Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Hacks, Hitler & the Hotel Imperial

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

We might now be used to hearing about the intimate details of celebrities and world leaders, but when did this become the norm?In the lead up to the Second World War, a collection of American journalists began to report not only on world affairs - interviewing Hitler, Gandhi and Mussolini to name a few - but also private affairs, their own and those of others.Today, Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Deborah Cohen to find out about the reporters John Gunther, Frances Fineman Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. Deborah is the author of a new book ‘Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On A World At War’*WARNING there are naughty words and adult themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Sophie Gee.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code BETWIXTTHESHEETS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription.To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hi, lovely betwixters. How are you? It's Kate Lister and I'm here with your fair do's warning. What is a fair do's warning, Kate? Well, this is the point of the show where I give everyone a heads up that this is an adult podcast of an adult nature and there will be adult themes flying around. So fair do's you have been warned. This episode we are veering into the sex lives and the general scandalous debris of a bunch of pioneering journalists who, were writing just before the Second World War broke out.

It's not the rudest one we've ever done, but there is definitely naughty words, and of course, as always, just a smattering of sexual content. And you just might not fancy that today, in which case, you can just sit this one out and I'll catch you next time, because fair do's, you have been warned. If your day job just so happens to involve traveling the world,

conversing with world leaders, some dictators as well, and a few revolutionaries to boot, You'd think that that was exciting enough, but is that ever where the excitement stops? Well, not for the people that we are looking at today. Gunther, Nickerbocker, Sheehan and Thompson were a group of pioneering globe-trotting American reporters. And if you've never heard of them, don't feel bad, neither at I. But we're going to hear about them today, and they are just amazing.

So today we are getting betwixt the sheets of their reporting, and of course, their bedrooms. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry.

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lester. The 1920s and 30s saw the birth of a new... new form of journalism. One which saw reporters not just anonymously and unbiasedly reporting on what they were seeing, but one that saw reporters listening at keyholes and psychoanalyzing their subjects in the manner of Sigmund Freud. But the resulting merging of public with private was also taking place for the reporters themselves. And as much as they wrote about the dirty secrets of dictators, and there were many, they were also hanging their own dirty washing on the line for everyone to see. Today I am talking to Deborah Cohen, who has spent hours sifting through

the archive to dig out diaries and articles and letters and notes written on napkins. From world leaders to love letters, she is going to take us into the glamorous and gripping lives of these reporters. Let's do it. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, Deborah Cohen. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be with you. I am so thrilled to talk to you about this because this book, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, this is one of my favourite types of episodes because until I'd looked into it, until I had read it, I'd no idea about this history. I'd no idea. It's fascinated. You are following the lives of four reporters I'd never heard of in the lead up to World War II and how they documented of fascism and how they documented the changing world and how they changed journalism.

And how they wrote about private life, right? I'm so happy to be with you because, you know, largely the book has been covered as being a book that's about the rise of fascism and it's also about the rise of anti-colonial nationalist movements like Gandhi's and Nauru's, and it's about those things. But fundamental to their project was private life. So, hurrah! And we can actually talk about this part, which is really crucial part of the book.

And it won't surprise you perhaps to know that many people who think that they're going to get a book that's just about dictatorship and just about military history are rather surprised to find themselves reading about orgasms and fake pregnancies and all of the other subjects of private life. How did you come to this story? Because I'd never heard of these. It's one of once I was going through the book and I was like, why haven't I? I should have heard of these people. But the way that you bring these lives together, the archival material that you must have had to go through to weave these four stories together, how did you come to this? Why did you go, these four authors are going to bring them together? And how did you know of them to start with?

Yeah, so even for Americans, these are not well-known. I mean, people will know Gunther and they'll know maybe Sheen, but these are not well-known characters because reporters' fame really does not last beyond. their lifetime with a few small examples like Bill Shire, for instance, who has a huge bestselling book, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he's still known. But they were much more famous than Shire. He was the sort of lesser member of this group. So what happened to me is that I had read Death Be Not Proud because my mother was assigned it when she was 13 or 14. And I went to the archives of Gunther. So mostly I'm a British historian or British and European historian, not an American historian.

