Few notable writing careers have begun less auspiciously. You have estimated that your first two million words went unsold, including 25 plays that by your own account were “lousy.” But with patience, gumption, great persistence and the valuable ability to listen well, you eventually built an exceptional body of work chronicling the central moments of recent history. Your genius has been to let countless participants in history, and those blessed or cursed with having had ringside seats, tell their own stories, and with the frequent help of your wife Toshiko, to get so many sources to talk publicly for the first time. Through such exhaustive interviewing you have unearthed a mine of new information (including the intriguing fact that the commander of the Bataan Death March was an Amherst man). Your book on Japan’s role in World War II, The Rising Sun, was awarded the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. The Wall Street Journal dubbed you “one of the master storytellers of modern war,” and The New York Times claimed that your In Search of Hitler “must be ranked as one of the most complete pictures of [the dictator] we have yet had.” In these works and in others, you are leaving for subsequent historians a treasure of richly detailed stories leaving little doubt that no one will ever have interviewed a greater number of eyewitnesses to the calamitous events of this dramatic century.
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