Edward Morris

The motives for living the life of a spy, author Howard Blum tells us, are subsumed under the rubric MICE—Money, Ideology, Coercion, Excitement. For the well-educated and well-to-do socialite Betty Pack (1910-1963), the prime motivation was clearly excitement, with just enough ideology thrown in to give her actions a veneer of nobility. Born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, she realized early that her striking good looks and sense of command made her irresistible to men. She invested (rather than lost) her virginity at 14 and enjoyed a series of lovers until she found herself pregnant at 19 and uncertain of who the father was. She then very prudently ensnared and married Arthur Pack, a minor British diplomat who, if nothing else, gave her rank and entry into various government circles where official secrets were kept—and, thanks to her zeal, stolen.

But Pack, animated as she was by “a terrible restlessness,” brought considerably more than sexual magnetism to the job. She was also courageous, quick-witted and doggedly persistent once given an assignment. When it appeared that a night watchman was about to catch her and her accomplice on a safe-cracking mission, she quickly stripped naked, leaving the guard to mumble his apologies for interrupting—after he’d gotten an eyeful, of course. Although she was an American, Pack began spying for the British in the late 1930s against Germany, Italy and Vichy France at outposts in Chile, Spain, Poland and Washington. After America entered World War II, it also became a beneficiary of the intelligence she collected.

Drawing on memoirs, diaries, letters and official documents, Blum takes us into Pack’s mind—both as she assessed her thoughts and motives and as those around her did. The Last Goodnight is a very intimate accounting of a singular personality. Pack was a faithless wife and an indifferent mother, but one could hardly imagine a more attentive lover. After all, every tryst was a report in the making.

Only a society riven by fear and desperation would have incubated a figure as initially uncredentialed and unimpressive as Adolf Hitler. A school dropout and frequent vagrant, Hitler had no achievements to speak of until he served honorably in the German army during the Great War. He remained in the army after Germany’s defeat and discovered his gift as a public speaker when he was assigned to a propaganda unit set up to encourage nationalism and root out Marxist inclinations among the troops. Eventually, he moved into a leadership position in the German Workers’ Party, a virulently anti-Semitic assemblage that tapped into the social discontent ravaging the fractious and debt-ridden country.

By late 1923, Hitler and his adherents had gained enough critical mass to move against the political establishment, which it did in the infamous “beer hall putsch.” Hitler took command of the overflow crowd at a Munich beer hall and declared that both the Bavarian and national governments were being replaced by a provisional government. It was a heady effort, but the putsch failed. Hitler and his chief conspirators were soon arrested and lodged in Landsberg Prison. Hitler was tried for high treason by a sympathetic judge, convicted and given a five-year sentence.

Providing superb detail and background, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler focuses on the few months he actually served at Landsberg, during which he was treated royally rather than punitively. Freed from the daily demands of party politics, Hitler was able to put his thoughts on nationalism and strong-man governance into a book that would become the first volume of Mein Kampf—and the grand rationale for the murderous Third Reich.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Now that anyone with a Facebook page and an opinion can be a political pundit, it’s hard to believe there was a time—and not that long ago—when a newspaper columnist could wield real political power. Mary McGrory did for nearly half a century. She entered the news business as a book reviewer but switched to politics in 1954 after her editor at the Washington Star assigned her to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings—not just as a reporter but as a reporter who was “opinionated.”

“Mary, for good and bad, was one of the important forerunners in the trend of newspapers blurring the line between hard reporting and commentary,” writes biographer John Norris. In that capacity, she covered every presidential campaign and administration from the last term of Dwight Eisenhower through the first term of George W. Bush. Generally leaning Democratic—but not uncritically so—she became an enthusiast for such political progressives as Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy (whom she once dated), Eugene McCarthy and Mario Cuomo. She was ambivalent about Lyndon Johnson (who once came to her home—Secret Service in tow—aiming to seduce her), but she persistently opposed him on the Vietnam War. Her columns were syndicated in 1960, and after the Star closed in 1981, she spent the rest of her career at the Washington Post.

McGrory became so influential—she would win a Pulitzer in 1975—that she regularly hosted senators, Supreme Court justices and other bigwigs at her home. Richard Nixon thought her sufficiently dangerous to include her on his enemies list. The downside of being such an insider, Norris notes, was that she “was more interested in capturing the character of politicians on the page than trading her access for exclusives.” Little wonder, then, that it took two relative outsiders—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, her fellow reporters at the Post—to dig out and write the stories that would topple Nixon. Norris says McGrory regarded the Watergate expose as one of the greatest feats of modern journalism. She died in 2004 at the age of 85.