The Magazine and the Writer: Harper's and John Bartlow Martin

While living in the Hubbard Woods neighborhood in Winnetka, Illinoi in the early 1940s with his young wife Fran, freelance writer John Bartlow Martin, who made his living writing for true-crime magazines at two cents per word, made an important reconnection with a friend from his days as a student at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, Francis S. Nipp, an English teacher earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago.
 
Nipp, who Martin called “a natural editor,” and his wife, Mary Ellen, became frequent weekend guests at the Martins’ home. The couples listened to music—Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, and especially Louis Armstrong—and the two old high school friends talked obsessively about writing.
 
Martin had begun to grow tired of the true-crime genre, which he once referred to as “monsters and ogres and fiends in human form.” In addition to introducing him to serious classical music, Nipp convinced Martin to become a regular reader of The New Yorker and encouraged him to start thinking about submitting “serious nonfiction” to one of the country’s most prestigious magazines, Harper’s.
 
Although it had a small circulation (109,787 in 1940) and offered its contributors paltry fees (usually $250 for articles) in comparison to other magazines, Harper’s reached a vital audience, what one of its editors described as “the intelligent minority” of opinion makers in the United States, “the thinking, cultured reader who seeks both entertainment and an enlarged and broadened point of view.”
 
By the late 1930s the magazine’s subscribers could look forward to contributions from such noted writers as Elmer Davis and John Gunther, as well as monthly columns from historian Bernard DeVoto, “The Easy Chair,” and E. B. White, “One Man’s Meat.” Frederick Lewis Allen, himself a best-selling author, who took over as Harper’s editor in October 1941, said the magazine under his watch intended to print within its pages “the exciting, the creative, the lustily energetic, the freshly amusing, the newly beautiful, the illuminating, the profound.”
 
Martin’s entry into this world came about as the result of a bungled espionage operation in the United States by Nazi Germany’s military intelligence organization, the Abwehr. On the pitch-black night of June 13, 1942, four men left a German U-boat and paddled their rubber dinghy to land on a beach near Amagansett, Long Island, south of New York City. The men were saboteurs sent by the German high command to infiltrate American society and, using high explosives and incendiary devices, wreak havoc on vital war-related installations on the East Coast.
 

Known as OperationPastorius, named in honor of the first German immigrant to the United States (Franz Pastorius), the bold plan also included a landing by another four-man team on June 17 at Ponte Verda Beach south of Jacksonville, Florida. The daring venture disintegrated in rapid fashion; by June 27 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, tipped off by one of the saboteurs, George John Dasch, had arrested the members of each team and had recovered $174,588 of the $175,200 in U.S. currency given them to finance the operation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the Germans were to be tried before a military commission. They were all found guilty and sentenced to death, but Roosevelt commuted Dash’s sentence to thirty years and gave another conspirator who had cooperated with authorities, Ernest Burger, a life sentence.
 
Two of the eight doomed German agents were American citizens, including twenty-two-year-old Herbert Haupt, a worker at the Simpson Optical Company who had lived in Chicago with his parents on Fremont Street and had attended Lane Technical High School. During his youth his parents, especially his father, Hans Max, who had served in the German army during World War I, taught him to love Germany more than the United States.
 
Haupt had been considered as a bit of a playboy by his fellow saboteurs and after landing in Florida had gone on a shopping spree, buying a three-piece suit, a Bulova watch, silk handkerchiefs, and several pairs of shoes. He made his way to Chicago with thousands of dollars entrusted to him by his team members and tried to resume his old life there, only to be apprehended by the FBI.
 
Writing a query letter to the editors of Harper’s in early December 1942 about doing an article on Haupt, and what happened to his parents and other relatives who helped him (they were tried and convicted of treason), Martin said the story could be seen as a tribute to the FBI’s excellent work, and that he had access to transcripts of the court’s records. “This really is a fantastic story of how treason is nurtured,” Martin wrote.
 
