The 20th-century’s top female journalist, good advice to editors, and more fodder for the spy novelist: newsletter, February 28, 2020

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Dorothy Thompson, America’s leading voice denouncing Nazism in the 1930s

Winston Churchill is rightly remembered as the lonely voice of 1930s Britain who recognized the dangers of Nazism and loudly and regularly denounced Adolph Hitler and his thugs while his own nation was sleepwalking through the decade.

America had a similar voice, but unfortunately, we hardly have any memory of her.

The voice was that of Dorothy Thompson, the foremost journalist of her age. Unlike Churchill, Thompson’s experience with Hitler and Nazism was up close and personal.

Thompson spoke German and had spent a good part of the 1920s in Germany as a foreign correspondent watching it deteriorate into turmoil. She left for a while (she married Sinclair Lewis in 1927 and lived with him in Vermont for a time) but returned in 1931 and because of her prominence was invited to interview Hitler as he was gaining more and more followers.

She was not impressed. She believed that he was a “little man” who would be outmaneuvered by the more skillful politicians in Germany. In that assessment, she was clearly wrong, but she was correct in seeing Nazism as a barbaric, authoritarian cult that posed a danger not just to Germany but to the world.

In August 1934, a year and a half after Hitler had seized power, Thompson was expelled from Germany, told that because of what she had said and written that Germany could not offer its “hospitality” to her. She had 24 hours to leave. When she boarded her train, almost the whole of the foreign correspondents corps in Berlin at the time came to see her off.

Her expulsion made front-page news around the world, and Thompson had the expulsion order framed and hung in her office in New York.

Thompson spent much of the next decade in loud and unceasing opposition to the Nazis. She had ample megaphones at her disposal. She wrote a thrice-weekly column, On the Record, for the New York Tribune that was syndicated in more than 170 newspapers and read by as many as 10 million people. Thompson was also offered a broadcasting spot on NBC radio as a news commentator, so she was not only read but also heard by most of the nation on a regular basis. In addition, she had a monthly column in Cosmopolitan magazine in which she discussed non-political topics, but that only enhanced her fame and her reach.

Thompson called on America to open their hearts and their doors to those fleeing Nazi persecution. She talked about how life in Germany was becoming intolerable for Jews and other minorities. In 1939 she attended a German America Bund rally in Madison Square Garden and loudly heckled the speakers until an armed guard had to escort her out.

Sadly and to its shame, America turned deaf ears to Thompson’s pleas until it was far too late.

Next week: How Dorothy Thompson got to Germany

Good advice from editors from Jane Friedman

One of my favorite people from the world of independent publishing is Jane Friedman, a wide-ranging consultant and author of the weekly newsletter Electric Speed, which is consistently full of good tips and advice.

The introduction to her newsletter this week struck me as especially enlightening. It’s a special message to those who would be editors:

One of my husband Mark’s favorite albums is God Bless Tiny Tim, first released in 1968. He believes it’s now an under-recognized album, mostly forgotten.
In 2018, the year of the record’s 50th anniversary, Mark decided it was time to write about it—a love letter, if you will—to convince the music world to listen again.
I was excited to see what he’d write. Of course he’s talked to me at length about what this album means to him. I couldn’t wait for his observations to be shared more widely. And he happens to be a very fine writer.
So he labored over this piece for months (doing loads of research) and was on the verge of publishing it.
But then he didn’t.
Why? Because of two mistakes.
The first mistake: He showed it to me.
The second mistake: I made a lot of revision suggestions that quashed his desire to go any further with it.
And now the 50th anniversary is in the distant past.
Editors do a lot of harm every day, unintentionally. In Mark’s case, I wanted the piece to work for the kind of audience I’d like him to have, not the audience he actually wants to reach. Plus I didn’t frame the feedback in a way that made it easy to take next steps.
It’s hard to find the right editor. If you’re struggling with an editor right now, ask them lots of questions. Figure out their assumptions. Ask for what next steps they’d take.

Good, heartfelt advice. And if you are looking to up your writing and editing game, you should subscribe to Jane’s newsletter.

A new source of material for spy novelists

Espionage novelists have a lot of material to work with. World War II and the lengthy Cold War have seen to that. But this treasure trove of material just got richer within the last couple of weeks with this story, meticulously researched and written by Greg Miller and his colleagues at the Washington Post:

‘The Intelligence Coup of the Century’

For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries.

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.
But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

That’s right. For most of the Cold War, the U.S. government had access to much of the diplomatic communications for most countries around the world. That did not include the Soviet Union or Communist China. Nevertheless, the CIA had some insight into these nations by reading the diplomatic exchanges they had with other countries.

It was a major con operation — perhaps the biggest in all of history — and it operated in near total secrecy until the CIA finally abandoned it in the 1990s. Incredibly, the CIA wrote its own history of the project, which Miller has managed to lay his hands on.

How the operation happened and how it worked is a fascinating story — a long but well-told one by Miller and his editors.

Spy novelists now have something new to stuff into their creative pipes and take some long, slow puffs.