A Skeptic Reviews the Century : Books: In the final volume of his memoirs, journalist-author William Shirer offers eyewitness accounts of almost mythic events and personalities.

Without name-dropping, without any competitive celebrity-chasing and without even a moment’s pause for self-congratulation, an afternoon’s conversation with William L. Shirer will include his references to friendships with Thomas Mann, James Thurber, John Gunther and Mohandas K. Gandhi.

It will contain recollections of the time presidential aspirant Thomas E. Dewey summoned Shirer and a group of fellow news hounds to learn about the state of the world--and instead bored his audience by telling them what was happening in the countries they had been covering.

Or the occasion when Dewey’s rival, Wendell Willkie, called in the same group of journalists and revealed, “Gentlemen, I’m ignorant as hell about the background of the Soviet Union, the history of China or the status of Nazi Germany. What the hell is going on?”

If pressed, Shirer will amplify on the unflattering portrait he offers of Edward R. Murrow in his newest book, “A Native’s Return, 1945-1988” (Little, Brown: $24.95), the third and final volume of “20th Century Journey,” Shirer’s memoir.

“Ed is really a mythological hero now,” Shirer said. But to hear Shirer tell it, the man who fired him from a $2,500-a-week job as a commentator for CBS radio in 1947 had metamorphosed into little more than a “corporate mouthpiece.”

Shirer can look back on how the publisher of a large West Coast newspaper upbraided him for writing critically of Adolf Hitler during the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936.

He will rail against writers “who believe in their own myth,” such as Ernest Hemingway, “whom I knew very well.”

He will remember detraining, on a whim, at Ur Junction, little more than a camel crossing in Central Asia. After a donkey ride through the desert, Shirer ended up reporting on the archeological findings of C. Leonard Woolley, who was supervising the dig that found evidence of the great biblical flood and of the splendid civilization of Sumeria as well.

“There’s an anticlimax to the story,” Shirer added when this episode came up.

“The Chicago Tribune”--then the young foreign correspondent’s employer--”is such a dumb paper. The Trib buried it in a Sunday section, one of those advertising throwaways no one reads. Used it as filler for resorts on the far side of Lake Michigan.”

There it is, the cherubic half-smile and the refusal to take any of it--most of all himself--too seriously.

Eighty-six next month, the veteran author, journalist and broadcaster is vexed most of all these days by his continuing inability to master the Russian language. He needs it, Shirer explained, because his next book, the one he is at work on now, will examine the last days of Tolstoy, Shirer’s literary icon.

“It’s a beautiful language,” said Shirer, already conversant in French, Italian, Spanish and German. “But my god, it’s so complicated.”

Even the assistance of his Russian-born wife, Irina, cannot save Shirer as he spends a month stumbling through a particular short story of Leo Tolstoy.

“I ask her what something means,” Shirer said, “and she says, ‘Bill, we’ve already been over that!’ ”

But, peering through specially designed glasses that improve the aging vision in his one good eye, Shirer continues in his efforts to conquer the Slavic tongue. Now comes the arch frankness that is another side of the Shirer persona.

The idea for the Tolstoy book, a longtime dream, has “been turned down by my own publisher,” Little, Brown, Shirer grumbled.

“But what do you expect? They turned down ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ too.”

It took “about three days” for word of the Tolstoy project to seep through the New York publishing community, Shirer said. “So I signed with Bantam instead. They paid me 10 times as much, anyway.”

Maybe that turn of events is another illustration of the belief Shirer shares with Tolstoy that it is luck that so often governs one’s fate in the universe.

“Life is full of good luck and bad luck,” Shirer said. “But we tend to remember the bad luck more.”

It was major-league rotten luck, Shirer still maintains, when Murrow delivered the news that Shirer’s lucrative career with CBS radio was over. In the increasingly conservative atmosphere just after World War II, Shirer wrote, the former war correspondent was viewed as too liberal and too outspoken.

Even as he prepared to deliver his final broadcast on Palm Sunday in 1947, Shirer wrote, he received a harsh admonition from Murrow not to deviate from his prepared script.

“You better not try anything funny today. You better stick to the script--or else,” Shirer recalls Murrow inveighing.

Shirer said the scene recalled his days of radio coverage of the Third Reich, when Nazi censors sat opposite him in Berlin, following his script word-for-word, and ready to cut him off at any moment. Shirer said he learned to express his true views of the activities of the Nazis through voice inflections.

When Murrow said CBS “had things fixed” so Shirer could be shut out “in a split second,” Shirer said he could not resist rejoining, “Just like in Berlin.”

Shirer’s agent assured his well-known client that another network would be quick to snap up a commentator with such a large following. But--more bad luck--no offers were forthcoming.

“In the networks and I think also in the newspapers, if you were terribly independent, they used a word, troublemaker ,” Shirer said. “Nobody wanted a troublemaker.”

Unemployed and apparently unemployable, Shirer turned to the more solitary pursuit of writing books. As it happened, this turned out to be a case of turning very bad luck into very, very good luck. After an abortive start as a novelist, several volumes of memoirs and an unmemorable tome on Scandinavia, Shirer buckled down and wrote “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

“Unexpectedly, that book saved our lives,” Shirer said. Several publishers rejected his proposal for a huge, popular history of Nazi Germany, and “everybody, my editor, publisher, literary agent, all my friends--they said, ‘Great book, but when are you going to start making a living?’ ”

While “Rise and Fall” hugged best-seller lists, many academics decried the book as the work of a mere journalist.

