The Press: Without Regrets

When Dorothy Thompson was ten years old, she fell from a tree in the family’s backyard in Hamburg, N.Y., and landed on her sister. In quick succession, Dorothy comforted her sister, glanced at her own skinned elbow, and kicked the tree with such ferocity that she almost broke a toe. That capacity for indignation regardless of the personal consequences was to make Dorothy Thompson, as a globe-girdling reporter and pundit, one of the most widely read women of her time. Her death at 66 in Lisbon last week ended a remarkable, often controversial, career.

Always an It. Between Hamburg, where her father was a Methodist minister, and Lisbon, Dorothy Thompson had traveled far, making news almost as often as she covered it. Arriving in Europe in 1920 with little money and no reportorial experience, she soon made a name for herself with freelance scoops on the Sinn Fein rebellion and the attempted Karlist Putsch in Hungary. She also made headlines with Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Sinclair Lewis, who ardently pursued her across Europe, won her hand in 1928. Retiring briefly to the U.S. to rear a son, after three years Dorothy and Sinclair Lewis again swung through Europe, where Reporter Thompson scored her biggest beat: an exclusive interview with Germany’s fast-rising Adolf Hitler. She keenly foresaw Naziism’s threat to world peace —but she was convinced that Hitler himself would never achieve a dictatorship.

Possessed, as one of her colleagues put it, of the gift of “perpetual emotion,” Dorothy was one of the journalistic leaders who roused the U.S. from isolationism; she reached the peak of her influence in 1941 when her column “On the Record” ran in close to 200 newspapers with a readership of 8,000,000. To some, her vehement sincerity became a burden. Radio station KWK in St. Louis cut her off the air with the explanation that she was too belligerent—”against everybody.” Lewis would sneak solitary drinks in the kitchen when the discussion got around —as it inevitably did—to “It,” as he called Dorothy’s incessant analyses of international affairs. And when, at an American Woman’s Association dinner, she was “nominated” for the presidency of the U.S., “Red” Lewis applauded: “I wish they would elect Dorothy President— so I could get to write ‘My Day.’ ” Not long afterward, in 1941, they were divorced.

After the war, Dorothy found new causes to champion. Though Hitler’s Germany had expelled her, she had developed a fondness for the German people, and strenuously objected to “the Morgenthau Mein Kampf plan” and other schemes to dismember or weaken the vanquished power. Her stand gained her mere unpopularity—never a deterrent to Dorothy Thompson—and she soon became happily embroiled in another foreign policy issue: Israel v. the Arab states. Declared she in 1951: “The partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel is an invasion of the Arab world, initially by European Jews, and therefore alien.”

Semiretirement. But not even Dorothy Thompson could outwear time and the rush of events, and in 1958, shaken by the death of her third husband, Vienna-born Painter Maxim Kopf, Dorothy discontinued her newspaper column, but kept up her monthly column of general comment for the Ladies’ Home Journal; she planned to write a “reflective” volume of her tumultuous life and times. She never finished that book: traveling to Lisbon by ship, she contracted a serious bronchial ailment on the voyage, suffered a heart attack just after New Year’s Day. Her death came the day after she was released from the hospital.

In one of her rare mellow moods, Dorothy Thompson once summed up her career in words that might well serve as her epitaph: “If I had it all to do over, of course I’d do a lot of things differently. One knows increasingly less in this world. So much truth is clouded over by propaganda and misinformation. But I don’t believe in regrets. I have written objectively and honestly.”