The first pony edition appeared in September 1943. It was six by nine inches (achieved by photographically shrinking the magazine’s normal pages) and carried no ads. Content ran heavily to cartoons, Talk items, humorous pieces, and war-related features. It began as a monthly, with a circulation of 20,000, distributed free to combat troops and sold at some post exchanges. The pony New Yorker (also called the overseas edition) was so popular with servicemen, and demand for it so strong, that the following March it went weekly, and by the end of 1944 its circulation exceeded 150,000, rivaling the readership of its parent.
The pony edition, which went out of business after the war, was a success in every sense. It did ease The New Yorker’s paper crunch, generated immense goodwill among the public, and made many fans among the military establishment, which began to view the magazine as vital to the war effort after all. Most important, it exposed The New Yorker to hundreds of thousands of new readers, and when they came home, many of them became paying customers. In the two years after the war, the magazine’s circulation leapfrogged to 320,000, and the lion’s share of these new readers were not New Yorkers.
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As the war in Europe pushed toward denouement, The New Yorker seemed to be mounting an invasion of its own. By the end of 1944, Flanner finally got back to her beloved Paris, an occasion that Ross extolled as “a historical moment in journalism,” and after a long hiatus the byline Genêt returned to the magazine. Daniel Lang was traversing Italy, and S. N. Behrman was touring London, where he found a grand Mayfair house that had been devastated save for a sumptuous “suspended” drawing room on the third floor. Philip Hamburger got to Milan in time to see Mussolini hanging by his heels in the Piazza Loreto, then filed a report from Hitler’s spookily abandoned aerie at Berchtesgaden. By the spring of 1945 even Edmund Wilson was accredited and encamped in Rome. Hamburger, who was staying at the same hotel for a time, suggested one day that they try to attend a noontime audience with the pope. Wilson grumbled but tagged along. At the Vatican, they made their way into a large public room, packed wall to wall with Allied soldiers. Noon came and went with no sign of the pope. Wilson grew impatient, then exasperated, and after about twenty minutes barked loud enough to get the attention of the Swiss Guards, “Where is that goddam pope?”
Meantime, Joel Sayre had crossed the Rhine with the Allied advance in early 1945 and began filing the magazine’s first reports out of a reeling Germany. That March, in fact, the magazine gave him a challenging if unorthodox assignment: a long, detailed account of the devastating bombardment of Cologne, the German industrial center and transportation hub. The idea was for Sayre to reconstruct the bombing not from the air, but from the ground: What were the German civilians doing when the bombs fell, where did they flee for safety, who lived, who died?
The New Yorker marked V-E Day with simultaneous Letters from London, Paris, Rome, and Munich, then, like everyone else, focused its attention on the war in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Sayre was finishing his Cologne reporting. It would not be an easy piece to pull off, this anatomy of a bombing, and his uneven work from Germany had made for plenty of headaches back in New York as it was, but by midsummer he was well into the writing of it.
Janet Flanner, after her return to Paris near the end of World War II. (Library of Congress)
But in early August the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. World War II was brought to an unexpectedly abrupt conclusion, and Joel Sayre’s Cologne piece was rendered so utterly beside the point that it was shelved.
That fall, the young writer and war correspondent John Hersey headed off to China, having made the unusual arrangement of reporting for both The New Yorker and Life, which would split his expenses. A year earlier he had appeared for the first time in The New Yorker with “Survival,” the John Kennedy/PT-109 story that Ross and Shawn had fought so hard to publish. Ironically, Life had passed up this story (for reasons the author never learned), but up to this point Hersey had been very much a Luce man—a protégé, in fact, who it was thought might one day run Time. Luce was especially fond of Hersey not only for his obvious abilities but because of their parallel life paths: like Luce, Hersey had been born in China; had gone to Hotchkiss and then Yale, where both men were Skull and Bones; and then had done postgraduate work in England. During the war Hersey distinguished himself as a resourceful and courageous correspondent, and produced books about Bataan and Guadalcanal. (Having wound up in the middle of the latter battle, Hersey won a Navy commendation for helping wounded men to safety. He wrote the book Into the Valley after his plane crashed at sea—he recovered his notebooks while extricating himself, underwater, from the wreckage.) He was best known, however, for A Bell for Adano, his 1944 novel about the U.S. Army’s occupation of an Italian village, which had won the Pulitzer Prize.