He went on to call it an “unbelievable true story of a youngster who grew up in a middle-class family on Chicago’s North Side, was taken from a factory job and hauled by chartered plane and blockade runner more than halfway around the world to the Reich, was trained, with typical German thoroughness, in the methods of the saboteur, and returned to betray his country, and, failing, brought death to himself and his family and his friends.”
 

Eight days after sending his letter, Martin received an answer from Allen personally, who said the Haupt article seemed to be a “very promising possibility and we hope you give us a chance at it.” Allen went on to warn Martin not to make too much of the story’s moral or play up the dramatic and “fictionizable” aspects of Haupt’s youth and background. “Simply and clearly told,” Allen wrote, “with considerable sharp detail, it ought to be continuously interesting and impressive in its total effect. Of course you can do some pointing of the significance of the story; the great danger, I should think, would be of doing too much.”           
 
At this point in his career, Martin did not yet really know how to write a serious fact piece for a national audience. His story on Haupt relied mainly on newspaper clippings, trial transcripts, and a certain amount of atmospheric writing that resulted from legwork he had done for his true-crime articles in German neighborhoods on Chicago’s North Side, where Haupt grew up. “I plead ignorance,” he said. “Later I became almost obsessed by being thorough in my research, and I always piled up high mountains of notes from interviews and documents and legwork on atmosphere that I could not use. But at that time I knew nothing of this and, I fear, wrote several pieces for Harper’s mainly from clippings.”
 
Martin admitted he probably did less legwork on the Haupt article than he had done on many of his pieces for Keller’s true-crime magazines. Considering the speed at which newspapers operated, and the frequent inaccuracies they therefore contained because they sometimes were written by inexperienced reporters, Martin said it was a “miracle” he never had to answer a charge of libel or had any of his facts successfully challenged in his early work for Harper’s, which also included a piece on the young members of Chicago’s Polkadot Gang that robbed several taverns and killed an off-duty policeman.
 
Martin had the good fortune to have as his editor Allen, who spent considerable time offering him suggestions for improving his Haupt manuscript before its publication in the magazine’s April 1943 issue. Allen told Martin to alter his beginning, adding a reference to the initial landing of the saboteurs, “something everybody remembers and which will arouse sharp interest,” and asked him to cut some of Haupt’s pro-German sentiments, as they were too repetitive.
 
There were a few other queries and revisions he wanted Martin to review, but overall Allen said he did not believe there was anything that needed extensive revision. After seeking approval from the Office of Censorship, which Allen believed would not be a problem, as the trial was public, he said the magazine would send Martin a check for $250. Martin wrote Allen back approving the new lead, saying it “sharpens the story and hammers home its significance.” He ended his letter by noting his appreciation for the publication of his article and expressing the hope they “could click on another one before too long.”
 
Harper’s became so interested in Martin and his work that he eventually traveled to New York to meet with Allen and his associate editors—Russell Lynes, George Leighton, John Kouwenhoven, Jack Fisher, and Eric Larrabee. Martin was impressed by this group, particularly Allen, whom he described as “a slight man, so slight he looked almost frail, with sparkling eyes and a ready laugh, a wise man with an endlessly inquiring mind.”
 
Martin had read Allen’s classic book on America in the 1920s, Only Yesterday, and he eagerly learned about how to write from the way Allen edited his stories, “cutting, tightening, endlessly tightening, and pointing up.” Martin never forgot one of Allen’s pronouncements: “Never be afraid to address the reader directly, to write, ‘As we shall see,’ or ‘Let us first study the slum itself,’” something Martin often did in his later multi-part articles for the Saturday Evening Post.
 
Impressed by the work Martin had done on the Polkadot Gang article, Leighton proposed that he begin writing articles about what the editor called “crime in its social context,” taking one of his fact detective cases, expanding the piece with additional facts, getting rid of the fake detective work, and developing “the lives and social backgrounds of the criminals and their victims.”

