Robert St. John (1) (1902–2003)

Robert William St. John (March 9, 1902 – February 6, 2003) was an American writer, broadcaster, and journalist.

St. John, at age 16, lied about his age to enlist in the Navy during World War I. On his return from France, St. John became the campus correspondent for the Hartford Courant while attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. But he was soon expelled for trying to expose the college president's censorship of an outspoken English professor.

Abandoning formal education, St. John pursued journalism as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago American. In 1923, with his younger brother Archer St. John (1904–1955), he co-founded the Cicero Tribune in suburban Cicero, Illinois, and at 21, became the youngest editor-publisher in the United States.

St. John joined the Associated Press and covered Franklin D. Roosevelt's first presidential campaign, then farmed for six years with his wife Eda in New Hampshire. In 1939, St. John moved to Europe to report on the imminent war for the Associated Press.

For two years, St. John reported from the Balkans. The persecution of Jews that he witnessed during that period helped instill in him a deep and enduring interest in Israel, Jewish issues and anti-Semitism.

St. John switched to broadcast reporting for NBC Radio, moving in 1942 to head its London bureau. He covered the Blitz, the Nazi bombing of the city, for a year before returning to Washington, D.C., and then went New York City to broadcast general war news. His broadcast brought the Americans the news about D Day, on June 6, 1944, and he was the first to announce the end of the Second World War on August 12, 1945. Although intimates said St. John never liked communism, he became one of 151 writers, performers, directors and others listed in the 1950 Red Channels, an American Business Consultants' report of purported communist influence in radio and television, and NBC fired him.

St. John spent the next fifteen years based in Switzerland, before returning to the United States, always travelling the world to write and broadcast major events on radio or in books and magazines.

He became regarded as a Middle East specialist after covering the war for Israeli independence. An eloquent non-Jewish spokesman for Jewish causes, he maintained close ties with the Jewish state and was honored by Jewish and Israeli institutions. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, called him "our goyisher Zionist". [from Wikipedia]