Reflective Reporter

The careers of most crack U. S. foreign correspondents can be divided into two phases. In the first they report. In the second they reflect. That Dorothy Thompson, like James Vincent Sheean and Walter Duranty, was finished with Phase No. 1 was clear last week when she inaugurated a thoughtful column in the New York Herald Tribune called "On The Record."

Dorothy Thompson was a journalistic "natural." Daughter of a Methodist minister, she tried social service, advertising, found neither satisfactory, joined the bustling exodus of young U. S. literati who went abroad in the early 1920's. First reporting Miss Thompson did was freelance work for London papers. When she brought in the last interview given by famed Irish Hunger-Striker Terence McSweeney, Fleet Street began to take Miss Thompson seriously. Soon a roving correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, she achieved another resounding scoop by interviewing ex-Emperor Karl of Austria at the climax of his second attempt to regain the Hapsburg throne in 1922. By 1924 she was chief of the Public Ledger-New York Evening Post bureau in Berlin, where her liberal tendencies later ran afoul of the Nazi movement (TIME, Sept. 3, 1934). With this job the first stage of Dorothy Thompson's journalistic career was complete. In 1928 she was ready to marry Nobel-Prizewinning Novelist Sinclair Lewis.

Run on the first page of the Herald Tribune's second section last week, and flanking Pundit Walter Lippmann's animadversions, "On The Record" began with no self-conscious fanfare but proved to be reading matter as solid as its famed neighbor. "I, like 120,000,000 other Americans," began Columnist Thompson, "will probably never grasp the truth about the money system." Thereupon, with no further matronly misgivings, Miss Thompson proceeded to discuss the profundities of the Corporation Tax Bill for some 1,500 words.

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