The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

The Newsreel’s one-hour show comprised news clips, shorts, and “The March of Time,” and it ran daily from early morning until midnight. Every Thursday, out of thousands of feet of news film supplied by companies like Pathé and Paramount, Mr. Tirschwell and the three other editors selected stories and spliced together an up-to-the-minute show so that regular customers like my father—whose office on Clinton Street was only a few blocks away—could keep pace with national news, important happenings worldwide, and exciting moments from championship sports matches that, back in the radio era, could be seen on film nowhere but at a movie theater. My father would try to find an hour each week to catch a complete show, and when he did, he’d recount over dinner what he’d seen and whom. Tojo. Pétain. Batista. De Valera. Arias. Quezon. Camacho. Litvinov. Zhukov. Hull. Welles. Harriman. Dies. Heydrich. Blum. Quisling. Gandhi. Rommel. Mountbatten. King George. La Guardia. Franco. Pope Pius. And that was but an abbreviated list of the tremendous cast of newsreel characters prominent in events that my father told us we would one day remember as history worthy of passing on to our own children.