For all his ties to Luce, Hersey, a committed Democrat, had lately become disenchanted with the conservative publisher. He had also found his PT-109 experience with New Yorker editors a pleasant and eye-opening change. In China, he was filing regular stories for Shawn when, at some point early in his stay—it is not clear exactly when or how the idea arose—the editor approached him with an intriguing proposition. Shawn wanted to revive the concept behind the Cologne story but apply it instead to Hiroshima. He was astonished that in all the millions of words being written about the bomb—how and why the decision was made, how the bomb came to be built, whether it should have been dropped at all—what had actually happened in Hiroshima itself, where more than one hundred thousand people were killed and wounded, was being ignored. On March 22, 1946, he cabled Hersey in Shanghai to lobby for the idea. “The more time that passes, the more convinced we are that piece has wonderful possibilities,” Shawn said. “No one has even touched it.”
The aim was to publish a story to coincide with the first anniversary of the bombing. Before he could get to Japan, however, Hersey needed to finish several other projects. This meant that he didn’t arrive until late May, and then could spend only three weeks in the country, first in Tokyo for official interviews and research, then in Hiroshima to find his subjects and interview them.
In late June Hersey arrived back in New York, where he sat down and started writing furiously. Several weeks and some one hundred fifty manuscript pages later, he emerged with a stunning tale whose working title was “Some Events at Hiroshima.”
Immediately Ross had a problem. From the outset the story had been intended as a serial, and Hersey wrote it in four distinct parts. This meant that the last three sections led off with something of a recapitulation, as the magazine did with multipart Profiles. But Shawn believed that in this case the interruptions detracted from the powerful narrative, and he had a brainstorm: Why not run it all at once?
Ross too had read the piece and found it to be “one of the most remarkable stories I have ever seen.” He agreed with Shawn that it would be even more powerful in a single issue, and Hersey thought so too. But the editor also knew that making such an extraordinary commitment meant that virtually nothing else could appear in that issue. True, it would solve one dilemma: how could The New Yorker possibly run cartoons—or any lighthearted material, for that matter—in proximity to Armageddon? But the idea smacked of a stunt, and the magazine did not go in for stunts. Besides, gutting the issue to run “Hiroshima” amounted to the final capitulation, the ultimate admission from its editor that his onetime comic sheet was now so serious and, alas, so respectable that it could comfortably publish the most sober testament he had ever read.
John Hersey was a protégé of Henry Luce, but William Shawn worked hard to publish him in The New Yorker. (UPI/Bettmann)
For a week Ross went back and forth. While he fretted about “cheating” readers of their familiar features, Shawn countered with the persuasive argument that The New Yorker was in a position to make a unique statement about this unnerving new atomic age. “Hersey has written thirty thousand words on the bombing of Hiroshima (which I can now pronou
nce in a new and fancy way), one hell of a story, and we are wondering what to do about it,” Ross admitted to E. B. White, one of the few people he let in on the “top secret” project. “[Shawn] wants to wake people up and says we are the people with a chance to do it, and probably the only people that will do it, if it is done.”
Ross was so anxious about breaking faith with readers that late one evening he pulled down the first issue of The New Yorker to remind himself what he had promised them twenty-one long years before in his statement of intent. The very first line said “The New Yorker starts with a declaration of serious purpose.” Ross read no more, and called an elated Shawn at home with his decision.
