In the 1920s and 1930s, a close-knit band of American reporters raised the alarm about the rise of fascism on the European continent. They were glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John and Frances Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world.
Worldwide celebrities in their day, they are largely forgotten, but at the time, the work of Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson in calling attention to anti-Semitism earned them the admiration of many American Jews. Thompson was the first American reporter kicked out of Third Reich, both for her sardonic comments about Hitler and her brave reporting about violence against Jews. From this circle of friends came both controversial reporting about Zionism (Sheean and Thompson) as well as the leadership of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe (Frances Fineman Gunther).”
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