There, St. John attended Oak Park River Forest High School, where he was in a writing class with Ernest Hemingway.

The gang leader offered St. John money—which the reporter rejected—and apologized, saying he liked newsmen and considered the exposés a form of advertising.

[6] 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.

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.

Covering the January 1941 pogrom in Bucharest, when Romanian fascists tortured and killed about 170 Jews, was watershed experience for him.

St. John hid a Jewish editor's family as a Christian fascist group called "The Brotherhood of the Archangel, Michael" rounded up several hundred Jews in the city.

[10] After writing the book, St. John switched to broadcast reporting for NBC Radio, moving in 1942 to head its London bureau.

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 wrote a dozen or so books about the Middle East and Judaism, including well-reviewed biographies of David Ben-Gurion and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The story of Rudolf Kastner, the Zionist Romanian-Hungarian Jewish leader who was accused of betraying his people to the Nazis, was the base upon which he built his fictional novel The Man who Played God (Doubleday, 1962).