Steve Wick

This week, the Arlis Perry murder made the news again, which led me to read Steve Wick's Bad Company, a book that has been on my reading list for years.

Perry was the nineteen-year-old wife of a Stanford student who was murdered in the Stanford chapel in what some argue was a ritualistic killing, and others just a brutal sex crime. Armed with DNA evidence obtained using new techniques, police went to question a suspect, the security guard who discovered the crime, and the man killed himself. Altogether an unsatisfactory conclusion.

I learned about the Arlis Perry case in the same place many others did -- by reading Maury Terry's The Ultimate Evil. The suspect in the Perry case had the book's dustjacket in his possession when he killed himself, but that hardly says anything one way or the other about his guilt. It's been a long time since I read that book, so I'm hazy on the specifics, but Terry argues that a nation-wide group of Satanists linked to the Process Church of the Final Judgement was responsible for the Manson killings, the Son of Sam killings, and of course Perry's murder. He argued the network was still active in 1987 (and presumably in 1999, when he revised the book, although I have not read the second edition). Terry drew largely on interviews with David Berkowitz.

One of the individuals Berkowitz said was a leader of the cult was a fearsome individual he called Charles Manson II, who took a leadership position in the cult after Manson's arrest. He identified this individual as William Mentzer.

Mentzer was imprisoned for his role in the murder of Vaudeville and would-be movie producer Roy Radin. I believe Steve Wick's book Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder is the only book to detail Radin's murder and the subsequent investigation.

Wick's book is a very good true crime novel. It's fast-paced, and seems well researched. It documents what was really a rather amateurish though brutal killing, done on contract for a drug dealer named Laney Greenberger who wanted to be a movie producer. She and Radin both wanted to help produce The Cotton Club with Robert Evans. When Radin tried to cut her out of the deal, she had him killed.

Unfortunately, it was written as the case went to trial (probably to maximize profits), so didn't have the benefit of trial testimony. There are a lot of open questions, some of which the trial also asked but never answered. Was Evans involved in the murder plot? To what extent was Larry Flynt's head of security, Michael Pascal, for whom the killers all worked, running a murder-for-hire outfit? Was Flynt involved? This was the same time Flynt was being investigated for trying to have four men killed. During testimony in the Radin trial, one of the men involved claimed Flynt had one of his security detail who was involved in that case poisoned. Many of the men involved in the Radin killing also had law enforcement ties (for example, the police officer investigating Radin's missing person case was later hired by Flynt's group), which makes one wonder how much they were allowed to get away with.

The book has nothing to say about any occult ties Mentzer and the other murders had. This is probably because they didn't have any. Mentzer comes across not as a Charles Manson II, but as a steroid-abusing tough guy who nevertheless had to drink to work himself up to killing. He doesn't seem to have been the leader of this ring, let alone the leader of a cult. He didn't even have the self-discipline not to brag about what murders he took part in. The closest thing to a cult connection Wick documents is the fact that Radin was shot on Friday the thirteenth, and that he may have been shot 13 times. I have trouble believing Berkowitz's assertion that he took part in the Son of Sam slayings, or that Radin was the leader of that cult.

In short, Wick's book is an interesting read, and good if you like true crime novels. It would be nice if it had been updated as a second edition after the trials, but that probably would not have been profitable. I also would have liked to have seen sources cited more closely. But it does give insight into the man Berkowitz called Charles Manson II, and, like a lot of other evidence, in my mind it helps discredit Berkowitz claims.… (meer)

William L. Shirer was journalist who took chances many others wouldn’t to get the truth out. Most of this story took place in Berlin at the height of Hitler’s reign. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to not know who to trust, not know if you were going to get your information out or not. The stress alone knowing that you could be booted out of the country and denied access to what was really going on around you while fighting to stay alive from the bombings had to have been horrible. Even though most of his work was censored he tried to warn people about what Hitler and his men were really up to. He attended Nazi Party Rally’s and got a first hand look at what was coming. While reading about Shirer’s experiences I felt as if I had been transported back to a time long before I was even a thought and was living in Berlin watching event unfold. I admire people like Shirer who are willing to risk everything to get to the truth. It is by hearing watered down versions of the truth in the media today that we continue to make the same mistakes. Anyone who loves this time period or history in general will love this book. It is not an easy read but it is well worth it.… (meer)

“There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.” – Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, September 26, 2001.

During a cold December day, William L. Shirer, foreign correspondent for CBS, hurries to Berlin’s Tempelhof airport. He wants to catch a plane to take him out of Germany and on to Spain, from Spain eventually to New York City and the safety and security of the United States. Steve Wick’s The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich opens like a taut political thriller. Like Shirer, Wick is a journalist writing history. This gives the book immediacy with a palpable “you are there” quality.

Shirer grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, listening to radio broadcasts of the Great War, his fingers following the routes of the armies on the maps shown in the newspapers. When he graduated from the local Coe College, he set his eyes on Europe. Shirer thought himself destined for greatness and his ambitious proved unflagging throughout his journalistic career. In that career, he went on to work for the Chicago Tribune and CBS. His years in Europe began with hanging around other literary members of the Lost Generation, including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, eventually gaining a lowly position in the Tribune’s Paris office. He worked his way up and then, without warning or cause, got fired. Through happenstance following a year in Spain, Shirer met Edward R. Murrow and worked alongside him at CBS. Following his career as a journalist, Shirer, beset by tough financial times, set out to write The Big Book, what we know today as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The Long Night spends very little time on the actual writing of that large book. (Relegated to a few pages in an Epilogue.) Instead, the book focuses on Shirer’s years as a foreign correspondent living in Berlin. Once Hitler’s Nazi Party consolidates its power, Shirer faced the challenge of balancing accurate reporting from a totalitarian state and not getting expelled. The balancing act involved dealing with the censors at the Propaganda Ministry. Once the Second World War started, he had to deal with three censors (from the Propaganda Ministry, Foreign Office, and Military). Shirer’s continuous quest to report the truth made him a high-profile target for the Nazis. He saw colleagues expelled and sources vanish. While his commitment to journalistic integrity created a situation where he could get expelled at the merest criticism of Nazi lies and distortion, he felt obligated to perform the balancing act because the United State and the world needed to hear about Nazi atrocities.

