William Whitworth

In memoriam

William Whitworth

In memoriam

I’ve been struggling for days to write this post, and it kept being too much about me, or about me and the legendary Miss Eleanor Gould of The New Yorker, and not enough about Bill Whitworth, who was the wonderful editor in chief of The Atlantic for most of the quarter century I worked there. I was in New York this past Monday to attend a celebration of his life at the Century Club. Bill died last March 8, at the age of 87, in his hometown, Conway, Arkansas, near Little Rock, where he grew up.

You can read a tribute to Bill in The Atlantic and a straightforward obituary in The New York Times and read or listen to a remembrance of him by Terry Gross, of Fresh Air, on the NPR website. Now I want to share a remembrance of my own. And having attended the event in New York and heard what his daughter, Katherine, had to say about him, I want to share an anecdote she told the group too.

Bill had come to The Atlantic from The New Yorker, where he was a writer and then an editor. I came from The Boston Phoenix weekly newspaper, where I had been a copy editor, then a writer, and then the editor of the Lifestyle section.

Shortly after Bill was hired at The Atlantic, I sent him a “Please hire me” letter that included the boast that I was good at copy editing. He called me, prefacing what he had to say, as he always did, by asking whether it was a convenient time for me to talk. Of course it was! My hair could have been on fire and I still would have told him it was a convenient time to talk. We talked for a bit, and he told me he wanted to send me a set of galleys (the typeset draft of an article) to mark up.

My recollection is that Bill sent me an article about economics that covered fifteen or so 8½ x 14 galley pages. In those days, copy editors wrote in pencil in the wide right margin of the galley, using an arcane alphabet of symbols and abbreviations to make clear what changes one was proposing. I toiled over those galleys late into a number of nights before sending them back. In response, Bill sent me a note that was in his typical short and to-the-point style. He wrote: “You did a good job. I’ll keep you in mind.”

And he did. He hired me in 1983.

While I was still angling for the job, I discovered that Bill had written a book and I took out a copy from the public library. Naive Questions About War and Peace: Conversations With Eugene V. Rostow, published on January 1, 1970, was actually a compilation of a series of interviews he’d written for The New Yorker, and I found it astonishing. Bill was strongly opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War — in fact, I believe it was his opposition to the war that caused him to turn away from writing stylish features and focus on the crucial issues of the day.

But rather than writing a piece explaining why he opposed the Vietnam War — which is what everyone else was doing — he tried to find out why the U.S. government, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon, was in favor of it. In other words, he did a now-unheard-of thing: trying to learn what people he vehemently disagreed with were thinking.

Bill was willing to accept that the people running the U.S. government were committed to the war for reasons that made sense to them and that surely their intentions were good. He didn’t consider them foolish or evil. But a lot of other people thought the war was wrong, a mistake — a disaster of epic proportions.

So, reporting for The New Yorker, Bill called a source in the government and asked to be put in touch with the highest-ranking person who’d have time for a series of interviews with him to explain the logic underlying the government’s prosecution of the war. Eugene Rostow was made available to him.

According to a 2002 obituary of Rostow published in the Los Angeles Times,

In the mid-1960s, Rostow — and his more influential brother, Walt W. Rostow — were leading figures in the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. As national security advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Walt Rostow was the architect of much of the U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Eugene Rostow defended that policy from his position as undersecretary of State for political affairs.

The series of articles, the book, included a huge amount of information about the war, with Bill definitely holding up his end of the debate. It concluded with Bill saying that Rostow felt he’d explained over and over why the war was necessary, but that he, Bill, felt that Rostow hadn’t explained it in any way that made sense to him. They finally gave up trying to see eye to eye. End of story.

Bill was always interested in the other guy’s point of view. If a writer had a thought-provoking  point to make that Bill hadn’t heard elsewhere and the writer could make a good case for it, he’d publish them. Thus The Atlantic published lots of academics (Boston being chockful of them) who had, basically, one thing to say that would interest a broad audience. These authors were accustomed to writing articles for scholarly journals and didn’t necessarily know how to write for a broad audience — but that’s where we, his editorial staff, came in. Our job was to help show them off to their best advantage, whether or not we liked or agreed with what they were saying.

In that way, Bill was prescient. The Atlantic under him ran early articles about the hollowing out of America’s middle class, climate change, immigration, population growth, vegetarianism, whether sex without explicit consent was immoral, and so on, that were far ahead of their time.

Bill had a management style that as far as I know was unique to him. The editorial staff never had meetings. Not once. He gave each of us a domain — mine was copy editing and eventually also assigning and editing the travel section and writing columns about the English language — and everything about that domain was just between you and Bill. If you wanted something from Bill, you went to see him, and his door was always open to us. If he wanted something from you, he’d come to see you in your office. He'd preface what he had to say by asking whether it was a convenient time for us to talk.

As his daughter, Katherine, told us at the memorial event, as a child she had long realized that her dad was in touch with a lot of important people and had a lot on his mind — but whenever she wanted his attention, he gave it gladly and completely. And she told us this story:

Around Christmastime when she was about nine years old, Bill drove her to a local toy store and told her to pick out anything she liked. “Go crazy,” he urged her; go fill up a shopping cart. And so she did. Bill bought everything, loaded it all into the car, and “drove us straight over to the homeless shelter” to give the toys to the children there. (In case you’re wondering, she said this not at all disappointedly but admiringly.) This became an annual tradition for them.

When I learned that Bill had died, I could scarcely believe it. Ever since I’d met him, he had been a supportive presence in the background, and somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t always be.

But as several speakers at the memorial said, he passed along a lot to all of us. We each have our own internal Bill now, and we’ll be forever grateful.