Subsequently, crime became for Martin a way to write about his fellow human beings and their place in society. He also learned that East Coast editors felt out of touch with the rest of the country, and often asked Martin about what people cared and thought about in the Midwest. “Just as farm boys yearn to go to New York, so do New York editors yearn to know what’s on the farm boy’s mind,” he said. “Sometimes they sounded almost anxious.” As he talked to them, some of the parochial concerns he had began to fall away and Martin developed a different view of the country’s problems and politics. “From editors I got something more valuable than editing—insight and perspective,” he noted.
 

The leisurely, often luxurious trips Martin made from Chicago to New York by railroad in the 1940s remained firmly etched in his mind for years to come. For the sixteen-hour trip, he had his choice of two trains—the Twentieth Century Limited, operated by the New York Central Railroad, or the Broadway Limited, run by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Martin remembered:
 
“You went down to the railroad station and waited at the gate with the crowd and, when the gate opened, walked through clouds of steam alongside the long train, all Pullman cars, and found your numbered car, and the Negro Pullman porter in white uniform asked your space and, hearing it, called you by name and took your bag and led the way to your roomette, the tiny antiseptic room with its grey steel walls, its gleaming chrome washbowl that popped out of the wall, the heavy windows with their rounded corners, the spongy upholstery, the rust-colored blankets lettered PULLMAN, the little shoebox with a door in the aisle so the porter could get your shoes and shine them during the night and replace them gleaming in the morning.”
 
Once he had stowed his bags, Martin retreated to the bar car so he could sit with a drink and watch through the window as the heavy industrial sights of northwestern Indiana faded into the flat plains of the northern part of the state. By the time dinner was served, the train had made its way to Ohio, the state where he had been born.
 
After dinner, served on tables draped in white tablecloths and decorated with shining silverware and a bud vase with a single rose, he retired to his room to work for a time on his portable Remington Rand typewriter, usually preparing a memorandum or an outline for a story to share with an editor. “I would go to the bar car for a nightcap then back to my room,” said Martin, “pull the bed down feeling it brush my pajamas, then squeeze into bed and snap off the lights and lie in bed watching the night, listening to the soft clickety-clack of the steel wheels on the steel rails in the night, sleeping.”
 

When Martin arrived in New York, he headed for 59 West Forty-Fourth Street, the location of the Algonquin Hotel, where he always stayed, at first because of its writers’ tradition (the hotel hosted the famed Algonquin Round Table of wits, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale, and George S. Kaufman), but later because he loved its “Edwardian elegance and came to know its staff and its owner and manager.” Martin also preferred the Algonquin because of its location—the hotel was within walking distance of almost anywhere he needed to go to pursue his writing career. “Virtually the whole United States communication system was crammed into a postage-stamp-sized patch of midtown Manhattan,” he noted, including Harper’s offices on Thirty-Third Street.
 
Martin hit his stride in conducting true heavy-fact legwork for a story he did for Harper’s on the wartime mood in Muncie, Indiana, which had a reputation, thanks to studies done in the community by sociologists Robert Stoughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in 1924 and 1935, as being the quintessential midwestern city.
 
For his article, “Is Muncie Still Middletown?” Martin traveled to the smoky factory town and interviewed at length union leaders, factory workers, businessmen, farmers, politicians, soldiers, college professors, and average people eating in cafeterias. “From several I drew their life stories. And repeatedly I asked: ‘What do you hear people talking about these days?’ This was the heart of my story—what Midwesterners were thinking about in wartime,” he said. Martin also believed a writer could get a more accurate sampling of public opinion through personal, lengthy interviewing than by “so-called scientific public-opinion polling.”
 
 

Death in a Cold Place: Burial on Attu

To recapture Attu in the Aleutian Islands from the Japanese in June 1943, U.S. military forces suffered extreme casualties, losing 549 dead and another 1,148 wounded—ranking, in proportion to the troops engaged, as one of the costliest battles waged in the Pacific theater, second only to the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Robert L. Sherrod, a war correspondent for Time, shared the human cost of the Aleutian battle with the magazine's readers in an article, “Burial in the Aleutians,” published in the June 28, 1943, issue. The article examined how those who fell were laid to rest on Attu.

