by Lynn Povich
Since we had to provide colorful commentary, quotes, and background material, our files were often very long compared to what ended up in the magazine. When Harry assigned me to cover a traditional singles weekend at Grossinger’s, the famous Jewish resort in the Catskills, my report started on an upbeat note: “They came 1600 strong in search of ‘the One’ or just a good telephone number.” For pages, I described the typical Catskill “get acquainted” activities (“Simon says all the single fellows stand up—Simon says all the girls look them over quickly”), the compulsive mingling at the skating rink and on the ski slopes, and the false identities that everyone used to find a partner. “No one tells the truth,” said one woman. “We say we’re stewardesses one minute and the next minute we’re in television.” I ended with the scene at the buses back to the city on Sunday—“the last judgment” when everyone desperately exchanged information. “The girls practically have their phone numbers pasted on their foreheads,” one guy said. But as a woman bitterly told me, “The boys are up here to have fun and accumulate phone numbers while we’re here to get a husband.” And with that, my thirty-one-page file was boiled down to a two-page Life & Leisure feature titled “The Last Resort,” written by Harry.
The Business researchers also did a lot of reporting, since New York was the financial capital of the world. Because most of the material for Nation and Foreign stories came from the bureaus, the Nation researchers were sent out of the office mainly during political campaigns and crises, such as the riots. Those in Foreign spent their time in the library or on the phone, providing historical context for their stories and cultivating important sources in academia or foreign affairs. Some women, such as Fay Willey, the chief researcher in Foreign, loved that work. With a master’s degree in international relations and American constitutional law, Fay had more depth of knowledge of her subjects than most of the writers she was checking. She was promoted three times before she was twenty-four, and found the work intellectually challenging.
Fact-checking might be a decent entry-level job in journalism, but many of us chafed at the work once we realized it was a dead end. Occasionally a researcher was promoted to reporter. Pat Lynden had started on the magazine as a researcher in Nation, took a leave to do reporting, and came back as a reporter in the New York bureau. But most of the eleven female correspondents working in the bureaus in 1970 had been hired from outside. Newsweek never hired women as writers and only one or two female staffers were promoted to that rank no matter how talented they were. During and after World War II, there had been several women writers on the magazine, but they had all mysteriously disappeared by the early 1960s. Any aspiring journalist who was interviewed for a job was told, “If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else—women don’t write at Newsweek.”
Some of the more ambitious young women saw the lay of the land right away. Nora Ephron, Ellen Goodman, Jane Bryant Quinn, and Susan Brownmiller all started at Newsweek in the early 1960s, but left fairly quickly and developed very successful writing careers elsewhere. “I thought I’d work my way up—to the clip desk, to research, and eventually to writer—once I proved my worth,” said Jane Bryant Quinn. “But I discovered that I’d never become a writer, just an older and older researcher, making my younger and younger male writers look good.”
Ellen Goodman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Boston Globe, said that for researchers, “the turnover was expected to be great because women didn’t stay in these jobs, either because they got married or because they left, but never because they were promoted. We’re talking 1963, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so sex discrimination was legal.” When an opening came up for a researcher in the Television department, Goodman, who graduated from Radcliffe (and never had a woman teacher), ended up working for her Harvard classmate Peter Benchley. “The only difference between Peter and me was gender,” she said. “I mean, there were other differences. His grandfather was Robert Benchley. But, you know, it wouldn’t have mattered if my grandfather had been Robert Benchley.”
Some young women knew they wanted to be writers from the get-go. At fourteen, Jane Bryant Quinn discovered the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter. “She had glorious hair, impossible eyelashes, mysterious boyfriends—remember the patch?—and an internationally glamorous life,” she recalled. “I don’t remember that she reported on much, but wherever she was, something thrilling was going on. I wanted to be a reporter, too.”
Nora Ephron’s father and mother worked in Hollywood and Nora had written for both her high school and college newspapers. “My mother was a screenwriter, so of course we were all going to work and we were all going to be writers,” she said. “And all four of her daughters are writers—that’s a sign of her terrifying strength.” When Nora was a researcher in Nation, Newsweek did a cover story on McGeorge Bundy, President John F. Kennedy’s top advisor on national security. Ambitious and a self-starter, Nora volunteered to report on Bundy’s early years at Yale, where he went to college. “Her file was absolutely spectacular,” recalled Peter Goldman. “Everyone was passing it around like samizdat, it was so brilliant.” But within a year Nora left Newsweek for the New York Post. “I knew I was going to be a writer and if they weren’t going to make me one, I was going to a place that would,” she explained. “Had they said to me when I said I was leaving, ‘How would you like to be a writer?’ I don’t think I would have been any good at it. It’s a kind of formulaic writing that requires quite a lot of craft and quite the opposite of the kind of writing I was doing.”
