The Press: Worst Best

No one knows exactly what happened to Bob Best. Columnist Dorothy Thompson believes he turned traitor because he is “intellectually lazy” and “ignorant.” Author William L. Shirer says Bob Best “stayed too long in Europe.” Some had always thought him a queer duck, with a fanatical religious bent. One correspondent who worked with him said: “I always figured he was an eccentric, but I never thought he was a son of a bitch!”

South Carolina-born, 2201b. Robert Henry Best served in the U.S. Army in World War I, later studied journalism at Columbia University. In 1923 he won a $1,500 Pulitzer traveling scholarship and went to Europe, never to return. He served the United Press as Vienna string man (space-rate writer), then as Vienna staff correspondent for years. He became something of a Vienna figure—his wretched German, his broad-brimmed Stetson hat, his high-laced shoes, his corner seat in Vienna’s Cafe Louvre, his troubles with women (for some time he lived with a supposedly sinister elderly Russian woman known as “The Countess”). In July 1941, U.P. fired him for “nonperformance.”

After Pearl Harbor, Bob Best was interned with other U.S. newsmen at Germany’s Bad Nauheim Spa. He displayed no animosity toward the U.S. there, but he did get special privileges (he slept in a hotel while other correspondents were confined in a train on a siding; he gained weight while others lost from 20 to 35 lb.).

When the others were brought home on the Drottningholm last June, Bob Best stayed behind. His explanation: he wanted to marry an Austrian girl. But beginning last March he has at intervals spouted Nazi propaganda into a Berlin microphone for U.S. consumption. In these talks he has belittled U.S. news stories about Russian successes as “poolroom reporting by mouthpieces . . . jackasses,” has violently attacked President Roosevelt as a “tool of the Jews.” He has called the New Deal the “Jew Deal,” and blatted praise of the German New Order (“I had never known what real freedom was until I came to Germany!”). Calling himself “Guess Who” or “B.B.B.” (for Berlin’s Best Broadcast), he shrilled in a half Southern accent:

“I see no reason why Europe will not demand the life of one Jew for every European who died in the present war, and personally I must say that I firmly hope that such will be the case. . . .”

“Down with the Judocrats, down with the kikes, on with the crusade, day after day!” Etc., etc.

For his treasonous blatherskiting Robert Best may keep, some day, a date with a U.S. executioner. The Department of Justice has announced that he and five others* will be indicted for treason. The penalties: imprisonment (not less than five years) and a fine (not less than $10,000)—or death.

* Idaho-born Ezra Pound, who has been in Italy since 1924 and broadcasts for the Fascists, and these Berlin propagandists: Chicago-born Douglas Chandler, Iowan Fred Kaltenbach, Georgian Jane Anderson, Pennsylvanian Constance Drexel.