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A Native's Return,
A Native's Return,
1945-1988:
Twentieth Century Journey Vol. III
(20th Century Journey #3),
by
William L. Shirer.
"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.
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Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.
His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
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At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.
Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.
Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?
No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.
Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.
In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
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"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.
"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."
Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.
"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.
"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.
"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”
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"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”
"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."
"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"
"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite space of the universe. The limited space and time that we can comprehend are nothing in the incalculable extent and age of inorganic nature. Who can say, then, that the purpose of the universe, if it has a purpose, has been to create man? Who can even say that there are not billions of other planets on which there is some kind of human life, perhaps much further advanced than ours, or at least more sane, meaningful, and peaceful?"
"What good three thousand years of so-called civilization, of religion, philosophy, and education, when right up to the 1980s, as this was being written, men go on torturing, killing, and repressing their fellowmen? In fact, was there not a retrogression here? In my own brief time we vastly multiplied our capacity to kill and destroy. With the advent of the bomber, we not only slaughtered soldiers but also innocent women and children far behind the lines of battle.
"We could see in our own country as late as the 1960s and 1970s how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and coolly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre by bombing of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools, and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering—or should one say, cowardly?—consciences were aroused."
" ... In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, given the folly of those who rule us and who have the power to decide.
"In such a world what meaning can there be in life, what purpose?"
"As Gertrude Stein lay dying in the July heat of 1946 in Paris she mumbled to someone by her bedside: “What is the answer?” And when there was no answer she said: “Then what is the question?”"
"The gloomy Schopenhauer found that life was merely the passage from being to nothingness."
"Plato thought that heaven, the Elysian Fields, was the reward for all the injustices and unhappiness on Earth."
"George Eliot was equally skeptical. For her, God was unknowable and immortality unthinkable.
"Such, in part, have been the meanderings of my own thoughts as they mixed with those of others and were influenced by them. They will creep in and color, no doubt, this narrative of one life and of the times as the world moved through our momentous twentieth century. That brief whiff of time, as time goes, that has comprised my own span, encompassed more changes, I believe, than the previous thousand years. It has been an interesting experience to have been born in the horse-and-buggy age and to have survived into the nuclear era."
"I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it."
"“Anyone desiring a quiet life,” Trotsky wrote shortly before he was hacked to death in Mexico by agents of Stalin, “has done badly to be born in the Twentieth Century.”"
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"The war was over. Germany, which had started it on the first day of September 1939, had surrendered unconditionally on May 7. Japan had given up on August 14."
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BOOK ONE
A Coming Home
1945
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" ... Monday, August 6? That day we had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a large city in Japan of which I had not previously heard, just as I had never heard before of an atom bomb. ... "
"President Truman had taken to the air to tell us about it. The single bomb over Hiroshima, he said, had the explosive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. ... The additional destructiveness of radioactive fallout was not mentioned. Only a handful of insiders, the little band of American scientific geniuses who in great secrecy had built the bomb in the sands of New Mexico, knew that radioactive fallout might in the end be the most frightful consequence of all. This would dawn on the rest of us later."
"Somehow we felt, though, that the planet would never be the same again. The explosion of the two American atom bombs over Japan had ended one age for mankind. ... "
"So from New York I set off for San Francisco on April 20, 1945, with high hopes. ... "
"The conference of fifty nations opened officially on April 25, 1945, in the resplendent opera house, built as a war memorial. ... "
"Sunday, April 29. A weekend for you!
"American troops have entered Munich and Milan, birthplaces, respectively, of Nazism and Fascism. The British Eighth Army has liberated Venice. Nine-tenths of Berlin is now in Russian hands.
"But the greatest news of all comes from Milan.
"Benito Mussolini, the swaggering little sawdust Caesar, is dead. He was executed by Italian patriots at four twenty P.M. yesterday in a little mountain village near Como. ... "
The author was called to phone on May 1st, CBS informing him of the news; German announcements came later, but lied at first.
"ANNOUNCER: Achtung! Achtung! The German Broadcasting Company has a serious, important message for the German people. It is reported from the Führer’s headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor….
"The admiral, a dour, thin-faced old submarine commander, came on the air. Hitler, he said, had died “a hero’s death” fighting to the last “the frightful danger of Bolshevism.” That struggle, he went on, would continue. Against the British and Americans only a defensive war would be fought, and if they continued to drive into Germany they would be “solely responsible for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.”
"Doenitz’s broadcast, I thought, must have been written by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Would anyone at this late date, even Russian-hating diehard Americans, fall for the old Nazi line about Hitler’s fighting against Bolshevism? It was Hitler’s embrace of Bolshevism in the pact with Stalin in August 1939 that had enabled the Nazi dictator to launch the war.
"I doubted very much that Hitler had died “a hero’s death, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism.” I was sure he had killed himself to avoid being captured by the Russians. But the lie would be necessary to perpetuate the Hitler myth, which was based on so many lies."
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So far it's still where End Of Berlin Diary began, and chapter two he is setting off to see the end of the Third Reich, when news about holocaust is just percolating in.
"These soldiers of Hitler had been so cocky and confident when I accompanied them through Poland in 1939 and Holland, Belgium, and France that spring of 1940. But now!"
"So this is the end of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich!
"The end of the awful tyranny, the bloody war, the whole long nightmare that some of us American correspondents began covering a decade ago in this once proud capital.
"It is something to see—here where it ended. And it is indescribable.
"How can you find words to convey the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once mighty nation that has ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindly sure of their mission as the master race when I departed from here five years ago, and whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry, without will or purpose, reduced like animals to foraging for food and seeking shelter in order to cling to life for another day.
"I found out something that first week in Berlin that depressed me, though it did not surprise me. The German people did not regret having started the war, only having lost it. I talked to a number of Germans about that. If only Hitler, they said, had listened to his generals during the Russian campaign; if only he hadn’t declared war on the United States; if only the whole world had not ganged up on poor Germany—they would have won and been spared their present sufferings. I found no sense of guilt or remorse in Berlin. Nor any resentment against Hitler for having landed them in such a mess. As for the terrible crimes inflicted on the occupied peoples, they seemed indifferent."
" ... In the golden years for Nazism, when Hitler was riding high, we correspondents in Berlin had often called him mad. But he wasn’t really, at least no madder than other totalitarian dictators, Josef Stalin, for example. He had been, like the Soviet leader, a cold, calculating, brutal tyrant.
"But in the last year or so, after the disasters in Russia and then in the west had doomed him and his regime, and especially in the final months, Adolf Hitler had degenerated into a wild and often insane man. The long strain of conducting the war, the shock of the defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air or exercise in the various underground headquarters bunkers that he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent and violent temper tantrums, and, finally, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, had left him a physical and mental wreck. When his headquarters in East Prussia were blown up by a bomb planted by Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, leader of a small group of military dissidents, he had barely escaped being killed, but he had been hurt. The explosion had not only injured one arm but had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness."
"It was in this state of mind and health that the Nazi dictator made one of the last momentous—and insane—decisions of his life. He issued orders on March 19 to make Germany an utter wasteland. Everything that sustained life was to be destroyed—factories, buildings, transport centers, railway rolling stock, car and truck parks, stores of food and clothing—to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy. It was an order condemning the surviving German people to death, for after such destruction there would be nothing left to sustain them. When Albert Speer, minister for war production, protested in a face-to-face showdown with the Führer, Hitler replied:
"“If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong to the stronger eastern nation [Russia]. Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have been killed.”
"His own personal fate having been sealed, the crumbling dictator was not interested in the survival of the German people for whom he had always professed such boundless love and devotion."
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"I eventually saw a copy of the marriage document. ... The once all-powerful dictator dutifully filled in all the forms except two: the name of his father (born Schicklgruber) and mother, and the date of their marriage. The bride, like most brides at this juncture, seems to have been nervous. She started to sign her name “Eva Braun,” but stopped, crossed out the “B,” and wrote “Eva Hitler, born Braun.” Goebbels and Bormann signed as witnesses."
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"The men checked their watches. It was 3:30 P.M. on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and twelve years and three months to a day since he had become chancellor and had begun to make a shaky Germany into the conquering Third Reich. It would survive him by just one week.
"The men checked their watches. It was 3:30 P.M. on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and twelve years and three months to a day since he had become chancellor and had begun to make a shaky Germany into the conquering Third Reich. It would survive him by just one week.
"The Viking burial and cremation took place to the accompaniment of exploding Russian shells in the garden above the bunker. During a lull in the bombardment the two bodies were placed in a shallow shell hole and ignited with gasoline ... "
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"It was at the Nuremberg trial that I at last learned for sure about the “Final Solution,” the diabolical plan of Hitler, carried out so ruthlessly by Heydrich and Himmler, to get rid of all the Jews of Europe by massacring them. Our own State Department and the British Foreign Office had done their best to keep the news of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews secret until the Allies had won the war, but a good deal of the truth had gradually filtered out to the West. Only, it had not been believed. It had been too horrendous for ordinary mortals to grasp. I myself at first had been skeptical, despite all my years in Nazi Germany. The extermination camps in Poland, where the Jews were gassed, had not yet been set up when I left Berlin in December 1940. Construction of them had begun only the following year.
"But looking back, I have to admit a terrible failure on my part. I should have remembered what Hitler said in his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his taking over the German government, and the beginning of the year in which he would launch the Second World War: “If the international Jewish financiers… should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war the result will be… the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.”"
"Back home after I left Berlin at the end of 1940, I should have done much more than I did to get the facts of this terrible genocide and then report it. I should not have been so easily put off by the State Department and the Foreign Office. I should have pressed the White House, where I had good contacts in Harry Hopkins and Bob Sherwood, and in Felix Frankfurter at the Supreme Court, who was close to the president. But even Justice Frankfurter, himself a Jew who as a youth had emigrated from Austria and who was very much concerned with the fate of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, was put off by President Roosevelt, who kept telling him that according to his information the Jews were being transported “to the East” to provide cheap labor for the Nazis and not to be destroyed."
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"Two of Germany’s greatest industrial firms, Krupp and I. G. Farben, had set up plants at Auschwitz to take advantage of cheap Jewish labor. How were the selections made, Hoess was asked, of those picked to work and those to die?
"Two of Germany’s greatest industrial firms, Krupp and I. G. Farben, had set up plants at Auschwitz to take advantage of cheap Jewish labor. How were the selections made, Hoess was asked, of those picked to work and those to die?
"We had two doctors at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. They would be marched past one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who looked fit to work were sent into the camp. The others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.
"But even those “fit” Jews who were sent to work as slaves in the very profitable enterprises of Krupp and I. G. Farben did not live very long. After they had been worked to exhaustion, they were returned to Herr Hoess and his colleagues for the “Final Solution.”"
"Hoess, the terror of Auschwitz, was turned over to the Poles, who tried him and sentenced him to death. In the spring of 1947 he was hanged at Auschwitz, the scene of his crimes."
" ... Had they learned anything from the thirteen years of the Third Reich, which most of them had enthusiastically supported? I found little evidence of it. They had never really minded the barbarism of the Nazi regime. They seemed uninterested in the horrors Hitler had perpetrated in the occupied lands and in slaughtering five or six million Jews in the gas chambers. Or they didn’t believe such things had happened: it was all enemy propaganda. The Allies had hoped the revelations of the Nuremberg trial would arouse the Germans to a realization of what had happened. But so far as I could see, it had not. More than once I had gone out into the streets and asked ordinary Germans what they thought of the trial.
"“Propaganda!” they said. “You’ll hang our leaders. So why go on with this farce of a so-called trial? It’s propaganda!”"
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"I was going home this time for good. In fact, this was for me a farewell to Europe, to being a foreign correspondent. It had taken me a long time to come to a decision, but I had made it in the last months of the war. The twenty years abroad—my entire adult life—had been wonderfully full. A reporter’s life had been interesting and sometimes exciting. I had come to feel at home in Europe, in London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, had picked up four languages in order to do my job and to get to know and enjoy different cultures, especially their rich literature. I had liked the work and the life. In Vienna I had married a Viennese and we had our first child there. It would have been easy and even pleasant to drift into staying on in Europe forever. CBS had offered me just that prospect: to succeed Ed Murrow, who was going home, as chief correspondent in Europe. It was tempting, but I had turned it down.
"I was going home this time for good. In fact, this was for me a farewell to Europe, to being a foreign correspondent. It had taken me a long time to come to a decision, but I had made it in the last months of the war. The twenty years abroad—my entire adult life—had been wonderfully full. A reporter’s life had been interesting and sometimes exciting. I had come to feel at home in Europe, in London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, had picked up four languages in order to do my job and to get to know and enjoy different cultures, especially their rich literature. I had liked the work and the life. In Vienna I had married a Viennese and we had our first child there. It would have been easy and even pleasant to drift into staying on in Europe forever. CBS had offered me just that prospect: to succeed Ed Murrow, who was going home, as chief correspondent in Europe. It was tempting, but I had turned it down.
"Instinctively, toward the end of the war I came to the realization that when it was over I must go home for good. Fascinating and fulfilling as my years in Europe had been, I would always be a stranger there, an eternal observer, unable to participate really in the life of any nation or people. It was difficult at first to admit this. But I had to face the truth that actually I had not put down any deep roots in Europe, not even in Paris and Vienna, which I loved and loved to live in, and where I felt more at home than in any American city."
"So I had turned down the chance to stay on in Europe. In London Ed Murrow and I had had a long talk about it. He himself—mistakenly, I thought—was going home to become CBS vice-president in charge of news and public affairs. I told him I thought it was foolish to give up what he had done better than any of us on the air to become a network executive.
"“Stay on the air!” I had urged him. “You’re the best there is. Besides, you’re a lousy executive.”
"But Ed had made up his mind. He was confident he could shape the future of radio as a medium of the news better as an executive than if he remained on the air as a commentator. Even more important, he said, television was looming in the near future and in his new job he felt he could help develop it into a tremendous force in purveying, as no other medium could, the news. Why not join him, he said, as his assistant? We could do great things together.
"But I was an even worse executive, I told him, than he was. I had no competence whatsoever. I would like to stay on the air as a reporter and a commentator, continue my Sunday column for the New York Herald-Tribune and its syndicate, write an occasional piece for the magazines, and, if I could find time, do another book. My first book, Berlin Diary, published in 1941, had done quite well. I did not tell Ed that my secret passion was to write books and that ultimately I hoped to end up doing just that. I didn’t quite trust myself. Like most other journalists I would probably put off writing books simply because a steady job gave one some kind of security. I doubted that I had the guts to give up a regular salary check and strike out into the uncertain world of writing full-time.
"Ed did not like my reply, and asked me to think it over. But I, too, had made up my mind."
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BOOK TWO
The First Two Years
1945–1947
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Shirer writes about being home with wife and daughters for Xmas and assuring them he was home for good.
Thus far, the material is largely familiar from his earlier work. Possibly he didn't cover the traitors in the earlier work, but otherwise it's making one wonder why he duplicated here what he covered well in his End Of The Berlin Diary. Unless, of course, that was written later.
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"The adjustment, so difficult for some of my returning colleagues and impossible for a few who drifted back to Europe and uncertain existence, was easier than I expected. True, I missed the life we had led before the war in Paris, London, Vienna, Rome—even in Berlin. But not as much as I feared. New York, I found, had practically all the things I liked in the Old World capitals: good libraries, art museums, theaters, symphony orchestras, chamber music ensembles, ballet, and opera.
"The adjustment, so difficult for some of my returning colleagues and impossible for a few who drifted back to Europe and uncertain existence, was easier than I expected. True, I missed the life we had led before the war in Paris, London, Vienna, Rome—even in Berlin. But not as much as I feared. New York, I found, had practically all the things I liked in the Old World capitals: good libraries, art museums, theaters, symphony orchestras, chamber music ensembles, ballet, and opera.
"And there was in the air of New York City an electricity, a surging vitality, that the cities of Europe lacked and that made living vibrant and stirred you up and made the blood tingle. It made you feel as if there was nothing impossible under the sun if you wanted it badly enough in your work and in your life."
Funnily enough, that's familiar. All but being cosy with a home and family, that is. Most migrants do not have those, not until settling in careers, anyway, not when one enters as a single student.
"The work in radio kept me busy enough, but I had added other jobs to it. In 1942 the New York Herald-Tribune had asked me to do a weekly syndicated column on propaganda, which the belligerents, especially Nazi Germany, were using widely as an important weapon of war. The paper called it “The Propaganda Front,” which I did not like, but in time I strayed widely from the subject, writing what I pleased about the war and the eventual peace and other aspects of foreign affairs, which in a sense had become, after twenty years abroad as a foreign correspondent, my principal lifework. This column enabled me to keep my finger in print journalism, my first love, where I had got my start. It kept sharpened my facility to write."
"Broadcasting regularly, I found, gave one a peculiar notoriety. Invitations to speak, to lecture, to debate, poured in. And just to keep my finger in that world, too, I accepted a few. For me it offered a chance to do what, among other things, I had come home to do: participate, however modestly, in the affairs of my country. On the platform, especially in rough-and-tumble debates, you could express your opinions more thoroughly than on radio. CBS was still, quite unsuccessfully, trying to prevent us from expressing opinions on the air. I did not particularly like to lecture or to deliver a long set speech. For one thing, it took me weeks to prepare. Unlike some of my colleagues on the lecture circuit, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, I could not talk at length ad lib. But I found I could do it when I got caught up in debate. The debates were also humbling. Sometimes I got clobbered. There is an entry in my diary for Thursday, April 11, 1946. “Got quite a drubbing at Town Hall [New York] tonight.” It was a debate over a popular radio program, “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” on the Russian-Iranian dispute, with Max Lerner and me pitted against two old friends, Louis Fischer and Edgar Mowrer, both veteran European foreign correspondents. “I was booed by the audience,” I noted. It was easy, with the notoriety and the constant publicity that radio brought, to get puffed up about yourself. The public debates brought me down a notch or two."
Shirer writes about various colleagues of yore with whom he reconnected, such as Dorothy Thompson , Joseph Barnes, and more.
