Arab capitals, seeking the truth about their people and cultures. She fought the trend in American politics and journalism to avoid any criticism of Israel's policy toward its Arab population.

Although Dorothy's editors warned her to stay quiet, she lashed out at the Israeli government for neglecting the Palestinians who lost their homes in the new Jewish state. Such criticism of Israel was largely professional suicide in the years following World War II, and Dorothy was tagged as an anti-Semite, a smear she hotly disputed. She struggled for her right to voice her opinion, unpopular as it was, but she won little support.

As her national reputation took a plunge, Dorothy Thompson's marriage seemed to spark a change that set her in a new direction. She started writing for
McCall's,
a well-established woman's magazine, and she began to take stock of her long life. She collected a series of essays she had written for
McCall's
and published them in 1957 as
The Courage to Be.

Dorothy wrote a lovely tribute to “Red” Lewis in 1960, even as she procrastinated for years in writing her own autobiography. She insisted she wanted to cement her place in the history
of American writers, but in the end, Dorothy Thompson, who had so much to say about the world around her, left no words for herself. In early January 1961, on a visit to Portugal to see her cherished grandsons, she had a heart attack and was hospitalized. She died a few weeks later, alone in her hotel room.

H
ungry for natural resources to feed its steel mills and factories, Japan launched its conquest of Asia in 1931. Especially tempting was China's Manchuria province, due west of Japan, and its dependency Korea, an underpopulated region rich in coal, minerals, and empty farmland. Japan began its encroachment of Manchuria in 1931, renaming it Japanese “Manchukuo.” In 1932, Japan's military moved south and attacked Shanghai, China's key port.

The “tremors of approaching violent change” that Irene Kuhn had sensed in Shanghai became real in 1937 as Japan's army swept south through China into Nanking, Han-k'ou (Hankow), and Canton. Japan was a parliamentary democracy in name only; its weak government at home could not contain its powerful, aggressive generals. By 1937, the Japanese also forced their
way northward into Inner Mongolia and China's northern provinces. Japan's government fell under the growing power of its military, and by 1941 Japanese General Tōjō Hideki ruled Japan, its parliament abolished and its emperor only a figurehead.

On December 7, the Japanese navy attacked an unsuspecting US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the US Congress to declare war on Japan. Germany and Italy then declared war on the United States, and the United States responded with its declaration on December 11, 1941.

I think the world is just as awful as it can be at any given moment, and then a second number of people appear at any given moment and try to keep it from being unbearably awful.

—Martha Gellhorn

When she was a young journalist getting her start, Janine di Giovanni interviewed and wrote about Martha Gellhorn, America's best-known woman war correspondent. Gellhorn, nearly six decades older than di Giovanni, was idolized by young women who were getting their start as journalists. During that interview, Martha Gellhorn stated firmly that di Giovanni was not to mention Gellhorn's marriage to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway.

Di Giovanni's book agent disagreed, telling her that the Hemingway information was necessary to her piece on Gellhorn, so di Giovanni included him. When Gellhorn read the piece, she was furious. Martha Gellhorn had good reason for her bitterness; Hemingway had cheated on her, both personally and professionally.

The daughter of a German-American doctor and his reform-minded wife, Martha Gellhorn grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Edna Gellhorn campaigned for women's suffrage and took Martha with her to suffrage events. Her father was equally open-minded about women's roles in life, and Martha grew up understanding that she was to make a difference in the world. She went east to college at Bryn Mawr, one of the selective Seven Sisters women's colleges, but she lasted three years and left, ready to get a job. She never looked back.

It was April 1930. At 20, Martha Gellhorn knew what she wanted. She worked as a cub reporter for a time at the Albany, New York,
Times Union,
and then her parents fronted her enough cash to start life in Paris, which was still the beacon for young Americans on the move in the early 1930s. She paid for her berth by writing travel material for the Holland America cruise line and arrived in France with $75, two suitcases, and a typewriter. She did odd jobs and wrote what she could, selling stories to various magazines and newspapers. She took a lover, the Frenchman Bertrand de Jouvenel, heir to a family of French literary figures and a married man. Juvenal had a reputation. His father's second wife, the popular author Colette, had seduced him at age 16.