“Inside History”
The term "inside baseball" denotes the unseen elements of the game, the hard work behind seemingly effortless results. There is a similar process in researching and writing good history.
Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle within a puzzle. But you create the pieces, many don’t fit and are tossed away, and the first job is trying to make sense of it all. The pieces come from notes pulled from old correspondence, newspaper clips, diaries, and other sources, mounting up to a perplexing pile.
Next, sort through these pieces in hopes of finding some coherent pattern, overarching themes. Then, arrange these pieces around those themes. This is far from the last step. Can these bits be organized in an understandable matter, the pieces put together in a way that tells a story? And if that is achieved, how to present the material in an interesting way? Take it to the next level. Are there ways to share the pieces in a narrative? Can skillful transitions carry the story along not only effortlessly but holds the readers attention, leaving her or him anticipating the next section? If it is a book, can you sustain all this over 200 to 400 pages?
Always it is a battle, a pitched struggle to organize those pesky pieces you retain (a great many remain unused), followed by searching the brain for words to form clear sentences and then, revision, revision, revision. At the end, one hopes that most of the hurdles described above were cleared. It is rare to check all these boxes and put between the covers an important story that, to the reader, tells itself. And if you can do all that, your name is Deborah Cohen, and your book is Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War.
The book focuses on a group of foreign correspondents—John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. Internationally known figures from the 1920s through the early 1950s, each confronted the rise of fascism, Adolph Hitler, and lesser-known dictators who led the run-up to World War II. Their confrontations with these forces and attempts to warn a disinterested world of the bloodbath around the corner seem particularly appropriate today. This becomes clearer while reading Vincent Sheean’s Not Peace But a Sword written in the late 1930s, wherein he recounted Mussolini and Hitler’s tactics and designs in places such as Austria, Ethiopia, Spain, and Czechoslovakia.
“Colorful” and “brilliant” are good words to describe the main four characters and the supporting cast—Marcel Fodor, Frances Gunther, Rebecca West, and Jawaharlal Nehru. Cohen manages to coherently track all these characters’ orbits in and out of each other’s lives and their reckonings with international madness. A reader is hard-pressed not to gain new appreciation for events in today’s Ukraine as Cohen tells the story of Czechoslovakia’s abandonment by England and France. Or shudder at the similarity of Nazi tactics in Vienna, including the assassination of Austria’s prime minister, with January 6, 2021, in the United States.
Thanks to Cohen, we have a work that is a close as we are likely to get to a biography of Vincent Sheean or, as his friends knew him, “Jimmy.” His story begins in the small, coal mining town of Pana. He has long been an interest of mine, having first wrote about him in 1977 for a Decatur, Illinois newspaper two years after his 1975 death. By the time he passed in Italy from lung cancer, Sheean was forgotten. Or, as H.G. Wells' one-time mistress, Rebecca West, told him, "Too bad you didn't die young and earn yourself a small part in the memories of Americans who can read." (p. 498)
One of the minor themes of Cohen’s book is main character’s awareness that they were being forgotten as they aged.
Dorothy Thompson, one of the most powerful woman journalists of her time, no, one of the best-known and respected journalists of her era, is another we should know more about. Thompson actually crashed a Nazi rally in New York City before the war to boo and heckle the speakers. And John Gunther, a fabulously successful author, who, if remembered at all today, is known for his searing book on his young son’s last year of life, Death Be Not Proud. Knickerbocker was a new discovery for me. Like the others, he was a hard drinker. In fact, at Cohen accounts the extent of her characters’ alcoholism, a reader wonders how they got any work done. Perhaps they drank to deal with the scenes they covered, the world they saw coming, and the suffering they witnessed, the “small” deaths of innocents caught up in the egos of Mussolini, Hitler, and the war criminal, Francisco Franco of Spain.
Reading this book, I could not help thinking of my friend and former colleague, Steve Hurst, a Decatur man, who decades later followed a path like that of Cohen’s subjects. Working for the Associated Press, NBC, and CNN, the former Decatur Herald city editor covered wars, the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s invasions of Iraq and other topics. One hopes that he will tell his own story someday.
Cohen has given us not only an important book but one that is accessible to most readers. There surely cannot be a collection of papers or relevant archive that she has not scoured. And assembling those pieces, she tells a story capturing both a reader’s attention and heart. If you want to see how to research and write history in a powerful way and read a book with much to say about our past and our present, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial waits for you to turn the first page.
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