"Jim Thurber was my oldest friend. It was he who had been sitting around the copy desk of the Paris Chicago Tribune one sweltering August evening in 1925 when I, age twenty-one and just out of a small Iowa college, having wangled a job at the last moment before a scheduled departure for home,13 had slipped into the slot next to him. We had become good friends in Paris and kept in touch after he went home toward the end of the 1920s and eventually, after the usual struggle, became a well-known writer and cartoonist, perhaps the best humorist in the country and a bright light at The New Yorker. Now we renewed our friendship. His eyesight was failing him; he had lost one eye in a freak accident in his youth. And though this was a blow to him as a creator of wonderfully humorous cartoons for the New Yorker, he did not complain. He and his wife, Helen, spoke of leaving New York soon and settling in West Cornwall, Connecticut."
"Kay Boyle was one of the oldest of the friends I met again. We had met in Paris during the late 1920s. She was a well-known, flamboyant figure among the Left Bank Americans then, but more serious than most, fiercely devoted to her writing and to the new currents that were stirring in Paris in those days from James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, transition, Hemingway, and others. She was a close and devoted friend of Joyce (but not of Stein) and worked with Jolas and his collaborators at transition to shake up our language—transition was fiercely devoted to what it called “the revolution of the word.” It seemed to me in those heady days on the Left Bank that Kay Boyle was the most talented of the American women writers in Paris. Fifty years later, I would say that there can be no doubt of it. She has continued over half a century to turn out notable fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. At eighty-four, as this is written, she is still going strong, writing and teaching.
"During the war Kay had married Joseph von Franckenstein, who came from an old Austrian family in the Tyrol. His cousin had been the Austrian ambassador in London at the time of the Anschluss in 1938 when Hitler grabbed Austria, and he had immediately resigned his post rather than serve the Nazis. The British paid him an unusual honor. They gave him British citizenship and a knighthood to boot. Kay brought Joseph to America early in the war. Soon he helped organize a unit of ski troops for the U.S. Army that trained in the Colorado Rockies. He went to Italy with them, fought against the Germans there, and as the war moved toward its climax volunteered to parachute behind German lines in his native Tyrol to organize the Resistance forces there, sabotage the retreating Germans, and furnish intelligence by radio for the advancing American troops. He was captured, however, by the Waffen-S.S., court-martialed as a spy, and sentenced to death. Miraculously, he was rescued by an American patrol just as he was about to be shot. How the United States government rewarded this hero who had risked his life for his adopted country will be duly recounted. It is a shameful and shabby story."
Shirer recounts the stories of travails of John Carter Vincent and Ed Snow.
" ... To think that Edgar Snow, in the end, had to be rehabilitated by Richard Nixon!"
" ... Van Wyck Brooks, at that time a neighbor in New York, invited me to have dinner with Helen Keller. Never had I looked forward so much to meeting someone, with the exception of Gandhi, when I went out to India. ... To become well educated, a cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, well versed in literature and history, a master of several foreign languages. It was an almost unimaginable achievement. And it was due not only to Helen Keller’s genius but to the genius of her teacher and companion, Anne Sullivan, later Mrs. John Macy, who took over her pupil at the age of seven and remained with her until her own death in 1936 when Miss Keller was fifty-six. She was replaced by another remarkable woman, Miss Polly Thomson."
"To my surprise, she said she had been an “avid listener” to my broadcasts from Berlin (and to those of Ed Murrow from London), and she wanted to know, she said, how I had managed to survive the long years in Nazi Germany. She of course had not actually heard our broadcasts, but Polly Thomson had communicated them to her by what they called the “manual alphabet”—the tapping out of the words on her hand."
"In her letter about our meeting, dated February 8, 1947, and mailed from her home in Connecticut, she mentioned this phenomenon. “Memory has preserved for me vibrations from your brave search for truth amid falsehood.” Apparently she had felt these from my broadcasts from Germany.
"I had mailed her after our dinner meeting an inscribed copy of my book, Berlin Diary, and also a copy to Polly Thomson. She thanked me warmly: “It is not easy to thank you for a gift so eloquent of your warm-heartedness. …When I feel the pages of your diary again under my fingertips, I shall be able to gain fresh instruction from the facts you recorded, though caught in an iron ring of surveillance and reviving barbarism. What a rare urge to opportunity and adventure it must have taken to stay as long as you did in that hell on earth.”
"At one juncture in our talk, Miss Keller had expressed a passionate desire to visit Russia. She thought the Russian people had shown extraordinary bravery during the war and she was anxious to talk to some of them and to see what they were doing for their blind. She feared the war had probably left thousands of soldiers without eyesight. I suggested that perhaps Joe Barnes, a former Moscow correspondent of the Herald-Tribune and fluent in Russian, might be of help to her and might even go along with her as interpreter and guide. He had served Wendell Willkie in this capacity there early in the war."
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"Berlin Diary, which Helen Keller overpraised so much that evening and in her letter, was my first book to get published. ... "
" ...as my job as a roving foreign correspondent swept me through Europe and parts of Asia at times of great upheaval and change in the late 1920s and through the entire decade of the 1930s, it occurred to me that these journals, recording events on the spot, might not be of use to only me as the raw material of contemporary history for writing books, but might themselves eventually be made into a book.
"I was particularly conscious of this when I arrived in Berlin at the end of the summer of 1934 and began to report on the rise of Adolf Hitler’s paranoiac Third Reich. ... And it became obvious to me that this mad and violent Nazi dictator, who had bamboozled the German people into giving him their fanatical support and into following him blindly and obediently no matter where, was going to decide before long the fate of Europe and perhaps the world. He was lurching down the road to conquest and war. He was threatening to exterminate all those who stood in his way, at home and abroad, and even those too unempowered to stand in his way, the Jews. However unpleasant, however much it sickened, this was becoming the most important story an American reporter could cover."
" ... In a diary I could get in so much that I had to keep out of my dispatches and broadcasts. There was no prior censorship in peacetime Nazi Germany of my cables, and, later, of my broadcasts. But I knew—every American correspondent who worked in a totalitarian country, Fascist or Communist, knew—that there was a fine line beyond which one did not go—if one wished to remain and work in the country for any time at all. If one stepped over the line, one was expelled. It happened all the time in Nazi Berlin. I was warned and threatened, and once the hysterical Nazi press called for my expulsion, but I managed to stay on. Probably, I figured, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the head of the Propaganda Ministry, who with Hitler decided who among the foreign correspondents would stay and who from time to time would get booted out, concluded that the advantages of allowing a correspondent who obviously detested the regime to remain (it showed that Hitler could take criticism, at least from a foreigner, and that he had nothing to hide) outweighed the disadvantages of having unpleasant happenings reported abroad.
"In July 1940, I had returned from Paris to Berlin after the fall of France, despondent at the turn the war had taken. The supposedly strong French army had been easily routed in six weeks. Actually, as I had seen while racing through France as an American correspondent with the great German Sixth Army (great until it was destroyed at Stalingrad some three years later), the French had really not fought, as they had so valiantly against the Germans in the First World War. The month before, Hitler had conquered and occupied Denmark and Norway. He now stood astride most of Europe, from the Vistula in Poland to the Atlantic, from the Norwegian North Cape to the Pyrenees along the French-Spanish frontier. Only England stood in his way of total conquest of Europe. And the British, having lost most of their arms in the miraculous but costly evacuation of Dunkirk, seemed hardly able to repel the invasion of what now we had to accept as the most formidable army of all time. Faint hearts were predicting that the British would have to capitulate too, as the French had."
"I wrote up my diary notes, scribbled into little pocket notebooks during the Battle of France. The Germans, after all, had invented and carried out a new and revolutionary kind of warfare—the Blitzkrieg. Determined not to get bogged down by the trench war of 1914–1918, they had raced down the roads of Holland, Belgium, and France, softening up the resistance by saturation bombing and then hitting what was left with swarms of tanks. It had been almost a parade. The Netherlands had been overrun in less than a week, Belgium in two, and France in six. I was one of the few neutral observers who had followed at first hand this formidable army and observed its completely new tactics of attack. I thought my diaries of the campaign in the west would make a good story for American magazines and incidentally interest our military people.
"I sent the diaries off to my agent in New York and urged him to try to sell them to one of the “slick” magazines. I needed some money to finance the trip home for Tess and our two-year-old child, Eileen Inga. Tess had kept open our CBS bureau in Geneva while I was away in Germany, but she had received no compensation. We decided, in view of events, that it would be better to close the bureau and give up our house, and for Tess and our child to get off to America until we could see what the situation would be in Europe. The prospect of Tess and Eileen leaving relieved me, but it also depressed me. I would no longer be able to get out periodically from Nazi Germany to Geneva to see them and restore my frayed nerves. There would be an end to even the little family life we had been able to preserve since our marriage nine years before.
"Late in August, the Germans flew us correspondents up to the Channel to watch the Luftwaffe begin its all-out onslaught on Britain and to prepare to cover the invasion. A couple of weeks there convinced me that the Germans were not going to invade, though they urged us correspondents to say so, to scare and pressure the British. The Germans simply did not have the shipping to move a large army across the choppy Channel. That was the first good news for me since the war began. While in northern France, I also learned that the army was beginning to send a number of divisions from the west to the “eastern front.” Since there was no eastern front, this could only mean the Germans were beginning to mass troops against Russia, then a virtual Nazi ally. To me, this was also good news. It meant the unholy alliance of Stalin and Hitler was breaking up. If Hitler took on the Soviet Union before Britain was conquered in the west, he would, I thought, be biting off more than he could chew."
"Tess and Eileen Inga left Geneva for home that fall. It was a sad parting. I had no idea if their bus would get through to Barcelona as it struggled through German-occupied France. It was a two-day trip. The bus took along its own gas, and food and water for the passengers. There had been a mournful scene at the bus station in Geneva. Scores of Jews, desperate to get away, had tried to climb on the bus, and because it was full had been turned away.
"Back in Berlin I had increasing battles with the Nazi censors. The Germans were resentful that I had not fallen for the propaganda all autumn that they were on the point of invading Britain. They began to cut more and more meat out of my broadcasts. Some evenings, when they hacked out most of my text, I refused to go on the air. Once, when this happened, the German Broadcasting Company cabled CBS in New York their “regret” that I had “arrived too late to do the broadcast.” By October I knew my usefulness as an American reporter in Berlin was over. A German friend in a position to know tipped me that the government was cooking up an espionage case against me. I was to be accused of being a spy, of using my broadcasts to CBS to get out coded messages to enemy intelligence. I decided to go home."
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Shirer had signed up with Alfred Knopf because Blanche Knopf, his wife and partner, had been a friend, and moreover, had encouraged Shirer to write up his diaries into a book.
"“Take this. Scrap it and write me a straight book—with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
" ... It appeared that nearly every publisher in New York wanted to publish my Berlin diaries as a book. They wired, telephoned, and wrote me. Even the magazine tycoons were interested. Henry Luce, over at Time and Life, sent two of his top editors to my hotel to persuade me to do an article. DeWitt Wallace, editor and owner of Reader’s Digest, came over himself to my cubbyhole of a temporary office at CBS and demanded I do a piece for him. William Shawn, managing editor of The New Yorker, wrote, “Please keep us in mind.”
"This was quite a contrast to my experience of some years before during the year off in Spain, when we were broke and couldn’t interest a single American editor or publisher in anything I was writing. It was different too from a few months before when all the big magazines, including Time, Life, and the Digest, had turned down my diaries of the German triumph in the west. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this sudden and unexpected attention. I even got a kick out of a weekend out at Oyster Bay as the guest of Kermit Roosevelt, then a power in a large New York publishing house, who was also pressuring me to give him the book. I shall never forget one elderly, white-haired, strong-faced woman of the T. R. Roosevelt clan sitting for hours embroidering a pillow on which was stenciled the face of Franklin Roosevelt. She kept jabbing the handsome likeness of the president of the United States with her needles, exclaiming with each strike: “That’s for you, my dear Franklin! That’s for you!” Having been away from the country since the days of Calvin Coolidge, long before FDR appeared on the scene, I did not know of the feelings of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts for their kin at Hyde Park."
Shirer had signed up with Alfred Knopf because Blanche Knopf, his wife and partner, had been a friend, and moreover, had encouraged Shirer to write up his diaries into a book.
"“Take this. Scrap it and write me a straight book—with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
"“Straight books, Alfred,” I said, “about Germany or Britain or Russia or the war are a dime a dozen these days. Every returning correspondent is rushing out with one.” I was really aroused. “What I’ve given you here in my diaries,” I said, “is something original, Alfred. Something you won’t find in other books.”"
Last day of the lecture tour, Shirer got a telegram.
" ... I tore open the telegram. We had been stopped underneath a streetlight, so there was enough light to make out the words.
"It was from Alfred Knopf and there were two pages of it. Just as he had expected, he said, the Book-of-the-Month Club had taken my book for its July selection. It had happened very fast. ... "
"The reviewers were kind, and their editors were generous in the space they gave. Both the Sunday New York Herald-Tribune Books and the New York Times Book Review, the two most influential literary publications in the nation, devoted their front pages to the book. I had not expected much from George M. Shuster, president of Hunter College and an authority on Germany, who I heard would write the piece for the Times Book Review. I knew he had been deeply sympathetic with the old Germany and with the Germans and I had heard in Berlin that he had been a little late in facing the facts about Hitler and the Third Reich. In the beginning, it was said, he had pleaded for a “better understanding” of them. Besides, American academic historians tended to look down on American journalists who tried to write history. But Dr. Shuster turned out to be surprisingly enthusiastic about the book and its author—even about journalists.
"“Shirer and his [journalistic] friends saw through the Nazi hocus-pocus; the trained diplomats frequently did not,” he wrote, and went on: “There is nothing stranger in all history than the ability of relatively untrained newspapermen to diagnose Hitler correctly, while the statesmen and the editorial writers were led around by the nose.”
"The piece in the Herald-Tribune, written by Joe Barnes, was full of understanding, because Joe had been there. And full of praise. But despite our friendship Joe could be quite objective, and he was.
"PM, the maverick New York daily that Ralph Ingersoll had recently started with the financial help of Marshall Field (for one thing, it took no advertising), gave me most of the front page of the paper itself, as if the publication of the book that day, June 20, 1941, was big news. Time, which had been rather critical of me as a broadcaster in the past, was surprisingly sympathetic. Its review began: “This diary is the most complete news report yet to come out of wartime Germany.”
"And so the reviews and the comments went. Not all, I hasten to add. In my very own home state of Iowa the esteemed Herald of Bellevue lashed out in an editorial entitled “Shirer Is out of Place over Here.”
"When William Shirer gave his short wave radio reports directly from Berlin earlier in the year, people excused his pro-Hitler reports on the grounds that he was in the midst of the Hitler nest and had to say what the Nazi propaganda machine ordered. But Mr. Shirer, the alleged ace reporter, is in the United States now and his isolationist propaganda continues over the radio and his book, “Berlin Diary,” with its Nazi poison is for sale on all book stands. Unfortunately Shirer has become widely known and thousands of people listen to him. It’s too bad that he returned to the United States: a pro-Nazi sympathizer like him should remain in Berlin."
"I cannot remember anything about me, before or since, in any language in any country, that was so absurdly wrong on every point. It was something of a small-town masterpiece.
"There was a spate of anti-Semitic letters and so many telephone calls in the dead of night from rabid anti-Semites that I had to have our telephone number changed and made unlisted. Most of these notes and calls came from New Jersey, where the pro-Nazi Bund, I believe, was at its strongest."
"A strange thing to me: because I expressed my outrage at the Nazi Germans and at Hitler in this and two subsequent books, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, many Americans, including some Jews, assumed that I was Jewish. What puzzled me, and still does, is that so many concluded that you had to be a Jew if you wrote like that about the Third Reich and its gangster leaders. It was rather disturbing."
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"The reviews in London that fall were equally flattering. ... "
"At least two reviews, one in the New Statesman, a second in the Observer, mentioned something that kindled my pride in my profession. They pointed out that America had produced between the wars a unique group of foreign correspondents to whom not only the Americans but the British owed a debt of gratitude. ... "
"F. A. Voight, himself once a British foreign correspondent, wrote similarly in the Observer. “England,” he said, “owes much to these men and women.” I took it as a British tribute to so many of us: John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, Dorothy Thompson, Sigrid Schulz, Walter Duranty, H. R. Knickerbocker, Ed Murrow, the Mowrer brothers, and others."
"There was a curious experience with President Roosevelt. Knopf had sent him one of the first copies of Berlin Diary off the press. One day a few weeks later I received it back. It had been signed by the president. ... A letter from Stephen Early, FDR’s press secretary, tried to clear the matter up. Perhaps I was naive. He said the president had “requested” him to send it back to me.
"Of the hundreds of books the President has received in the more than eight years he has been in the White House, this one is the first, to the best of my knowledge, that he has ever asked to have returned to its author.
"This still left me wondering. Then Steve explained.
"It is returned to you for your signature, at least, and if the signature includes an inscription, I think the object of sending this book to you will have been happily achieved.
"I did not return the book. It had been slightly damaged in the mail. I sent another copy, inscribed to the president, which Alfred Knopf lugged down to Washington and personally delivered to the White House. By now Alfred was very happy about Berlin Diary. In a second letter to me, Early described Alfred’s arrival.
"Alfred Knopf came in yesterday and brought a first edition of your Berlin Diary, inscribed by you. The President was delighted—perfectly satisfied with the exchange but a bit sorry that the copy I had sent you had arrived in a slightly damaged condition.
"Knopf gave me a very enthusiastic report on the sales of Berlin Diary.
"I hope you make a million!""
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"One of the most eloquent tributes to the book came from Ed Murrow. ... There was no bombing to report that evening. He was going to devote his part of the broadcast, he said, to talking about Berlin Diary. Ed was very moving: about the book, about me, about our friendship, about the way we had worked together in Europe."
"One of the most eloquent tributes to the book came from Ed Murrow. ... There was no bombing to report that evening. He was going to devote his part of the broadcast, he said, to talking about Berlin Diary. Ed was very moving: about the book, about me, about our friendship, about the way we had worked together in Europe."
" ... We were so emotionally drained, each of us, by what Ed said that after he had finished speaking we sat there on the side of the road a long time, unable to move or to speak. We could not find words for what we felt."
CBS brought him another contract, with considerable raise, and the book sold well, but he was left only eight percent of his earning after taxes.