I went to the Archives of Gunther, which happened to be conveniently located down the street from my house in Chicago. Oh, that's helpful. Yes, it was the very first time I've actually been able to do archival research that doesn't involve crossing an ocean. And I found myself completely entranced by these records.

First of all, they were voluminous, you know, 250 boxes, but also exactly this interweaving of the private and the public that had been so crucial to me and everything that I had actually ever studied before in, you know, my time as a historian. And so I would read and think, my God, here is a letter about a wife writing to a husband about not having orgasms. That doesn't happen. And comparing it, this is Francis Gunther writing to her husband, John, and comparing

herself to an Indian official, not wanting to tell the British bad news. Okay. So there was that. And then here's someone taking notes. during an interview with Trotsky. And my God. Here is Harold Nicholson gossiping with John Gunther, you know, about the latest government change in 1929.

And a man who I haven't said enough about, which is the extraordinary reporter, Vincent Sheehan or Jimmy Sheehan, began to feel, this is this porosity through the world, he began to feel that he could actually figure out where the next cataclysm was going to break out. And he is sitting there. He decides, I know that Gandhi's going to be assassinated.

He is sitting there in the courtyard of Burla House when the assassin fires the gun. Because he knows. He knows. He actually feels it in his body. That's freaky. Right? So I became completely entranced by them. So I started with Gunther, the two Gunther's, and then it seemed to me like you couldn't

really write about them without writing about their close friends because they were engaged in a kind of intellectual and political project together. And as you said, the interweaving was, that's a great. the tough part, but they came in and out of each other's lives in a way that made it possible to keep them in some kind of balance with each other. All right. So tell me who the four journalists are. Tell us, set the scene. Who are they? Yeah. So this is a group of young American reporters who would become some of the most celebrated international foreign correspondence of their day, meaning that they are not only famous in America, where they are

celebrities, but they're famous all over the world. So there are four main figures in the book, really five, all foreign correspondents. I'm just going to give you their names, though, as you said, they won't really mean very much to most people, despite the fact that they were very famous in Britain as well. So John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheen, Dorothy Thompson, and John Gunther's wife, Francis Feynman, Gunther. So they were all young people born in the, more or less in the Midwest, around the turn of the 20th century. And they go to Europe and to Asia in the 1920s. By the 1930s and 40s, there are sort of international stars on a, you know, Francis Gunther is flirting with Nehru and becoming his advocate. John Gunther interviews, among other people,

Leon Trotsky in exile. Dorothy Thompson interviews Hitler, nature of Knickerbocker sees Hitler, and he also interviews Mussolini four times. So these are people who are absolutely at the red-hot center of the disasters of the 1930s, the political disasters of the 1930s, and they're absolutely rushing to the fires.

What was it that they were doing that was different from what journalists had done before? So all of them by the 1930s are committed to a kind of, reporting that is much more subjective, much more about them as eyewitnesses and the feelings that they have when they're watching these events unfold, and much more committed as well to speaking to readers for whom the collapse between kind of the world stage, the sort of events that you're seeing outside, and then your own inner life, those lines have totally collapsed. And they identify that

phenomenon for their readers, and then they speak to them about it. So Dorothy Thompson, for instance, in a column that's published on the outbreak of the Second World War, says to her readers, do you feel as I do, as if the world and everyone in it and ourselves and are all sick in our hearts and in our minds? Do you feel that way? And so she's making this kind of emotional appeal. So they write not in the detached kind of bird's eye view of the foreign correspondent, I don't know that they can do that, but they oftentimes write very, very personally. That's one thing that they do. They report on all sorts of things that their editors think you can't publish that.

I'm not going to publish that. Like the gossip of the reporter's bars. So John Gunther in his big book, his first big book, which is a book called Inside Europe, published in 1936, a huge, huge, huge success in not just in the U.S., but also in Britain. He reports on things like the gossip about the homosexuals, of the Nazi leaders, or he reports on Hitler's childhood. He goes out to find Hitler's relatives in a small Austrian town, backwater town.

