Word: columning
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Columnist's Day. The job of conducting a column requires a peculiar admixture of journalistic talents. A columnist must be receptive and selective, absorptive and digestive, and have the trick of verbal catharsis. The successful columnist must be both an introvert and an extravert, a reporter and an exhibitionist...
Dorothy Thompson wakes up at ten o'clock and reads furiously for two or three hours in bed. Along about noon she gets up, dresses fast, then dictates her column. She has three secretaries, named Madeleine, Madeline, and Madelon (she distinguishes them by their last names). One is always at the Herald Tribune answering mail and digging up research and one or two go to her apartment to help her while she works. Miss Thompson seldom goes to her office because the telephone never stops ringing...
...apartment. She seldom talks anything but world affairs and seldom stops talking them. Her husband has been heard to shush her after hours of it. When she is alone again late at night, if she is worked up about something, she will sit down and write a column at white heat, and these columns are usually her best...
Dorothy Thompson believes the U. S. should be governed by the Cabinet, and nowadays she has her own private cabinet which governs the thinking of her column. Her chief adviser on economic problems is Alexander Sachs, an economist who works for Lehman Corp. and used to be head of NRA's economic research division. On foreign affairs she consults Hamilton Fish Armstrong, John Gunther, Quincy Howe. If she wants to know what the British are doing she calls Harold Nicolson in London. About France she talks to Raoul de' Roussy de Sales, U. S. correspondent for Paris-Soir...
...writing her column, speaking over the radio, doing a monthly article for the Ladies' Home Journal and delivering lectures, Dorothy Thompson was paid $103,000 last year. Her business expenses were $25,000 and she contributed $37,000 in taxes, which left her $41,000 to live on. She gave 20% of that away...