" ... And until recently, apparently, one best-seller would have guaranteed setting you free. Sinclair Lewis had told me once that he himself had become financially independent with his first big success, Main Street, on which he paid, he said, if I remember rightly, 6 percent income tax.
"I told Hemingway and the Authors Guild, which I had just become eligible to join and which had also urged me to be a guinea pig, that I would not go to court, or even publicly protest what I thought privately was an outrageous treatment of an author by our federal and state governments. It would be unseemly with a war on. Our country had already been drawn into it in December 1941, six months after the diary was published, by Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on us. Millions of Americans were going to be drafted to fight and risk their lives—practically without pay. It was not the time to squabble with the government over taxes."
"As soon as the war was over—after all the lost opportunities!—the American networks junked the rule against using recordings. ... "
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"I was also pleased, I have to concede, to be invited to address a dinner at the Waldorf honoring the great German writer Thomas Mann on his seventieth birthday. (He had befriended me and more than any other author had kept encouraging me to write.) And I was flattered to be asked to speak at various banquets to honor General de Gaulle, Mahatma Gandhi, and others, or to say a few words on behalf of some cause or institution."
"Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, recruited me into the Council on Foreign Relations. It was a much smaller organization than it is now, and only gradually did I become aware that it was a growing force in shaping American foreign policy and influencing the men who made policy—indeed in picking some of these men. To me the council offered a number of opportunities, above all the chance to dine and talk off the record with visiting foreign statesmen—they became more numerous after the establishment in New York of the U.N. Once or twice a week there was a meeting with a visiting prime minister or foreign minister or other such dignitary. To have sought them out in their native lands would have taken much time and trouble.
"The council also gave one an inside view of what was going on in Washington. Secretaries of state and their assistants and ambassadors came to speak to us."
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" ... Every report we made of a bombing or a battle had to be transmitted live. To use a recording for background to show you the true sound and fury of modern Blitzkrieg was verboten. This idiotic rule tied our hands. ... But all too often when your time came to broadcast there would be a brief lull. No bombs. No sound. Just a rare silence."
"I did not have this particular problem in Berlin since the Nazi authorities forbade me to even mention that an air attack was in progress, as it sometimes was during my late night broadcasts. Once when the sound of exploding British bombs and the response of the flak guns nearby penetrated through to my mike in the studio and emerged loud and clear in New York, causing the anchorman there, Elmer Davis, to remark that by the sound of it Berlin was being heavily bombed as I spoke, German engineers on orders from the Propaganda Ministry installed a lip microphone that picked up no sounds at all beyond a foot from your mouth.
" ... Every report we made of a bombing or a battle had to be transmitted live. To use a recording for background to show you the true sound and fury of modern Blitzkrieg was verboten. This idiotic rule tied our hands. ... But all too often when your time came to broadcast there would be a brief lull. No bombs. No sound. Just a rare silence."
"I did not have this particular problem in Berlin since the Nazi authorities forbade me to even mention that an air attack was in progress, as it sometimes was during my late night broadcasts. Once when the sound of exploding British bombs and the response of the flak guns nearby penetrated through to my mike in the studio and emerged loud and clear in New York, causing the anchorman there, Elmer Davis, to remark that by the sound of it Berlin was being heavily bombed as I spoke, German engineers on orders from the Propaganda Ministry installed a lip microphone that picked up no sounds at all beyond a foot from your mouth.
"But I had plenty of opportunity to broadcast the sound and fury of modern combat at the front, in Poland, in September 1939, after the Germans attacked, and in the west when spring came the following year. Early in the German drive through Belgium and France in May there was a great tank battle just west of Dinant as German armor broke over the Meuse River, a major Allied defense line. Some two thousand German and French tanks were locked in what was the greatest tank battle ever fought up to that time. The sound, the fury, was indescribable in words, but a recording would give you some idea of it. Foreign correspondents were not allowed to get near the place. At any rate it would have been impossible to get a telephone line up to the blazing scene, which moved back and forth in the dust and smoke. German army combat correspondents made recordings of the battle. The German army offered them to me. I urged CBS in New York to make an exception of their idiotic rule in this case. It was refused."
"As soon as the war was over—after all the lost opportunities!—the American networks junked the rule against using recordings. ... "
" ... For example, transmission often was surer if we broadcast from Europe in daylight when it was also daylight at home rather than when it was night in Europe and day in America, as it was during most of our regular live broadcasts. Murrow and I had begged CBS in New York to allow us to record earlier to take advantage of this situation. Then if our live broadcasts didn’t get through they could use the earlier recording. It seemed so reasonable. But not to the CBS brass at Madison Avenue."
" ... I was unduly impressed by the unanimous vote—54 to 0—in the U.N. Assembly the day before to press forward for general disarmament, including the abolition of the atom bomb and the establishment of an on-the-scene inspection to see that no one cheated. At that time, of course, only the U.S.A. had the bomb and it was willing to give up its monopoly and put the bomb under the control of the U.N. If that had happened, we might not face such a grim nuclear future as we do today."
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" ... I was unduly impressed by the unanimous vote—54 to 0—in the U.N. Assembly the day before to press forward for general disarmament, including the abolition of the atom bomb and the establishment of an on-the-scene inspection to see that no one cheated. At that time, of course, only the U.S.A. had the bomb and it was willing to give up its monopoly and put the bomb under the control of the U.N. If that had happened, we might not face such a grim nuclear future as we do today."
"The atom bomb provoked in our land much silly—and dangerous—talk about war with Russia. This came not only from ordinary people, who probably did not have the facts, but from top people in government, including a former president, who presumably had them. The latter, especially, were becoming gung-ho on going to war with Russia, though the sounds of battle and bombing from the war with Germany and Japan had scarcely died down. Indeed, former President Herbert Hoover would return from a quick visit to Germany and propose to President Truman that the Allied agreement at Potsdam for the treatment of defeated Germany be scrapped and that German heavy industry, which had helped Adolf Hitler come within an ace of winning the war, be revived. We would need a restored Germany, I heard him say in private, to help us cope with the Russians. Others wanted to give more help to revive prostrate Japan, for the same reason."
" ... I remember a dinner given by Hamilton Fish Armstrong to honor two Supreme Court justices, Robert H. Jackson and Felix Frankfurter. A number of prominent men were there, including Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Lord Inverchapel (Clark-Kerr), the new British ambassador in Washington, who had just arrived from serving in Moscow, Henry Luce, the Time-Life-Fortune tycoon, and Myron Taylor, former head of U.S. Steel and until recently U.S. observer at the Vatican. Justice Jackson, just back from heading the U.S. prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, tried to explain what he had done in handling Nazi war criminals. Taylor said he himself opposed the whole idea of prosecuting the Nazi leaders. What we ought to be concentrating on, he said, was war with Russia. He became so rabid on the subject that John Gunther shouted across the table at him that his talk was “shocking.”"
"One veteran Associated Press reporter in Moscow, who had no illusions about the Bolsheviks, was depressed at all the talk of war with Russia. Eddy Gilmore, returning to his post after several months’ leave at home, reacted with a dispatch that expressed his bewilderment and concern—and Gilmore was one of the least emotional and most matter-of-fact of all the American correspondents in Europe.
"In Russia there is little or no talk of war. On the contrary, there is much talk of peace. There is no anti-American feeling as such in Moscow. There are articles of criticism of the United States… but I would be a very untruthful reporter if I did not say there is three to five times as much anti-Russian sentiment in the American press and on radio as there is here against our country. I’ve heard no one in Moscow express a desire for war with the U.S.…, which is more than I can say of what I heard in Washington."
It wasn't people of U.S., Shirer points out, who expected or feared or wished a war against Russia, and churches expressed the same view. It was some Washington politicians and so forth.
" ... Certain politicians were drumming up fear that our Communists, who couldn’t elect a dogcatcher in any state of the Union, were about to take over the Republic.
"I had not heard such idiotic talk since my early days in Nazi Germany."
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"Toward the end of the war the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had become almost extinct, was rescued from oblivion largely by John E. Rankin (D–Miss.). As the hysteria about Communism and Russia increased, the committee, which by its very nature had been something of a joke (who is to decide who and what is un-American and on what basis?), took on a new life and gathered so much power that few congressmen dared to oppose it or even criticize it. The press was equally craven.
"Though a man of almost unbelievable narrow-mindedness, Rankin provided me with many good quotes for my Sunday broadcasts and newspaper column. He had a marked talent for the utterly ridiculous. He described the Fair Employment Practices Commission as “the beginning of a Communistic dictatorship the like of which America never dreamed!” Communism, he said, “had hounded and persecuted the Saviour during his earthly ministry, inspired his crucifixion, derided him in his dying agony, then gambled for his garments at the foot of the cross.” Rankin once proposed a bill that would make schoolteachers liable for ten years’ imprisonment if they “convey the impression of sympathy with… Communist ideology.”
"It was Rankin who once asked the House Un-American Activities Committee’s chief counsel, one Ernie Adamson, about the chairman of the British Labour party, Harold Laski. Labour had been voted into power in England at the end of the war. Though Laski was a distinguished economist and academician from the University of London, the author of many books, a friend of two U.S. Supreme Court justices (Holmes and Frankfurter) and of many other prominent Americans, Rankin spoke as if he had never heard of him.
"“Who is Mr. Laski?” the congressman asked his counsel.
"Adamson: “Mr. Laski is, I believe, one of the leaders in England of the Communist movement.”
"Rankin: “Is he an American?”
"It was Mr. Adamson who wrote a strange letter to an American veterans’ group.
""I note that you refer to democracy several times. I wonder if you are sufficiently familiar with the history of the United States to be aware that this country was not organized as a democracy?"
"This must have confused our war veterans, who apparently believed that democracy was one of the things they had fought for."
Shirer quotes some unbelievable vitriol spewed by various, chiefly republican, politicians, including against President Truman, before telling what he felt.
"As I struggled through my first years back home, trying in my broadcasts and newspaper columns to make some kind of sense of what was going on, I began to wonder if my beloved country was turning into a lunatic bin. I had lived through the nightmare years in Nazi Germany. Were there to be nightmare years at home?"
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BOOK THREE
Ousted by CBS
The End of a Career in Broadcasting
1947
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Shirer was informed about being dropped by a sponsor; his agent, MCA, was assured there were sponsors galore waiting in the wings. But when he talked with Ed Murrow, who'd been a friend for years before and through WWII, he began to get the surprise.
"I had not taken the change of climate as seriously perhaps as I should. I had been through it all before—in my years in Nazi Germany.
"Recently, I had begun to notice a growing criticism of my broadcasts from the right. The archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, did not like some of the things I was saying on the air. His criticism was shared by other conservatives. Even the vice-president of the ad agency that handled the shaving-cream company account began to hint that I was “too liberal.” He himself was rising in Connecticut Republican party circles."
"On the following Sunday, March 23, I said at the end of my talk: “Next Sunday I will make my last broadcast on this program. I have been informed by the sponsor and by the Columbia Broadcasting System of that decision.” After much wrangling over the phone, Ed had finally approved that statement. At first he had tried to make me agree not to say a word about disappearing from CBS on Sunday afternoons. I had insisted on at least mentioning it.
"I had scarcely signed off with those words at 6 P.M. that Sunday afternoon when the storm broke."
Calls poured in and protests went on, by audiences and by fellow authors et al.
"Dorothy Parker, whom I did not at that time know personally, but whose caustic wit in her short stories and reviews I had long admired, certainly outdid herself. Her telegram of protest was signed by several dozen well-known writers and actors, including Gregory Peck, John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, Lewis Gannett, Ring Lardner, Arthur Miller, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Holliday, José Ferrer, and Margaret Webster.
"They were joined in separate protests by a number of others. Robert E. Sherwood, playwright and confidant of President Roosevelt, wired Paley that it would be “a tragedy if CBS lost the broadcasts of William L. Shirer.” Archibald MacLeish, the poet, also a confidant of Roosevelt and a personal friend of Murrow, wired Ed that the action of CBS “will be interpreted… everywhere as another retreat by the networks before the pressure of advertisers.” He was sure, he told Murrow, “that you have done everything possible to prevent [such] an action.” He couldn’t have been more wrong.
"Ralph Ingersoll, former editor of P.M. and of some of the Luce magazines, and also a friend of Ed, was more skeptical with his old friend. He wrote him:
"Dear Ed: I’ve just read the shocking news of Bill Shirer’s being dropped by Columbia and I want to tell you how appalled I am. What have they done to you since you came back from England, that you aren’t out in front fighting for him?"
Shirer was informed by the sponsor that the company preferred to hire him back, in face of the backlash. But Bill Paley at CBS informed him to the contrary, when Shirer called him.
" ... Elmo Roper could not believe it. But I was beginning to. I was beginning to see that Paley could not forgive me for having crossed him. You did not do that to the chairman of the board of a big corporation. For a day or two perhaps he had hesitated until he saw whether Murrow would be loyal to him and the company or to an old friend. Now that Ed had made it clear where he stood, Paley did not hesitate. He would show me the cost of insubordination.
"And he would put out of his mind, as the imperious Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune had done fifteen years before, as all the great American tycoons did, any thought of the services one had rendered the company over the years, the risks a foreign correspondent had taken to get the news, to cover the war, the lack of normal personal and family life, the long hours of toil seven days a week, week after week, month after month, the prestige one had brought the organization by one’s work, the loyalty and devotion one had showed it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been through it all before with Colonel McCormick, as had so many of my colleagues with their respective press lords. Bill Paley was just another one of the breed. With Ed Murrow, of course, it was different. I was still baffled by his behavior."
" ... Several radio editors and columnists on the metropolitan newspapers quickly exposed the Paley-Murrow hypocrisy. But support from another and unexpected source soon made the network look ridiculous—to the embarrassment of both executives."
"A few days after I was replaced, the press announced that I would be the recipient of what was then radio’s highest honor, the George Foster Peabody Award for “outstanding reporting and interpretation of the news,” at the seventh annual presentation of the awards on April 17 at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York."
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"No doubt in the next few weeks and months and even for a year or two I felt sorry for myself, suddenly deprived of a career after having practiced it, not without some modest success, for twenty-two years—ever since I had turned twenty-one and finished college and set out for Europe."
"No doubt in the next few weeks and months and even for a year or two I felt sorry for myself, suddenly deprived of a career after having practiced it, not without some modest success, for twenty-two years—ever since I had turned twenty-one and finished college and set out for Europe."
"David Halberstam in The Powers That Be, published thirty-two years later, suggested that though Ed and I were good friends, we had been, “in a subtle way, rivals as well.”
""Murrow, deft, civilized, the ultimate gifted broadcaster in projecting mood and feeling; Shirer, a far better writer, more cerebral, a more penetrating journalist in dissecting ideas and issues. It had been a friendship not without its edge, but they were men bound to each other by a transcending common experience which had evoked the best of each of them. More, they were identified with each other completely in the public mind, for in those dark days at the start of World War II it had been their two voices, Murrow and Shirer, that the nation had listened to: listeners could not think of one without thinking of the other.""
"Murrow, I was told, had resented my not joining him in London after I left Berlin at the end of 1940. ... "
" ... Later, even when the war was over, after I’d returned to Europe twice, in 1943 and 1944 to help cover, first, the Eighth Air Force, which had begun its big bombing of Germany in 1943 from its bases in England, and then the American army, in 1944, after it landed on the Continent and drove toward Germany, my failure to join Ed in London earlier still seemed to rankle him."
Ed Murrow met the fate too, with growing intolerance of the McCarthy era, of which Shirer was an early victim.
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"The previous fall, the November 1946 congressional elections had been a disaster for the Democrats. For the first time in eighteen years the Republicans had captured both houses of Congress, much of its majority the result of its candidates winning on a platform of clearing the Communists out of the government in Washington, its “communistic” targets including such staunch patriots as General G. C. Marshall, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, and President Truman himself. This Congress was bitterly reactionary. Its Republican majority proclaimed that it was not only going to clean the Communists out of Washington but also repeal all social and welfare legislation passed since the beginning of the New Deal. The clock was going to be set back with a vengeance, if not back to McKinley, at least to President Calvin Coolidge.
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"The previous fall, the November 1946 congressional elections had been a disaster for the Democrats. For the first time in eighteen years the Republicans had captured both houses of Congress, much of its majority the result of its candidates winning on a platform of clearing the Communists out of the government in Washington, its “communistic” targets including such staunch patriots as General G. C. Marshall, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, and President Truman himself. This Congress was bitterly reactionary. Its Republican majority proclaimed that it was not only going to clean the Communists out of Washington but also repeal all social and welfare legislation passed since the beginning of the New Deal. The clock was going to be set back with a vengeance, if not back to McKinley, at least to President Calvin Coolidge.
"Among those elected that fall of 1946 was a little-known local judge, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the Senate, and an even lesser known local politician in California, Richard M. Nixon, to the House. Both had accused their opponents of sympathy with Communism and of having “Communist” support. The voters had fallen for it, as they usually do in this country."
"Eventually Murrow realized where such hysteria was taking the country. And in the end he would turn on the shabby senator from Wisconsin in a memorable broadcast that exposed McCarthy for the mountebank he was and indeed hastened his end. But to some, Ed’s move came late. David Halberstam, researching his book The Powers That Be, noticed it. It was “significant,” he thought, “that Murrow’s broadcast attacking McCarthy took so long in coming.”"
" ... No other network then, or later, allowed one of its commentators to take on McCarthy. The broadcast of Murrow on his See It Now program devastated the Red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, and he never recovered from it.
"But it turned out also to be the first step in Ed Murrow’s fall from grace at CBS. Several members of management and the board of directors were far from pleased. Frank Stanton, president and the righthand man of Paley, returning from a business trip to the Midwest, called in Fred Friendly, Murrow’s collaborator on See It Now, and told him that several affiliates there thought the broadcast had been bad for business. Some went further. They thought Murrow’s attack on McCarthy “might cost the company the network.”
"Indeed, Ed soon confronted the same sponsor problems that had helped terminate my career at CBS. Alcoa, which had stuck by Ed through many a public controversy, decided the next year not to renew See It Now. Then, in a series of moves that resembled those he and Ed had taken against me, Paley decided to phase out See It Now, despite its enormous prestige as by far the best public affairs program on TV. Soon it was gone, and a poor substitute show was given to another (Friendly) to produce, and Ed found himself on the way out."