Shirer himself proves a rich source of information. An eyewitness to history, he wrote personal diaries from a very early age. Coupled with the Big Book and his later memoirs, we get a variety of perspectives on this momentous time in history. Wick used Shirer’s diaries to reconstruct his life and times. This gives Long Night a clarity and immediacy associated with thrillers and unfazed by the murky nostalgia that sometimes infects popular history books. The Long Night is a short volume for those interested in the daily struggles of a journalist in a hostile state and a doorway to unlocking the interpretations forwarded in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/the-long-night-william-l-shi...… (meer)

It sticks out on almost any bookshelf. Like the cover, a white circle appears in the center of the jacket spine, the antithesis of the black that otherwise fills the space. In the midst of the circle is black again, but in the shape of the Nazi swastika. The title, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is in gold at the top. It is as if the cover symbolizes what is within, history viewed as a recounting of the rise and destruction of evil.

Considering it was nearly 1,300 pages long, the book was a significant popular accomplishment. Not only did it top the New York Times bestseller list and win the National Book Award, it was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. A worthy achievement for any historian. Yet the author, William L. Shirer, was not a historian. He was a reporter who provided firsthand coverage of Hitler's Germany and the onset of World War II from 1934 through 1940. Those six years are the focus of Steve Wick's new biography of Shirer, The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Like his subject, Wick is a journalist, not an academic, a point he makes in an author's note. His goal "was to write more of an adventure story than a book of history." The Long Night meets the objective.

Wick traces Shirer's life and career from Coe College in Iowa to Europe and India and his work as a wire service, newspaper and radio correspondent until his departure from Berlin in December 1940. Throughout, Shirer was an inveterate diarist. The notes and journals he smuggled out of Nazi Germany when he left were the basis of Shirer's Berlin Diary, itself a bestseller in 1941. Wick relies on and quotes extensively from those notes and journals. He occasionally looks to other sources in attempting to give a more complete picture but perhaps not as often as one might like in fully setting the significant times and events in the Nazi rise to power and entry into war.

Although Wick writes in the straightforward prose one would expect from a journalist, he uses the original material to tell the story in a way that utilizes but does not abuse the concept of creative nonfiction. In addition to detailing Shirer's journey as a European correspondent, The Long Night presents some of the conflicts that confronted Shirer and other reporters as the Nazis increased their power. As the Nazis grew stronger, reporters struggled with balancing government censorship against the risk of expulsion. Is censored news better than no news about what was happening in Germany? Wick also points out the human level of some of the conflicts. How does a reporter balance the extent to which they use a source in the government or the Nazi party against the risk that contact will result in the source's arrest? Perhaps more crucially, should the Nazi government's treatment of the Jews require a journalist subject to censorship to become an advocate for them or at least against the Nazis?

Although it was his coverage of Nazi Germany that made Shirer famous, he actually set off for Europe in 1925 without a job. By luck, he was hired by the Chicago Tribune in Paris just as he was preparing to return to America. At the beginning, he only covered Europe, including Charles Lindbergh's landing in Paris after his solo flight across the Atlantic. Eventually, the job would take him to India to report on Gandhi's efforts for independence. He would also find his way into Afghanistan, where, according to Wick, he concluded the seemingly endless conflicts and wars left a "sinkhole not worth a drop of foreign blood."

In 1934, Shirer began work in Berlin as a correspondent for William Randolph Hearst's Universal News Service. The news service, however, was shut down in 1937. Again, luck played its hand as Shirer was contacted and hired by Edward R. Murrow, the head of CBS's European staff. Somewhat ironically, although he and Murrow would essentially pioneer foreign radio correspondents actually broadcasting news from the scene, that was not Shirer's main task when he started with CBS. Instead, he arranged and set up venues for non-news programs, such as musical performances. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, though, he and Murrow headed up a round-up of European coverage, a format the CBS radio network would use for years.

As censorship increased, Shirer tried to use subtle references and intonations to convey more meaning to audiences with the language the censors would allow. Wick examines Shirer's true feelings toward the Nazis and the internal conflict -- and even depression -- the censorship produced. The Long Night also suggests this period could be the source of a theme of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich frequently criticized by academics. Shirer's perspective was that Hitler and Nazism arose because of the character of Germans and their society. Wick acknowledges that Shirer's feelings toward the German people hardened and became more cynical with time. "He saw them as cows. They wanted to be led around by a strong leader who lied to them every time he opened his mouth," Wick writes. "They did what they were told and did not debate moral issues. They never debated moral issues when self-interests were involved."

While that theory was debated and criticized by academics, The Long Night makes clear he was not a historian; he was a reporter whose later books allowed him to express what he could not when in Germany. Because Wick's intent was to write "about a journalist at work," he does not delve into those books or the validity of Shirer's ideas and themes. Rather, Shirer's life after leaving Berlin in 1940 is summarized in a 12 �-page "Postscript." To that extent, those interested in Shirer will be disappointed and need to await a full biography. For now, Wick at least provides insight not only into the man but the formative period of his most notable work.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie)… (meer)