Wow. So they're making an argument about the significance of private life, of family upbringing to the events on the world stage. Is this like what we would call gonzo journalism? Yeah, you're so completely right. Exactly. This is, so what we would call the new journalism. So Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion or, you know, fly in the wall.

subjective, richly textured, taboo breaking. They're doing that and they're doing it in the 1930s. Wow. And the differences is that they put eye into their articles. They say, I feel this, I did this, I experienced this. Yes, yes. And, you know, war correspondents have always done that. But they're really doing, it's because they're both reporting on inner life and family life. And they exist in this kind of post- Freudian moment where those, subjects are not only fair game, but they're saying, you know, if you really want to understand Hitler, you really want to understand Mussolini, then I got some stories to tell you. Wow.

And you better listen up. And they were quite glamorous as well, weren't they? Oh, super glamorous. They were sort of influences before they were influences. Yes, yes. They would all have been brilliant on Twitter, possibly Francis Gunther the most of all, because she was very aceristic and very cutting. But yes, so they're, you know, they look like America.

She and Gunther are both. over six feet tall, they're blonde, they're handsome, they're from the Midwest. They have that kind of American swagger. They can go anywhere. They're not afraid. They can always go home as they think about it if they need to. And rich, right? And if they weren't rich before they started.

It become very, very, very rich. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they all have humble backgrounds to start. So the reporters in my book are not coming from elite, you know, East Coast establishments or Ivy League schools. They're coming from the Midwest and from small town some of them. But yeah, they really understand what the American reader needs to know, and they become famous and then eventually rich because of it.

Should we make any journalists listening cry, and you can tell me about their salaries and their expense account? Yeah, well, just one little detail, which is H.R. Knickerbocker. Excellent name. Yes, a wonderful name from Yolkham, Texas, who is reporting from the, after Mussolini's troops invade Ava Sin, today, Ethiopia. Nickerbocker is sent by the Hearst Enterprise there,

and he's got an expense account that's essentially equivalent to something like 60,000 pounds today for one month. I mean, unimaginable. So this is what he's in Addis Ababa. This is what he is spending. What's he spending it on? What can he spend 60,000 pounds on a month in Abyssinia?

Very good question. Hotels are very expensive. He's drinking a huge amount. He has protection. He has presumably hired, I mean, he says he's hired a boy with a rifle, but I assume he's hired many more boys with rifles. He's also getting into showdowns with Yblen Waugh. He's very sympathetic.

Waugh is very sympathetic to the Italian fascist side of things. And Nickerbocker says to Waugh, they meet a Nickerbocker who is a Texan, really uppity, says to Waugh, you know, you're the second best writer in England next to Aldous Hugsley. Everyone loves Aldous Huxley in this group. And Juana says, I should knock your socks off or knock your block off or whatever. And then at that point said for saying that. And they get into fista cuffs there at the hotel and at us. Yeah, that cost you.

Wasn't Dorothy Thompson? Like, what was her salary? I read that and my eyes went, ooh, ho. Yeah, so she's making almost a million dollars, you know, in real terms. By the time that she's actually, you know, the late 30s when she has a radio show, and she's writing a thrice weekly column for a six to, 8 million readers. Wow.

And she's got a column in the ladies' home journal, which is one of the biggest circulation magazines in the US. So they weren't just reporting what happened. They were extremely influential, weren't they? The power that they commanded to the point where world leaders were in communication with them, right? Oh, world leaders are not only gossiping with them, but actually asking them for interviews. If you take someone like, say, Gandhi and Nehru, they are so smart about the need

for nationalism to cultivate these American journalists because they view them quite rightly as sympathetic to their cause. And none of these people had very much of a fond feeling about the British Empire. I mean, Dorothy Thompson was a great ally, as was Knickerbocker and Sheehan to the British during the Second World War in beating the drum for American involvement. But Sheehan was always advocating for Indian nationalism. John Gunther's wife, Francis, was probably one of the leading figures lobbying on behalf of the Indian nationalist cause in America during the Second World War. And one of them got particularly cozy with Mussolini, didn't they, to sort of the point where

it was a bit like, it might be a bit too friendly there. Yeah, well, this is, so Nickerbocker, who is one of the most astute reporters of his time. So Nickerbocker sees Hitler not long after the Beer Hall putch, where Nickerbocker's actually present for the Beer Hall Pitch. Wow. Okay. Yeah. He'd been a big city reporter.