“They excoriated Barbara Tuchman too,” Shirer said. “She took it awfully personally. I just resented it.

“It’s a question of envy, these academics,” he said. “They write this gibberish. They have no respect for the English language. It’s almost impossible to read it.”

Here in this quiet village in the Berkshires, the home of the renowned Tanglewood music festival, Shirer still tries to stick to a daily writing goal of at least 1,000 words. He types on an old Royal manual, lamenting only that “you can’t get parts for them anymore.”

Recently, when a local newspaper wrote a column describing him as “the late” Mr. Shirer, he found himself more amused than incensed.

“I borrowed from Mark Twain,” Shirer said, and wrote the newspaper to say that reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated.

He moves slightly creakily, wears a large hearing aid and occasionally finds that a word he is seeking escapes him. His white beard is trimmed short, and his equally white hair, what remains of it, is combed in a modified Prince Valiant cut. Today he is wearing a bright red sweater, and to match, even brighter red socks.

With Irina, a small woman with long gray hair and intense blue eyes, Shirer lives in a house that is neither new nor, in the context of a colony founded 370 years ago, particularly old. Wall upon wall is filled with books, as are every counter and table top. Milton, Plato, D. H. Lawrence and a Russian poet named Akmatova are the kind of authors Shirer often turns to, making him long sometimes for his old friends like Vincent “Jimmy” Sheehan who could discourse in person or in letters about Seneca’s definition of time.

What Shirer misses, too, is “a sense of history” among his countrymen. In large part he blames television, “which takes all the time of the child, and most of the time of the parent--and of course there’s no reading anymore.”

It’s a far cry from Shirer’s own youth in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “That was before even radio,” he said. “We all sat around on Saturday nights and we read the local newspapers, the Chicago newspapers and the magazines.”

Lacking videotapes, Cliffs Notes or classic comics, Shirer’s generation read the classics in their original forms. Seventy-five years later, he can still quote from his grade-school performance of “Macbeth.”

But when he finds himself making pronouncements like “the kids don’t read at all anymore,” Shirer shudders, because he feels like such a dinosaur.

“I have to be careful. I really am an old fuddy-duddy,” he said, laughing at himself.

Shirer’s career has spanned 64 years. Sometimes it has been glamorous, and sometimes--dodging bullets from bandits in Afghanistan and elsewhere--less so. Married three times, Shirer has had no shortage of romance, either. With some of his more legendary love affairs chronicled in his books, Shirer’s experiences prompted reproach from a Coe College classmate at his 50th reunion.

“Bill,” said the girl who had married the town merchant, “I admire your books. I detest the life you’ve led.”

Luck, he believes, guided him as a journalist, so that he always seemed to position himself in the right place at the right time. Shirer was just 30 when he and his first wife, Tess, went to Berlin. It was 1934, and Shirer thought there might be a big story there.

He learned to fence with the censors of Nazi Germany, and he learned that news gathering in a totalitarian regime can be tough. “If you report what’s really happening, they throw you out,” he said. “If you don’t, you’re playing to their side.” Somehow, Shirer managed to toe the line.

“One thing you learned was that you didn’t argue with Goebbels,” Shirer remembered. “You would say to yourself, ‘Well, what kind of lies is he going to give us today?’ ”

Now, as he witnesses the amazing changes in Germany and in Eastern Europe, the struggle for democracy and “this whole new racial hatred,” Shirer cannot help but think, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

He bewails in his own country not only the absence of historical perspective, but also a decline in a sense of ethics.

“I guess part of it is eight years of Reagan,” Shirer said. “He was like that French king, Louis Philippe, who said, ‘Enrichez-vous!’-- ‘Everybody get rich!’ That became the moral consideration of an awful lot of Americans.”

Still, Shirer dodges the tendency he has seen in some people his age to lapse into pessimism.

“I would prefer the word skeptical, “ he said.

For one of the great things he has learned, Shirer said, is “the fortitude of the people of this world.” He recalls lines and lines of refugees driven from their homes by the German army.

“They would march along, a few of them with baby carriages, or pails, or whatever they could carry. But they were indomitable in a sense.”

So, “whenever I get blue and I think about the stupidity and folly of the human race, particularly our leaders, the people who run our society--the mindlessness of these people--I think about that, about those people and their indomitability.”

Similarly, Shirer said he has resisted a turn to the right, “probably because I’m so limited. I’m not very smart. I didn’t go to Yale, like the President.”

He remains “too old-fashioned” and “too much a Jeffersonian” to change, said Shirer. Jefferson kept believing that “the independent farmer was going to dominate the rest of our history,” Shirer said. “He didn’t see the Industrial Revolution coming.

“I sometimes think I’m like that, or maybe I’m just dumb, because I haven’t changed.”

But most of all, said Shirer, it all comes back to luck: to recognizing good luck from bad, and to learning to take advantage of good luck when it happens.

There is a nursing home next door, Shirer explained. He would hate to ever have to go in there; in fact, “I would jump off the roof first.”

With luck, he agreed, that won’t be necessary.