For most of a night, caterpillar tractors towed trailers over the valleys and plateaus between Attu’s high peaks, bringing 125 dead Americans to be buried in the Little Falls Cemetery—named for a nearby waterfall and one of two graveyards on the island.

Most of the dead had been killed in a Japanese banzai charge and had been “horribly mangled by bayonets and rifle butts,” Sherrod wrote. (The Americans who collected their dead with “tight-lipped calm,” later vomited as they gathered for burial the 1,000 Japanese who died in the attack.)

The sudden influx of bodies had overwhelmed the graves registration company, which augmented its numbers by dragooning clerks and truck drivers for burial duty. “Their reactions are sober,” said Sherrod. “There is no excitement at this scene of wholesale death.”

Perhaps trying to offer solace to families who lost loved ones in the Aleutian campaign, Sherrod wrote:

“No nation handles its casualties as carefully as we do. The 125 who lie in rows at the edge of the crude cemetery were examined meticulously. A medical officer (Captain Louvera B. Schmidt of Salem, Ore.) recorded the cause of death and the number and type of wounds as each body was unclothed. Members of the graves registration company cut open each pocket and placed the personal effects of the dead in clean wool socks for dispatch to the quartermaster depot at Kansas City. One identification tag has been left on each body, the other nailed to the cross which will be placed above the grave until a larger metal plate can be stamped. The graves are laid out in perfect geometrical pattern; they have been charted so that no mistake can be made in locating any body.

Three sets of fingerprints were made from the hands of each dead man. One set stays with the man’s military unit, two will be sent to the Adjutant General in Washington [D.C.]. (If a soldier’s “dog tags” are missing and his personal effects carry no absolute identification, his body is not buried until some men from his unit have made positive identification.

After fingerprinting, the bodies were carried through the identification tent and wrapped in khaki blankets tied at three places: around the neck, the waist and the feet.”
 

Bulldozers dug the graves because there was no time nor labor available to dig them with shovels. “The bulldozers plow back & forth until a space seven feet deep has been scooped out,” Sherrod said, “which is long enough to place eight bodies 18 inches apart. Then into the collective grave small one-foot deep individual graves are scooped out by shovel. Thus, each man lies with seven of his comrades."

Three chaplains conducted the burial service, singing verses of “Rock of Ages” over the clanking and chuffing of dozens of tractors working on the muddy roads and beaches a few hundred yards away. Sherrod noted that Lieutenant Colonel Reuben E. Curtis, a Mormon from Salt Lake City, Utah, opened his khaki-colored Bible and read: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. . . . O God, great and omnipotent judge of the living and the dead, before whom we all are to appear after this short life to render an account of our works, lift our hearts, we pray Thee.”

Close by the graves, two buglers closed the service by playing “Taps.” The chaplains placed their caps back on their heads, Sherrod reported, and the graveyard bulldozer "huff puffs again, pushing mounds of cold Attu earth over the khaki-clad bodies of eight U.S. soldiers."

A young lieutenant spoke for many on Attu when he said, after looking at the bodies lined up for burial at the cemetery’s edge, “I wonder if those sons of bitches holding up war production back home wouldn’t change their minds if they could look at this.”

The War Horse: Malcolm W. Browne and the Gulf War

“My God, we’re going to die and I must pray!”
 

The Saudi taxi driver floored the accelerator and started chanting in Arabic as air-raid sirens wailed to mark the appearance of Iraqi Scud-B missiles, looking like “fireballs from Roman candles,” streaking over Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The taxi careened past a half-dozen wrecked cars, including a police vehicle, on its way to deliver its passenger, Malcolm W. Browne of the New York Times, to an air-raid shelter at the Dhahran International Hotel.
 
Arriving at the hotel, Browne discovered that its lobby, one of the few places open during such raids, was jammed with Saudis, “some wearing gas masks but most huddling in corners with their red and white head cloths tied over their noses and mouths” to ward off an expected poison-gas attack. The threat of Scuds armed with gas warheads alarmed everyone. “You can kill me with a knife or gun or bomb, and I won’t care, but I don’t want to die of gas,” a Saudi soldier, his voice muted by a bulky respirator, told the reporter.
 
