Who Am I? August 2018

I was born in the “gateway to the west” long before the arch was erected there. Mom was a suffragette and dad was a gynecologist.

I had a pretty comfortable childhood. I attended Bryn Mawr but left school to pursue a career in journalism that was to last 60 years! Among my employers were the New Republic, Collier’s Weekly, the St.Louis Post-Dispatch, the Atlantic Monthly, and the London Guardian. I also wrote 5 novels, 14 novellas and 2 collections of short stories so you can see I was a busy gal. Early on I spent a couple of years in Paris as a
foreign correspondent for UPI. Harry Hopkins hired me to be one of 16 investigators for the ‘FERA’ (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) where I reported back on the Great Depression. Our work influenced the Roosevelt administration’s relief programs. It was there that I developed my life-long friendship with Eleanor, the First Lady.

I “made my bones,” so to speak, by fearlessly covering the Spanish Civil War, the Russo-Finnish War, the second Sino-Japanese War, the London Blitz and the European Theater of War in WWII. I used my wiles and every trick in my reporter’s handbook to get to places where women rarely had gone before. Despite the long odds, I too landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day by stowing away on a hospital ship and sneaking ashore as a stretcher bearer! I was also on the ground to report from Dachau soon after its liberation by allied forces.

For a time I was married to a “manly man” journalist /novelist but I refused to be overshadowed by him. Whenever we took our shotguns to go out duck hunting I proved to be as good a shot as he was! In later years when I was asked about him I said, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a
loathsome human being.””

Over the course of my long career I also covered the Vietnam War, civil wars in Central America and some of the Arab-Israeli conflicts. I have always been very pro-Israel and I had an excellent relationship with Moshe Dayan, the former Defense Minister of Israel.

Along the way I adopted a baby boy but I had to leave him with my relatives in Englewood, N.J. because of the peripatetic nature of my work.  Some have considered me glamorous just because I happen to be a leggy blonde. Maybe you know me from work or by my raspy voice because I was a chain-smoker. That’s me in the photo below.

(1)Who Am I? (2)What was my connection to the 82nd Airborne Division? (3) What was the name of the famous journalist/novelist I was once married to? (4) I was honored by having my image appear on a U.S. postage stamp. Which 4 other people were also honored by the U.S.P.S. at the same time as I was?