The first book to prominently feature captured and declassified Nazi communiqués sent from Washington, D.C., to Berlin that show how the Nazis attempted to contaminate the American political system by meddling in the 1940 election.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN:
Fear, Propaganda and the True Story of the Nazi Plot to Steal the American Presidency
by John Klima
Pantheon/PRH, 2022

Credit: Jennifer Marder

The year: 1940. Joseph Goebbels, desperate for a favorable outcome to the US presidential election, deployed every media tool at his disposal. THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN is the first book to prominently feature captured and declassified Nazi communiqués sent from Washington, D.C., to Berlin that show how the Nazis attempted to contaminate the American political system by meddling in the 1940 election. The protagonist: one of the farthest-reaching voices in American media of the time—the largely forgotten dynamo Dorothy Thompson. The first woman journalist to interview Hitler, in 1931, she came back from the experience aghast, and spent the next decade—the period of this book—sounding the alarm of the creeping threat of fascism coming to America. Through her syndicated columns and her regular radio addresses, her audience numbered 13 million. She was the first woman journalist to make the cover of TIME Magazine. Since her interview with Hitler—and drawing on her decades in Europe as a foreign correspondent—she saw the way insidious propaganda and the stoking of xenophobia could drive an economically vulnerable democracy into the arms of an anti-democratic despot. In a fast-paced, informative, and reverberating narrative, John Klima recounts this battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.

John Klima, a former staff writer at The Los Angeles Times, a former National Baseball columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News, and whose work has appeared in the Best American Sports Writing, The New York Times, and elsewhere, is the author of three critically acclaimed narrative baseball histories: The Game Must Go On (Thomas Dunne, 2015) (“Zips along and offers great descriptions,” PW), Bushville Wins! (Thomas Dunne, 2012) (“[Klima] tells a great story well, makes a dead era vivid,” Wall Street Journal), and Willie’s Boys (Wiley, 2009) (“The drama is real, the stakes are high, and Klima captures it with shimmering prose and hard-nosed reporting,” Jonathan Eig).