The Press: Off the Record

• Share

To Insider John Gunther, she "swept through Europe, an amiable, blue-eyed tornado." To Columnist Heywood Broun, she was "a victim of galloping nascence," whose speeches in one year would "constitute a bridge of platitudes sufficient to reach from the Herald Tribune's editorial rooms to the cold caverns of the moon." But to approving readers of her three-a-week column of political analysis, "On the Record" (147 papers), durable Dorothy Thompson was a snappish combination of Cassandra and Joan of Arc, the first and finest of political newshens.

Last week Dorothy Thompson went off the record. The time had come, she wrote in a farewell column, for her to "relive my life" in preparation for her ninth and most ambitious book: an autobiography that would also be a personal history of her war-torn times.

Solemn Suffragette. The daughter of a Methodist minister, Dorothy Thompson grew up in upstate New York. Solemn, pudgy and 20, she flounced into Buffalo in 1914 after graduating from Syracuse University, toured the state as a low-paid, high-pressure suffragette for three years, then drifted in and out of a job as an advertising copywriter in Manhattan.

With vague longings to be a writer, Dorothy sailed to England in 1920, became a reporter when International News Service signed her to cover a Zionist conference in London. For the next eight years, she matched wits with the sharpest scoop hounds in Europe—Gunther, Floyd Gibbons, Walter Duranty. She covered a Polish coup d'etat in evening dress, with the help of $500 lent her by Sigmund Freud. With verve and clarity, she analyzed the mood of Depression-hit Germany. But her best-known bit of punditry was also her worst: in 1932 she produced a book on Adolf Hitler, decided he would never reach power. "Oh, Adolf! Adolf!" she wrote. "You will be out of luck!"

Divorced from Hungarian Writer Josef Bard after four years of marriage, Dorothy returned to the U.S. in 1928 to embark on a new career: wife to Novelist Sinclair Lewis. As energetic a spouse as she was reporter, she gave up heavy reading for menu planning, bore Lewis a son, hosted his parties. But as Dorothy and "Red" drifted apart (they separated in 1937), she took on more and more work.

At the suggestion of Mrs. Ogden Reid, vice president of the New York Herald Tribune, she started "On the Record," the next year began a monthly chitchat for the Ladies' Home Journal. By World War II, she was read across the U.S. (peak circulation: some 200 papers in 1941), feared in Government circles.