Apps

Dorothy Thompson — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Journalism in Europe

Thompson boarded a ship to London in June 1920 to become a foreign correspondent, submitting articles to William Randolph Hearst's International News Service (INS). Ireland was in political ferment, so she went there, and on August 12 was the final person to interview the Sinn Féin independence leader Terence MacSwiney, who later that day was arrested for sedition; he died in prison on a hunger strike two months later.

The interview was sent by INS to American newspapers and led to Thompson being appointed Austria correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

While working in Vienna, Thompson became fluent in German. She met and worked alongside correspondents John Gunther and G. E. R. Gedye. In 1925, she was promoted to Chief of the Central European Service for the Public Ledger. She resigned in 1927 and, not long after, the New York Evening Post appointed her head of its Berlin bureau. In Germany she witnessed firsthand the rise of the National Socialist or Nazi party. According to her biographer, Peter Kurth, Thompson was "the undisputed queen of the overseas press corps, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance".

During this time Thompson cultivated many literary friends, particularly among exiled German authors. Among her acquaintances from this period were Ödön von Horváth, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Fritz Kortner. She developed a close friendship with author Carl Zuckmayer. In Berlin she got involved in a lesbian affair with German author Christa Winsloe, while still married, claiming "the right to love".

Thompson's most significant work abroad took place in Germany in the early 1930s. In Munich, Thompson met and interviewed Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1931. This would be the basis for her subsequent book, I Saw Hitler, in which she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany. Later, in a Harper's Magazine article in December 1934, Thompson described Hitler in the following terms: "He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man."

Biographer Kurth wrote: "Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Thompson was asked to defend her 'Little Man' remark. 'I still believe he is a little man,' she replied. 'He is the apotheosis of the little man.' Nazism itself was 'the apotheosis of collective mediocrity in all its forms.' "

Zionism and the State of Israel

Thompson had been sympathetic to the Zionist movement since she first travelled to Europe in 1920. During her visit, she had "endless discussions" about the movement with delegates who were traveling to the International Zionist Conference which was then being held in London. In the late 1930s, as Thompson emerged as a leading advocate for Jewish refugees who were fleeing from persecution in Europe, she grew close to the Zionist statesman Chaim Weizmann and she also grew close to Meyer Weisgal, Chaim Weizmann's lieutenant in the US. As World War II unfolded, Thompson went from being a sympathetic commentator to being an outright advocate for the movement. She was a keynote speaker at the 1942 Biltmore Conference, and by the war's end, she was regarded as one of the most effective spokespersons for Zionism. However, Thompson's attitude towards the movement had begun to shift, most especially after a 1945 trip to Palestine, because she grew more concerned about the activities of the movement's right-wing adherents. She was especially troubled by its escalating political violence. After penning several columns which were critical of right wing Zionist terrorism, Thompson provoked a tremendous backlash that ultimately led her to cooperate with the leaders of the Jewish anti-Zionist organization, the American Council for Judaism.

She wrote a critique of American Zionism in Commentary in 1950, accusing Zionists of dual loyalty. A response in the magazine by Oscar Handlin criticised her "totalitarian" understanding of national identity in demanding single loyalty. After her Commentary article, the backlash against her grew more intense. This included accusations of antisemitism, which Thompson strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, "almost a definition of professional suicide." She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war. As Thompson's distance from the Zionist movement grew, she became an advocate for Palestinian refugees. After she travelled to the Middle East in 1950, Thompson was involved in the founding of the American Friends of the Middle East, an organization which was secretly funded by the CIA.

Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote in 2017 that There can be no doubt that anti-Semitism was a theme in Thompson’s later writing. Pathologizing Jewishness, in particular, became habitual for her in the 1950s. By May 25, 1950, she is writing to Maury M. Travis, darkly, of the “tragic psychosis of the Jew”... In the Commentary piece she warns: “We bring on what we fear. Any psychologist will tell you that a primary neurosis is the fear of rejection and that when that neurosis takes hold of a person he unconsciously strives to create the conditions for that rejection.” The reference is to Jewish “neurosis,” but the passage also rather elegantly describes the logic of Thompson’s own fears. In what well may be a case of knowing your addressee, Thompson wrote to Winston Churchill in 1951: “I have become convinced that the Jews, phenomenally brilliant individually and especially in the realm of abstract thought, are collectively the stupidest people on earth. I think it must come from cultural inbreeding—perhaps physical inbreeding also—in a desire to retain a homogenous, in-group society in the midst of ‘aliens.’