When Dorothy Thompson was ten years old, she fell from a tree in the family's backyard in Hamburg, N.Y., and landed on her sister. In quick succession, Dorothy comforted her sister, glanced at her own skinned elbow, and kicked the tree with such ferocity that she almost broke a toe. That capacity for indignation regardless of the personal consequences was to make Dorothy Thompson, as a globe-girdling reporter and pundit, one of the most widely read women of her time. Her death at 66 in Lisbon last week ended a remarkable, often controversial, career.
Always an It. Between Hamburg, where her...