Dispatches and Dictators
Barbara S. Mahoney
Dispatches and Dictators uncovers the fascinating story of Oregon native Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune's European correspondent, who served in Paris, Rome, Moscow, Berlin, and London in the years between the two world wars. Barnes has been praised by colleagues and competitors alike as one of the best reporters of that pivotal era. But since his death in the 1940 crash of a British bomber in Yugoslavia, he has been largely forgotten.
With persistence and unusually keen insight, Ralph Barnes reported on Fascism, Communism, Nazism, and the events leading to World War II. Stalin confined Barnes to Moscow for disclosing that millions were dying during the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, and Hitler expelled Barnes from Germany for predicting the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union.
Recently, scholars have rediscovered Barnes, recognizing the perceptiveness of his observations about the nature of the Soviet regime, the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazis, and the descent into war.
Drawing from Barnes's dispatches, his personal correspondence, and the recollections of his colleagues, Dispatches and Dictators offers a valuable perspective on the interwar period and on the challenges facing journalists covering the events of the time. Barnes's story also offers an intimate glimpse into one family's experience with the risks, hardships, and separations that belie the romantic popular image of the foreign correspondent.
**2003 Oregon Book Award Winner for General Nonfiction**
About the author
BARBARA S. MAHONEY is a historian whose interest in Oregon history began when she moved with her family to Salem, Oregon, in 1976. She has contributed a number of entries to the Oregon Encyclopedia and is the author of Dispatches and Dictators, a biography of Oregon native Ralph Barnes, who was a foreign correspondent in Europe in the 1930s. Dispatches and Dictators won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction in 2003.
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- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I. Oregon to Rome: June 1899 - March 1931
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Part II. Moscow: March, 1931 - August 1935
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Part III. Berlin: September, 1935 - March 1939
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Part IV. The Coming of War: March 1939 - November 1940
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
"None of us could equal Ralph as an all-round, highly informed, and keenly perceptive news bloodhound. Of our generation, Ralph had the widest posted experience in major European capitals. Ralph Barnes was unchallengeably unique."
for the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News
"A masterful biography of a journalist who dedicated himself to the truth as he saw it, who openly defied the true monsters of our last century (Hitler and Stalin), who was so dedicated to what he saw as his responsibility that he died for it. The Salem man was one of the great ones, now almost forgotten. This breakneck-paced book might just restore his reputation."