He's then training to become. a psychiatrist. And he leaves Newark, New Jersey, which is where he's living. And he goes to Munich because it's cheap to live in Munich. It's the German hyperinflation is happening. You can basically bankroll and German medical school with very few dollars. So he goes to Munich because he's always wanted to be a psychiatrist. And then he walks past the Beer Hall Putsch in progress and basically becomes a reporter again.

So Nickerbocker is warning about Hitler from early on. He also goes to the Soviet Union and reports. on Stalin's first five-year plan and his warning about the dangers of Stalinism, he reports on the famine in Ukraine. He gets it. But then Mussolini. So what is happening with Muslim? He sees Mussolini four times he interviews him. Do you fanboying a bit? Yeah. Well, he finds himself actually thinking, you know, I'm not in favor of fascism, but maybe in Italy, actually, what's necessary is a little fascism to get these people in gear and to have the country industrial. And he doesn't view Italian fascism as being the same thing as Naziism at all.

In fact, he thinks that the main thing that the British and the French have to do is keep Mussolian on their side. He thinks the really crucial thing to do is to make sure that animosity between Mussolini and Hitler continues. And Dorothy Thompson was buds with Churchill, right? Yeah, so Churchill again, so the Indian nationalists are courting these people, but so too are British political leaders and especially Churchill. So from the 1930s, Dorothy Thompson is saying to her American readers, you have to get ready people. You have to understand you are not going to be able to sit out the conflict that is coming. They all know that the Second World War is on the horizon.

And Churchill is constantly courting, not just Dorothy Thompson, but also John Gunther and Vincent Sheehan. He actually lends Sheehan money to pay off his gambling debts in the Riviera, which, you know, since you know, Churchill is always bankrupt. So the idea he's lending she and money is pretty ridiculous. But anyway, it testifies to his desire to keep the American correspondence on his side. Yeah, Dorothy Thompson has an entire weekend at Checkers with Churchill. And he says, you know, she is worth, she herself, in a tribute to her, he says she is worth an entire battalion of men in the cause of human liberty.

So this isn't unbiased journalism, is it? And it doesn't pretend to be. No, not at all. This is self-consciously subjective opinion. position-taking, this is the war for the future is on. The war for the world is on, and you better take sides. I'll be back with Deborah after the short break. A hundred years ago, one of history's greatest discoveries ever was made in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb of Tutankarmon was found intact with thousands of treasures. And this month on the ancients from history hit, we're exploring how a discovery transformed a boy king from minor Egyptian monarch into immortalised ancient ruler. Join me Tristan Hughes every Thursday on the ancients from History Hit as we delve into the life and legacy of Tutankar wherever you get to your podcasts. Was there any British equivalents of these new journalists, these four journalists, at all? Was there anybody here that was kind of doing the same thing? Yeah, there's certainly many British foreign correspondents who are reporting bravely.

So the Guardian in particular, the Manchester Guardian in particular, has people whose reports are really influential coming from Nazi Germany in particular. Harold Nicholson, the writer and diplomat and Bloomsbury figure, he is in a sense both Pathbreaker and also he's a good friend of this group of American journalists, as is Rebecca West. And what they take from their experience with these journalists

is the sense, and as Harold Nicholson, reviews John Gunther's book. In The Telegraph, he says, this is how we should all be reporting the way these Americans were reporting. This is as great an American invention as air conditioning and orange juice for breakfast. Oh, wow. And they are important. Yeah. What Nicholson says is that this kind of psychological portrait is what people need to understand. The news needs to be vibrant. It needs to be full of personalities in this way. And similarly, the British writer Rebecca West is very good friends. She's a lover of John Gunther's in the 1920s. She remains a lifelong friend of his. And when she writes her opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published during the Second World War,

it's very much of the same kind of project as these characters, which is what she's interested in is the slippage between personal life, private life, and the big geopolitical developments. And that has always been an interest of Rebecca West from her early days in the suffrage movement. So I think you can not only pinpoint the kind of foreign correspondents who are raising the alarm in the way that these people are, but you can also pinpoint a group of writers who are friends with them. On the other hand, you also have people like Malcolm Mugge who loathes them and thinks, you know, their attention-seeking, they're reporting all this rubbish. Yvlin-Law satirizes H.R. Nickerbacher in scoop.