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BOOK FOUR
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BOOK FOUR
Down and Out: The McCarthy Years
The Struggle to Survive and to Write and to Publish
1948–1959
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"So, after working out plans for doing over the farmhouse, we went up to Lake Placid for the summer, where I finished putting together a second book of diaries that would be published as End of a Berlin Diary. In the meantime a local contractor was renovating the farmhouse. We were quite innocent about that, despite a good deal of advice from our friends, who said they spoke out of bitter experience. Though the old farmhouse was in fairly good shape, it lacked plumbing, electrical wiring, and central heating. Also, we soon learned that the chimney, which helped to support saltbox houses, was a fire hazard and had to be torn down to the cellar and rebuilt and that the roof leaked and had to be completely reshingled. We tore out one wall to enlarge the living room and—against the raging of Ruth Gannett, a purist in regard to eighteenth-century houses—put in two large picture windows to give a better view over the Litchfield hills. By the time the contractor was finished, we owed him four times the cost of the house and the one hundred acres.
"But it was worth it. In the years to come, when the going got rough, it was a haven. Here, at least, no matter what happened, we had a roof over us and enough land to grow a lot of the food we needed."
"One thing I liked about MBS was that, unlike CBS, it gave me complete freedom, including freedom to express my opinions. CBS had forbidden us to air an opinion; and though Murrow and I had often broken the rule, we had been under increasing pressure to knuckle under."
"By the time I was through at MBS, I had already lost my Sunday column on the New York Herald-Tribune, which that newspaper had syndicated in other papers from coast to coast. The country was going more and more conservative—or at least the powers that controlled the newspapers and radio networks were. This was true of the Herald-Tribune, which under the long administration of Ogden and Helen Reid had carried the banner of a liberal Republican party. (It had almost single-handedly put across the nomination of Wendell Willkie in 1940.) Now the running of the paper had passed to their elder son, Whitelaw Reid; and it was moving toward the right. My kind of commentary was not in tune with what it wanted. I had sensed that for some time.
"I was now out of journalism completely, and apparently I was unemployable in either broadcasting or the newspapers. American journalism had given me a good and interesting life over a span of twenty-four years. And I thought I had made at least a modest mark in it. But the newspaper editors and the broadcasting executives obviously did not agree. Through the grapevine I learned that they thought I was finished, washed up, a has-been—though I was only forty-four. Or if none of those, perhaps something worse: a “pink” or perhaps even a “Red.” Out of step with good old patriotic Americanism."
"Even so knowledgeable a man on Russia as George Kennan had in 1947 published an article in Foreign Affairs (identifying himself only as “X”) calling for American containment of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism within Russia’s borders “at every point where they show signs of encroaching”—a policy warmly embraced by the Truman administration, most of the press, and the public but deplored by Walter Lippmann as “a strategic monstrosity.”
"I think Kennan had been provoked, at least in part, by a hard-line speech by Stalin to his party officials in 1946, in which the Soviet dictator denounced the idea of coexistence with the West and renewed his determination to further world revolution.
"Then Stalin, following his seizure of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, had in June begun the blockade of Berlin in the false belief that he could drive the Americans out of the Allied-occupied city. We had replied with the Airlift and had flown into Berlin from Western Germany enough food, clothing, and coal to sustain the city’s population of two and a half million.
"But for several months it looked as if the two superpowers would be drawn into war. I flew into Berlin that fall of the blockade, and though Allied planes, chiefly American C-54s, were bringing in enough supplies to keep the Berliners from freezing or starving, the great fear in American circles was that some mad Russian would shoot down an American plane and war would follow. I spent a tense evening in Berlin with a grim General Lucius Clay, the American high commissioner for Germany. He feared the Russians might provoke an incident any moment that would lead to war. In the end the Russians gave up after eleven months—probably because if it had come to armed conflict, they realized the consequences of our having the atom bomb and their not having it, not for a year or two more. But it was a close call in Berlin."
"Pearl Buck, a Nobel Prize laureate, in literature, was barred from addressing a Washington, D.C., high-school commencement—she was not anti-Communist enough, especially on China, where she had spent most of her life and which she knew very well and which was now, in 1949, about to be taken over by the Communists, whom she didn’t like.
"McCarthyism and its un-American reign of terror in our country lay just ahead."
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"Unable to find a job on a newspaper or radio network, I turned of necessity to what deep down for a long time I had wanted to do most: writing books. Perhaps—probably, even—I did not have the talent for it; though my first two books, Berlin Diary in 1941 and End of a Berlin Diary in 1947, had been well received and had reached a large audience—especially the first, which by now had had sales in the Knopf and Book-of-the-Month Club editions of nearly a million copies."
"Unable to find a job on a newspaper or radio network, I turned of necessity to what deep down for a long time I had wanted to do most: writing books. Perhaps—probably, even—I did not have the talent for it; though my first two books, Berlin Diary in 1941 and End of a Berlin Diary in 1947, had been well received and had reached a large audience—especially the first, which by now had had sales in the Knopf and Book-of-the-Month Club editions of nearly a million copies."
"The idea of trying a new field had been sprouting slowly in my mind for a long time. Somehow it began to dawn on me that you could get closer to the truth about life in our time in a novel than in a work of nonfiction. My feeling for nineteenth-century Russia, France, and England, I noted, had come largely not from books of history and biography—though I had read a number of them—but from the novels: in Russia from those of Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Turgenev, Chekhov (his short stories and plays), and Gorky; in France from those of Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola (and for the turn of the century, Proust); in England from the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Thackeray, and Hardy. They were the ones who illuminated the century for me, leaving indelible impressions of what life was like in that time and what the human experience, with its comedies and tragedies, its ups and downs and uncertainties, and its baffling mysteries, was. And to boot, the novelists usually told a good story.
"I, of course, did not pretend for one minute that I could come within miles of reaching the level of these giants of literature. I lacked their talents, let alone their capacity for greatness. Still, within my limitations I thought that one day if I had the chance, I might try to set down in a series of novels whatever experience had taught me about life in the turbulent, strife-torn years I had lived through in the twentieth century."
"Actually I had been at work on a novel in my spare time since leaving CBS. At first it took the form of a play. I thought that this was a good way to develop my characters and the plot for eventual use in a novel. Beyond that, in whatever form, I wanted to fathom the motives of the chief figures in the story for behaving as they did.
"It was to be a fictionalized account of the American and, to a lesser extent, the British radio traitors in Berlin, the small group of men and women who turned against their countries and broadcast during the war for Adolf Hitler. (I have written about them previously in these memoirs.) In the play and novel, especially the latter if I could get to it, I wanted to penetrate, if possible, into a phenomenon that is as old as mankind: treason. Why do men and women commit it? For money? For love? Out of hatred, for some reason, of their native land? Or because they become obsessed with some new ideology—in this case Nazism and racism? Treason, like prostitution, is one of the oldest human practices. Why is this?"
Shirer mentions several of them.
"Ezra Pound, the distinguished poet who broadcast for Mussolini from Italy during the war, was adjudged insane and mentally unfit for trial in 1945 and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Federal Hospital in Washington. He was released in 1958 and returned to Italy."
"Why there were different forms of justice for the Americans who broadcast for Hitler during the war—some considered traitors, others not—has always been a mystery to me. Down through history, I guess, justice has always been that way. Erratic. Uneven.
"In England, remember, William Joyce and John Amery were hanged for broadcasting for Hitler."
Shirer wrote The Traitor.
"Then my agent, Paul Reynolds, sent the manuscript to a new publisher, Farrar & Straus. John Farrar and especially Stanley Young, who had just joined the firm, read it, liked it, and offered to publish it.
"It came out in November 1950; and though the reviews on the whole were quite good, it did not at all stir the country. It hit the best-seller list; but the sales were modest, nothing like those for the diary books. No magazine was interested in serializing it. A typical comment came from an editor of the Saturday Evening Post. The “consensus” at the Post, she wrote, “was that the theme, as a whole, is dated and old hat.” The age-old theme of treason and why men commit it “dated and old hat”? And in its latest form, when for the first time in history men were convicted of treason for having broadcast for the enemy in wartime and hanged or given life imprisonment?"
But Thomas Mann praised it, and not superficially either.
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"The year before, in 1949, the Russians had themselves got the atomic bomb.
"New York, September 24, 1949. …A historic day yesterday! President Truman announced that “we have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.”"
"Abruptly the balance of power in the world was upset. Since Hiroshima in 1945 we alone had possessed the bomb. During all the time since—five years—we could have annihilated the Soviet Union with it. That was the chief reason, I was sure, why Stalin abandoned his foolish blockade of Berlin. But now we had lost—or would shortly lose—that staggering advantage. Either the two rival superpowers would now have to work out some agreement to coexist in the atomic age. Or they would collide and blow up the planet.
"I think Truman understood that at once. It seemed surprising that he was still president. On the eve of the 1948 elections he had not been given even an outside chance by anyone. I had helped cover that strange campaign for MBS."
Everyone predicted and expected Dewey to win.
"I awoke about 11:00 A.M., turned on the radio and learned to my joy that it was all over. A few minutes later—at 11:10 A.M.—came word that Dewey had conceded.
"And so the little man that everyone said couldn’t make it did make it because he had guts and confidence and fought on the issues while Dewey, depending on the polls’ certainty that he would win easily, went about mouthing pious platitudes and refusing even to discuss the issues. He has only himself to blame, though his mistake was human. It must be a bitter pill for him, for he had taken it for granted from the moment he was nominated that he would be in the White House on January 20….
"The people have confounded the wiseacres, the smoothies. Perhaps they have shown that the day is past in America when the wealthy, through control of the media of information—press, magazines, radio—can bamboozle the citizenry into voting for reaction and greed.
"In this, looking back from the Reagan years of the 1980s, I was, I can see, indeed naïve."
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"With the loss of my syndicated Herald-Tribune column and soon afterward of my Sunday broadcast over Mutual, I could no longer avoid facing the problem of earning a living—enough to support a family of four. Nearly every month as the year 1950 raced by we had to sell some of the few stocks we owned to pay our bills. We realized our modest life savings would not last long at that rate. Unless The Traitor went better than my agent and publisher estimated, I would have to try to scratch elsewhere to make ends meet. Perhaps I could get more lectures, but that would mean a lot less time for writing.
"With the loss of my syndicated Herald-Tribune column and soon afterward of my Sunday broadcast over Mutual, I could no longer avoid facing the problem of earning a living—enough to support a family of four. Nearly every month as the year 1950 raced by we had to sell some of the few stocks we owned to pay our bills. We realized our modest life savings would not last long at that rate. Unless The Traitor went better than my agent and publisher estimated, I would have to try to scratch elsewhere to make ends meet. Perhaps I could get more lectures, but that would mean a lot less time for writing.
"In the meantime that summer came an offer from a pair of movie producers in Hollywood to consult on a film about Adolf Hitler, which they were going to shoot in Vienna, and to act in it in a minor role—that of myself as a foreign correspondent in Nazi Germany. My agent had some doubts about the producers, but he finally secured an agreement for round-trip tickets to Vienna for Tess and me, expenses in Vienna, a payment to be made in Paris, and a small percentage of the film’s profits. If the film was a success, we stood to make a considerable sum. For the time being the job would enable Tess to return to her native city and visit with her parents—her younger brother, drafted into the German army, had been badly wounded on the very last day of the war and died two years later—and it would allow me, after the filming was over, to work in Paris, Bonn, and London on the book that had been turning over in my mind: Midcentury Journey. (I had no illusion that my acting debut in an American movie would lead anywhere at all.) The project would tide us over until late fall; my sister would look after the children on the farm while we were gone.
"There was another purpose in making the trip: to see if, as many feared, the Russians would take advantage of our having just become tied down in Korea and move westward into the heart of Europe. ... "
"A couple of weeks in Vienna, waiting for the work on the film to start, convinced me that the Russians were not going to move. ... "
" ... In November 1918, with the war lost after four years of bitter fighting, the ancient House of Hapsburg came tumbling down, ending a golden epoch and a way of life that this city—like the imperial capitals of Berlin and St. Petersburg—would never see again. Over the next three decades these lighthearted and attractive people would, in fact, go through a damnation unequaled in the West in our time: revolution; blockade; hunger; cold; the bloody shooting down of workers, women, and children; Fascist oppression and Nazi savagery; bombing and bombardment and finally Russian occupation. And yet in 1950, as we roamed the streets, we could see how splendidly these people had survived; their buoyant spirits restored their lust for life after such hardship and sorrow still wonderfully strong. It was an experience, I remembered, that we in America had never had to go through. I wondered how we would have taken it had it happened to us; since character is mostly formed in adversity, and we had had so little of it, never having been conquered nor—since the British burned Washington in 1812—occupied."
"The film, called The Magic Face, was certainly no masterpiece, even by Hollywood standards; but it did well at the box office and even better later when it was shown repeatedly on television. Somehow the producers never got around to divvying up the agreed modest percentage of the profits owed to me; and I heard that Luther Adler and Patricia Knight, who had a much larger share, fared similarly. My first inkling of the hesitation of the producers to part with their cash came toward the end of August when we arrived in Paris and found the one thousand dollars in francs, due us on arrival under our contract, failed to materialize, as did a few weeks later a thousand dollars payable in pounds sterling in London. We got stranded in both capitals until my New York agent came through with hasty advances."
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" ... While in Frankfurt, I had noticed in the European edition of the New York Times a letter from Howard Lindsay, the playwright and actor, protesting the inclusion of my name and the names of some other writers in an obscure publication I had never heard of called Red Channels. Apparently we were accused of having some connection with Communists or with Communism or both."
"It became obvious that CBS was the main target of the publishers of Red Channels and of their weekly sheet, Counterattack. The latter had charged that “all networks let some Communists and Communist fronters get on their programs, but CBS is worst of all.” The response of CBS to this shocked many. It hired the publishers of the scurrilous sheet that had attacked it to investigate the loyalty of its employees! CBS had capitulated to the hysterical vigilantes."
"I was proud to have headed up “The Friends of the Spanish Republic,” a not very effective organization that tried in vain to help save the Spanish Republic and prevent the rebel general Franco from turning Republican democratic Spain into another Fascist country on the model of Italy and Germany. I had lived in Spain for a year just prior to Franco’s rebellion, and I had admired the stumbling efforts of the Spanish Republic to establish a democracy after King Alfonso had abdicated and fled. There was nothing Communist about our little organization. It was not listed among the alleged “front” groups in the back of Red Channels. It was not mentioned on the attorney general’s list of “subversive” organizations.
"Neither was the second group, “The Voice of Freedom Committee.” It was true I did attend one of its meetings. In May 1947, shortly after my ouster from CBS, this committee announced that it was holding a public meeting to discuss my controversy with the networks. It said that Ed Murrow, representing CBS, and a commissioner from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which had jurisdiction over the networks and radio stations, would appear. It invited me to come to speak for myself.
"I went. Commissioner Clifford J. Durr turned up for the FCC. Ed Murrow did not show. Durr and I spoke our pieces. During the session I got the impression that the committee was chiefly interested in exploiting me. And I began to suspect it might be a front organization. That was the end of my connection with it.
"The third “charge” against me turned out to be the most effective: that I had signed an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Hollywood Ten. I had."
" ... I learned later there were many similar briefs submitted by others in the country. But my signature on one of those briefs, along with fourteen or fifteen other people, mostly conservative Republicans, was to cost me for the next ten years’ employment in American journalism: both broadcast and print. No executive from the networks, ad agencies or sponsors, no editor of a magazine—with one or two exceptions—to whom I submitted manuscripts would touch me with a ten-foot pole."
" ... I decided to ask my lawyer to sue Red Channels. I was not interested in damages, though it looked as though I would certainly be damaged unless I could force Red Channels to issue a public retraction and erase my name from its blacklist."
"To my astonishment Morris Ernst refused to sue Red Channels on my account."
"Ernst wouldn’t listen.
"Don’t be sore at me [he went on] because I won’t take your money by advising you to start a libel suit. On the other hand I would not relish, even if you so desire, trying to work out a deal with Red Channels. I would not relish it because I know that those who have tried are not only not better off but are worse off….
"Strangely, in view of those last two sentences, Ernst called me up a few weeks later and proposed that I meet with him and the publishers of Red Channels for lunch at “21” to discuss my problem. He seemed surprised when I indignantly refused."
"The Julian case seemed to prove that Morris Ernst, in refusing to take my money to sue Red Channels, was right. Later, as John Henry Faulk’s 1962 libel suit against Aware, a blacklisting outfit similar to Red Channels, would show, you could win a case against them. Faulk, host of a talk show on CBS, was awarded over two million dollars in damages—a figure later cut down by the New York Court of Appeals to half a million, but a notable victory nevertheless because it appeared to help to end the era of blacklisting and its acceptance by the powers-that-be in broadcasting, films, and certain areas of journalism. A brilliant, flamboyant New York lawyer, Louis Nizer, had represented Faulk and, against all the odds, won."
"Thirty years later I wondered if some revelations about Ernst’s close relations at the time with the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, which were too shocking for me at first to believe but which turned out to be fully documented, explained in part his refusal to take on Red Channels for me."
"Of the many telephone calls and personal visits they had, there is less documentation. But the odd exchange of letters between the two men over twenty-five years offers enough to make us see Ernst in a somewhat new light; and it set me to wondering why, in my own case, he gave me a runaround in a matter that he knew almost destroyed me over a desperate decade."
"What was reprehensible in his relationship to Hoover, in my opinion, was that he sent the FBI director copies or originals of many confidential letters addressed to him (Ernst) without the knowledge, much less the consent, of those who wrote them. And in doing so, and on other occasions, he became what can only be termed an informer to the FBI."
" ... All I can say is that had I known of Ernst’s cozy relationship with Hoover and the FBI, I would have given up on him and asked another lawyer—perhaps Louis Nizer, who was an acquaintance—to take my case. But to me, Morris Ernst was more than a lawyer. He was my friend. I believed in him as a great fighter for civil liberties. Including my own."
"Learned Hand thought the American community was “in peril.”
