Theodore H. White

He didn’t have time to read Horatio Alger—he was too busy being a Jewish version of an Alger hero. In the Hebrew school he learned about the God of the Jews; in the public school he was aroused to the call of history; and in the streets he learned the American “hustle.” Then, at Harvard, the aggressive, ambitious young man, from the Jewish ghetto of Boston, studying under a newsboys’ scholarship, got his compass boxed and set out “in search of history.” As they say, “Only in America.”

There was little joy on that day in 1945. “I wanted to be out of Asia then, and hoped we would stay out until the end of time. If that happened the surrender would have meant something. . .” So writes one of America’s celebrated reporters in this memoir of the end of the war with Japan.