Hate is going to hate. Yeah, right. But it's the kind of reversing. of what Nicholson is saying, which is all that stuff about private life and politicians and gossip, you know, this is not dignified reporting. There is an argument to make that. I mean, one thing that I wouldn't want to say before we get onto the private lives is that they were brave. It's not just that they were just swaning around with massive expense accounts and just being the lovely darlings. Who is it who went to Germany to speak to Hitler's relatives? And Dorothy Thompson was put on like

the Gestapo's hit list and like they were in danger. Absolutely. Dorothy Thompson is the first American reporter to be kicked out of Nazi Germany. So reporters of other countries had been kicked out previously. But in the summer of 1934, Dorothy Thompson goes to Germany to report. She's already reported very, very bravely, as you say, in 1933 after the Nazi takeover about the violence against Jews and other political enemies, communists. And she goes in 1934 back to Germany to do more reporting. And basically the German police officer appears with her door and says, it's like you've got 24 hours to leave the country. Could you even imagine that's fucking terrifying?

And also, but Dorothy Thompson being Dorothy Thompson thinks, okay, this is an opportunity. She produces a public statement. She's given a bouquet of roses by her colleagues in the press as she leaves the railroad station in Berlin. She's ready for the reporters when she disembarks from the train in Paris and essentially says, They think that they can spoon feed us. The German government says that they give all freedom to foreign correspondents, but they don't. They just want us to print what they're going to say that we should print,

and we're not going to do that, the foreign correspondents. We're not going to do that. I think the journalists generally are made of different stuff to the rest of us, especially like war correspondents of people like that. You know, like when natural disasters, wars, things happen, I am running in the other way. I'm not hanging around for that. And yet they are charging in.

No, that's right. And today, I mean, look at the report. reporters in Ukraine. I mean, how extraordinarily, extraordinarily brave you have to be. Right. And, you know, I think about the reporting of it was done in Rwanda, Fregulkin, for instance. I mean, these things have huge, huge disastrous effects on people's lives. And yes, just immensely, immensely brave. It just is, isn't it? Let's talk about their private lives, because that's something that I find really interesting about the book. Because I was thinking about this today, we live in a world

with social media and we're kind of saturated with it. And people now live their lives online and people sell us their lives online. We're talking about something like the Kardashians or, you know, the influencers is they're not even really selling products. They're just selling their lives. So we're now almost like post, you don't even need the news. Just tell us the good bits. Tell us the gossip.

But they were very good at playing with that, weren't they? And marketing it and making it juicy and people wanted to know more. Yes, yes, that was so as much as they were exposing the rise of fascism and as much as they were saying the European empires are tottering and they will fall, they're also saying something else, which is private life is really important, that family life shapes us. They're living, as I said, in this post-Froidian moment where thinking really hard about the relationship between individual pathology and collective pathology, because what else is. is on display in the 1930s in those roaring stadium crowds is completely exigent. This is absolutely at the forefront of their agenda. And then they're doing something else as well. And this happens later after the war is they're writing some of the earliest and taboo-breaking,

most taboo-breaking accounts of subjects that people felt were really not appropriate to write about, that we're too private. Like death? Yeah, exactly. John Gunther writes an account in 1949, a book called Death Be Not Proud, which was required reading for many generations of American school children. It, unlike the rest of John Gunther's books, by the way, didn't sell very well in Britain because, as the publisher, Hamish Hamilton said, it was so unremittingly grim,

and people didn't want to read that in a blitzed, bombscarred landscape, with plenty of death of their own to reckon with. But at any rate, this book is a book, John Gunther's 17-year-old son, only child at that point, dies of a brain tumor in 1947. And the book is a chronicle of the diagnosis, the illness, and the death of this child. And it's taboo-breaking in that writing an account for such a broad audience of this kind of subject delivered not in religious terms, not in the kind of Victorian way, when these kinds of accounts are privately circulated, usually, to friends and family.