Even now, I don’t know why the rest of us didn’t “get it,” why we just didn’t leave and try our luck elsewhere. Maybe because we were simply happy to have jobs in a comfortable, civilized workplace that dealt with the important issues of the day. Maybe it was because we, too, were elitists, thrilled to be at least a minor part of the media establishment. “Nora was eager to be a writer, so she was quite disgusted by the place,” noted Trish Reilly, a researcher in the Arts sections. “I was thrilled to be a handmaiden to the writer gods and thought it was all quite wonderful.” Or maybe we just weren’t ambitious enough—or angry enough—at that point in our lives to buck an inherently sexist system. “I certainly saw what was going on,” Ellen Goodman later said, “but I don’t think I was angry about it for years.”
For many of us, Newsweek was just a way to earn pin money before getting hitched. “At Radcliffe, the expectations were that you would leave college, work for a couple of years, get married, and then write the great American novel while your children were napping,” said Ellen Goodman. At least working at a place like Newsweek might increase your chances of meeting a more interesting Mr. Right—or even a Mr. Rich and Famous. That fantasy was fueled by Karen Gunderson, a reporter in Newsweek’s Arts sections. In 1965, Karen was sent out to interview Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist and librettist of My Fair Lady and Camelot, among many other musicals. They fell in love and the following year, Karen left Newsweek to become the fifth Mrs. Alan Jay Lerner (he married eight times).
Whatever our destinies, Newsweek was an exciting place to work. It mattered what the newsmagazines put on their covers in those days. Every Monday morning, Time and Newsweek set the news agenda for the week and in the 1960s, that agenda was filled with cataclysmic events. In the beginning of the decade, Newsweek was a pale also-ran to Brand X, which is what we called Time magazine. But that would change rather spectacularly under the brilliant hand of Osborn Elliott.
CHAPTER 3
The “Hot Book”
ON THE SURFACE, it seemed unlikely that Oz would be a transformative editor. A balding man with a beak nose, Oz was the quintessential WASP: his Dutch ancestor, Stephen Coerte van Voorhees, had come to New Amsterdam early in the seventeenth century; he was raised on the posh East Side; he graduated from St. Paul’s prep school and Harvard; and like everyone in his family except his mother, he was a Republican (he switched to Independent when he became a journalist). But Oz had a rebellious streak that he cred
ited, ironically, to the strong women in his life. His mother’s mother, Josefa Neilson Osborn, started a successful dress-designing business in 1898, after her wine-merchant husband lost his money. She held salons at the Waldorf, supplied costumes to the fashionable ladies on Park Avenue, and wrote a monthly column for the Delineator, the Vogue of its day. When Oz’s father lost his money and his partnership at Kidder, Peabody in the Crash of 1929, his mother went to work in real estate, where she became a top broker and the first female vice president of her firm.
During the Depression, Oz’s father had to arrange for scholarships to Harvard for Oz and his older brother, Jock, who later became chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency. (When Oz’s father finally got a job as an investment advisor, he paid Harvard back in full.) After college, which he finished on an accelerated program, Oz served with the navy in the Pacific in World War II. When he returned, he landed a job as a cub reporter on the New York Journal of Commerce and two years later went to Time magazine, where he became a business writer (he also met his first wife, Deirdre, there). In 1955, Oz moved to Newsweek as Business editor and became friends with Ben Bradlee, then a reporter in the magazine’s Washington bureau. Five years later, when rumors started that the Vincent Astor Foundation was putting Newsweek up for sale, Bradlee called Oz, then the magazine’s managing editor, and said, “Ozzie baby, I know where the smart money is. It’s in Phil Graham’s pocket.”
Philip L. Graham was the publisher of the Washington Post. His father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, had bought the Post in a bankruptcy auction in 1933. His wife, Katharine Meyer, had worked as a newspaper reporter before they married but had retreated home to raise their four children. In 1954, Graham bought the rival morning paper, the Washington Times-Herald, and merged it with the Post, propelling the Post into first place over the afternoon Washington Star and doubling its circulation. Phil Graham was a dazzling figure around Washington. A former president of the Harvard Law Review and law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, he was a friend of both John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon B. Johnson’s (he helped persuade Kennedy to offer the vice presidency to LBJ) and he was high on Ben Bradlee’s radar.
To get Phil Graham interested in Newsweek, Bradlee called him at eleven one night and said he wanted to talk. “Why don’t you come over?” Graham said. “Now.” According to Bradlee, “It was the best telephone call I ever made—the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding, totally rewarding.” Bradlee enlisted Oz in his crusade and together they convinced Graham to buy Newsweek in 1961 for $15 million. In a fifty-page memo to the new owner, Bradlee recommended that the thirty-six-year-old Oz become the new editor.
It was the magazine’s salvation. Phil Graham immersed himself in Newsweek, setting up shop in New York, visiting reporters in the bureaus and traveling abroad to wave the flag. With his financial support, the magazine grew to sixteen bureaus and some forty correspondents by 1963. When Phil Graham visited Newsweek’s London correspondents in April 1963, he forever set the mission of the magazine with these now famous words: “So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand.”
