In the early 1920s, American newspapers were just beginning to hire Americans as foreign correspondents. They had had them in wartime — almost always men who made their names reporting from far-away battlefields — but not during other times, when they tended to rely on wire services like Reuters and Associated Press (which in turn got their stories from local press). “This changed with the war, the 50,000 doughboys dead in France, and the settlement in Versailles,” writes Deborah Cohen in her new book, “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War,” (Random House). “Now Americans required their own eyes and ears abroad. Never again would the Europeans, particularly the British, trick naive Yankees into a costly Continental entanglement.” 

At that time, seven major newspapers were building up extensive foreign news services: The Chicago Daily News, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Evening Ledger. The group of reporters who covered the international beat were bold, glamorous, and rather fearless as they headed overseas to cover the fall of monarchies and the rise of dictators and political movements, getting a front row seat to world history as it unfolded. 

These reporters, including John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, covered the decade in between world wars as the world fell apart in the wake of World War I and reassembled itself, only to come apart again. 

Dorothy Thompson made the case to her editors to send her to Vienna in 1920, the former Habsburg empire reeling after the loss of most of its territory and people. Thompson had a hunch that the “problems of east-central Europe — nationalist grievances combined with economic dislocation — were storing up trouble for the future.” 

The Vienna beat included Albania, Bulgaria, Czech, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece and Turkey. Knowing the American obsession with royalty, she wrote about eligible Romanian dukes and “threadbare Russian princesses driving taxis.” She would stop at little to land a story, and once snuck into Esterhazy Castle dressed as a Red Cross nurse there to attend to a pregnant former Empress during an unsuccessful coup attempt. She would interview Ataturk, Trotsky, Hitler, and once borrowed money from Sigmund Freud in order to travel to Poland to cover Marshal Pilsudski’s seizure of power. 

“If they tell you you ‘write like a man,’ Dorothy would later tell a group of women reporters, ‘don’t take it as a compliment. That’s only a man’s badge of approval, and it doesn’t mean anything.”