Word: gunther
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...VIPs who are pumped by Gunther also turn to him for information. Says Egypt's President Nasser: "You have to take Gunther seriously, because he tells both sides." Inside Europe landed in Churchill's library (and so firmly in Hitler's bad book that Gunther was marked for postwar liquidation by the Nazis). Inside Asia was on Harry Truman's desk when he broadcast his V-J day speech. Inside Africa was studied dutifully by Russia's Dmitry Shepilov, who cited it in a United Nations tirade against British colonialism, and by Richard Nixon, whose...
Froth v. Fundamentals. John Gunther's critics often scorn his slickly, quickly produced Insides as superficial glimpses through hotel windows. He has been dubbed "the Book-of-the-Month Club's Marco Polo," a "Jonah among journalists," "master of the once-over-lightly." Gunther brushed off Venezuela in 24 hours while researching Inside Latin America, skipped the Ivory Coast entirely on his Inside Africa trip. At the start of his 17 months on the road for Inside U.S.A., Gunther himself recalls, he sped out of Rhode Island in horror after realizing suddenly that he had spent "eight whole...
...occasion prove as hasty as his stopovers. In 1955's Inside Africa he predicted confidently that independence would not come soon to Morocco; less than a year after Inside Africa appeared on the bookstalls, Morocco was independent. The last 1951 edition of Inside U.S.A. perpetuates Stevenson Democrat Gunther's three-year-old thumbs-down verdict on Earl Warren (whom he had not met): "He will never set the world on fire or even make it smoke." In all his 35 years as a foreign-news specialist, Gunther has never learned a foreign language. His critics also take...
Drawing the Maps. Gunther as a book-journalist lacks the originality and profundity of Rebecca (Meaning of Treason) West, the stylistic graces of Negley (Way of a Transgressor) Farson, John (Hiroshima) Hersey or Vincent (Personal History) Sheean. Yet none matches him for sheer scope, reportorial zest, or, most notably, the gift of popularizing remote places and difficult subjects. Says Critic Clifton Fadiman: "Gunther is a born teacher; he doesn't miss a fact-trick. His books are almost too easy to read; because of that, they seem superficial. But he's taught us a hell...
Twentieth Century: In CBS's Gandhi, the scrawny, jug-eared little man in the white loincloth looked as Author John Gunther once saw him: an inscrutable "combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father." Fuzzy images from old films showed the gentle ascetic all but engulfed by the worshiping, hysterical throngs on the mass pilgrimage to the sea to carry out a plan of passive resistance during the British salt monopoly. There was the shrewd lawyer-diplomat putting his hand over an inquisitive British reporter's mouth or quipping on arrival in London in 1931: "You people...