COLOURFUL CAREERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 139, 20 February 1942, Page 7

COLOURFUL CAREERS

HUBERT RENFRO KNICKER. BOCKER only took up journalism in the first place to save money so that he could study psychiatry, but now he is a roving reporter for Hearst International News Service and has a box-seat at every big event in inter national history. He is 44, a genial red haired Texan with a southern drawl. For a while he drove a milk waggon in Austin, Texas, but sold his round in 1919 to study psychiatry in New York. When he got to Columbia University all he could afford was the journalism course. On the Newark (NJ) Morning Ledger he conducted a vice crusade. In 1923 he again set off with the intention of studying psychiatry, this time in Germany. But to pay his way he took a job as occasional correspondent for United Press. He was in Munich during Hitler’s first unsuccessful putsch. In 1925 he joined Hearst’s International News Service and spent two years in Moscow. At this stage his old ambition seems to have died out-his biography mentions no more universities.

In 1930 he won a Pulitzer Prize for 24 articles on "The Red Trade Menace." Then in 1932 the Nazis recognised him as an observer out of sympathy with them. Gradually he was edged out of Germany, and Hearst made him roving reporter. He "covered" Abyssinia, was with Franco’s army in Spain, went to China’ in 1937, saw Germans march into Austria, into Czechoslovakia. His exposure of the huge investments outside Germany of the Nazi leaders created a sensation. After one month on the’ Allied front in the present world war he flew back to America to give lectures urging American intervention. * % * OSEPH C. HARSCH is a foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, and though he has not achieved such fame as H. R. Knickerbocker, his reputation is now soundly established. He went back to America from Berlin last year, having been there since the outbreak of war, and in a review of his book Pattern of Con-

quest the periodical Newsweek said that the book "goes to the head of the list for objectivity and its sober ring of truth." Harsch’s book declared that the Germans still backed Hitler even though they disliked him, because they feared bankruptcy or reprisals, in the event of defeat. Harsch said he could not find a single sincere Nazi in Berlin even among the Government officials and party functionaries he dealt with.