William Shirer's Adventure Story

The only problem with the journalist William L. Shirer is that he couldn't think. Not that reporters have to think. Not much, anyway. Besides, Shirer had most of the other talents a newspaper writer needs. He possessed, for instance, that almost impossibly restless activity that good reporters seem to have, slamming back and forth across 1930s and early 1940s Europe like he was bouncing around in a pinball machine: Bing off one bumper, and he's in Vienna for the German takeover of Austria, then boing off another bumper, and he's back in Munich as Neville Chamberlain lets Hitler take Czechoslovakia out for a test drive. And then with a sudden bang, he's racing across Belgium with the German Army, and then with a quick bop, he's in the Compiègne Forest watching the French surrender. He's everywhere, an ostensibly neutral American observer in a Europe at war, reporting on history as it happened.