"I believe that a community is already in a process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists to win or lose. Such fears… may in the end subject us to a despotism as evil as any that we dread….
"Risk for risk, for myself I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry."
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"I remember my boiling resentment when Kay wrote me of what happened. How many Americans, I thought, would have had the guts to volunteer, as Joseph had, to be parachuted behind the enemy lines during the war and risk being captured, tried as a spy, and executed? ... "
"I remember my boiling resentment when Kay wrote me of what happened. How many Americans, I thought, would have had the guts to volunteer, as Joseph had, to be parachuted behind the enemy lines during the war and risk being captured, tried as a spy, and executed? ... "
"So Joseph Franckenstein was out of a job and so was his wife. For The New Yorker, which had accredited Kay Boyle as its correspondent in Germany, withdrew her accreditation as soon as her husband was in trouble—an act for which Kay never forgave the magazine and its editor, William Shawn.
"Over the next years Kay and Joseph spent all their spare time and all their money collecting papers and documents to prove Franckenstein’s loyalty to his adopted country. And that he was not a Communist! The charge seemed so senseless to those who had known him. For Joseph came from an old and conservative Catholic family in the Austrian Tyrol. His cousin, George Franckenstein, had been the Austrian ambassador in London, and when the Nazis took over in Vienna in 1938, he had promptly resigned. In recognition of his integrity the British government had knighted him—a rare honor."
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"New York, April 10, 1951. …Somehow these two luncheons this week helped me to bring on another spell of depression….
"I know what I want to do. Continue writing. But I have a… family to support. …When I try to think merely of how I am going to earn a living during the next six months—until the fall lecture season begins—I am completely baffled—for the first time in my adult life, I think.
"When you are considered down, if not out—and I suspect most people who know me, or of me, have written me off45—one’s friends drop away. …It has happened now. Not only with our general friends; but with the three or four closest friends. Even the Gunthers have become chilly and avoid us. I have seen them once, I think, in six months.
"Tess says: wait until you have a book that goes. They’ll all come tripping back then."
"I found a way out, sort of, in lecturing. The Red-baiters had invaded this field, too, and were trying to hound anyone left of McCarthy out of business. A handful of lecture dinner clubs and similar groups did cancel when the vigilantes brought pressure on them. But thanks to the colleges and universities, which sponsored most of the lectures those days and which had more guts than the advertising agencies, sponsors, networks, and filmmakers, they were thwarted. In the McCarthy time they were a bastion of free speech and the only one we had."
He was accosted by an old woman in Dallas in a hilarious incident He recounts.
"Dallas in the 1950s was full of rather fanatical conservatives, it is true; and many of them were mindless or loony and very rich. The main currents of American thought, in all their diversity, had not reached them. They did not have much sense of history. It did not surprise me that one of Dallas’s sterling citizens—a woman at that, as I recall—spat upon Adlai Stevenson when he was running for president. But I always liked the rough and tumble of speaking there. Maybe I was lucky: no one ever spat on me. And I was never run out of town on a rail."
"I have just returned from a long lecture trip of one-night stands through your own deep South. And while it is very interesting to get reacquainted with your native land after a long absence, lecturing is no leisurely way of life. One comes back exhausted. It does have its point though. …For one thing you can say pretty much what you damn please. And that’s becoming a luxury in this country."
"Says M.T.: “When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination calls for.”"
"The winds of Amarillo blowing steady in gale force the whole time, unlike any other I have ever felt anywhere in the whole world. …Talullah Bankhead making her debut in Dallas as a lecturer, chain-smoking the entire time. …The five-hour bus ride from Odessa, Texas, to Alpine across the arid land… the dazzling sun and the fatigue and yet the beauty of it, esp. when the mountains, which I had not expected, appeared on the horizon and we started to climb…."
"Also friendly to me was General George C. Marshall, whom I did not know personally until he turned up at a lecture of mine to some group at Pinehurst, North Carolina, composed almost entirely of retired army officers, who naturally were rather conservative and rigid in their views. Most of them disagreed strongly with some of my views on foreign affairs, and there was a lively question-and-answer period at the end of the talk. At one point, General Marshall, who had been sitting in the front row, jumped up to defend me. After the meeting we adjourned for a drink and some private talk. He complimented me for speaking out. He seemed depressed about the state of the country, which McCarthy and his supporters were terrorizing. The witch-hunting senator from Wisconsin had accused Marshall of “treason” and proclaimed that he had made common cause with Stalin. Even President Eisenhower, in fear of McCarthy, had once dropped from a speech a defense of the general who had been his boss and benefactor during the war as chief of the Army General Staff. For my money, General Marshall, who also had served as secretary of state and secretary of defense and who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, was one of the great Americans of our time, not only a patriot but a man of integrity and decency at a lamentable time in our history when those qualities were in short supply among the men who were running our country."
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"This being driven out of my profession by… the hysteria of the times has puzzled and troubled me. …And I have had to fight hard—inside—to make sure it did not DEFEAT me.
"This being driven out of my profession by… the hysteria of the times has puzzled and troubled me. …And I have had to fight hard—inside—to make sure it did not DEFEAT me.
"I do not think it has.
"What is important… is not to give in, not to surrender, not even to withdraw from the fight, as one is tempted to do….
"In the meantime one can achieve some sort of happiness in one’s personal life. You can keep on building an inner life. I still get much out of books. …And there is music. And the land here: nature, the soil, the woods, the flowers, the plants, the trees, the changing seasons. They have been very important the last few years.
"And the family of course, the center of my personal life.
"And a few friends remain true; not many but a few. And as one grows older so many tragedies befall those you have known that at times you think that you yourself have been lucky."
"There was a fine scene, my diary reminds me, on the evening of September 11, 1952, when a popular TV program called Author Meets the Critic did a show on Midcentury Journey, published that very day. ... Henry J. Taylor, an arch-conservative who had often attacked my views. There was no love lost between us. Taylor breezed in fifteen minutes before air time and, to the consternation of the show’s producer and director, announced that he would not attack the book, that he liked it very much, agreed with most of it, and would say so. The producer and director appealed to him in vain to change his mind. They had hired him, they said, to criticize the book; Miss Fleeson would do the defending. Without an argument, without debate, the show would be a flop. But Taylor, to everyone’s surprise, was adamant. So he joined Miss Fleeson in praising the book. The director and producer wrung their hands. One of them was so wrought up I feared he might have a stroke."
"An amusing and typical incident at NBC today. I sat around with the producer of a book program, a director of the Talks Department, and one or two other NBC moguls waiting for the man who was supposed to interview me for a recording to be broadcast Saturday. After half an hour, they started telephoning for the man; finally reached him at his home. He had, he said, not come to the broadcast for the simple reason that NBC had fired him the week before!"
Literary Guild picked Midcentury Journey.
"Farm, New Year’s Day, 1954… One great event of 1953: Stalin finally died. But the jungle world he built up in Russia goes on unchanged. His body was hardly cold before Malenkov, apparently the top man in the succession, framed his chief rival and had him shot on Christmas Eve.48 What will Stalin’s place in history be? Distasteful as the tyrant was to us, it will probably be big. He built up the Soviet Union into one of the world’s two great powers.
"True. But over the bodies of millions of Russians. I did not realize then the extent to which Stalin, in his paranoia, went in literally wiping out millions of his fellow countrymen until I read Khrushchev’s account at the Twentieth Party Congress and George Kennan’s devastating revelations in one of his books. Stalin’s tyranny was as brutal as Ivan the Terrible’s and more massive; and its cost to Russia physically, morally, spiritually, and culturally was incalculable. I was wrong about Stalin’s place in Russian history. In the Soviet Union he was finally exposed for what he was under the Gorbachev regime."
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"New York, June 1, 1955—My book on Scandinavia out May 23, and so far the NYT… has completely boycotted mention of it. …I must reluctantly face the fact that there is no living—even a modest one—for me in books. …We exist mostly from my lectures, but that also is a diminishing return, and I must turn to some other field of writing. Few writers in America now earn their living from books. Almost all have to do something else: journalism, teaching, advertising, lecturing. Problem is to find something else that will still leave time and energy for writing."
"Farm, September 18, 1955. Another summer’s end. Back to New York tomorrow….
"I have written the bulk of five books here (and in 1950 and 1953 I spent most of summer in Europe, and in 1951 I was broadcasting for “Liberty” and stayed in New York.)
"1. The Traitor (novel)
"2. Midcentury Journey
"3. Stranger Come Home (novel)
"4. The Challenge of Scandinavia
"5. Pawancore (working title of novel just finished)."
"The next year, 1958, I had hoped would be better. Perhaps the novel just out, The Consul’s Wife, would sell—it was by far the best fiction I had yet written, I thought."
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"For some time I had been working, on and off—and for the last year and a half, full time, fourteen hours a day—on a long and difficult book that almost everyone told me was well worth doing but would not sell. ... "
"For some time I had been working, on and off—and for the last year and a half, full time, fourteen hours a day—on a long and difficult book that almost everyone told me was well worth doing but would not sell. ... "
"I was sure I had found a subject for a book that might be very important as contemporary history and that, through the circumstances of my work in the last years leading up to World War II and because of an unprecedented break that never before had come to historians, I was in a rather unique position to write.
"I was not a “professional historian,” as the academics would say. For them, for some reason, you had to teach history to be a “pro.” I knew better. Some of the greatest historians had never been in academe—Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, to name the first three that come to mind.
"I cared not a whit about a classification. What was important was not whether you were called a “historian” but that you wrote good history. And the field was open to all, especially, I thought, to former journalists. As a reporter I had watched history being made in India when Gandhi began his revolt against the British; in Germany when Hitler took over; and in Great Britain and France when the Western democracies began to slide downhill; and in Italy when Mussolini strutted about.
"At Nuremberg at the end of the war, covering the trial of the Nazi war criminals, I had learned that almost all the confidential records of the German government during the Nazi time, including those of the Foreign Office, the army and navy and of the Nazi party, had fallen into the hands of the Allies. Such a treasure had never before become to writers of history available in their lifetime. And in my case I had the advantage of having lived through at first hand the nightmare of the Third Reich. Memories of it were still fresh in my mind, my blood, and my bones. Academicians might scoff at the value of such an experience. But I remembered that Thucydides, one of the first and probably the greatest of historians in the Western World, had justified his writing the history of the Peloponnesian War by reminding his readers that he had lived through it, “being of an age,” he had added, “to comprehend events and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth.”
"All through the 1950s, I had labored at sifting through the mountains of German documents, classifying them, translating them and making notes. Some time in 1955, I had started to write—at first in time snatched away from other work, later full-time, which came to mean night and day. Friends later said I seemed to be living and working those years in a daze, as if I were in a trance, no longer in touch with the real world."
Shirer writes about his his friends thinking he was crazy, and his publisher refusing it. He asked Shirer what he was planning, and what was the title he had.
"“The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It’s going to be a history of Nazi Germany based on the captured secret documents and on my own personal experience in Berlin in the Hitler time. It’s an opportunity, Stanley, that comes once in a lifetime, if that. With any luck, it’s bound to be a pretty important book.”"
The publisher was willing to give it in writing that they weren't interested.
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BOOK FIVE
BOOK FIVE
“The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”
A Turning Point
1954–1960
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"Actually, I had been tossing around in my mind the idea of doing such a book ever since covering the Nuremberg trial of the chief Nazi war criminals nearly nine years before, in the late fall of 1945. Berlin Diary, published in 1941, had been a sort of a day-to-day eyewitness account of the Nazi conquest of Germany and then of most of Western Europe from 1934 to 1940. It was what I personally had seen and experienced as an American correspondent in Berlin. But it had been impossible in a totalitarian dictatorship to penetrate very deeply under the surface. We journalists watched and recounted events: Hitler’s tearing up the Versailles Treaty in 1935 and proclaiming, in violation of it, a large new conscript army; his occupation of the Rhineland the next year, 1936, in violation of another treaty; the Nazi invasion and occupation of Austria in 1938 and of Czechoslovakia the spring of the next year—a prelude to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and his launching of World War II.
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"Actually, I had been tossing around in my mind the idea of doing such a book ever since covering the Nuremberg trial of the chief Nazi war criminals nearly nine years before, in the late fall of 1945. Berlin Diary, published in 1941, had been a sort of a day-to-day eyewitness account of the Nazi conquest of Germany and then of most of Western Europe from 1934 to 1940. It was what I personally had seen and experienced as an American correspondent in Berlin. But it had been impossible in a totalitarian dictatorship to penetrate very deeply under the surface. We journalists watched and recounted events: Hitler’s tearing up the Versailles Treaty in 1935 and proclaiming, in violation of it, a large new conscript army; his occupation of the Rhineland the next year, 1936, in violation of another treaty; the Nazi invasion and occupation of Austria in 1938 and of Czechoslovakia the spring of the next year—a prelude to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and his launching of World War II.
"I covered these events as a correspondent. But I did not know—none of us, journalists and diplomats, knew—what went on in the secret meetings and conferences of Hitler with his generals and Nazi cronies where the Nazi aggressions were plotted nor the secret diplomatic exchanges between Hitler and Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier, and Stalin, which largely determined what took place in that time of upheaval and deceit. We saw the Jews being hounded and persecuted, their property and savings stolen by the state; and we saw them being carted off to concentration camps. But we could not follow them to see how barbarously they were being treated, nor did we know of the decision on high, about the time I left Berlin at the end of 1940, for the “Final Solution” that would consign them to extermination camps nor, until it was much too late, did we learn that they were there massacred on the order of the popular government of this ancient Christian nation.
"There was so much we didn’t know, and we knew it.
"There was so much we didn’t know, and we knew it.
"Then at the war’s end in May of 1945 the whole vast secret record of what we had not known, set down in millions of confidential records of the Nazi German government, party, military establishment, ministries and the leaders, fell into the hands of the victorious Allies."
"For the first time—ever—historians immediately after the event could now write the definitive history of the rise and fall of a great nation.
"Was it something I should tackle?"
Shirer waited to see if someone else would write it.
"You might have expected the Germans to take the lead in writing the great, documented history of their country under Adolf Hitler. But they were avoiding the subject like the plague. Perhaps it was too soon for a German. Perhaps German historians first would have to come to grips with the enormity of the barbarism their nation had plunged itself into and their own responsibility for it.
"Nine years after the end of the war and the fall of Hitler, I decided to take the plunge—since no one else would. I would not write around the subject. I would tackle it head-on. I would try to write for the first time a fully documented and complete history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Somehow I would find the time to do it and still support my family."
Shirer tried othe publishers after his own declined.
"New York, Tuesday, April 24, 1956. …I have now signed up with S&S to do a book, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” which…—the thought sobers me—will take the next one and a half to two years out of my life. At my age—52—that is something to contemplate. It isn’t that there is anything else I would rather do; there isn’t. But there is the problem of supporting the family during that time; and I have not come near to solving it.
"Because of the hundreds of tons (millions of words) of captured German documents, the material for the book is overwhelming."
"Soon after the Nuremberg trials two separate series of volumes stemming from them had been published by the Allies. The first was the forty-two-volume Trial of the Major War Criminals, of which the first twenty-three volumes contained the text of the testimony at the trial and the remainder the text of the documents accepted in evidence, which were published in their original language, mostly German. Additional documents, interrogations, and affidavits collected for the trial and translated rather hurriedly (and often badly) into English were published in the ten-volume series Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. There was no index to either of these series. It took some wading through to find what you wanted.
"After the major Nazis had been tried, there were twelve subsequent trials at Nuremberg conducted by United States Military Tribunals, from which duly emerged fifteen bulky volumes called Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Bulky as they were, they contained only one-tenth of the material used in the trials. This series, too, had no index.
"By the time I first started plowing into the documentation for my book, all these volumes had become available and you could assemble them at home and work on them. But they covered only the material released at Nuremberg. Vast quantities of Nazi documents did not figure in the trials. One gigantic collection of them had been stored for years in a large U.S. Army warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia. No one in our great government had shown the slightest interest in opening the hundreds of packing cases to see what of historical interest might lie within them. It was only in 1955, ten years after their capture and the year before I contracted to write my book, that the American Historical Association took the initiative to look into the Alexandria papers. Its members got little help from the government. But a handful of its scholars, giving freely of their time and helped by a few modest grants from foundations, finally got access to the documents and began to sift through them. For a time the air force loaned them a couple of photographers to microfilm the papers. It was slow going; but these valiant researchers, under the leadership of Dr. Gerhard Weinberg, were spurred on by the threat of their own government to return the Alexandria documents to Germany before they could be duplicated. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles seemed completely insensitive to their task. He was constantly and publicly assuring the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, that he intended to give the Alexandria papers back to Germany without further delay. There was no reason to hurry and good reason not to. American scholars feared that once the captured documents were returned to Germany they might not find access to them all for some time—or ever. After the First World War, the government of the liberal Weimar Republic, which had succeeded the Hohenzollern monarchy, had released only a few confidential papers, thus stifling the work of scholars, German and otherwise, trying to write the history of the last years of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regime and of the First World War.
"Though I had begun the actual writing of my book in the fall of 1956, I spent a great deal of my time henceforth, long hours day after day, in research. In Washington I worked in the Library of Congress, in the Archives, in the Historical Division of the State Department, and in the office of the Chief of Military History at the Department of the Army, making myself a pest at each of these learned places but obtaining a vast amount of material.53 I flew twice out to Palo Alto to labor in the Hoover Library at Stanford, which had, among other treasures, the files of Heinrich Himmler, the dreaded chief of the Nazi Gestapo and one of the great German killers of the Jews.
"I worked long hours in the library of the Council of Foreign Relations and in the New York Public Library. Luckily I was able to do a great deal of research at home, poring through the sixty-seven unindexed volumes of the Nuremberg trials, the ten volumes of secret papers of the German Foreign Office (published jointly by the British and American governments)—the latter a great treasure for one who, as a correspondent in Berlin, had spent endless hours covering that shrine in the Wilhelmstrasse—and finally the papers collected for me from a myriad of sources by Dr. Epstein and others, including Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the twelve subsequent trials at Nuremberg."
Shirer wrote to General Halder, chief of the German Army General Staff, for more information.