Although Browne was close to turning sixty at the time, the Times sent the veteran war correspondent to the Persian Gulf in the winter of 1991. President George H. W. Bush had assembled an international coalition of approximately forty countries to face off against Iraqi forces, who had invaded and taken over the oil-rich nation of Kuwait in August 1990. The rules imposed by U.S. military authorities made the Gulf War “more difficult to cover” than anything Browne had experienced before, except for the Indian-Pakistan conflict in 1971.
 

During the month he spent in Saudi Arabia, Browne could not escape the feeling that the military had learned all the wrong lessons from its 1983 invasion of Grenada, a smashing triumph for American troops, all without the bothersome presence of civilian journalists. “It was impossible to altogether bar the Persian Gulf to the thousands of correspondents from many countries who poured in,” Browne noted, “but by confining newsmen to officially licensed tour groups called pools, the U.S. commanders achieved much the same thing.”
 
U.S. Defense Department officials also seemed fixated on avoiding the mistakes with the press they believed had contributed to the country’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam. Browne believed that an “anti-press cant” had been prevalent in American military journals and pronouncements since the war in Southeast Asia ended. Influential military officials, he noted, had “implied a causal relationship between two facts: that reporters were barred from on-the-ground coverage of the Grenada war in October 1983, and that Grenada has been America’s only unequivocal military victory since World War II.”
 
Shortly before the United Nations deadline of January 15, 1991, for Iraq’s forces to withdraw from Kuwait, Browne arrived in Saudi Arabia to join the approximately 1,200 correspondents and technicians covering Operation Desert Shield, the buildup of Allied troops in the Persian Gulf. He described the newsmen working in Dhahran and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as “by far the largest concentration of journalists assembled to cover any American conflict since World War II.”
 
Browne became one of the lucky few reporters (initially only 130; later raised to 192) to be part of the official pool system, whereby representatives from wire services, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio were assigned to ground, air, naval, and rapid-reaction units. All media members covering units in the field had to be escorted by a public affairs officer, who was present for all interviews. Reporters’ dispatches, videos, and photographs were available to all the media organizations accredited by the military. “In effect, each pool member is an unpaid employee of the Department of Defense,” reflected Browne, “on whose behalf he or she prepares the news of the war for the outer world.” Some of the journalists began to “feel more like draftees than civilians,” he recalled.
 
Assistant Secretary of Defense Pete Williams announced that news media not part of the official pools would be banned from forward areas and U.S. military commanders would “maintain extremely tight security throughout the operational area and will exclude from the area of operations all unauthorized individuals.” Browne said he had never witnessed such an attempt at controlling the press. He pointed out that in Vietnam, military authorities often concealed information “for reasons other than security, but correspondents were free to move about Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in private cars, commercial and chartered aircraft, and even by train. More than 40 correspondents were killed, but they succeeded in covering most of the major military developments fully.”
 
Browne had to fill out a detailed questionnaire asking for his blood type, religion (“important to the Saudis”), and his next of kin. He also had to sign a two-page agreement promising not to reveal military secrets and to submit everything he reported for a “security review.” While the agreement tried to reassure reporters that any “material will be examined solely for its conformance to the attached ground rules, not for its potential to express criticism or cause embarrassment,” Browne had his doubts.
 
Officials photographed and fingerprinted Browne and issued “a Saudi press badge, a Geneva convention card identifying me as a noncombatant accompanying United States forces and a steel dog tag embossed with the kind of information . . . useful to medics and graves-registration teams.” Unlike his early days in Vietnam, when he had to prowl the black market to outfit himself for combat, Browne noted that the U.S. military provided him with everything he needed, including a field jacket and pants, a sleeping bag, a canteen with a chemical-warfare cap, a durable backpack, gas mask with antidotes for nerve gas, and a chemical warfare suit with boots, goggles, and a helmet.
 
