Edition: U.S. / Global

At 85, Shirer Rounds Out His Story

Published: January 13, 1990

William L. Shirer, now 85 years old and, by his own admission, slowing down a bit, gives this illustration of what he calls his lucky habit of being in the right place at the right time.

He was traveling by train in 1930 from Afghanistan to Europe and while going through Iraq he noticed a conspicuously biblical signpost identifying his train station as Ur Junction.

''I thought that there might be a story there,'' he said, remembering that Ur was the native place of the patriarch Abraham. He quickly interrupted his journey and found the famed British archeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, who was in the process of discovering the first signs of Sumerian civilization. Mr. Shirer said he had stumbled entirely by good luck on an important event, which he duly reported for The Chicago Tribune, his employer in those days.

Mr. Shirer then resumed his travels, eventually to stumble - as he might put it - across such other ''good stories'' as the rise of Hitler, the appeasement at Munich, the fall of France, World War II and the trials at Nuremberg. Mr. Shirer is a man who knew Gandhi, attended press conferences by Goebbels, spoke to the French Prime Minister Eduard Daladier, and observed Hitler at close quarters, watching carefully his facial expressions, for example, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics when the American Jessie Owens left in ruins the Aryan theories of racial superiority. And so, not surprisingly, he has called his just-completed three-volume memoir of his life and times ''Twentieth Century Journey.'' The last volume, ''A Native's Return,'' will be published this month by Little Brown.

'Egotism' With a Purpose

''It's certainly an act of egotism,'' Mr. Shirer said during an afternoon talk at his home in Lenox, Mass., referring to the practice of autobiography. ''But in the back of my mind,'' he continued, ''it was to make it a part of 20th-century history.''

These days Mr. Shirer lives a quiet life, spending a part of the winter in Florida to escape the cold. Photographs in his earlier volumes show him stout and dark-haired with a bristling mustache. Now a white fringe of hair and a white beard give him a bit of the look of a 19th-century Russian novelist (appropriate since he is hard at work on a book about Tolstoy's last years).

''A Native's Return'' covers what might be the least unusual period of his long life - from 1945, when he returned from Europe for good, to 1988 -though the last episode he describes in detail is a return trip he made in 1985 to Paris and Berlin, where he had passed so many years of his youth.

But even if the events of the latest volume are less turbulent and momentous than those of earlier volumes - particularly ''The Nightmare Years,'' which covers his experience of the rise and fall of European fascism - it describes plenty of events. Mr. Shirer was dismissed from CBS in 1947 because, he suggests, he was too ''liberal'' in the Sunday radio commentary he gave every week. He was blacklisted during the MacCarthy years after he was listed, falsely, as a Communist in the journal known as Red Channels.

Drew on Nazi Archives

There followed several economically difficult years, during which Mr. Shirer lectured, wrote a couple of not very distinguished novels, and slowly depleted his savings. In the mid-1950's, he got the idea to write a history of Nazism, drawing on the vast numbers of German archives seized during the war and kept in various warehouses in this country.

The idea was rejected, Mr. Shirer says, by several publishers who seemed to believe that nobody was still interested in Nazism. But Simon & Schuster paid him a $10,000 advance and he spent five years in what he now calls a ''delirium'' of writing to produce - in 1960, with the creditors knocking on the door - his extraordinarily successful ''Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.'' The book is still the standard volume on the history of Nazism for the general reader.

Mr. Shirer has in a sense lived the central episode of his long life, the Nazi experience, three times - the first as a journalist, the second as a historian and the third time as memoirist - and each time the experience was different.

''When you're there as a newspaperman you know that you're just scratching the surface,'' he said. Then, acknowledging that he was tempted at times to practice a bit of self-censorship as a CBS Radio reporter to avoid being expelled from Germany, he continued, ''You often wonder, should I publish this or should I keep it to myself?''

The Madness Was Grasped Later

As an example of scratching the surface, Mr. Shirer said that he and his colleagues often kept watch on Nazi Party headquarters, and when there was a large collection of cars outside they knew that some kind of meeting was being held. But the full madness of the Hitler years could be grasped only through scrutiny of the extraordinary Nazi archives - Mr. Shirer calls them ''the greatest single historical find ever'' - captured by the Allies after the war.

''Take the Munich agreement, for example,'' Mr. Shirer said. ''I was there that day.'' Mr. Shirer was referring to the day in 1938 when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, attempted to appease Hitler by acceding to his demand to annex the German-speaking portions of Czechoslovakia.

''I attended two press conferences by Chamberlain and spoke briefly to Daladier, but I didn't get to the bottom of the agreement,'' Mr. Shirer said. ''I didn't know how things had come about.''

Years later, Mr. Shirer continued, ''the minutes of the Munich meetings showed that Chamberlain and Daladier were over-anxious to give Hitler anything he wanted.''

Asked if he could offer some insight into the meaning or spirit of the era he had lived through and chronicled so thoroughly, Mr. Shirer responded with a recollection of his father who, he said, was a devout Presbyterian from Chicago and a criminal prosecutor whose views of the world were utterly different from those of his wayward son. His father, he said, was a deeply religious optimist, a believer in progress who was in these respects a product of an optimistic time. Mr. Shirer himself, influenced by the worst horrors of history, emerged without religious conviction and, if not pessimistic - since that is a word he does not like - certainly more skeptical about human prospects.

Opposing Experiences

''My father lived through a period when there was peace in the world,'' Mr. Shirer said. ''He took it absolutely for granted that life was getting better, more civilized.''

''But it isn't true.'' Mr. Shirer said. ''My experience was the opposite in the sense that I became aware of how savage men can be. Also the fact that we now have acquired the means of blowing up the world means that all thinking had to be radically changed. The bomb marks a great dividing line in history. You can't talk about wars anymore because of the atomic bomb.''

''My father was an orthodox Presbyterian and I'm sure he believed in heaven and hell and that sort of thing,'' Mr. Shirer said. ''For me all that is gone.''

He hesitated at this point in the conversation, worried, he said, about sounding ''pontifical.'' But when pressed to describe the images that remain brightest in his mind, he said, after a moment's thought:

''One of the things that has given me a tremendous amount of admiration is the indomitability of the human race. I remember the refugees from Nazi Germany who didn't know what tomorrow would bring. But they had some indomitable quality. They were not weeping. They were determined to survive. And they did.''Time Warnerd(Little Brown)

Photo: William L. Shirer, whose final installment of a three-volume memoir of his life and times is to be published this month. (The Berkshire Eagle/Craig F. Walker)