"The one whom I now asked for help was General Franz Halder, chief of the German Army General Staff from August 14, 1939, a fortnight before Hitler plunged the world into its second world war, to September 24, 1942, when the Russians had begun to seal the fate of the hitherto invincible German Army. ... "
"I wrote to General Halder because I had not understood why Hitler, on May 24, 1940, just as his armored forces were closing in on the surrounded British and French armies on the Channel coast at Dunkirk at the climax of the Battle of France, had ordered them to stop in their tracks. The delay allowed the British to evacuate the bulk of their expeditionary force that had been fighting in northern France and Belgium and also enabled several thousand French troops to get away. I knew from Halder’s diary that he had been flabbergasted by the decision. But I wanted more light on why Hitler had issued the crucial order, which Field Marshal von Rundstedt later called “one of the great turning points in the war.”
"Halder replied almost immediately and in detail."
"Another primary source was Hitler’s daily calendar book, snatched from the ruins of the Chancellery bunker in Berlin where the vanquished dictator had killed himself, by an American soldier, though the Russians had been in possession of the bombed-out building for weeks before the Americans arrived. This book enabled me to keep track of Hitler’s whereabouts and settle controversies over where he was on such-and-such occasion and whom he saw and what he was up to.
"There were other informative diaries available besides those of General Halder. I was surprised at how many Nazi bigwigs kept them. Halder was not the only general to indulge in the practice. General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), wrote almost daily in his diary at moments of crisis. OKW itself kept an official diary of events, as did the Naval High Command. Indeed, I found that the Allies had captured at Schloss Tambach near Coburg some sixty thousand files of the German Naval Archives. This was a lucrative find. The files contained practically all the signals, ships’ logs, diaries, and memoranda of the German Navy from April 1945, when they were found, back to 1868, when the modern German Navy was founded.
"The diaries of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, survived. So did those of Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the minister of finance throughout the Hitler reign. Despite having been a Rhodes scholar, he was one of the most muddled aristocrats who faithfully served the Führer; but his diary, reflecting his weakness, still provided a good deal of evidence of Nazi skulduggery, especially in the last desperate months of the crumbling regime."
And there were transcripts of telephone conversation tappings, including conversations between Göring and his henchman in Vienna, and one between Hitler and Prince Philip of Hesse, when Germans were intending to invade Austria.
"This was the sort of material which understandably we newspapermen on the spot at the time could never get. Only the captured documents could reveal what went on inside the cuckooland of the Third Reich. Every week, even after I had started writing, I made new discoveries as I continued to wade through the documentation."
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" ... This was in 1937. That year there was no further Nazi aggression, and we felt somewhat confirmed.
"The captured Nazi documents revealed that we were wrong. They showed that it was indeed in 1937 that Hitler made his fateful decision to go to war. We have the date: November 5, 1937."
" ... There could be a surprise German attack on Czechoslovakia, which, said the directive, “must be eliminated from the very beginning.” Then the generals must get ready for “armed intervention” in Austria and Spain."
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Neither Guggenheim nor Ford foundation would give the money he needed for survival for next year for finishing the book.
"With the foundations and the magazines out, my prospects of being able to finish the book became more and more dim. At some point soon, it seemed fairly certain, I would have to lay it aside and get a job of some sort to keep my family afloat. My diary in 1958 is full of accounts of wild attempts to come up with something that would enable me to go on writing—now that I was so near the end of the book. I had invested so many years in this work it seemed outrageous not to be able to finish it. I simply couldn’t afford not to."
Neither Guggenheim nor Ford foundation would give the money he needed for survival for next year for finishing the book.
"With the foundations and the magazines out, my prospects of being able to finish the book became more and more dim. At some point soon, it seemed fairly certain, I would have to lay it aside and get a job of some sort to keep my family afloat. My diary in 1958 is full of accounts of wild attempts to come up with something that would enable me to go on writing—now that I was so near the end of the book. I had invested so many years in this work it seemed outrageous not to be able to finish it. I simply couldn’t afford not to."
Overbrook Foundation advanced the necessary amount for survival, so Shirer could continue to finish work on the book.
"This saved my life and my book. We quickly paid what we owed on our grocery bills, assured the girls they could remain in school—Inga was a junior at Radcliffe and Linda a senior at the Dalton School in New York—and I settled back to fourteen hours a day of writing. I had reached a point in the book where the tide of war had changed; the once invincible German army was now in retreat in Russia and in North Africa; and I was about to halt the narrative to write a long and terrible chapter about Hitler’s barbarous so-called New Order in Europe, including the “Final Solution” for the Jews. The revelations of a vast array of secret Nazi documents not only about what Hitler had done in the conquered lands but, worse, what he intended to do, were so shocking that I could scarcely believe them. He planned to make Europe, including Russia, a gigantic land of slaves to serve their German masters. The Jews were to be completely exterminated. The Slavs were to be starved down to a manageable level of lowly toilers for the Third Reich. Russia as a nation would, in the Nazi phrase, cease to exist.
"For years the prospect of such a hell, worse than anything our poor planet had ever suffered before, had kept me in a state of depression. Then in 1942, with Hitler’s first military reverses, one could begin to hope that that world might be saved from this calamity after all. With 1943 bringing Germany’s fateful defeat at Stalingrad, the worst disaster to the German army in its history, the clearing of the Germans out of North Africa by the Anglo-American armies, and the Allied landings in Italy, it became certain that the New Order was doomed. But it was a fearful chapter in history nevertheless, and it had to be set down. Then in 1944 came the Anglo-American landings in France, the sweep across that country past Paris to the German frontier. The Russians, for their part, neared the old German border in the east. The end could not be far off; and it came at 2:41 on the morning of May 7, 1945, when in a little red schoolhouse at Reims, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies and repeated the act in Berlin a couple of days later."
"The war against Germany, the most destructive, the most savage warring that Europe had ever seen, was over. And as I got to that point, my book was finished too. I had watched the rise and some of the fall of the Third Reich over the years. Hitler had boasted it would last a thousand years. It had expired after exactly twelve years, four months, and eight days. Still, it had seemed an age to those who suffered its outrages, an Age of Darkness. Now a bleak night was descending on the Master Race, which had perpetrated so much evil.
"All that autumn of 1958, I wrote and wrote, and all that winter of 1958–1959 and the spring that followed and the summer. My family and friends said later I batted away at my typewriter as if I were possessed. For the first time, I did not jot down a line in my diary. When I first started checking over my journal for this book, I noted that since I could find nothing for 1959, that year’s entries “were missing.” And then I realized that most likely there had never been any. An entry on April 12, 1960, explained: “Very few entries in recent years. Most of my time and energy for more than five years has gone into researching and writing the Third Reich book….”"
"On September 24, exactly one month after finishing the book, I went up to the Look offices on Madison Avenue, opposite the CBS building where I had worked for so long, and signed a contract to write a piece of some 25,000 words by the end of December on the life of Adolf Hitler, based on the book. The magazine would extract three articles from the manuscript at five thousand dollars apiece. It also had the right to publish a fourth piece at the same price. We had not seen such sums since the golden days of radio and of Berlin Diary ages before. We were once again, after such a long drought, in clover! The feeling of relief was indescribable. I went around the streets of New York in a great white, shining cloud for days thereafter."
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"Despite the Book-of-the-Month Club’s taking the book and all the publicity from the Look piece, Simon and Schuster stuck with its print order of 12,500 copies (after selling 7,500 to Warburg) when the book finally came out on October 17, 1960. I wondered about it but I concluded that the publisher knew what he was doing. My chief concern now was how the book would be received. A good many writers claim they never read their reviews. I do read them. And in this instance I felt some trepidation. I remember hearing from the grapevine that the Sunday New York Times Book Review had given the book for review to a prestigious Oxford historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper, whom I much admired."
"H. R. Trevor-Roper’s review of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was spread all over page one of the Sunday New York Times Book Review of October 16, 1960. It flabbergasted me. I could scarcely believe it. The editor’s caption gave the first hint.
"LIGHT ON OUR CENTURY’S DARKEST NIGHT"
"Now, as never before, the living witnesses can converge with the historical truth. All they need is a historian. In William L. Shirer they have found him."
"Daladier, who was premier in the last years leading up to the war, wrote in the Paris Candide that he would have acted differently had he known of certain things disclosed in my book ..."
"Daladier was particularly resentful, he told me later in a conversation, that the British government, to whom the German conspirators had confided, had not tipped him off.
"In Britain and in France, then, the statesmen involved and the academic historians took my book seriously; though, naturally, they found parts to criticize. They were not suspicious of a work of history simply because it was a “best-seller.”"
"One of my American academic friends reminded me that this was not so among many of his colleagues here at home. One evening he telephoned me from the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, then holding its Christmas-week convention in Washington.
"“Good thing you’re not here!” he exclaimed. “The professors are clobbering the hell out of you!”
"“Still?” I asked. “What’s bothering them now?”
"“They can’t forgive you for making the best-seller list.” He paused. “There’s another reason why they can’t forgive you.”
"“And what is that?”
"“Because, dammit, you wrote the whole damn history of the Third Reich before any of them had even started to think of doing it. They say you should have left it to them.”
"“I tried,” I said. “I waited and waited for them.”
"“I know. That bugs them, too. During all that time, they realize, they were sitting on their behinds. Too lazy or too timid to attack those mountains of Nazi documents and organize and write the book.”"
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"Terrence Prittie, the Manchester Guardian correspondent in Germany after the war, had concluded in his review in the December 1960 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, that in my book “there is history which might do the most good after all in Germany. For nothing comparable has been written there; and if anyone ought to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it is the Germans themselves.”
"But it did not do much good in Germany. As I expected, The Rise and Fall had rough sledding when it was published there in translation a year later.59 Sixteen years after the Allies had destroyed the Nazis (the Allies, not the Germans), the Germans were still not able to face up to the ghastly truth of the barbarian rule of Hitler, which most of them—so far as I, who had lived and worked among them, could see—had supported, often with surprising zeal. By this time the bombed and bombarded land had been largely rebuilt from the ashes and the debris with much Allied help; and the Germans, or at least the West Germans, were regaining their self-confidence and forgetting their past. They were becoming prosperous again in their newly built homes; and they resented being reminded of that terrible past, which was just what they said The Rise and Fall did. The newspapers and magazines, and even the chancellor and his government, fell on it with a vengeance. Their anger and hysteria was something to behold, though it did not much surprise me.
"The pack was led by a mass-circulation weekly illustrated magazine of supposedly liberal tendencies called Stern, which honored me with a long review and an even longer cover story filled with wonderful vituperation and the most amusing personal attacks. A second weekly of conservative bent, Aktuell, devoted parts of two issues to clobbering me and suggesting that for such an anti-Nazi book I deserved to be awarded the Order of Lenin. Der Spiegel, a weekly whose format had been borrowed from Time, joined in assailing me as an “amateur historian” surrounded by “critics and amateur historians who have joined his bandwagon.” The first of these it cited it called “the Jewish critic Eliahu Ben Horin,” followed by the New York Times. The review in the Stern was almost a masterpiece in misrepresentation and in what I could only believe, in some instances, was pure invention. “For the American, William L. Shirer,” it began, “the war against Germany goes on.” (The book actually concluded with the end of World War II and the fall of the Nazi Third Reich.) “He has at his disposal a dangerous weapon: a book in which he tells a million times stories as history. Too many have already taken it as the classic history of the Nazi time.”"
"Terrence Prittie, the Manchester Guardian correspondent in Germany after the war, had concluded in his review in the December 1960 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, that in my book “there is history which might do the most good after all in Germany. For nothing comparable has been written there; and if anyone ought to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it is the Germans themselves.”
"But it did not do much good in Germany. As I expected, The Rise and Fall had rough sledding when it was published there in translation a year later.59 Sixteen years after the Allies had destroyed the Nazis (the Allies, not the Germans), the Germans were still not able to face up to the ghastly truth of the barbarian rule of Hitler, which most of them—so far as I, who had lived and worked among them, could see—had supported, often with surprising zeal. By this time the bombed and bombarded land had been largely rebuilt from the ashes and the debris with much Allied help; and the Germans, or at least the West Germans, were regaining their self-confidence and forgetting their past. They were becoming prosperous again in their newly built homes; and they resented being reminded of that terrible past, which was just what they said The Rise and Fall did. The newspapers and magazines, and even the chancellor and his government, fell on it with a vengeance. Their anger and hysteria was something to behold, though it did not much surprise me.
"The pack was led by a mass-circulation weekly illustrated magazine of supposedly liberal tendencies called Stern, which honored me with a long review and an even longer cover story filled with wonderful vituperation and the most amusing personal attacks. A second weekly of conservative bent, Aktuell, devoted parts of two issues to clobbering me and suggesting that for such an anti-Nazi book I deserved to be awarded the Order of Lenin. Der Spiegel, a weekly whose format had been borrowed from Time, joined in assailing me as an “amateur historian” surrounded by “critics and amateur historians who have joined his bandwagon.” The first of these it cited it called “the Jewish critic Eliahu Ben Horin,” followed by the New York Times. The review in the Stern was almost a masterpiece in misrepresentation and in what I could only believe, in some instances, was pure invention. “For the American, William L. Shirer,” it began, “the war against Germany goes on.” (The book actually concluded with the end of World War II and the fall of the Nazi Third Reich.) “He has at his disposal a dangerous weapon: a book in which he tells a million times stories as history. Too many have already taken it as the classic history of the Nazi time.”"
"Chancellor Adenauer made no bones about his position. He attacked me on television. He raved to anyone who would listen, I was told, especially on his visits to America, against the book and against me. And once when he was in New York, he called Mike Cowles to his suite at the Waldorf, angrily denounced him for publishing pieces from the book, and demanded that Look cease publishing further extracts. Cowles, who could be hard as nails, was not intimidated by the angry German chancellor. He told me afterward that he said to the German:
"“Sir, are you telling me that the Shirer book is not truthful? If so, Look will print a retraction.”
"“Mr. Cowles,” Mike swore the chancellor answered, “you do not get the point. The point is not whether it’s truthful or not. The point is that it is turning out to be extremely harmful to German-American relations. It is stirring up in America hatred of the Germans. Mr. Shirer is a German-hater, a Deutschhasser! You must not publish any more of his trash.”
"“That is something for us to decide, Herr Chancellor,” Mike said he replied. “As I said, show me proof of lies or distortions and I’ll correct them. But we shall go on publishing the rest of the pieces from the book as scheduled. We believe they are based on the documented facts. Incidentally, Herr Chancellor, did you note that the book is about Germans under Hitler, not about the Germans today?”"
"I had been maligned by the German chancellor and the German press for what I had written of the Germans during the savage Nazi time. But here was a German philosopher writing about them today as the 1960s began.
"“We Germans have still to achieve our own integrity as a prerequisite of our new liberty. …Both truth and political education are the victims of our German amnesia. …
"“Our political freedom is not of our own doing. …We received freedom as a gift from the conqueror. …By the will of the victors we have been given the opportunity of democracy, a democracy which did not emerge from some struggle for liberation but was decreed for us at a time when we were simply a huddled mass of German survivors.
"“Does Germany yet know what freedom is? Political liberty was created by Europeans in struggle. [And in] America. …Today we Germans are only enjoying the political fruits of these events. But can we become true democrats? Up to now ours is only a superficial relation to democracy.”"
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BOOK SIX
BOOK SIX
The Running Out of Time
1960–1975
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"And then I succumbed, briefly, to the temptations of Hollywood.
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"And then I succumbed, briefly, to the temptations of Hollywood.
"In my diary of January 1, 1961, reviewing the past year’s turn of good fortune, I had noted: “It even looks as though we might get a movie sale.”
"Up until then my agent had advised me that this was not likely. “They almost never buy a work of nonfiction,” he said, “and I do not expect them to take this.”
"But “they” had.
"“Unfortunately, for peanuts,” my agent later lamented. He had been so surprised when an offer came from MGM, of all studios, that he had taken what they first offered, which was “a disgrace,” he said. But at that time, after so many lean years, the offer—and I have forgotten exactly what it was—seemed big enough to me. And it would be interesting, I thought, to see if Hollywood could do a film about so vast and terrifying a subject.
"“They’ll do plenty,” my friends said. “You won’t recognize your book when they get through with it, especially at MGM.”"
Shirer was taken to Hollywood.
"“My dear Mr. Shirer, you’ve ruined my sleep for the last three nights. You can ask my wife. I tell you, I’ve sat up through three nights reading The Rise and Fall. I couldn’t put it down. But it’s long. It left me no time to sleep. It’s…”
"He turned to pick up the phone, which had just buzzed.
"Jack Houseman, sitting at my side, whispered in my ear: “Don’t believe a word of it. The son-of-a-bitch can’t read!”"
" ... I was to write the script. A little later we would scour the archives in Washington and in Europe for new film. I was sure there were masses of it that had never been shown.
"The next few days I was initiated into a familiar Hollywood scene. The three of us would sit around a swimming pool, usually at the swank hotel where I was staying, and discuss the picture we would do and the script I would write. Often toward the end of the afternoon we would adjourn to John’s place on Malibu Beach for further talks and further drinks. It was fun, but so far as developing a script, a pleasant waste of time. Finally I moved out to a motel at Palm Springs to really get into the script, and John and George flew off to Washington to see what kind of film was available there."
"After dispensing a million dollars, MGM gave up on the film of the Third Reich book. John Houseman and George Roy Hill took off to greener pastures. In the end MGM sold the rights to David Wolper, who made of it a very good documentary film. It was an impossible task, really, to compress the history of Nazi Germany into a two-hour film. But Wolper did wonders. It is still shown in colleges and universities and occasionally on television.
"I never tried to write for the films again. Hollywood was not my dish. It was unreal. I could not connect with it."
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Shirer writes about facing old age, about his affair with Tilly Losch and its effect on his marriage, about his thinking about writing about fall of France in 1940, and about Martha Dodd.
"The 1960s raced by. My days were full of work and of wonder at what was going on—in our country and abroad—and how swiftly and dramatically life was changing. A new generation was taking over our country, as the election in 1960 of John F. Kennedy, forty-three, as president showed. Its men and women were born well into the century. A still younger generation, the one that had reached the colleges and universities, was in revolt. It was stirring up the campuses and provoking fear and resentment among the old fuddyduds of the Establishment. Changes that would deeply affect the lives of Americans were sweeping the old away."
