A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century by Ken Cuthbertson

Author:Ken Cuthbertson [Cuthbertson, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780773597242
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2015-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

23

Berlin Diary

William Shirer was among the throng of relieved, happy passengers standing on deck when the American Export Lines ship SS Excambion arrived in New York harbor the morning of 23 December 1940. As the ship steamed past the Statue of Liberty on this gray, sullen Monday, Shirer stood at the rail puffing his pipe, the collar of his overcoat turned up against a biting winter wind. Scanning the crowd of eager faces lining the pier, he broke into a smile when he caught sight of Tess and Inga waving in greeting. With Christmas just two days hence and the family reunited at last, there was much to celebrate.

On her previous visit to the United States, Tess Shirer had stayed with her brother-in-law and his wife in their home in Virginia. This time she did not; she was irked that it was only begrudgingly that John Shirer had loaned her money to help pay travel expenses.1 So, upon their arrival in New York six weeks earlier, Tess, Inga, and the nanny had taken up residence in the St Moritz Hotel. “I think there were many Europeans there, and I remember that everyone on the staff seemed to speak French, which was my only language at the time,” recalls Inga Shirer Dean.2 The hotel, one of New York’s poshest, was a luxurious way station for the family, especially Inga. “It will be good for her to get away from the hotel,” Tess confided in a letter to her mother-in-law. “People [there] spoil her so, you know.”3

The contrast between the circumstances of William Shirer’s youthful departure for Europe and his triumphant homecoming was marked. In June 1925, he and his pal George Latta had sailed from Montreal, working their way over to Europe on a cattle boat. They had been two cashstrapped young men out for a summer of adventure. Now, fifteen years later, Shirer was returning home a celebrated foreign correspondent and a married family man.

Now in the eleventh year of the Great Depression, the United States was still struggling to right itself. The blind, unbounded optimism of the Jazz Age had been bludgeoned into submission by the familiar afflictions of our own era: a deep-seated cynicism that was reflected in cultural touchstones of the day. The acerbic tone of author John Steinbeck’s proletarian novel The Grapes of Wrath, that year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, struck a chord with many Americans.

Despite the fact isolationist sentiments still held sway in Washington, public interest in Europe’s conflict was growing. This was largely due to the dramatic nature of wartime events and the sense of immediacy being fostered by the breathless live broadcasts that aired daily on the CBS, NBC, and Mutual radio networks. To millions of Americans and Canadians, star foreign correspondents and radio personalities – Edward R. Murrow and William Shirer in particular – had become household names and trusted figures. “To listeners, relaxed comfortably in their easy chairs at home, [Shirer’s] voice from a nation at war has [become] but another taken-for-granted bit of radio magic,” a New York Times reporter observed.

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