Being outfitted for the coming fray caused Browne’s blood to stir with the “heady prospect” of once again being near the front lines. “Recidivist war correspondents have difficulty explaining the thrill of anticipation of combat,” he mused. “We scarcely understand the feeling ourselves, or why it is that we are so powerfully drawn to combat, even against the revulsion most of us feel for the sights, sounds and smells of death.” 

Browne's zeal lessened, however, when he and other journalists assigned to his pool were taken by bus to an auditorium. While there, a U.S. Air Force “operational commander” gave a briefing. Before his talk, he informed the newsmen he wanted to let them know where they stood with each other. “Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” the officer said. “Your presence here can’t possibly do me any good, and it can hurt me and my people.”
 
Despite his unfriendly beginning, the commander went on to give what Browne, always a fan of aircraft, called “one of the most lucid and informative briefings on fighter tactics” he had ever heard. He wondered if the officer’s frostiness might have been a way to establish his credentials as a “bluff but honest leader of men, rather than as a Pentagon publicity seeker.”
 
In the years since he had reported from Vietnam, Browne noticed numerous changes in the methods by which his profession communicated from the field. Once used to waiting for hours to use a staticky radio phone line or bribing an official to use a slow telex machine, he viewed the technology available to him in 1991 as “simply amazing.” 

For example, reporters from the Times had in their hotel room in Dhahran a dish antenna a little larger than a toilet seat and a Honda generator in case the power went out. “It would have been just great,” he remembered, “except that we all were under the thumb of US censors, so nifty communications were largely canceled out.” He ended up writing his dispatches on a typewriter not much different than those used by reporters in World War II. It might have been for the best. As Browne noted, electronic emissions from a dish antenna could attract the deadly attention of air-to-surface high-speed anti-radiation missiles, if any were in the area.
 

On January 17, with Iraqi troops still in Kuwait, coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm, an air campaign against targets in Iraq, including its capital, Baghdad. For the opening of the air war, Browne had been assigned by the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Information Bureau to a desert air base from which F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters from the Thirty-Seventh Tactical Fighter Wing operated. Two squadrons from the unit flew thirty sorties against sixty Iraqi targets.
 
The wing’s commander, Colonel Alton C. Whitley, showed Browne and other reporters, including Frank Bruni of the Detroit Free Press, videotapes in which the F-117A’s had hit underground bunkers, command stations, microwave communication links, and other “high-value” sites. “The opening shot of the war against Iraq was a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb dropped into the AT&T Building in Baghdad near the bank of the Tigris River,” Browne reported. “The tape showed the bomb hitting the building squarely in the center, probably demolishing its communications nerve centers.”
 
The Stealth fighters also attacked one of the “presidential facilities” supposed to be used by Hussein. “The video tape shows the bomb flying right into a rooftop skylight and demolishing the structure,” Browne wrote. Returning from their missions, pilots at the base talked to the Times newsman about the stress they felt flying in combat: “Your heart beats faster, your mouth goes dry, and when you depart the target area you take a big gulp from your water bottle. Of course, you still have to find the refueling tanker on the way home, but the hardest part is over.”
 
As per regulations, a U.S. Army public information officer had cleared articles from Browne and Bruni and sent them on for transmission to pool headquarters in Dhahran. Three hours later, however, Colonel Whitley had second thoughts about the stories, changing some words and deleting others. “None of them appear to have anything to do with security,” Browne noted. “In Frank’s copy, the adjective ‘giddy’ used to describe the pilots, has been changed to ‘proud,’ and in my story, the words ‘fighter-bomber’ have been changed to ‘fighter.’”
 
Browne guessed that the air force had changed his description to fighter because it had been waging a battle with Congressional critics about its B-2 Stealth bomber and feared they might use such a description to scuttle the program. To meet their deadlines, both reporters agreed to the proposed changes if their copy was transmitted to pool headquarters via a fax machine. “This proves a forlorn hope,” Browne noted. He learned the next day that their stories had instead been sent to the home base of the Stealth fighters, the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, “where everything we wrote has been deemed a breach of security.” The pieces were finally cleared by the military twenty-four hours after they were written, making their “perishable” news “hopelessly stale,” he said. Browne considered it quite ironic because the dispatches portrayed the missions as brilliant successes.
 