"I watch weekend sports and the daily evening news on network TV and a play, an opera, a symphony concert occasionally on public television. There is not much real news on the evening shows—there is not time to treat it more than superficially—but from them I get a certain feel for people and places. For news I have to turn to my local paper, and since I live in the northeast, to the New York Times. That still leaves me a good deal of time for reading. I gather there is not much general reading, at least of books, in our country anymore. Gazing at the tube has replaced it as it has replaced social conversation. Are the consequences not predictable: a country of illiterate boobs sitting dumbly around the TV set, like ancient cavemen around a fire, unable to communicate or articulate, stupefied by inanities?"
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"In the fall of 1962 an event occurred that sobered up the country and forced it to face a grim reality: our very extinction no less. A nuclear war between Russia and the United States was narrowly averted. This time Americans suddenly woke to the threat of a nuclear exchange and its consequences. I was up on the farm doing some fall chores. But when the crisis broke, I abandoned them to stay glued to a TV set. On Tuesday, October 23, 1962, I began my diary:
"In the fall of 1962 an event occurred that sobered up the country and forced it to face a grim reality: our very extinction no less. A nuclear war between Russia and the United States was narrowly averted. This time Americans suddenly woke to the threat of a nuclear exchange and its consequences. I was up on the farm doing some fall chores. But when the crisis broke, I abandoned them to stay glued to a TV set. On Tuesday, October 23, 1962, I began my diary:
"A possibility of nuclear war and the end of the world. Pres. Kennedy last night broadcast the information that Russia was building missile bases in Cuba capable of delivering nuclear warheads on the nearby U.S.A. and Latin Amer. countries. He demanded Russia dismantle U.S.A. bases, and he clapped on what he called a “quarantine”—actually a naval and air blockade—of Cuba, shutting off all offensive weapons. If and when American naval vessels stop Russian ships, what happens?"
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"The following year, 1963, the country was again thrown into shock. And this time there was sorrow too and despair. The young president was assassinated at Dallas.
"It was a Friday in late November, and I had gone up to the country the day before for the weekend. There was some wood to saw up and split, so that we would have enough to last over Christmas. About 1 P.M. I knocked off and went into the house for a bite of lunch. I was just finishing when the wife of a farmer down the road phoned to say she had just heard the last part of a bulletin on TV. Apparently the president had been shot. I turned on my set. Walter Cronkite, so stunned he could hardly speak, was saying on CBS that the president was being rushed to the hospital in Dallas but that it was not known whether his wounds were serious. So there was hope, and I grasped it desperately and clung to it. I remained sitting immobile, stricken, before the tube the rest of the afternoon and all through the evening, refusing at first to accept the truth of what happened and then trying to cope with it."
"I have never before felt such a personal loss in the death of a president or public figure—not even the time in April, 1945, when F. D. Roosevelt, a beloved figure to my generation, suddenly died when I was on leave in Cedar Rapids….
"Personally I had never even met Kennedy, except for a brief handshake some years ago in New York when as senator and author of a best-selling book called Profiles in Courage, he made the major address at the Annual Book Award ceremony. I believe he received the award that year… for nonfiction….
"And though I had some reservations about him as president these past three years (I had voted for him), he was the first occupant of the White House since FDR who inspired me with much confidence and hope, and even affection. …He had a spontaneous sense of humor that added to his attractiveness. It bubbled over in his last public appearance at a [breakfast] speech at Fort Worth an hour or so before he was murdered. Thanks to TV we saw that appearance—after the sudden death was reported, and this juxtaposition, this seeing him in such a radiant mood just before death, made the tragedy almost beyond bearing."
" ... His motives for shooting the president were not known, or at least never made public, and with his murder it was unlikely that they ever would be. Thus suspicions were aroused that never quite died down. I noted them in my diary that very day I saw him on TV being murdered. There were some seventy Dallas police guarding him in the jail’s basement corridor through which he was being whisked. Not one of them lifted a finger, much less a gun, to stop the assassin. And what was Ruby doing there in the first place? The public had been excluded. Only reporters were allowed entrance. And the Dallas police knew the man.
"Was it a cover-up? I wondered in my diary, noting the suspicious behavior of the Dallas police. For years some Americans wondered, even after a Presidential Commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren had, after long hearings, confirmed that in its opinion Oswald was the lone assassin, firing the fatal shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where he was employed."
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" ... The last of the giants who had shaped the world in the years that led up to and through the Second World War died at the beginning of 1965. After Hitler and Mussolini and Roosevelt, whose lives came to an end in 1945, the last year of the war, and Stalin, who died in 1953, Winston Churchill, whose courage, eloquence, and fierce determination, had kept Britain in the war against the conquering Nazi Germans until the final Allied triumph, died in London at ninety on January 24."
" ... The last of the giants who had shaped the world in the years that led up to and through the Second World War died at the beginning of 1965. After Hitler and Mussolini and Roosevelt, whose lives came to an end in 1945, the last year of the war, and Stalin, who died in 1953, Winston Churchill, whose courage, eloquence, and fierce determination, had kept Britain in the war against the conquering Nazi Germans until the final Allied triumph, died in London at ninety on January 24."
"In great contrast to his primitive views on India, Churchill saw very clearly and very early the threat of Nazi Germany. And because of this he became a pariah in his own Tory party, a lone voice in the wilderness as the party under Neville Chamberlain blindly opted for disarmament at home and appeasement of Hitler abroad."
"It was during this period, in 1938, that I had a rather droll experience with Churchill. I thought of it as I read through the obituary and an account of all the worldwide tributes on this great man’s death. It happened a day or two after I had flown from Vienna to London to give an uncensored report on the Anschluss. CBS, for which I was a correspondent in Europe, asked me to get Churchill to broadcast on the crisis, but it would pay him only fifty dollars. When I phoned Churchill at the House of Commons, he agreed to do a broadcast; but he wanted more than fifty dollars, which was a ridiculous sum. From the way he talked I concluded he would accept five hundred dollars. But William Paley, the head of CBS, was adamant. He would not pay more than fifty, and we lost the broadcast."
" ... He had spoken at Westminster College, a small institution at Fulton, Missouri, with a beaming President Truman looking on.
"Stalin, his armies having installed puppet Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, was becoming more and more belligerent toward the West in his speeches and actions. In Fulton, Churchill rose to take issue with him.
"“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he said in a peroration that reverberated around the world and gave it a new term for the line separating the East and West in Europe, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”"
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Shirer writes about other known figures that departed during sixties, such as Aneurin "Nye" Bevan, Jennie Lee, Adlai Stevenson, H. G. Wells, John Steinbeck and others. He writes about the Orient Express.
"On May 29, 1961, I pasted in my diary a clip of a Reuter dispatch from Paris to the New York Times. It began:
"The Orient Express is no more. After a service that has lasted 78 years, the train was on its last journey today [the 28th].
"It had left the Gare de l’Est in Paris the night before for Bucharest by way of Basel, Zürich, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest, a journey of sixty hours. Reading this brought back memories.
"How often I have taken that train… from Paris to Istanbul down through Switzerland and Austria to Vienna and then down the Danube to Budapest and then southeast to Bucharest and Istanbul—a journey of 67 hours and usually a pleasant one. Some of the cars branched off to Italy and Yugoslavia (and even to Greece). In my Vienna days I traveled on it frequently to and from Paris."
"The Orient Express was a comfortable all-Pullman train with good food and wine served in the dining car. It took you through picturesque landscapes, especially the mountains of the Alps from Basel to Salzburg, then the hilly valley of the Danube down through Vienna to Budapest and thereafter the mountains, hills, and valleys of the Balkans, with their quaint villages and colorfully dressed villagers.
"What killed the Orient Express? The airplane, no doubt, and to some extent the Iron Curtain. It became much quicker and a bit cheaper to travel by air. After the war it proved exhausting and frustrating to cross the frontier of a Balkan Communist country. You were hauled off the train, even in the dead of the night, to open your baggage to inspection—it too had been removed—even if you were only passing through the country."
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" ... President Nixon and his scheming secretary of state, Kissinger, began their devastating Christmas bombing of Hanoi, hitting among other things the city’s main hospital and massacring many of its patients and staff. They tried to deny it at first, but Telford Taylor, our chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, happened to be in Hanoi, witnessed the carnage, and reported it to the New York Times, though he was not a correspondent.
"Such a Christmas message!
"Such American barbarism!"
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Shirer writes about Thurber and other friends.
"I have never known a man as generous, gentle (and yet tough-minded), warm, genial, broadminded, and unstuffed as was Lewis Gannett. He loved discovering new writers and encouraging them. In 1932, when he was relatively new at reviewing books daily, he wrote a column about a novel whose author, he said, he had never heard of, Pastures of Heaven.
"“I would recommend to editors,” Gannett wrote, “a name I have never met before, that of John Steinbeck.”
"Lewis helped launch the unknown Steinbeck on a career that brought the novelist the Nobel Prize. By that heady time Steinbeck had ceased seeing Gannett. Early on Gannett championed Faulkner and Dos Passos. When Dos moved from the far left to the far right in his politics, Gannett was saddened but kept in touch with him. Toward the end of their careers, Gannett invited Dos, whose latest books were being ignored by reviewers and critics, to write a volume for the Mainstream of America series, which he was editing; and he worked with him very closely to help make it, a work on Jefferson, one of the best books Dos Passos wrote in his declining years."
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"In coming to Berlin from Moscow, Joe Barnes had exchanged one totalitarian dictatorship for another. From the brutalities of Stalin to those of Hitler. He knew the Soviet Union well, spoke fluent Russian, and loved the people and the culture. Germany was new to him, the people as well as the language. And it puzzled him. Yet such was his intelligence and burning curiosity that soon he was writing some of the most perceptive dispatches from Berlin as Hitler pushed Germany ever closer toward war. We soon became fast friends, sharing the same hostility and also, I think, the same fascination, in regard to a regime that in so short a time and with so many ruffians as its leaders had turned the Germans into sheep who would do the bidding of Adolf Hitler, no matter how criminal and barbarian.
"In coming to Berlin from Moscow, Joe Barnes had exchanged one totalitarian dictatorship for another. From the brutalities of Stalin to those of Hitler. He knew the Soviet Union well, spoke fluent Russian, and loved the people and the culture. Germany was new to him, the people as well as the language. And it puzzled him. Yet such was his intelligence and burning curiosity that soon he was writing some of the most perceptive dispatches from Berlin as Hitler pushed Germany ever closer toward war. We soon became fast friends, sharing the same hostility and also, I think, the same fascination, in regard to a regime that in so short a time and with so many ruffians as its leaders had turned the Germans into sheep who would do the bidding of Adolf Hitler, no matter how criminal and barbarian.
"In the last summer weeks, full of tension, before the Nazi dictator plunged the world into war on September 1, 1939, Joe and I met nightly after I had done my broadcast and he had finished his dispatch. Often we would walk through the Tiergarten where we could talk without fear of hidden microphones and end up after midnight at the Taverne, a café where the American and British correspondents met after work and where we could chew the fat with our colleagues, exchange ideas and information and escape for a moment the tensions of living and working amid the paranoiac Nazis."
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BOOK SEVEN
BOOK SEVEN
Past Hope or Fear
Twilight and the Gathering Night
1975–1988
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Shirer talks of how his marriage ended, of Gilly and their history.
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Shirer talks of how his marriage ended, of Gilly and their history.
"Tess and I began to reach the end that blizzardy Christmas Eve in the country in 1966, the night it all ended for Gilly.
"My first meeting with Gilly in Vienna went back thirty-four years. We had not become friends until fifteen years later, after the war, when we were both back from our long time in Europe. But only friends. Not more. Then suddenly, to our complete surprise, only a year or so before this fateful Christmas Eve, we had fallen in love. We had resisted it. I did not want to break up my marriage, and she did not want to play any part in it. But our resistance crumbled."
"Loss of love does not necessarily end a marriage, especially in the old, rigid, very Catholic aristocracy in Poland; and the American princess and her Polish prince lived on together in Poland. She had another child and gradually accustomed herself, as far as a young American woman could, to the isolated, narrow, routine life of the country’s nobility.
"Loss of love does not necessarily end a marriage, especially in the old, rigid, very Catholic aristocracy in Poland; and the American princess and her Polish prince lived on together in Poland. She had another child and gradually accustomed herself, as far as a young American woman could, to the isolated, narrow, routine life of the country’s nobility.
"The people the couple associated with were so isolated, she later said, that they did not see the war coming or realize that Poland would be its first casualty, though that was plain to everyone but an idiot after Hitler consolidated his hold on Germany and turned abroad for new conquests. It also was obvious that Poland could not afford the luxury of being at odds with both of its giant neighbors, Germany and the Soviet Union. Obvious, that is, to all but the privileged class.
"Gilly herself, she later wrote, was blissfully apolitical and, like the Poles, did not at first see the threatening clouds gather over central Europe. She was rudely awakened one day in March 1938, while on a visit to Vienna to consult a doctor. It happened to be the day Hitler marched in and took over Austria. She suddenly became aware that the Nazi dictator wanted much more than Austria. Czechoslovakia, now surrounded by Germans on three sides, would be next and then Poland, when she too became outflanked. But Gilly was not listened to when she returned. The Poles would continue to blind themselves to the very end.
"That end came for Gilly and her Polish family in the humid, warm days of September 1939, when Hitler’s armies smashed through Poland in three weeks. She and her two children escaped from their castle in Silesia to Rumania and eventually to Paris, where her husband, after Poland had been gobbled up by Germany and the Soviet Union, joined her."
She worked for a publishing firm in N.Y. after the war.
"We got better acquainted after she invited me to participate in a popular TV program, The Author Meets the Critic, which she began moderating in 1952 and at which she was very good. This was a time when the McCarthy hysteria had put me down if not out, and I found that Gilly was very sympathetic to those of us caught in that bind. Against great opposition from her sponsors she had insisted on devoting one program to a book of mine. Later I learned that Gilly was largely responsible for my getting the National Book Award in 1960 for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She had badgered her colleagues on the judges panel into voting for the book."
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Through the divorce tumult Shirer managed to finish his book on France. French law officially prevented his access to documents, but he found another way.
"I found that I could get most of the French material I was looking for without ever having to break the law. For one thing, the former political leaders and the generals, particularly the latter, were making them available either in their memoirs or in their sworn testimony at the postwar trials of collaborators, especially those of Pétain and Laval, and during exhaustive questioning by the Parliamentary Investigating Committee, which after the war was charged by the National Assembly to look into the events from 1933 to 1945 which had brought the country to its knees. It became a rather common sight to see former cabinet members, politicians, diplomats, generals, and admirals appear on these occasions and, as they testified, pull out of bulging briefcases sheafs of secret documents that they had stashed away and that they were now using to defend themselves and clear their names.
"Once a key French general, whose confidence I had gained after some initial difficulties by impressing him with the results of my initial research (i.e., that I had learned quite a bit about my subject), suddenly broke off a conversation we were having at his home, got up without a word, left the room, and returned lugging in three trunks of confidential material he had been guarding that covered an important part of the story I had not been able to document fully.
"The publication in France of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich undoubtedly helped me. It brought a certain respect from French academic historians that I had not received from their American counterparts. A surprisingly large number of them, including some of France’s most illustrious historians, helped me in numerous ways, not only in my research but also in understanding the complex factors that brought about the debacle. Some of the politicians, too. Edouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, the last two premiers of the Third Republic and, therefore, the two most important politicians of the last years before France’s fall, went out of their way to help me. With them I put to practice an idea I had found valuable in my work as a journalist: that statesmen open up most to a reporter who can provide them information in return for what they are giving. It makes the relationship a two-way street.
"Daladier was especially appreciative of certain revelations in my Third Reich book. He wrote in the press that I had revealed a great deal that would have moved him to act differently had he known it when he was in office.
"Both former premiers complained to me that because of the “law of 50 years” they were being denied access to their own state papers, though Reynaud must have taken an awful lot of them with him when he left office, for they were largely the basis of his own memoirs. At numerous meetings at his home he showed me a number of them. Over the years of research in Paris, Reynaud turned out to be one of my chief sources of information. ... But it was not only historical material that he gave me: he opened doors to other politicians, military chiefs, historians, editors, diplomats. For some Americans, the French are often difficult to deal with. They gave me more help and cooperation than I had ever received in any other country, including my own."
"To Reynaud’s credit, he opposed the armistice with the Germans to the last and was replaced by Marshal Pétain as premier, who promptly asked for it. But some thought Reynaud could have been stronger in the last crucial days in Bordeaux and that he might have arranged, as General de Gaulle, his military adviser, was urging, as were several members of his cabinet, for the French government to move to its colonies in North Africa, from where France could have made a prolonged stand. But his dogged mistress had worn him down."
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The book about France had taken eight years.
"The reception by the New York Times was an example. It was surprising. The distinguished newspaper clobbered the book—not once but twice, in its daily review of books and in its Sunday Book Review. For good measure its news department, which had asked me to talk with a Times reporter and pose for pictures by a Times photographer for a story it said it had to have by publication date, November 13, did not print it until December 29, six weeks later, when the appearance of the book was no longer news. The reporter’s piece itself was harmless enough, but the photographer turned out to be a problem. He had greeted me on arriving at my home in Lenox by saying that the last time we met I had shoved him off the stage onto the floor of Carnegie Hall in New York while he was trying to photograph me—an unlikely story, since I could not recall ever having been on the stage of Carnegie Hall and I had never pushed anyone off a stage anywhere, especially a man bigger than I, as this cameraman was. The photograph of his which the Times used was far from flattering, to say the least."
The book about France had taken eight years.
"The reception by the New York Times was an example. It was surprising. The distinguished newspaper clobbered the book—not once but twice, in its daily review of books and in its Sunday Book Review. For good measure its news department, which had asked me to talk with a Times reporter and pose for pictures by a Times photographer for a story it said it had to have by publication date, November 13, did not print it until December 29, six weeks later, when the appearance of the book was no longer news. The reporter’s piece itself was harmless enough, but the photographer turned out to be a problem. He had greeted me on arriving at my home in Lenox by saying that the last time we met I had shoved him off the stage onto the floor of Carnegie Hall in New York while he was trying to photograph me—an unlikely story, since I could not recall ever having been on the stage of Carnegie Hall and I had never pushed anyone off a stage anywhere, especially a man bigger than I, as this cameraman was. The photograph of his which the Times used was far from flattering, to say the least."