For the next ten days Hersey huddled with the two editors in Ross’s locked office. In going over the manuscript, Ross alone had more than two hundred queries, most of them substantial. (One that Hersey was fond of repeating was the editor’s quibble with his description of some bicycles near ground zero as “lopsided.” Asked Ross, “Can something that is two-dimensional be ‘lopsided’?” It was changed to “crumpled.”) Hersey wrote and rewrote in near-total secrecy. Having committed himself to an unprecedented single-story issue, Ross wanted to make sure that it had maximum impact. With the exception of one frazzled makeup man, no one at The New Yorker outside Ross’s immediate circle knew what was going on until the last possible minute. The business side was kept in the dark; so were staff writers, who naturally suspected something was up but could only mutter while their own copy went unread.
With all the deliberation and rewriting, Ross overshot the anniversary, but only by a few weeks. The colorful cover of that August 31, 1946, New Yorker was a typically upbeat summer scene of people frolicking in a park. As a tipoff and subtle attention-getter, Ross ordered that all newsstand copies of the magazine carry a white band warning readers of the editorial departure. The issue, sixty-eight pages, contained only advertisements, the Goings On calendar, and Hersey’s story, which started on the page where on any other week Talk of the Town began. The original title, which Ross had disliked, was shortened simply to “Hiroshima.” The piece ran as a Reporter at Large, in four sections, the first of which was entitled “A Noiseless Flash.” An editor’s note to readers on the first page said: “The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.”
The story itself was, and remains, a journalistic tour de force. It is the straightforward but extraordinary recounting of how six Hiroshima residents—two doctors, a female factory clerk, a Japanese Protestant minister, a German Catholic priest, and a tailor’s widow—survived the atomic blast and its aftermath. The characters are all real, the details true, the horror genuine. Hersey presented their story in a clear, unhysterical tone that only underscored the terror of the experience. By running in one piece, rather than serially, “Hiroshima” had a power that accumulated gradually, by grisly twists and turns. As many observers said then, Hersey, without preaching, made Americans see for the first time that “atomic bomb” was more than a concept; it was human suffering on an apocalyptic scale.
The response to “Hiroshima” was instantaneous and overwhelming. Ross had braced himself for some kind of reaction, most likely unpleasant. After all, the story’s very existence was an indictment of the bomb—or at least of its use—and was sure to provoke a political furor, but he could deal with that. Far more terrifying was the prospect of thousands of disgruntled readers storming his office wanting to know where their cartoons were.
His fears proved unwarranted. “Hiroshima” was a sensation. The issue sold out almost instantly, copies being scalped for fifteen and twenty dollars. Broadcasters read from it over the radio. Demand to reprint it came in from newspapers and syndicates around the world (proceeds were donated to Red Cross relief). An instant book was made and snapped up by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Congratulatory letters poured in. Albert Einstein asked for one thousand copies of the issue. Henry Luce, who would never even have entertained the idea of running “Hiroshima,” nonetheless was so outraged by what he regarded as Hersey’s treachery that he removed his protégé’s photograph from Time Inc.’s gallery of honor.
At first Ross was surprised by the impact of “Hiroshima”—“There was never any magazine story in my life that went off like this one,” he told Frank Sullivan—then a little embarrassed by the reaction. Finally, as the sheer magnitude of the accomplishment sank in, there was humble gratification. When Irwin Shaw praised him for publishing it, Ross could honestly say, “I don’t think I’ve ever got as much satisfaction out of anything else in my life.”
“Hiroshima” ran to 31,347 words, and half a century and the culmination of the Cold War have not diluted their raw power. When John Hersey died in 1993, in marking his passing The New Yorker could still suggest that the piece was “the most famous magazine article ever published”—and just possibly the most important.
CHAPTER 13
SQUIRE
When The New Yorker turned twenty years old in February 1945, with the war still on but nearing its end, Comment took note of the occasion. E. B. White wrote the words, but one can virtually hear Ross intoning them: “Twenty years ago this week, The New Yorker put out its first issue. Our intentions were innocent and our foresight dim. We armed ourself with a feather for tickling a few chins, and now, twenty years later, we find ourself gingerly holding a glass tube for transfusing blood. Perhaps we should have expected this sort of adventure, but we feel like a man who left his house to go to a Punch-and-Judy show and, by some error in direction, wandered into Hamlet.”
