Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dorothy Thompson: Withstanding The Storm, Michael J. Kirkhorn

The Courier

The "unremitting terror" of totalitarianism was Dorothy Thompson's nightmare. She witnessed the atrocities of Nazism, and later, after the Second World War, the cruelty of Soviet communism. The violent will to power that she described for her millions of readers was for her the nemesis of all hope and goodness. It could not be appeased, it could not be satisfied; it had to be resisted. Her profound recognition of that single necessity, and her frustration with the complacency with which this great threat was met at home drew her, one of the great political journalists of the century, into misjudments …