The daily book review.
"After noting that I was “a popular historian” and that “Lord knows there’s nothing wrong with that” he gave his readers, despite his obvious ignorance of the subject, a little lecture on “written history,” which he asserted was “a distortion of reality.” But “Mr. Shirer,” he complained, “does not buy that. He is bent on reproducing history in its pristine state.”
"This irked him. For one thing, he wrote, he did not think that the fall of France and the collapse of the Third Republic in 1940 was important enough to warrant so long and detailed a book as I wrote. After all, he said, France had been defeated by Germany before, in 1870. Why all the fuss about its defeat in 1940 by the same Germans?"
"It could not be compared to the surrender to the Prussians in 1870 as the reviewer thought. As I read on, I could discern that he seemed miffed that I was what he called “a best-selling author” and that my new book, like the previous one, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. He saved his punchline for the last. After informing his readers that there were a few parts in the book worth reading, he gave them this parting advice: “Tear out the rest of the pages and use them to line the gerbil’s cage, or something.” In other words, as toilet paper for your pet rat.
"It was the first time I had seen this reviewer resort to vulgarity—and the Times print it—though it may have popped up in pieces I had skipped, of which there were many."
"The editor of the Sunday Times Book Review had given my book for review to an unknown teacher of history at Columbia. The editor, or his predecessor, had given my Rise and Fall of the Third Reich nine years before to an eminent Oxford historian in the belief, my publishers suspected, that such a British authority would give a history by an upstart American journalist the drubbing it probably deserved. Instead, H. R. Trevor-Roper, later the Regis Professor of Modern History at Oxford, had praised the book to the skies on the front page, finding it to be a “monumental work… a splendid work of scholarship, objective in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions.” My publishers believed, I’m sure wrongly, that the Times Book Review editor never forgave Trevor-Roper for crossing him up. At any rate, some of the editors at Simon and Schuster thought the Review was not going to take any chances this time with a noted historian. So it chose an obscure young instructor at nearby Columbia.
"Like the Times daily reviewer, the young Columbia teacher seemed resentful that some of my previous books, Berlin Diary and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, had been “best-sellers” and were selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club. “Now ‘The Collapse of the Third Republic,’” he added as if it irked him, “is also a Book-of-the-Month selection.” Apparently to this young university instructor, as to many of his academic brethren, if a book was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and sold well, it had to be bad. He could scarcely get off the subject. He snidely suggested that in my case there was “the commercial calculation by which a best-seller [my book on Nazi Germany] has its pre-sold sequel [my France book].” If he were a wiser young man, he might have known that invariably an author who tries consciously to write a best-seller ends up with a book that no one will buy or read. At any rate there was never any such “commercial calculation” on my part. No one had believed the Third Reich book would sell at all. And as a matter of fact, the France book never sold enough to pay back the advance."
"Not all professors missed the theme of the book. An unsolicited letter from Eric F. Goldman, professor of history at Princeton, noted: “This is certainly history in the grand tradition—a theme of sweeping significance illuminated by tremendous research and a skeptical but always warmly humane intelligence.”
"There was a beauty at the end of the young Columbia instructor’s long piece. Despite all the solid documentation, which had taken years in France to gather and which I had checked with many of France’s most illustrious historians, this reviewer told his readers that in the main my book “on closer inspection” turned out to derive “from 1940 potboilers.”
"I dwell on these two Times reviews for two reasons. First: my book on the fall of France was surely marked by flaws as most long, narrative histories are. Any reviewer worth his salt would have had to point them out if he were knowledgeable enough to detect them. A writer does not gripe about such reviews. What is harder for him to take are reviews which deliberately—as in these two cases—decline to give the reader the faintest idea of a book, its scope, its sweep, its story, its scholarship, its documentation, its judgments and conclusions, however controversial—but instead give a false and distorted picture. And he does not much enjoy being the victim of petty prejudices and jealousies even when they come from academics. To write that the France book—any part of it—was based on “1940 potboilers” was not only cheap and petty but also a deliberate deception."
"The Times with its monopoly could kill a play in New York—and often did—with its one review. It could not kill a book, but it could damage one, especially if there was a one-two punch from the daily and then the Sunday editions.
"This had not been true until the lamentable demise of the New York Herald-Tribune three years before. The Tribune’s daily book column, pioneered by Lewis Gannett, was excellent as was the Tribune’s Sunday Books, edited by Irita Van Doren, a worthy rival to the Times Sunday review. In both cases the Tribune provided a fair balance to the reviews in the Times. Now that balance was gone."
"The serious reviews of the book from coast to coast displayed a healthy variety of opinion. Time was condescending as it had been with my Third Reich book. In both cases Time concluded that I was not qualified to write on such important subjects. Its sister, Life, came to just the opposite conclusion. Its reviewer hailed the book as the “most illuminating one ever written” on the fall of France. “The essential merit of his book is that it explains the fall of France in 1940 not only as a military defeat but as the collapse of a political system and a society.”"
" ... A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal faulted me, as had the man in the Sunday Times Book Review, for spending more time scandalizing over the mistresses of Daladier and Reynaud than I did “analyzing the atmosphere and psychology of deceit and defeat that felled in 20 years” the Third Republic. One wonders about their arithmetic. There were some 810 pages devoted to the latter; three or four pages, in all, to the former."
"I wondered what the reaction in France would be when the French translation came out in the late fall of 1970. ... "
" ...The reviews found plenty to criticize. Some of my views and interpretations were attacked, my shortcomings pointed out. But the book as a work of history was taken seriously and seriously reviewed. The French, however much they disagreed with it, concluded that it was an important work, a considerable contribution to their history and more objective, despite my prejudices, than it was yet possible for a French historian to be.
"None of the French reviewers, some of whom were university professors, seemed to care a whit whether I was an academic or a journalist-historian. They judged the book on its contents. Some from the universities even conceded that my having been a journalist eyewitness to the last years of the Third Republic added color and authoritativeness to the chronicle."
"But my analysis of tank and plane strength did not convince the French veterans. They wrote in protest to the press, especially to Le Monde. And they published a manifesto attacking the book. I must say they were civilized about it. At the end of the declaration they wrote: “We invite W. Shirer to come and discuss this with us.”
"Other veterans rose to my defense. Colonel Adolphe Goutard, for instance, a noted military historian, wrote a lengthy reply to veterans. After that the ruckus died down. But I felt good that a mere book could arouse such interest."
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"Over the years I drifted slowly and, for the most part, happily, actively and in relative good health, into old age. I did not retire. A writer rarely retires. But I began to ease up a bit, trying to face up to the fact that at seventy and then eighty, one could no longer pursue fully the strenuous life of youth and middle age. It was not easy at first to face. The illusion that old age would never creep up on me stubbornly persisted. I forgot the advice George Bernard Shaw once gave to a friend: “Don’t try to live forever. You will never succeed.”"
"What mankind had speculated on and dreamed of for millennia had taken place. Human beings from Earth had traveled to another planet. It was almost too tremendous to believe. But there was no doubting. Hundreds of millions throughout the world could see it on television. They watched Neil Armstrong slowly descend the ladder of his frail craft, and as his foot touched the barren surface, exclaim: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
"Like almost everyone else on our planet, I dropped whatever I was doing and sat glued before the TV set, watching. The moon landing was a triumph for man’s spirit, for his resolve, for his creation of the incredible technology necessary and for bravery—bravery of two American men. The great voyage had been made. But could the astronauts blast off in what looked like a very rickety contraption, return safely to their spaceship, and then fly back to Earth? I put the question in my diary and added: “One prays that they’ll get back. But I feel a pit in my stomach about it. The blast-off machinery, though tested at home, has never been tested on the moon.” If it didn’t work, two splendid human beings would be left to die on this desolate place when their oxygen gave out—in a day or two."
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"During the last week of the presidential election campaign supporters of McGovern had miraculously raised enough money to buy television time for one last speech by the candidate, who was faring terribly in the polls. McGovern spent most of his broadcast denouncing Nixon for the “Watergate Affair,” predicting that it would turn out to be one of the worst political scandals in the history of the American presidency. The speech impressed me and many others in Massachusetts, the only state in the Union that would go for McGovern. But it made little impression on the country. Reporters covering the election largely ignored it. The nation’s newspaper editorials were silent about it. I remember one TV network reporter asking a farmer’s wife in Wisconsin what she thought of Watergate. “Watergate? Never heard of it. What is it? A fountain or something?”
" ... But gradually the country, thanks to the brilliant reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, became conscious of it, conscious that something was wrong at the Nixon White House, that the reelected president and his men may have been up to serious crimes and were trying to cover them up."
"In 1974 matters reached a climax and a denouement, the most extraordinary the nation had ever experienced. It was the most exciting year I had lived through since coming home twenty-nine years before."
"Toward the end of the previous year the vice-president of the United States, Spiro Agnew, had resigned to escape prison. In a sordid deal, as I put it in my diary, the Department of Justice allowed Agnew, who, like the president, had been lecturing Americans for six years about morality, to resign in return for promising not to prosecute him except for income tax fraud, for which he received only a fine. Nixon appointed Gerald Ford, the genial, loyal, plodding Republican minority leader in the House, to succeed him. Since then Ford had gone around for months proclaiming President Nixon innocent of any involvement in the Watergate affair or its coverup. He had seen the documents, he said, and they cleared the president. The chief documents consisted of tapes of conversations Nixon had with his men in the White House—he himself set up the unusual process of taping them."
"The evidence, both committees were sure, would be found in the tapes. But Nixon refused to hand them over, despite court-issued subpoenas. The investigators, though, continued to close in on him, and on April 29, 1974, my diary reminds me, the president went on national television to announce that he was making public twelve hundred pages of transcripts of his taped Watergate conversations—“all that was relevant,” he said, except the profanity.
"This was a lie, as we would soon learn. But even that night, as I watched and listened to the president speaking from his Oval Office in the White House with stacks of the transcripts piled up behind him, I felt he was perpetrating a fraud. If he had nothing to hide, why didn’t he produce the tapes themselves—all of them? Already the Senate committee had discovered that eighteen and a half minutes of one tape of a conversation he had with J. R. Haldeman, his right-hand man at the White House, about the Watergate cover-up had been “erased”—inadvertently, Nixon claimed. And wasn’t it suspicious that the president was fighting in the courts to prevent the subpoenaed tapes from being turned over to the special prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee?"
"This was the tape of a conversation Nixon had with his chief of staff, Haldeman, on June 23, 1972, on how they could hush up the scandal of the Watergate break-in. Nixon had succeeded in getting the Justice Department and the CIA to lay off any further investigations. In the case of the latter it was explained that the CIA had decided that “national security” interests were involved and had to be protected. But the FBI insisted on pursuing its investigation. Nixon had tried to call them off but to no avail. On June 23, 1972, Nixon and Haldeman had had a long conference at the end of which Nixon, plainly exasperated by the FBI’s stubbornness in carrying on its queries, told Haldeman to call in the FBI and say to them on behalf of the president: “Don’t go any further into this case. Period.”"
"Today at noon, Vice-President Gerald Ford will be sworn in as the 38th president. …
"Good riddance! What I felt about him from the first finally got through to the American people.
"Lenox, New Years Day, 1976. …So ended a tumultuous year. We have now for the first time a president and a vice-president (Ford and Rockefeller) who were appointed by presidents and approved by Congress, but not elected by the people."
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Shirer began his three part memoirs in 1971; his previous four historical books dealt with Europe.
Shirer began his three part memoirs in 1971; his previous four historical books dealt with Europe.
The distinction is really a matter of proportion. What he calls memoirs are only slightly more about him, and the other four include his journalist writing too.
His first volume, Start, had more mixed reviews than others before .
"This time the New York Times did not clobber me, as it had done with my previous book. The memoirs were given for the Sunday Review to that veteran critic and chronicler of the “lost generation” in Paris, Malcolm Cowley, who was most generous in his comments. Naturally he liked the Paris chapters the best, but he took notice of the part that history played in the narrative. In fact, he found the book to be “another contemporary history rather than a true memoir.” Amidst all the characters in the book he found one was missing. “The missing person,” he concluded, “is William L. Shirer.”
"The daily review in the Times this time was written by someone I could not identify: Maurice Carroll, apparently a reporter on the newspaper. He found the memoirs “a good book by a good reporter.” He looked forward to the next volume. But he seemed a little concerned about being too enthusiastic. “Maybe,” he wrote, “I liked the book more than I should have.”"
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"If my publisher was lukewarm about the first volume of memoirs, it was positively chilly about the next book, a memoir of Gandhi. I had tried to write it first as the opening section of the second volume of memoirs, since the first volume had ended with my receipt in Vienna of a three-word cable from Colonel McCormick, the lord of the Chicago Tribune: “SHIRER FLY INDIA.”
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"If my publisher was lukewarm about the first volume of memoirs, it was positively chilly about the next book, a memoir of Gandhi. I had tried to write it first as the opening section of the second volume of memoirs, since the first volume had ended with my receipt in Vienna of a three-word cable from Colonel McCormick, the lord of the Chicago Tribune: “SHIRER FLY INDIA.”
"Eventually I agreed with Simon and Schuster that the Gandhi part did not fit into the volume, which was going to be mostly about my life and work in Nazi Germany. I thereupon proposed that we take it out and make it a separate book. It seemed to me that Gandhi had been the greatest man of our time, that it had been a lucky break for me to get to know him while covering the revolution against British rule in India in 1930 and 1931 and that this small book about him, a work of love on my part, was worth publishing.
"Simon and Schuster did not agree. The publishing house, now quite changed, I thought, under the ownership of Gulf & Western, was not interested, it said, in bringing out a memoir of Gandhi. In fact, it objected to my publishing such a memoir. It wanted me to go back to the second volume of the memoirs, take out the Gandhi section, and go ahead with the time in Nazi Germany and the coming of World War II and its aftermath, completing the whole project. They wanted no Volume III."
Simon & Shuster were finally made by Shirer to take it, but they didn't promote it, he writes, until several years later when Richard Attenborough made the biopic Gandhi, and then Simon & Shuster brought out the book grandly, on the eve of the film.
"The Washington Post again clobbered me, this time with a review by one of its foreign correspondents who, it said, had served in Southeast Asia for the last ten years. He pooh-poohed my admiration of Gandhi and insisted that there was in Gandhi “a great deal of hokus-pokus, of showmanship, of the shrewd politico who knew how to play to the grandstands at home and abroad.” Such demeaning of a man who Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy in India, had said would “go down in history on a par with Buddha and Jesus” and who made Einstein exclaim: “Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” Was the generation of foreign correspondents which had followed mine trying to show how tough and realistic (and mindless) it was? Gandhi—“a hokus-pokus politico”?"
"The Washington Post again clobbered me, this time with a review by one of its foreign correspondents who, it said, had served in Southeast Asia for the last ten years. He pooh-poohed my admiration of Gandhi and insisted that there was in Gandhi “a great deal of hokus-pokus, of showmanship, of the shrewd politico who knew how to play to the grandstands at home and abroad.” Such demeaning of a man who Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy in India, had said would “go down in history on a par with Buddha and Jesus” and who made Einstein exclaim: “Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” Was the generation of foreign correspondents which had followed mine trying to show how tough and realistic (and mindless) it was? Gandhi—“a hokus-pokus politico”?"
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Publishers will allow no more copying for quoting.
Shirer on Reagan, definitely worth quoting.
He writes about Nightmare Years and the shoddy behaviour of his until then usual publishers.
His account of visiting Soviet Union, as a dancer, droll. He visited Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and writes about correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi. Also about how extensive Tolstoy's correspondence was.
Nazis destroyed it partly, he writes, including some books. They set fire to the house as they left, and it was Russians, peasants and so on, who saved the house; the Russian government replaced the books that the nazis had destroyed. Shirer describes how barbarous the nazis destruction of Catherine's palace was, apart from loot of Russian treasures by nazis, and Russians asked him if their forces had wreaked such havoc in Berlin. No, Shirer said, quite the opposite. Marshall Zhukov had kept the palace he occupied spic and span.
Shirer was in Moscow shortly after Chernobyl and describes the goings on he saw. He writes about the immense and deep love inspired by the Russian land as he saw it fleeting past the window of the train he took from Moscow to Helsinki.
Shirer was asked by CBS to visit Berlin in 1985, and he writes about Reagan's paying homage at Bitburg cemetery where several of those buried belonged to the Waffen-SS that perpetrated massacre in France. He mentions the antisemitism in reactions of Germans about furore in U.S..
Refuting Reagan's defence and exposing the fraudulent nature of his statements, Shirer gives here a succinct account of atrocities perpetrated by German military, especially in East Europe and Russia. He mentions The 'Nacht und Nebel Erlass', the Night and Fog decree, whereby those caught in France were made to disappear without a trace, families given no information, no records kept, and total numbers unknown. He writes also of antisemitism widely prevalent and deeply rooted in the military in Germany, and of their being not only aware of, but participants in, the holocaust.
"My feeling was that most Germans had not faced that question, had no wish to come to terms with the past or even understand it."
And he mentions much that supports the statement, from the article in Der Spiegel by Augstein to the television series in West Germany about WWII, and conversations with German people he'd known to be against nazis and their ideology, all justifying it all, by equating it all with allied bombing of Germany.
He mentions counterexamples, such as the speech on May 8, 1985, by Richard von Weizsaecker, president of the Federal Republic, and one by Helmut Kohl on April 21, 1985; and one in bundestag in November 1988 that questioned German people having backed Hitler. That forced Philipp Jenninger, president of the bundestag, to resign due to the furore it evoked. Shirer mentions that this was on a significant anniversary of Kristallnacht, half a century after the event.
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At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.
Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.
Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?
No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.
Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.
In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
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Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.
His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
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April 21, 2020 -
May 24, 2020 - May , 2020.
ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795334184
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April 21, 2020 -
May 24, 2020 - May , 2020.
November 07, 2020 -
November 10, 2020 - November 27, 2020.
ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795334184
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