And a lot of it is, you know, gods will be done. This is a memorial of my child carried off by Scarlet Fever. This is a medicalized memoir of a totally familiar type to us now, the illness memoir. And he's absolutely pioneering in doing it so pioneering that his longtime publisher in the U.S., they have made millions of dollars off of him by this point, thinks we can't publish this book. It's way too private. And by the way, why would you even want to write such a book as this? And they publish it on the agreement that neither they nor Gunther will make any profits from the book.

So all the profits are donated to medical research. And they have to be in a way for it to be a respectable thing to do. So in 1949, there's that book. And then equally shocking, actually, in 1964, is Vincent Sheehan, Jimmy Sheehan, who's one of the reporters in my book actually, writes a book about another of the reporters, Dorothy Thompson and her marriage to the Nobel laureate writer Sinclair Lewis. And that book Dorothy in Red at the time is viewed as the most shocking, intimate, frank account of a marriage ever published.

And this precedes Nigel Nicholson's account of the marriage of Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson, Portrait of a Marriage. Why was it so shocking? What was the content? What were the juicy bits? Everything. Everything is in there. So Dorothy Thompson's lesbian affair, the drinking, the alcoholism of,

of Sinclair Lewis, which was severe, the neglect, the marital trials and tribulations, the domestic violence of Sinclair Lewis against Dorothy Thompson. So, you know, this is a no-holdsparred account. And what happens is Dorothy Thompson dies. She's left a huge archive. Her publishers are looking for someone to publish the biography. And they go through a bunch of people and decide they're all insuitable or they won't do it or something. And then they send Jimmy in her best, you know, her long-time friend,

her best friend probably, to report on what's in there. And is he interested in doing the book? And he says, yes, I'll do it. But I'll only do it actually as a personal story as an account of a marriage. And at first they say, oh, sure. And then when they get the manuscript, they think, oh, yikes. What have we done here? And then like all good publishers, they go from shock to thinking, how can we actually make money? And then by the time the paper buck is published, it's the frankest account of a marriage ever published, which is indeed true.

I mean, they had messy private lives these people, didn't they? They had a lot of source material to be working with here. Was it like friends? Were they all sleeping with each other? Yeah, they were sleeping with each other. They were having affairs with each other's wives. They were hitting on each other's wives. It was messy, and it wasn't just messy

because they lived in stressful times and stressful circumstances. I think it was messy because they were witnessing something that other people at the time were also noticing, which was the way in which the boundaries between private life and the kind of patterns you were seeing on the world stage were totally breaking down. And this is a really important point I want to make about private life, which is we think about private life. You know, when we talk about private life, so oftentimes it's about the domestic, it's about the familial, it's about stuff that you can't see.

But there are really important relations between the kind of big patterns, the biggest patterns of world history and the ways in which people live their intimate and domestic lives. And that means that the tenor of emotional life changes really drastically. And they felt that. They felt like this is not the world of our parents. This is not a world where politics ends at your door.

This is the world where, as Dorothy Thompson says, in her 1937 essay, Dilemma of Liberal, you cannot get away from the world. My relations with my husband and my child, she writes, are secondary to everything that I see in the world. And I cannot shut my door. It's a really fascinating viewpoint, isn't it? Because we still wrestle with these kind of ideas and beliefs.

So if we're thinking about something like politicians, and especially with reporters reporting on politicians, their private lives are often brought into the mix. And there's always an argument of, like, for example, just to completely make-believe Prime Minister, we'll just pretend, had had lots of affairs and had cheated on all of his wives and didn't know how many children he had. For example, just imagine that happened. Just, right, right, right.

Hard to conceive that such a thing would happen, such a violation. But anyway, yes. Stretch, stretch your imagination. But the debate always arises, doesn't it? But that's your private life. That's, this imaginary person's private life, doesn't have any impact on their job. But this is exactly what this set of journalists were trying to pick apart, wasn't it? They were making the point that actually it really does. Yes, they were saying, first of all, it does. That if we want to understand these people, we have to understand all of this stuff. But they were saying something else too, which is that because of the actions of these politicians that are private lives too are now uniquely susceptible to the patterns on the world stage. And so,

you know, they're sitting around thinking, how am I behaving like Hitler in my marriage? That's a question. Or am I like Stalin in my marriage? I mean, it seems crazy, right? And certainly when I first started to read about this, this is pre, you know, doing this research, pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, it seemed like, really? You're really analogizing your marriage to the relationship, you know, that Hitler has to his cabinet members. But it doesn't seem so strange when we know, you know, people are talking to their therapists about these questions all the time. And there's a kind of huge field of psychology that's about the permeability of inner life to the world around us.

