After years of being thought of mainly as the dedicatee of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as the famous author’s third wife (and, oddly enough, his third consecutive wife from St. Louis), Martha Gellhorn has begun to come into her own, with a recent biography by Caroline Moorehead, an HBO film in the works and a possible feature film as well.

On D-Day, Gellhorn was first on Omaha Beach after the beach was secured (while her estranged husband Hemingway — also a great war correspondent — stewed on board a troopship in the English Channel).  For Collier’s, which gave her her start as as a war correspondent, she had been in the middle of the fighting during the Spanish Civil War, was at the liberation of Dachau and the liberation of Paris, and later covered Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. She hated her years with Hemingway and later in life refused to discuss him or their time together.

Here’s a sample of her work, written in Madrid while the city was under siege from Franco: (more…)

The flashy British tabloid the Daily Mirror and America’s so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, would seem to represent opposite ends of the MSM.  Yet in the third week of January 2009, as two of their respective columnists rendered verdict on the outgoing president George W. Bush, the two papers seemed barely a bitch slap apart.

On one side of the Atlantic, writing for the fish-and-chips crowd, Tony Parsons declared Bush “the global village idiot,” “a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline,” “a natural simpleton, a rich man’s son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy’s shirttails.”  Meanwhile, in the learned pages of the Gray Lady, Maureen Dowd dropped the guillotine, deriding Bush as “the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance,” “Oedipally oddball,” “an asphyxiated and pampered son.”

Now that is all clever stuff, sure to win a round on the house at the MSM bar, where everybody knows that the Nobel Laureate out of Chicago will be remembered as a better president than the one-time drunk driver from Texas.

But the view from the future will likely be a different one.  The notions of Parsons and Dowd, like so much of the MSM storyboard, shall be of scant interest to presidential historians.  Instead the media’s decade of rage at George W. Bush will be written about by doctoral candidates in social psychology under the title “5 million minutes of hate.” (more…)