Off the Record

To Insider John Gunther, she "swept through Europe, an amiable, blue-eyed tornado." To Columnist Heywood Broun, she was "a victim of galloping nascence," whose speeches in one year would "constitute a bridge of platitudes sufficient to reach from the Herald Tribune's editorial rooms to the cold caverns of the moon." But to approving readers of her three-a-week column of political analysis, "On the Record" (147 papers), durable Dorothy Thompson was a snappish combination of Cassandra and Joan of Arc, the first and finest of political newshens.

Last week Dorothy Thompson went off the record. The time had come, she wrote in a farewell column, for her to "relive my life" in preparation for her ninth and most ambitious book: an autobiography that would also be a personal history of her war-torn times.

Solemn Suffragette. The daughter of a Methodist minister, Dorothy Thompson grew up in upstate New York. Solemn, pudgy and 20, she flounced into Buffalo in 1914 after graduating from Syracuse University, toured the state as a low-paid, high-pressure suffragette for three years, then drifted in and out of a job as an advertising copywriter in Manhattan.

With vague longings to be a writer, Dorothy sailed to England in 1920, became a reporter when International News Service signed her to cover a Zionist conference in London. For the next eight years, she matched wits with the sharpest scoop hounds in Europe--Gunther, Floyd Gibbons, Walter Duranty. She covered a Polish coup d'etat in evening dress, with the help of $500 lent her by Sigmund Freud. With verve and clarity, she analyzed the mood of Depression-hit Germany. But her best-known bit of punditry was also her worst: in 1932 she produced a book on Adolf Hitler, decided he would never reach power. "Oh, Adolf! Adolf!" she wrote. "You will be out of luck!"

Divorced from Hungarian Writer Josef Bard after four years of marriage, Dorothy returned to the U.S. in 1928 to embark on a new career: wife to Novelist Sinclair Lewis. As energetic a spouse as she was reporter, she gave up heavy reading for menu planning, bore Lewis a son, hosted his parties. But as Dorothy and "Red" drifted apart (they separated in 1937), she took on more and more work.

At the suggestion of Mrs. Ogden Reid, vice president of the New York Herald Tribune, she started "On the Record," the next year began a monthly chitchat for the Ladies' Home Journal. By World War II, she was read across the U.S. (peak circulation: some 200 papers in 1941), feared in Government circles.

Nasser's Champion. An erratic, headstrong conservative, Dorothy nevertheless backed Franklin D. Roosevelt, shifting her column to the Bell Syndicate and the New-Dealing New York Post when Roosevelt's third-term candidacy scandalized the Herald Tribune. She defiantly cast a protest vote for Socialist Norman Thomas in 1948, supported Ike in 1952 and 1956. After a 1950 Mediterranean trip with her third husband, Vienna-born Artist Maxim Kopf, whom she married in 1943, Dorothy was bitten by her last, most persistent bug: the failure of U.S. policy in the Mideast. Convinced that wholehearted support of Israel was folly, she helped found the pro-Arab American Friends of the Middle East. She went on to champion Egypt's Nasser as an impulsive nationalist with no interest in aggression or seizure of oil-company property.

Two months ago Artist Kopf died, and now, says Dorothy, "I must get me to a library." She plans to move to Hanover, N.H., where "I can read and have access to [Dartmouth College's] stacks." Sighs ex-Pundit Thompson, 64: "I have lived in my times as no one else has, and I want very much to record my views and observations of those times."

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