I mean, they found it happening to themselves, and then they really felt like they had to document it. So they're making an argument about private life really in two regards. I mean, it never goes away, does it? But a really good point at the moment is, you know, the spiraling cost of energy and just how everything on the world stage is just utterly, utterly fucked. And now it's really impacting people's private lives,

just how they live their lives, their mental health, their well-being, And that slippage between public and private, I think is really important today. Totally. We're definitely in a moment where the world in which I grew up was, there was much more, you know, the 60s and 70s. And of course, there was a privilege to this too of being able to close the door, as Dorothy Thompson says. But we are in a moment of, I would say, pretty extreme slippage. And hard to imagine that that isn't just going to become.

become, you know, more acute. And that's precisely what this group of people are trying to diagnose because they feel it happening. And as they feel it happening, you know, sitting there, John Gunther reporting in 1934 from Vienna as the Austrian dictator, Dolphus, you know, attacking the socialist housing projects, he's scribbling notes about his marriage. So he's got notes about the events, you know, the rise of Austro-fascism and its disastrous consequences. But then he's also completely obsessed about his marriage. And then he starts to feel maybe these things are the same thing. Yeah. You know, maybe everything is falling apart. Maybe I wouldn't, my marriage wouldn't look like this if I weren't so exposed, so permeable, right? So porous. It's so true. That's such a good point.

Tell me about the outbreak of the Second World War, because all of this journalism and this kind of further around the Four Genesis is happening just as the Second World War is kicking off. How did their careers fare during and post-war? Yeah. So these, They are at their height at the outset of the Second World War. And they are the people who have been saying for years then, the war's going to happen, the war's going to happen. There's even a joke about it. Are you an end of 36er, meaning do you think the Second World War is going to break out

at the end of 36 or the beginning of 37 or? So by the time the war comes, as someone writes of Dorothy Thompson, she should title her next book, I Told You So, because indeed she had been telling everyone, I told you so for so long. So they're influential voices during the Second World War, but in various ways, the men all kind of start to fall apart. Gunther isn't sure what he thinks about the war and embarks on an affair with his best friend's wife. Messy. Totally messy situation.

Vincent Sheehan is kind of, again, he decides that he can't just be a reporter. He has to go and actually enlist in the American Air Force, because after all, he's been, as he says, to his wife. I've been a warmonger. Now it's time for me to go and do his part, but of course he's miserable in the military. And Adrian McElbacher is drinking and drinking and just falling off of the map out of communication with the home office. So their moment is the moment of the 30s. And so what they do after the war, and, you know, it's not that they're not still significant figures. John Gunther actually continues to be a best-selling author. And Jimmy Sheehan also has some best-selling books. And Dorothy Thompson is still a syndicated columnist. But their zeit-guise, their mode is the most. 1930s. And after that, then they do this memoir writing. And, you know, Death Be Not Proud,

Dorothy and Red, there's some other texts as well that they produce. You've been amazing to talk to you. And if people want to know more about you before they go and know about these reporters, which they should, where can they find you? Oh, I have a website, which is just Deppercocon.com. And I'm also a professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. And so there's a kind of professional, you know, more of the historian website there. And are you a sensible person who's got no social media at all? No, no, I have a very pathetic Twitter presence. So if you want to find me in my most pathetic and inept form,

unlike you, Kate, who are brilliant on Twitter, I am there dragging along on the bottom of the Twitter sphere. Follow me. What's your Twitter handle? We'll all go and follow you. Follow me. Yes, follow me. It's Deborah A. Cohen, C-O-H-E-N. Deborah, you have been so much so wonderful and enlightening to speak to.

Thank you so much for talking to me. Well, I so love the show, and thank you so much again for having me. A complete pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Deborah for giving us your time and your expertise today. That was just fascinating, wasn't it? And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe, wherever it is that you get your podcast.

I know everybody always says on every podcast and every YouTube video, but it really does actually help us quite a lot. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.