But it was Oz who invigorated the magazine with late-breaking covers, national polling, well-known columnists (Walter Lippmann and Stewart Alsop), and big “acts” (Newsweek’s twenty-five pages on JFK’s assassination versus Time’s thirteen). He also instituted in-depth coverage of the incendiary social issues of the 1960s: from student unrest (at Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard) to sex (Jane Fonda in Barbarella), drugs (LSD), and rock ‘n’ roll. Although the magazine was the first to feature the Beatles on the cover in 1964, it hilariously missed the point. “Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair,” Newsweek said. “Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.”
Oz also hired talented deputies in Gordon Manning, a former editor at Collier’s, and Kermit Lansner from Art News, and together they built a staff of better writers and stronger editors. “With Kermit, we had a Jewish intellectual from New York,” Oz told the New York Times, “and with Gordon, an Irish Catholic sportswriter from Boston, and in my case, a WASP from the Upper East Side. It made for a wonderful balance.” Perhaps it was because Oz was so good balancing competing interests and ideas that the top editors of Newsweek were called the Wallendas, after the famous circus family and their “death-defying” aerial stunts; their executive offices were dubbed “the Wallendatorium.”
It was Oz’s commitment to covering the paramount issues of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam that not only distinguished Newsweek in the ’60s and ’70s, but made it, finally, the equal of Time. In 1963, Oz assigned Lou Harris to do a poll of black Americans, which resulted in a July cover story titled “The Negro in America: The first definitive national survey—who he is, what he wants, what he fears, what he hates, how he votes, why he is fighting . . . and why now?” The eighteen-page report found that the black revolution extended to every community and aimed to establish equality in every field. Suddenly everyone was talking about Newsweek and the magazine became the place to turn to for full and fair coverage of the civil rights movement. Three months later, the magazine published a cover on “What the White Man Thinks of the Negro Revolt.” In 1967, Oz decided that the time for advocacy had come. Departing from the newsmagazine tradition of never editorializing, Newsweek appeared on the stands in November 1967 with a special issue titled “The Negro in America: What Must Be Done,” a landmark cover that offered a twelve-point program on how to accelerate progress for black Americans.
“Oz was the godfather of our civil rights coverage,” explained Peter Goldman, who was the chief writer on civil rights and author of the book The Death and Life of Malcolm X. “I don’t think he knew very many black people, damn few. But he had a profound WASP social conscience, which led us to jump on the civil rights story and become the voice of the movement in a way. And it also helped on our coverage of Vietnam and our advocacy issues on both race and the war. We were a moderate voice for progressive America and that was Oz’s conscience setting the compass.” Oz was simply following in the tradition of his WASP forebears, Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin, those upper-class Episcopalians who, noted Goldman, “starting in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, thought, ‘Oh my God, our system is broken. It’s our duty to intervene and fix it. We have to get political even though we don’t want to, because politics has fallen into the wrong hands.’”
In early 1968, Oz decided the magazine should again take a stand, this time against the war in Vietnam. Newsweek’s first cover on Vietnam appeared in 1961, when the magazine took a skeptical view of America’s strategy even though, as Oz later wrote, “we—I—rarely questioned the basic wisdom of America’s commitment to ‘holding Southeast Asia.’” But after the Tet Offensive in March 1968, when the North Vietnamese forces surprised the US and South Vietnamese armies, Oz ordered up a special section titled “More of the Same Won’t Do,” which argued in favor of de-escalation and ultimate withdrawal. “The war cannot be won by military means without tearing apart the whole fabric of national life and international relations,” Newsweek said. “Unless it is prepared to indulge in the ultimate, horrifying escalation—the use of nuclear weapons—it now appears that the U.S. must accept the fact that it will never be able to achieve decisive military superiority in Vietnam.”
We were proud of our leader and of our magazine. Even though we were professional observers, many of us were sympathetic to the antiwar movement. During one antiwar march on Madison Avenue, a group of editorial staffers stood in a silent vigil outside the Newsweek building. In 1970, we he
ld an open forum on the war in the Newsweek offices, much to the dismay of the reporters in the field as well as a few writers and editors. “No doubt the war has become a tremendously emotional issue in the United States,” cabled Saigon bureau chief Maynard Parker, “but if the Newsweek staff cannot keep some objectivity and coolness on the subject, then who can?” The Tokyo bureau chief, Bernie Krisher, worried that “once identified with a cause, those who oppose that cause will hesitate to confide in us.”
That concerned Oz as well, but as he wrote to the correspondents, “the divisions and passions among the Newsweek employees would have been exacerbated had we denied the turf for this purpose.” Oz felt better about the staff’s ability to keep their feelings in check when Dick Boeth, one of the senior writers and moderator of the mass meeting, wrote to him privately. Boeth said that although a poll of the editorial employees showed that a majority of the staff opposed the war, it also showed that “a majority of them hold exactly the same opinion about company activism as Parker and Krisher do.” In other words, they were journalists first.