As a print journalist, Browne faced another frustration during the conflict. He had to deal, as he had never had before, with the “overwhelming prestige” television enjoyed, especially the powerful live coverage provided from Baghdad by CNN reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Browne’s former Associated Press colleague Peter Arnett. “These reports rivet the attention of American servicemen,” Browne remembered. The ground crews at the airbase he visited eagerly watched the CNN reports.
 
Field commanders appeared to be bending the rules for television crews, Browne noted, and treated print reporters “as also-rans.” Censorship guidelines also worked against print journalists, who had to submit typewritten texts of their dispatches to field information officers and commanders for a security review, while television and radio reporters “could broadcast live without prepared texts, permitting them greater latitude,” said Browne.
 
Upon his return to the United States in early February, Browne, invited by U.S. Senators John Glenn and Herb Kohl, was one of the journalists who testified at a February 20 hearing held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on “Pentagon Rules Governing Press Access to the Persian Gulf War.” Browne expressed his concerns about the pool system, as well as the lack of direct access to American soldiers and to front-line areas. Newsmen, he pointed out, wanted to spend time with soldiers and marines, not to “spy on American military intentions, but to see how the troops are getting on in difficult circumstances. Today’s correspondents identify ourselves with the soldiers of our generation as strongly as Ernie Pyle did with the soldiers of his.”

Browne’s testimony, combined with articles he wrote and television appearances he made repeating his complaints, unleashed on him what he called “an avalanche of angry letters” that accused him and other journalists of undermining both the security and morale of soldiers in the field. One letter went as far as to describe the press as “not only anti-American but pro-Communist,” and suggested that the “so-called Fourth Estate should more properly be called the Fifth Column.”
 
Browne believed it was probably futile for him to remind those who wrote such angry letters that democracy itself depended “on a free people informed by honest journalists.” It dawned on him, Browne recalled, that honest reporting was “the last thing most people want when the subject is war.” And while Benjamin Franklin had observed that “there never was a good war or a bad peace,” his experience had taught Browne that in the eyes of many people, “there may never have been a bad war. War is thundering good theater, in which cheering the home team is half the fun.”

William McPherson: The Rise and Fall of a Pulitzer Winner

The name William McPherson cropped up while I was doing research for my planned biography of journalist and war correspondent Wallace Terry, author of the classic 1984 book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. Terry mentioned McPherson in an interview he did with Eric James Schroeder for what became the 1992 collection Vietnam, We’ve All Been There.

Terry told Schroeder that McPherson, with whom he had worked on the Washington Post, had called him after the publication of a cover story about Black soldiers in Vietnam he had contributed to for Time magazine. An editor at the time for the William Morrow publishing house, McPherson had told Terry: “Wally, you should write a book for us about the black soldier.” Terry demurred at the time, explaining that he did not have enough material for a book.

Trying to discover more about McPherson’s life, I learned that the native of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, had enjoyed a distinguished journalism and writing career that included serving as the longtime editor of the Post’s “Book World” section, winning the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and producing the critically acclaimed novels Testing the Current (1984) and To the Sargasso Sea (1987). “I’ve cared about words since I was a kid,” he reflected. 

McPherson felt fortunate at being the editor of “Book World” because it allowed him to select only the books that he wanted to review. “Generally speaking,” he added, “I didn’t review books that didn’t interest me. There was no reason I should pan a first novel that nobody was going to hear about, for example.”

I was delighted to come across a remark made by one of his friends about McPherson, who attended the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and George Washington University without ever bothering to earn a degree. McPherson, noted his friend, “never allowed degree requirements to stand in the way of pursuing his own interests.” Those interests included a short stint as a merchant seaman (“one of my attempts to try on a new identity and escape the world around me”) before finding work in Washington, DC, as a copy boy at the Post, where he quickly rose up the ranks to become a staff writer and travel editor.

