This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. For these last couple of weeks of August, we've been airing a mini-series from our friends at Radio Diaries, profiles of three controversial radio personalities who had huge audiences in their day, but today are largely forgotten.

The third and final part is about a woman named Dorothy Thompson.

In 1939, Time magazine called her a woman who, quote,

thinks, talks, and sleeps world problems, and scares men half to death.

They weren't wrong. Thompson was a foreign correspondent in Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War, and she broadcast to

millions of listeners around the world. She became known for her bold commentaries on the rise of

Hitler. The Nazis even created a Dorothy Thompson

emergency squad to monitor her work. She was an eloquent and opinionated advocate for the

principles of democracy. But by the end of the war, those strong opinions put her career in jeopardy.

The National Broadcasting Company brings you at this time a talk by the noted woman commentator Dorothy Thompson.

Miss Thompson.

I don't know how you feel, but I feel as though I'd like to take a little time off to think over and digest what's happened in these last days.

My name is Leslie Dorothy Lewis. I'm 63 and I'm hearing my grandmother's voice for the first time.

It almost makes me cry.

The reports from Poland today are that the Germans are attacking fiercely on all fronts,

the victims of which are wholly civilian.

She was saying some very dark things because it was a very dark subject.

She was a dress thing, but it was done in a feminine style.

No one had ever heard it done like that before at that time.

They had to always hear about a man like Edward R. Maro was somebody like that.

And I have an idea this war is going to go on being surprising. Let us wait with calmness and see. Good night.

I'm Peter Kirth, and I am the author of American Cassandra, The Life of Dorothy Thompson.

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