An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s by Stephen R. Mackinnon, Oris Friesen (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 389 June 12, 1940, on the eve of the German occupation of the city. It was reborn late in 1944 with a new vocation: not simply to be the house organ of Americans in Europe, but an international newspaper that would represent ''the new American world position" and would become a "symbol of the American Century." That it failed to achieve this, and came close to bankruptcy in 1950, reflected many of the complexities of American-European relations in the postwar period. The finances of the newspaper started to stabilize only in 1966with a participation of the Washington Post; the modem era began the following year when the New York Times joined with the Post as co-publishers of the International HeraldTribune . Within a few years, daily circulation exceeded 100,000 and the newspaper was on the way to becoming a genuinely international newspaper. The last link with the raffish old Herald was broken in 1978 when it moved from the premises that it had occupied since 1930 on the rue de Berri into a modern office building in a ''most unpicturesque" setting on the avenue Charles de Gaulle in suburban Neuilly. Computers and international facsimile editions completed the transformation of the '' IHT'' into a newspaper '' defined by the common interests of a multinational readership scattered about the globe.'' The history of this metamorphosis, as Charles Robertson tells it, reveals a great deal about changes in journalism during the past century, in the international role of the United States, and in our own romantic illusions about both. Perhaps it is too much to expect all this in a single volume, which is what Robertson has attempted. The subject exceeds not his intellectual grasp but his ability to write about it with flair. The result is a book that is a bit pedestrian, that becomes overwhelmed at times by detail, and that blurs the sharp personal outlines of a memorable cast of publishers, editors and journalists. As the cover blurb by Pierre Salinger indicates , it is "a must read," but only for journalists and students of news media. Peter Desbarats Graduate School of Journalism University of Western Ontario Stephen R. Mackinnon and Oris Friesen. An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 230 pp. Illus. The ''loss'' of China remains to this day a scar on the U.S. psyche. There are still those who attribute the success of Chinese Communists on the mainland to a subversive betrayal by State Department foreign service officers and the brainwashing of American correspondents in the field. The fact that this loss could be so traumatic is evidence of the special relationship that Americans have had with China for a century or more. 390 Shorter Book Reviews Stephen Mackinnon, co-author of a new biography of Agnes Smedley, herself no slouch about telling it as it was in China in the 1930s and 1940s, and Oris Friesen, a computer expert, have done American historiography and journalism a service. They have recorded much of a unique gathering in 1982, in Scottsdale, Arizona, of a panoply of some of the legendary American "China hands"journalists , academics and government officials who were in China during the crucial period 1935 to 1950. This is oral history at its best. The authors managed to capture not only the participants' memories of the events, but also their disagreements. Thus, for example, while most present at this meeting greatly admired Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Communists' chief spokesmanin Chongqing during World War II, there were exceptions. Tillman Durdin, who reported for the New York Times in the 1930s and 1940s, says: I myself became disillusioned with Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai)1 and his group to a degree, because in the early days in Chungking (Chongqing), in the propaganda war between the KMT and the Communists, the Communists were always bringing forward popular groups. They would suddenly discover the Northwest People's Organization or the Kwei (Gui) People's Political Organization or something like that .... You know there was not a Northwest representative in Chungking (Chongqing) that you could get at. They were just creating all these things. And I got...