The Press: Cartwheel Girl

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"I judge any program by whether I think it tends to distribute power and bring about equilibrium, whether it tends to destroy privilege, whether it subjects itself to reason and measures itself by criteria—the chief criterion in the economic field being the release of productive energy. My program, which is the program of a journalist, and not the program of a person with any political ambitions whatsoever, is to try to make more people think along these lines."

Columnist's Day. The job of conducting a column requires a peculiar admixture of journalistic talents. A columnist must be receptive and selective, absorptive and digestive, and have the trick of verbal catharsis. The successful columnist must be both an introvert and an extravert, a reporter and an exhibitionist.

Dorothy Thompson wakes up at ten o'clock and reads furiously for two or three hours in bed. Along about noon she gets up, dresses fast, then dictates her column. She has three secretaries, named Madeleine, Madeline, and Madelon (she distinguishes them by their last names). One is always at the Herald Tribune answering mail and digging up research and one or two go to her apartment to help her while she works. Miss Thompson seldom goes to her office because the telephone never stops ringing.

She usually has a luncheon date, to make a speech, receive a medal or talk politics with somebody. After lunch she reads some more, paces around her apartment, with a pencil and a pad of yellow paper in her hand, and generally gets curious about something and starts telephoning people. She runs up tremendous telephone bills calling Washington and London. At teatime people start dropping in: friends, ex perts and refugees. She almost always goes out to dinner, or has a flock of people to her apartment. She seldom talks anything but world affairs and seldom stops talking them. Her husband has been heard to shush her after hours of it. When she is alone again late at night, if she is worked up about something, she will sit down and write a column at white heat, and these columns are usually her best.

Dorothy Thompson believes the U. S. should be governed by the Cabinet, and nowadays she has her own private cabinet which governs the thinking of her column. Her chief adviser on economic problems is Alexander Sachs, an economist who works for Lehman Corp. and used to be head of NRA's economic research division. On foreign affairs she consults Hamilton Fish Armstrong, John Gunther, Quincy Howe. If she wants to know what the British are doing she calls Harold Nicolson in London. About France she talks to Raoul de' Roussy de Sales, U. S. correspondent for Paris-Soir. On Central Europe she calls any of her hundreds of refugee friends. On national issues she is likely to get most of her ideas from the opposition. One of the chief criticisms leveled at her is that she rarely consults anybody inside the labor movement, but she wrote a vigorous column in defense of Harry Bridges after talking to Frances Perkins.

For writing her column, speaking over the radio, doing a monthly article for the Ladies' Home Journal and delivering lectures, Dorothy Thompson was paid $103,000 last year. Her business expenses were $25,000 and she contributed $37,000 in taxes, which left her $41,000 to live on. She gave 20% of that away.