Why did the tribune of the people become the crusader for capitalism? It was not just hardening of the arteries. Nasaw suggests that the turning point was the bloodshed in 1934, when the phony peace between capital and labor ended in pitched battles and gunfire across the country. Hearst feared that revolutionary excesses would generate a homegrown fascist movement that would destroy American democracy. Traveling in a fleet of black limousines through southern and central Europe, he saw firsthand how Nazism and Fascism had been spawned as an antidote to Communism. The messages Nasaw examined reveal how relentless Hearst became in enforcing execution of his command to fight Communism. It is time to call in the cockroach man, he instructed his editorial director. So Hearst reporters, posing as students, set out to entrap un-American university professors, unleashing in every city with a Hearst newspaper a witch hunt that lasted 20 years. Nasaws explanation of Hearsts anti-Communism is credible, but it is harder to swallow W. R.s response to Hitler and Mussolini. It was one thing to commission them as columnists. (Its satisfying to learn that the greedy Musso -- $1,500 a crack, or $15,000 in todays currency -- could not write, and that Hitler always missed his deadlines.) It was another to cable his New York editors to make the Berlin correspondents coverage of the Nazis more favorable: Von Wiegand articles and cables seem too incendiary. Think he should be instructed to send generally interesting news without partisanship. The Hearst press did report the Nazi violence, rather more than The Times of London under Geoffrey Dawson, and in a private meeting with Hitler in 1934, Hearst did make a personal appeal for the Jews. But he gravely misjudged his man. It was a singular failure that he was blind to the realities of Nazi rule and Nazi anti-Semitism. His isolationism was one of the key factors in Americas fatal hesitation before the world blew up. At the end of his examination of all the material, Nasaw confesses that Hearsts confidence in Hitler remains baffling. The conclusion is symptomatic of the scrupulous honesty that distinguishes this biography of the most powerful publisher America has ever known: Welles got that part right. nytimes/books/00/07/02/reviews/000702.02eva.html
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 18:44:15 +0000