. ♪ peter: joining us from chicago is pamela toler the author of this book, the untold story of an americaneporter in nazi germany. who was robert mccormick? pamela: robert mccormick was the owner and publisher of the chicago tribune in the years between the two world wars. he was an artillery officer in world war i, had inherited the paper from his father, and he was a newspaperman to the core. peter: how would you describe his work? pamela: he was fascinated by world politics. he was fascinated by the military. he also was an isolationist. he was antisemitic in sort of a reflex way. much in the way that he was presbyterian and inherited an identity that he had not thought three very much, he had hesitations about the east coast of the united states, was anti-england, and gradually came to go from disliking franklin roosevelt to actively hating him and that combination of isolationism and being anti-roosevelt shaped much of his policies around the paper but at the same time, he was just interested in putting out a good paper. so he hired good people and pretty much let them run the stories

peter: pamela toler's latest book is "the dragon from chicago." e's been our guest for the last hour. thank you for the time pamela: thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2024] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> "q&a" programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our c-span now app.

peter: pamela toler's latest book is "the dragon from chicago." e's been our guest for the last hour. thank you for the time pamela: thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2024] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> "q&a" programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our c-span now app.

. >> host: pamela toler, that first meeting with butler took place at the hotel kaiser, but the hotel in your story. why? >> guest: it was the initial club for foreign correspondents. and it was where they found out, they met with politicians, when she first was hired because she grew up in a time and a social class in which respectable women didn't travel to bars unattended. they needed to be chaperoned by their father or their husband or a brother or a fiancÉ but she knew she could not avoid that. she needed to go into that bar and act like one of the boys. at the same time she knew she couldn't match most of the men drink for drink and she was a small woman, barely 5 foot 2, almost underweight. world war i had been a hungry place. she was down to skin and bones. she made a deal with the bartender. orange juice based cocktail. he got orange juice with a heavy dose of clear alcohol the bartender opened at the time. she created this illusion that she was a hard drinking newspaperman and that was her preferred term, newspaperman but the idea of getting a drink. >> host: you report abou