By Danny Freedman

Robert St. John was drawn to journalism by "the glamour of being a reporter." When he joined the profession in the early teens of this century, a journalist carried about himself a somber face, half shaded by the tilt of his Stetson. His body was cloaked in a trenchcoat, the pockets of which, at all times, contained a pencil, paper, and a nickel for a phone call.

St. John, now 96 years old, represents a disappearing breed of journalists, driven by their devotion to morals, freedom of the press, and the hot pursuit of a story. His legacy is paralleled only by the greatest newsmen to set a story in ink or broadcast their voices over the air. Among the elite are such respected journalists and stellar reporters as Edward R. Murrow, H.V. Kaltenborn, and Walter Cronkite.

Over the course of his 70 years in journalism, St. John has created for us the image of a true journalist. He has proven himself to be nothing less than a renaissance man in this field, having distinguished himself as a much celebrated author, foreign correspondent, and lecturer. He is the author of 22 books, he has given thousands of lectures in 49 of the 50 United States, and has traveled over 4 million miles around the world in order to bring some of the most important news to the American people.

Born in 1902, Robert St. John grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Oak Park High School with Ernest Hemingway and, at the age of 16, enlisted in World War I, serving his country in naval aviation in France. "Although," he admits, "if you asked the Pentagon, I’d be 98 now. You see, I boosted my age to 18 when I enlisted in the Navy."

Upon returning home, St. John continued his education at Trinity College. However, in his sophomore year, now a campus correspondent for The Hartford Current (the oldest newspaper in the United States), he had a major conflict with the President of the college over the censorship of his articles, which ultimately resulted in his being expelled from school. The city editor at the Current took him on as a full time reporter and nurtured the budding career of a man who would become one of the foremost newsmen of this century.

Shortly after, he returned to Chicago where he was employed as a reporter for one of the principal papers there, The Chicago Daily News. Yet, in "the town that Billy Sunday couldn’t shut-down," a city ruled by the most prominent mob in America, the Scarface Al Capone gang, St. John felt an obligation to orchestrate the power of his pen against the mob in a newspaper of his own in Cicero, Illinois, The Cicero Tribune. In fact, in one of his several run-in’s with the mob, St. John was abducted by gangsters, beaten, and left for dead on a curb.

"When I was leaving the hospital," he recalls, "I went to the cashier to pay my bill and she said, ‘That bill was paid this morning.’

‘By whom?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, he didn’t give his name.’

‘Describe him.’

‘He had a scar across one cheek,’ he recounts her saying, dragging his index finger from the top of his cheek to the bottom. That was Scarface Al. He had paid my bill himself."

"I had a partner in The Cicero Tribune," St. John recollects, "who was the Advertising Manager of the paper. He owned forty-nine shares of the stock, (and) I owned forty-nine shares, but the laws of Illinois required three stock holders, so we put the other two shares in the name of a mutual friend. When I got out of the hospital after being beaten up by the Capone people, my partner said, ‘I’m going off on a vacation to Florida for awhile.’ While he was gone, Scarface Al’s professional bondsman, a very repulsive character, came into my office one day and said,

‘The boys don’t like what you had in the paper today.’

‘I didn’t expect they would, so what?’ I said.

‘Maybe you don’t know who owns this paper now.’ Well, I did some quick thinking and realized that maybe my partner had sold out. And true enough, he had sold his forty-nine shares to the Capone gang. But I said to this fellow,

‘Fifty-one is still more than forty-nine, isn’t it?’

He said, ‘Call up your friend.’

I called up my friend and I said, ‘Chuck, put those two shares of stock that we gave you in a safety deposit vault because I think we have trouble.’

‘Oh, but I did what you told me to,’ he said.

‘But I haven’t talked to you.’

‘No, but I got your note.’

I asked, ‘What did the note say?’

He said, ‘Sign over your two shares (to this man who was sitting in my office).’ So, I put on my hat and coat, and took some private things from my desk, and left Cicero. I still own forty-nine shares of a newspaper that Scarface Al Capone owned."

After leaving Chicago, St. John spent time at other major publications, such as the Philadelphia Record, and eventually became the City Editor at the Associated Press in 1931. While there, he covered extensively the presidential campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and today, remembers it as a very different time for journalism.

