Book Review: Merchant of Words: The Life of Robert St. John, by Terry Fred Horowitz

Abstract

Merchant of Words: The Life of Robert St. John. Terry Fred Horowitz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 444 pp. $85 hbk.Robert St. John's From the Land of Silent People, an account of the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 as told by an Associated Press journalist who barely made it out of the country alive, ranks as one of the great books of wartime journalism.A reader who turns to Terry Fred Horowitz's biography of St. John (1902-2003), Merchant of Words, to find an equally compelling narrative about a journalist's motivations, methods, and mettle-say, along the lines of James Tobin's Ernie Pyle's War or Joseph E. Persico's Edward R. Murrow: An American Original-is likely to be disappointed.It is not that Horowitz has failed to do his legwork. The biography is based on countless hours of interviews conducted during the final years of St. John's life, after Horowitz had already spent eighteen years as a friend. And it is not from an attempt to provide context and detail; Horowitz appears to emulate John Dos Passos's fictional U.S.A. trilogy by inserting news summaries and quotations into his narrative.It is just that he does not pull it off well. Several issues are paramount to this reviewer.First, the narrative follows strict chronology. St. John's life unfolds day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, bordering on a desk calendar approach to biography. This causes the book to jump, often disjointedly, from one subject to the next without allowing sufficient attention to developing themes that might best be cultivated with some flexibility in the timeline. In a single page, for example, the author moves from St. John taking over as emcee of NBC's Believe It or Not, to his writing about the McCarran Act, his reviewing a book by William Shirer, his resignation from the Voice of Freedom Committee, and his being associated with a communist front by radio commentator Fulton Lewis. Some major issues, such as St. John's long association with pro-Jewish and pro-Israel causes, assume the readers' familiarity with narrowly focused historical situations and would have benefited from expansion and reflection.Second, the author inserts himself into the book, making himself and his wife recurring characters. Historians and journalists may debate the value of detachment and the pursuit of objectivity versus a more subjective approach, and there is much to argue in favor of a writer disclosing his or her biases upfront for a reader. But Horowitz does not use a light touch, and his voice can be jarring. He suggests disbelief, or at least a degree of skepticism, with such comments to his subject and his readers as Robert, can we talk? and (Sotto voce) I believe it. Perhaps the warning light should have flashed in the prologue, which includes multiple pages of personal letters between St. …