PBS Episode Includes Robert St. John

By: Rafe Bartholomew Robert St. John spent most of his 80-year career in journalism as a war correspondent -- an odd choice for a self-described pacifist.

"I hate war so much and I'm very eager to show what it really is," said St. John in an episode of the PBS biography series "The Living Century," in which centenarians tell their life's stories.

St. John died on Feb. 6 of this year, a little more than a month before his 101st birthday, but this hour-long documentary, directed by Steven Latham, will allow PBS audiences to learn about his long and distinguished career in journalism. The program will be be shown in 98% of PBS markets during June and July, said Latham. (See www.TheLivingCentury.com).

Latham compares St. John to a real-life Forrest Gump because "he managed to be on hand for so many important events." While making the film and hearing St. John tell his stories, Latham said he often found himself wondering, "What am I doing with my life?"

As the founder, editor and publisher of the Cicero Tribune in Illinois, a reporter for the Associated Press and a broadcaster for NBC, St. John covered many of the most important events of the 20th Century. St. John became known as the man who announced the end of World War II (on the radio). His aggressive and liberal-minded reporting frequently brought him face-to-face with danger.

At the Cicero Tribune in the 1920s he devoted himself to exposing the corruption and brutality of Al Capone's gang, which used Cicero as its base. Then Capone sent a crew of hooligans to deliver St. John a beating that put him in the hospital. "If they hadn't been drunk, they would've killed me," said St. John in the documentary. "That was the end of my Cicero experience."

He moved to New York and became AP's city editor there. With the rise of Nazi Germany, St. John asked to be reassigned as a war correspondent in Europe to cover the impending war. Already in his mid-30s, AP told him he was "much too old to be a war correspondent," according to St. John in the program.

St. John went "unilateral" and traveled to Europe on his own, looking for stories. The day Poland was invaded, St. John walked into AP's Budapest bureau and was hired on the spot. As a correspondent, St. John covered the human toll of WWII, focusing on human rights violations and civilian casualties. "Everything about war is horrible, and what happens to human beings is the most horrible of all," he said in "The Living Century."

St. John routinely risked his life in the war. He navigated a sailboat through the Adriatic Sea and was fired on by Mussolini's navy. When a German Messerschmitt attacked a train he was riding, the plane's machine gun fire hit St. John in the leg. Three or four bullets were still lodged in his leg until the end of his life.

Explaining why he never had the bullets removed, St. John said: "I've refused to let any doctors remove them because they move around in my leg occasionally and they hit a nerve and that reminds me of things I don't want to forget."

Indeed, it was probably hard for St. John, during the war, to imagine living to 50. And when he appears in the documentary, a smiling, gentle 100-year-old man wearing an oversized black bow tie with red and green floral patterning, it's hard to imagine him fleeing from Nazis or facing Capone's army of toughs. But St. John's career remained active after WWII and well into his old age.

During the Cold War paranoia of the 1950s, the liberal St. John was accused of being a communist and he was blacklisted. He moved to Switzerland and began writing books. He returned to the United States after a 15-year hiatus, and wrote a well-regarded biography of Israel's David Ben-Gurion and was working on his 23rd book at the time of his death.

In his introduction to the documentary, Walter Cronkite said St. John had "seen reporting evolve from the days of the telegraph to today's satellite technology." He could have added that St. John influenced each step of that evolution.