That June, with victory secured in Europe and imminent in the Pacific—that is, with his responsibility to the war effort (and that is how he viewed it) essentially fulfilled—Ross abruptly resigned from the magazine’s board of directors and let it be known that he wanted out of his job, too. This was not one of his rash, garden-variety threats to quit, but the real thing. He wished to cancel his employment contract. Not only was he exhausted, but he remained profoundly unhappy over his compensation and his continuing financial straits in general. Fleischmann and the board had heard this complaint before, yet it seemed that every time they cooked up a way to augment Ross’s salary, such as with special stock options or bonuses, tax implications undercut their good intentions. The result was that while The New Yorker’s financial future looked as bright as could be in the summer of 1945, Ross’s was anything but. He was still fending off the IRS on one flank, and on the other Jane Grant’s lawyers, who had dogged him all through the war for back payment. He was bitter at his predicament, and tired of being tired.
Taken by surprise, the magazine’s executive committee scrambled to put a new offer in front of Ross. That Fourth of July the editor was in his office trying to catch up on work, and he set down his answer in the form of a letter to Lloyd Paul Stryker. He remained in a state of high agitation and seemed intent on leaving. Saying that he had “long ago renounced the hope of justice,” Ross argued that there were two “fundamental flaws” with the board’s proposal: “One is that the major owner of The New Yorker is a fool and that the venture therefore is built on quicksand. Another is that you envisage another employment contract for me, and I feel that I would be an ass and a traitor to my vow if I signed any such thing.… I could not contract to edit The New Yorker for two weeks, let alone three years, with the Fleischmann ring of stupid fumblers in the background, in a position to take over at will.” He added that the magazine would not have an easy time finding a qualified replacement for him. “This outfit is known as a leper spot throughout the industry.”
As Ross was finishing up the letter, Truax wandered in and the editor asked him to read it. Taken aback by its fatalistic and angry tone, Truax pr
evailed on his friend to let the executive committee keep trying. Ross agreed, but remained resolutely pessimistic. In a postscript, he told Stryker, “If you want to go further with this thing, you will, I warn you, find me very stern, and probably preposterous.”
As usual, Ross kept the turmoil from his editorial staff, but the key shareholders all knew about it, and before long apparently most of them had joined in the brainstorming to find a way to placate him. These included not only Stryker and Truax but Peter and Ruth Vischer, and even Jane Grant, whose financial welfare was still bound up with the man who had divorced her sixteen years before. Though she continued to press her ex-husband for every dollar coming to her, she understood his bitterness. “It’s downright ridiculous that Ross isn’t top dog of an enterprise so entirely his,” she wrote in a note intended for Stryker but not sent, adding that she herself resented being a “load of hay” to her former husband. One of Ross’s demands was that any renegotiation help resolve his financial obligation to Jane once and for all, and she herself thought this only fair.
By coincidence, at this time Jane was pressing a financial grievance of her own against The New Yorker. For conceiving and overseeing the tremendously successful pony edition, she was to receive a percentage of its profits, but these figures were in dispute almost from the start, and she was still wrangling with Fleischmann when Ross’s disgruntlement arose. Suddenly it dawned on Ross that he might lump their two situations together. In late October, in an emotional and rather gallant letter to Stryker, he reiterated how much Jane had meant to The New Yorker, not just in conceiving the pony edition but in getting Fleischmann to underwrite the magazine in the first place—or, as he elegantly put it, “She got a sucker where I failed, after a long hunt for suckers.” He strongly urged that as part of any new deal with him, they clean up her complaints too. Further, he proposed that the company undertake to pay her five thousand dollars a year, guaranteed for life:
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