According to a story in his hometown newspaper, McPherson had received the news about winning his Pulitzer after returning home from a vacation. He saw a Post envelope pinned to his front door. “I thought I’d been fired when I saw the envelope was from Ben Bradlee [the newspaper’s editor] and figured he didn’t want me to come to work the next day and find out,” McPherson told a reporter.

Bradlee, however, had written on the outside of the envelope indicating that the note enclosed should be read while “sitting down with a drink and a smile.” When McPherson opened the envelope, the note read: “Damned if you didn’t win a Pulitzer.”

During his days editing "Book World," McPherson displayed a deft hand when editing what went into the section. He had a list of common-sense, cogent ideas about editing. They included: 

"The writer comes first.

The editor must remain in the background, insignificant.

Take enormous care, and never be cavalier with copy.

Don't inadvertently edit in mistakes.

The best editing is the least editing.

Change no more than has to be.

Ask: Is this a real improvement or just a change?

Above all, read carefully. What may seem amusing may only be flip; arguments should be sound: points made must be meaningful."

McPherson never had the inclination to write a novel, hoping to avoid adding “another tree to the pulp mill.” While walking to work at the Post one day between Christmas and New Year’s in 1977, however, he received, unbidden, at the corner of Eighteenth and Q Streets, a vivid mental image of a woman on a golf course on a summer morning taking a practice swing. 

“I saw the river in the distance, I saw the leaves on the trees, I saw the dew on the grass, every detail,” he told a Chicago Tribune reported in 2013. “And then it was as if the camera was panning back . . . and I realized that this was being seen by a kid sitting on the steps of the country club. It sounds weird, but there was something sacred about that moment, something luminous, so much so that I was kind of awed about it. It hit me with such intensity and clarity that I thought, ‘I have to write this down.’”

At home in his office that night he decided to write down what he had seen in his vision. The result: Twelve single-space pages that grew over the next five and a half years into his first novel (Testing the Current), told through the perspective a young boy named Tommy MacAllister, who returned as the subject (now forty years old) in McPherson’s second novel (To the Sargasso Sea).

McPherson left his editor’s position at “Book World,” joining the newspaper’s editorial page staff, selecting what letters to the editor to publish and writing the occasional column. He decided he did not want to edit “Book World” any longer because he had learned “how hard it was to write a book, and I didn’t want to criticize other books.”

At the age of fifty-three, McPherson, in 1987, accepted an offer of early retirement from the Post, believing he could make a living as a freelance writer (he remained on the newspaper’s medical plan). For several years, he explored Eastern Europe, frequently writing about the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.

McPherson’s pieces about his time overseas appeared in such publications as Granta, Slate, The Wilson Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. “It was truly a great adventure, it changed my life, and it was a lot more interesting than thinking about what it cost, which was a lot,” McPherson noted. “There’d always been enough money. I assumed there always would be. (I think this is called denial.)”

The uncertain and often poorly paid life of a freelancer, bad investments, bad luck, and bad health, including a major heart attack, led to McPherson finding himself sitting on a park bench with only a quarter in his pocket and nothing in the bank. “It’s a very lonely feeling,” he shared in a moving, well-regarded 2014 essay titled “Falling” for the academic journal Hedgehog Review. “It gives new meaning to the sense of loneliness and despair.”

McPherson wrote his essay not to evoke sympathy from his readers, realizing he had acted the same as those who had won the lotter and squandered their newfound wealth "on houses, cars, family, and Caribbean cruises. But I hadn't won the lottery; I'd fallen under the spell of magical thinking."

McPherson, who died on March 28, 2017, due to complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia, had wallowed in despair for a time at his unhappy situation. He decided, however, that he had two choices—to die in misery or to persevere. McPherson thought of the last two lines of John Milton’s poem “Lycidas”: “At last he rose, and twitch’s his mantle blue: / To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.” He got up from the park bench, grateful to his college English instructor for “teaching me to study ‘Lycidas’ seriously and realize what a great poem it is and what that matters.”