Helen Thomas hails Dorothy Thompson as one of “The Greatest American Journalists Of Our Times” in her latest book Watchdogs Of Democracy?.

Dorothy Thompson, who was born in 1894 in Lancaster, New York, and died in 1961 in Portugal, was viewed as one of the two most influential women in America along with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939 when war was breaking out in Europe. Ms. Thompson took controversial stands and backed the underdog. She wrote a column, “On The Record,” three times a week and appeared as a magazine writer and commentator on NBC radio.

Ms. Thompson became head of the Berlin Bureau of the New York Evening Post in 1925. She was expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 when she infuriated Adolf Hitler with her dispatches warning Americans against the rise of Nazism.

Her wisdom from over seventy years ago seems eerily appropriate today.

She also declared in 1935, “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument of Incorporated National Will…. When our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say Heil to him, nor will they call him ‘Fuhrer’ or ‘Duce’ (Mussolini’s title). But they will greet him with one great big universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘Okay, Chief!'”

Since we’re headed into a new year with a new (hopefully much improved) congress for 2007, I’d like to start with a new sig line, too. I thought another Thompson quote would be a good reminder to myself about the attitude I’d like to maintain.

“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.”