But what’s most important about these characters, which the author notes in the prologue and epilogue, is that they were all Americans abroad while the U.S. was still in its “stumbling global ascendancy.” The role of the foreign correspondent would change dramatically after the Second World War. “As the United States sought to exert its dominance globally, remaking the world to suit, foreign correspondents became more entangled in that project, either as critics or as sympathizers,” Cohen writes. But, for this lot, both their impressions and advocacy were a little less loaded. They rarely had deep knowledge of any foreign countries or languages before they went abroad; Thompson’s hard-won German remained “ungrammatical” in the nineteen-forties, during the war. The Chicago boys, even more naïve at the outset, were empty vessels, learning about the world as they wrote about it.
Is being an empty vessel an asset to the foreign correspondent? And is having strong beliefs, especially political ones, a detriment to journalistic objectivity? These questions are a major undercurrent of this book, and are most electrically animated in the romantic and professional partnership between John and Frances Gunther. Cohen makes use of a wealth of archival material about these two—letters, diaries, and, in the Freudian cast of their era, dream journals and analysis-session notes—and maps their debates onto the seminal world events happening around them.
John and Frances first collided in Paris, in 1925. John was from a German American family on Chicago’s North Side, and was a son of a seedy businessman and a doting mother; Frances was born, in 1897, to Jewish immigrants who ran fabric and convenience stores in uptown Manhattan. She attended Barnard, in 1916, where she became the secretary-treasurer of the Socialist Club. After dropping out or being kicked out of three consecutive universities, all the while mixing with such prominent left-wingers as Dorothy Day, she eventually graduated from Barnard, at the age of twenty-four. The Gunthers married in 1927, less than three years after Frances arrived in Moscow. Their first child, Judy, tragically died at just a few months old, in 1929, and their second, Johnny, was born later that year. After that, Frances did much of her reporting vicariously, through her husband’s postings.
It’s evident from the correspondence cited in “Last Call” that Frances had the first-rate analytical mind. Cohen writes:
Unlike John and Jimmy, who liked to emphasize their American freshness and ignorance, Frances had read the classic texts of Marxism with Harold Laski and the Wednesday Socialist Club, attended Dadaist art shows and constructivist theater. . . . She was paying attention to the world.
Among the main characters of the book, she alone understood the ideological background of the emergent Soviet superpower and asked penetrating questions about the larger economic and political forces at work. When John went to Germany during the Nazi rise to power, he was, once again, in over his head, but Frances urged him to pay attention to economics: “The capitalists who were using the Nazis to prop up their own class interests. The industrialists filling up Nazi coffers. The arms dealers supplying the fascists with munitions,” in Cohen’s words.