"Back in the days when I was attending White House conferences, the morals were so different. For example, Roosevelt’s infirmity. The press covered (it) up. They would not take pictures of Roosevelt trying to sit down in a chair and having trouble because of his legs. . . and, reporters would not violate (his) requests to speak off the record."

In 1939 St. John became the Balkan correspondent for the AP and, while traveling on a Greek troop train, it was strafed by a Nazi plane in Greece. A great story, but one for which he still carries Nazi bullets in his leg.

Not long after, in 1941, St. John fled Europe in a little Greek sardine boat with nothing but his typewriter, for he had lost all his notes on his Balkan experience in the process of escaping the continent. His 23-day journey aboard the boat back to the States and his Balkan adventure were immortalized in one of St. John’s best selling books, From the Land of Silent People. In order to write the book, however, he was forced to rely solely on his memory of the experience. As soon as he had returned, St. John took a room on the top floor of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. From there, with planes on the way to the near by airport day in and day out, the shrill calls of firetrucks and police sirens, and the vivacious sounds of everyday life surrounding him, he transformed the room into a tent on the front lines of a war, keeping only a cot, a small table for his typewriter, and a bottle of scotch-whiskey to aid him in the painstaking task of total recall.

As a result of deciding to write the book (published by DoubleDay), St. John had to resign from the AP, where he was told that he could not pursue his ambitions of lecturing and writing while he worked there. Opportunity, though, was never far from such a journalist, and in 1942, St. John took a chance and signed with the top of the broadcasting industry at that time, NBC.

"The News Director of NBC called me up and offered me a job. And that’s how I switched from print journalism into radio. I explained to them that I knew nothing about broadcasting, and that I didn’t even own a radio. But they told me I’d learn soon enough . . . and I did."

Diving into the pool of broadcasting, St. John began to make waves when he returned to Europe to cover the Second World War for NBC. Engulfing himself in the plight of countries torn apart by the Nazis, and in the animosity of the Allied Forces for Adolf Hitler, St. John covered all aspects of the war with an unabashed devotion and passion, one that kept drawing him ever closer to the front lines of battle. He was eye witness to the entrance of the Nazi forces as they stormed into Romania and Bulgaria. St. John, present during the worst pogroms, which were the routine slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of Jews by the Iron Guard of Romania, hid a Jewish family in his home, saving them from their immanent extermination. He watched the fall of Yugoslavia, the conquering of Greece and Crete, and the bombing of Britain. He spoke to us from the infamous Nazi "Blitzkrieg" that rained down on London, and St. John was among the first to bring us news of the D-Day invasion by the Allies in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944. His broadcast crossed the United States from NBC in New York around 1:00 a.m. on D-Day:

"Here is a bulletin from London which we can all believe: Londoners were awakened in the early hours of this morning by the roar of planes. Londoners and the people on the coast of England saw the largest force of bombers and fighters ever to take the air. . . fighters and bombers sailing away across the Channel. The latest Berlin broadcast is one which reveals the diabolical humor of the Nazis, it was the following brief announcement in English: ‘This is D-Day. We shall now bring music for the Allied invasion forces.’ Diabolical humor."

As our troops poured onto the shores of Normandy, France, Robert St. John spent a 117-hour vigil before a microphone, delivering history to the world as it was happening.

"Men and women of the United States, this is a momentous hour in world history. This is the invasion of Hitler’s Europe, the zero hour of the second front . . . This is the European front, once again being established in fire and blood. Not only by the Americans and British, but many Allies, in the fight against Axis aggression. This is the supreme test of Allied spirit and of Allied weapons. The world’s greatest military undertaking, is underway."

His voice echoed through the otherwise silent homes of astonished Americans as he reported the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and the carnage it unleashed.

"I expressed my fright at what this was going to lead to . . . the Atomic Age," said St. John.

He stayed with the public via radio, remaining on the air continuously for 72 hours, reporting the surrender of the Japanese.

Robert St. John traveled to the Middle East and covered the birth of Israel for print, radio, and television. Likewise, he reported the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. In 1982, St. John’s vast coverage of these conflicts earned him the title of "dean" of more than a thousand war correspondents present in Lebanon when the Israeli Army began it’s "Operation Peace in Galilee." The title, bestowed upon him by the Government Press Department, was for both being the only man to have reported all previous Arab-Israeli wars, and for being the oldest member of the press there, at 80 years old.

