The Good Girls Revolt (6 page)

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 held 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.

Under Oz,
Newsweek
became the “hot book” in the media and on Madison Avenue. Coinciding with the 1960s, life at the magazine not only was fascinating, it was a fun and even wild place to be. Since most of the writers were in their thirties and nearly all the researchers in their twenties, the culture inside the office mirrored the “Swinging Sixties” on the street. Everyone, including Oz, was on a first-name basis, which gave a feeling of equality even to us utterly powerless. After work we went out drinking either to the Berkshire Bar, a front-of-the-book favorite, or to The Cowboy, where Pete Axthelm, the Sports department’s wunderkind writer and champion drinker, held forth every night.

Waiting for the files to roll in at the beginning of the week, or for the edits on Friday nights and Saturdays, we spent hours joking around in the office. “I loved the intense but nutty, freewheeling atmosphere on Saturday afternoons,” recalled Pat Lynden, “drinking wine, strumming guitars, playing baseball in the hallways.” Peter Goldman and Ed Kosner used their downtime in Nation to cowrite a never-finished parody of a dirty novel. Dwight Martin, a senior editor in the back of the book, moved an old Steinway upright into his office so he could practice piano in the afternoons; at cocktail time he poured sherry for his staff.

One Friday night, Betsy Carter, the media researcher, was so bored waiting for her story to be edited that at 2 A.M., she decided to make a copy of herself. “I just lay on the Xerox machine and copied my body piece by piece,” she recalled. “I stapled them all together and mailed it to my parents with a note that said, ‘Here I am at work and I thought you would like to know.’ I think my mother said something like, ‘Do you think you’re working too hard?’”

The back-of-the-book researchers had a classic “office wife” relationship with their bosses. While the front-of-the-book researchers sat in an open bullpen and checked stories by different writers every week, each of us sat in a twenty-five-foot-by-twenty-five-foot office with our section writer. The men’s desks were by the window, of course; we perched by the door. To add some personality to our steel-gray work spaces, we pinned up pictures of our idols or celebrities we had interviewed. I put up photographs of nearly naked models Veruschka and Marisa Berenson from
Vogue,
prompting several writers to ask me if I was a lesbian. Sitting only six feet from our writers, we were on intimate terms with them, sharing more than we ever wanted to know about their personal grooming habits, their intimate medical issues, and their heated arguments with the ex-wife or girlfriend.

The back-of-the-book and the Business sections worked Monday through Friday, but the official week didn’t begin until Tuesday morning, when Oz held a 10 A.M. story conference in his eleventh-floor office. After the story line-up was set, the writers sent queries to the bureaus asking for on-the-ground reporting. The color-coded files arrived on Thursday and Friday: blue from the international bureaus, green from Washington, and pink from the domestic correspondents. Then the creative rituals and angst would kick in. Pacing the halls in their socks or rocking in their chairs, the writers would cull the information from our reports and the rainbow-colored files and weave it all into a smart, colorful analysis or description of the week’s events. Harry Waters, my boss, would pepper me for the right word or phrase, nervously asking, “How does this sound?” or “Listen to this.” Paul Zimmerman, a movie critic, was called “the talking blue” because he proudly read aloud to any passerby the blue-inked mimeographs of his latest review. The entire magazine was written and edited in forty-eight hours, culminating in Friday nights that lasted until one or two in the morning because the Wallendas would take a two-hour, martini-soaked dinner break at Giambelli’s across the street.

Describing the weekly routine, Carole Wicker, a researcher at
Time,
wrote a typically sexualized, over-the-top piece for
Cosmopolitan
magazine titled “Limousine to Nowhere . . . if You’re a Girl at a News Magazine.” In it she quoted an unnamed
Newsweek
staffer on what it was like to be a researcher: “It’s a mini-marriage, between researcher and writer, with the orgasm coming at the end of the week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, everything goes easy. By Thursday, the pitch is higher. Friday afternoon you’re flying, and by Friday midnight you go over the top.” “What she’s saying,” explained Wicker in the piece, “is that the researcher is drawn into the writer’s pattern, inch by inch, pressure by pressure, until she’s lost her own being and becomes an extension of her boss.”

That didn’t describe most of us but there was definitely a caste system at
Newsweek
. “For every man there was an inferior woman, for every writer there was a checker,” said Nora Ephron. “They were the artists and we were the drones. But what is interesting is how institutionally sexist it was without necessarily being personally sexist. To me, it wasn’t oppressive. They were just going to try to sleep with you—and if you wanted to, you could. But no one was going to fire you for not sleeping with them.”