Word: sheean
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...SHEEAN has written one of the most important books in post-war journalism. Commencing with remarkably incisive comments on his career in Chicago University, and concluding with his flight from Russia and Communism, he holds his reader fascinated; treating him the while to a display of such intellectual honesty as does one's soul good in these jingoistic, nationalistic, patriotic days...
More through circumstance than anything else, Mr. Sheean early acquired a reputation as a dare-devil newshawk, in the best Floyd Gibbons manner. He was in Morocco during the uprisings of the 1920's, and managed several times to slip through the frontier between the French and the native troops. He had escapades in Spain which gave him an insight into the Rivera revolution. While a correspondent in Paris, he observed Poincare at close range; the only mental conception he retained was one of contempt. He was in Geneva when the ill-fated Protocol was introduced; his cynicism regarding...
...Whenever Sheean suggested anything to his syndicate, the North American Newspaper Alliance, it would be vetoed unless it involved dashing across deserts in sheik robes. Wanting to go to China, where the Kuomintang Revolution was sweeping up towards Shanghai from the South, he had a hard time persuading his bosses that "personal adventure" awaited in the Far East. Eventually, however, he managed to turn the trick, got a drawing account, set out to interview Sun Yat-sen's widow, the delicate Soong Ching-ling; Borodin, the Russian adviser to the Kuomintang; Eugene Chen, who had been...
...wandering Sheean arrived in Shanghai just after Chiang Kai-shek had split with the Communist-dominated wing of the Kuomintang and made peace with the Western powers. Two governments existed in China after that-the Nationalist of Nanking, dedicated to making China a Middle-Class country, and the so-called Communist government at Hankow, where Borodin and Madame Sun Yat-sen stood in the wings, hoping to "proclaim the Soviet," but never getting a chance. Sheean saw Borodin daily, was impressed by the man's philosophy, the "long view" of the theoretical Marxist who regarded immediate events as meaningless...
Contact with the "ideas" behind the Chinese Revolution made Sheean into a sort of Bruce Lockhart, both onlooker and participant. Unable, in spite of Borodin and Rayna, to make up his mind about Communism, Sheean wavered. But he began to take a hand in the processes of history, attempted to bring T. V. Soong, brother of Madame Sun Yatsen, from Shanghai to Hankow, offered to smuggle Fanny Borodin out of Peking. No longer the impassive newshawk, Sheean, when he covered the Jewish-Arab conflict in the Holy Land, broke down completely, took sides violently, and learned conclusively that...