St. John’s habit of conducting thorough research and his mastery of the written word have won him credibility among readers of the world, and his unmatched interest in the affairs of the Middle East, have earned him the right to become the only non-Arab member of the Arab tribe of Abu Gosh, and the reputation of being an eminent Gentile spokesman for the Zionist cause.

His book Shalom Means Peace, was an on-the-spot account of the Israel’s creation in terms of the people involved, and the book has been dubbed by critics to be the best book on Israel by a non-Jew. He is the best-selling author of several in-depth biographies as well, including: Ben-Gurion, the Biography of an Extraordinary Man, recently reprinted for the 50^th anniversary of the creation of Israel; Tongue of the Prophets, the story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, which has been translated into a dozen or more languages; and Eban, a biography of Abba Eban, Israel’s first Ambassador to the U.S. and U.N., and most prominent Foreign Minister.

For his biography on Ben-Gurion, a key person in the creation of Israel, St. John read and studied a majority of the boundless number of texts and speeches of Ben-Gurion, in great part by interviewing those who knew him best and by seeking out and referencing a great deal of previously unpublished material in the Middle East, United States, and Europe. Before he composed his biography of Ben-Yehuda, founder of the modern Hebrew language, he read every word of a twelve-volume Jewish encyclopedia. He did his two years of research on Abba Eban on three continents.

"During my 70 years as a journalist," St. John told me, "I have interviewed or written about most of the heroes or villains of the 20^th century. In the course of that experience, I have found only five people that I consider really great. A great person, in my opinion, is someone who has spent his or her entire life working for an ideal of some kind.

"My five people are: The Mahatma Gandhi, who created freedom for the people of India; Dr. Albert Schweitzer; Albert Einstein; David Ben-Gurion, who was chiefly responsible for creating a country for the Jews; and finally, Helen Keller . . . who incidentally was a good friend of mine."

In today’s world of fast paced life, which has popularized the microwave ‘minute meal’, the concept of eating on the run, raised speed limits, and the news "bite," it is understandable why someone like Robert St. John would be "distressed by the state of broadcasting." He feels that television is a medium for entertainment, not the news, and revels in the memory of a time when The Chicago Daily News, with it’s team of the greatest foreign correspondents in the world, would saturate the second and third pages of that newspaper every day with 16 solid columns of foreign news.

"When I hear some character on television reporting some foreign news story with a 30 second sound bite, I think of The Chicago Daily News . . . I don’t like the effect that television has had on journalism."

Besides the ever increasing brevity of the news, St. John is displeased about the sinking level of the quality of journalism today and an apparent fading of a once great concern that reporters placed on their morals and journalistic integrity. He firmly believes that, while it’s practically ignored in modern journalism, "the press does not have the right to intrude on the private lives of anybody."

"JFK’s carrying on with women was no secret to the press," St. John concedes, "but that was his business, his life. Contrast that with what they’re doing with Clinton today. It’s absolutely disgraceful."

Robert St. John, standing tall and speaking with the same confidence that he displayed 70-some years ago, still dons the full beard, mustache, and slicked back hair of the young journalist who concentrated his efforts on driving the mob out of Cicero. The tone and inflection of his voice still carries remnants of the war correspondent who brought America word of the D-Day invasion, the releasing of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, and, ultimately, the surrender of the Japanese. He has the face, aged by the experience of two lifetimes, of the famed lecturer who spoke on democracy, war, and the protection of minorities all over the world. Despite all this, St. John attributes his youthfulness primarily to . . . gardening?! That’s right. This 96 year old world-renowned journalist spends an estimated four hours a day, six days a week, for three months each year, raking the leaves that fall from the 20 to 30 oak trees that share a home with St. John and his wife, Ruth. While he continues to give the occasional lecture, and writes a magazine article here and there, St. John reiterates, with a look of relaxed content, that principally, he is spending most of his time gardening these days.

Looking back on the interview and the magnificent life that he has led, Robert St. John, one of the greatest journalists of our time, confessed, "I am a reporter, basically. I am not a politician, and, as you found, I don’t have the solutions to the problems of the world –

I just report them."

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