The Press: The Insider

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Andrei Gromyko looked up with a rare, quizzical grin at the burly, bulgy-eyed visitor. “Ah, Mr. Gunther!” he exclaimed. “You must be Inside something!” Foreign Minister Gromyko was right. This week—17 months, 23,000 miles and 550 pages later—the presses are rolling out John Gunther’s latest massive contribution to the school of reporting that bears his trademark. Its title: Inside Russia Today (Harper; $5-95).

Reporter Gunther, 56, tucks the world’s biggest country under his belt with his sixth Inside job in 22 years of chewing up the globe in continent-sized chunks. Few others would dare even to attempt a comprehensive survey of Russia in 24 chapters (including one called “A History of Russia in Half an Hour”). But no other reporter has ever plowed or plucked on Gunther’s gargantuan scale. A hulking (6 ft. 1 in., 238 Ibs.) legman in seven-league boots, he has at once traveled more miles, crossed more frontiers, interviewed more statesmen, earned more “money (more than $1,000,000), written more books and sold more copies (more than 2,000,000) than any single other newsman. Gunther’s bestselling Insides, crisscrossing every continent but Australia, have traveled even farther than Gunther. In all. 13 of his books have been translated into 87 languages, massively pirated in Asia, published behind the Iron Curtain.

Gunther’s reporting has made him more famous than most of the people he reports on. Yet he still basks in the celebrity of newsmaking titans, drops their names like trophies into his own entry in Who’s Who in America:

Has interviewed Lloyd George, President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, King Carol of Rumania, Gandhi, Trotsky, De Valera, Dollfuss, Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kaishek, President Quezon of Philippines, Presidents Cardenas and Avila Camacho of Mexico; Vargas of Brazil; Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Pope Pius XII, Premier de Gasperi of Italy, Nehru, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, General MacArthur, and many other contemporary statesmen.

Asked by a minor Russian official how his first day in Moscow had gone, Gunther shrugged: “Moderately well.” Pausing for effect, he added: “I met, shook hands with, and had brief interchanges of conversation with Khrushchev, Bulganin, Zhukov, Molotov, Gromyko and Shepilov. That’s all.” Many of the world’s grandest panjandrums go out of their way to butter up Insider Gunther, and some are his good friends. To introduce him on an India-wide radio hookup, Nehru in 1938 went on the air for the first time in his career. When Gunther began working on 1947’s Inside U.S.A., governors and senators across the land heaped him with invitations to interviews and conferences.

The VIPs who are pumped by Gunther also turn to him for information. Says Egypt’s President Nasser: “You have to take Gunther seriously, because he tells both sides.” Inside Europe landed in Churchill’s library (and so firmly in Hitler’s bad book that Gunther was marked for postwar liquidation by the Nazis). Inside Asia was on Harry Truman’s desk when he broadcast his V-J day speech. Inside Africa was studied dutifully by Russia’s Dmitry Shepilov, who cited it in a United Nations tirade against British colonialism, and by Richard Nixon, whose party was weighted with copies of the book on his 1957 visit to Africa.

Froth v. Fundamentals. John Gunther’s critics often scorn his slickly, quickly produced Insides as superficial glimpses through hotel windows. He has been dubbed “the Book-of-the-Month Club’s Marco Polo,” a “Jonah among journalists,” “master of the once-over-lightly.” Gunther brushed off Venezuela in 24 hours while researching Inside Latin America, skipped the Ivory Coast entirely on his Inside Africa trip. At the start of his 17 months on the road for Inside U.S.A., Gunther himself recalls, he sped out of Rhode Island in horror after realizing suddenly that he had spent “eight whole days” on his first and smallest state.

His judgments on occasion prove as hasty as his stopovers. In 1955’s Inside Africa he predicted confidently that independence would not come soon to Morocco; less than a year after Inside Africa appeared on the bookstalls, Morocco was independent. The last 1951 edition of Inside U.S.A. perpetuates Stevenson Democrat Gunther’s three-year-old thumbs-down verdict on Earl Warren (whom he had not met): “He will never set the world on fire or even make it smoke.” In all his 35 years as a foreign-news specialist, Gunther has never learned a foreign language. His critics also take him to task for deliberately passing up fundamentals for froth. Inside Africa, chided the sober Times of India, has only “one page dealing with the Moroccan economy, and four giving an account of a dinner with El Glaoui.”

Drawing the Maps. Gunther as a book-journalist lacks the originality and profundity of Rebecca (Meaning of Treason) West, the stylistic graces of Negley (Way of a Transgressor) Farson, John (Hiroshima) Hersey or Vincent (Personal History) Sheean. Yet none matches him for sheer scope, reportorial zest, or, most notably, the gift of popularizing remote places and difficult subjects. Says Critic Clifton Fadiman: “Gunther is a born teacher; he doesn’t miss a fact-trick. His books are almost too easy to read; because of that, they seem superficial. But he’s taught us a hell of a lot about our world, in primer terms. He’s drawn the maps for us. He did for us what H. G. Wells did years ago.”

To the task Gunther brings driving curiosity, elephantine memory, gregarious charm, ferocious vitality. Reporter Gunther also has phenomenally sharp ears and eyes for the telling anecdote and the detail that vividly catches the mood. He has a homing instinct for the essentials in a complex situation. He is a master of the art of brain-picking—and of choosing the right brain to pick. From careful homework, he knows precisely what information his story needs, and can extract it with the efficiency of an automatic orange squeezer.

Though widely hailed as a reporter, Gunther is at least as good a rewrite-man. He can take widely scattered strands of information—from books, statistics, official reports, newspaper clippings—and weave them into a pattern that is not only meaningful but brightly his own. Says “Jimmy” Sheean: “He is no mere compiler, for all his massive array of facts. He has repeatedly proved readable to a degree which no assembly of facts could explain. The zest with which he relishes his material gives it the breathless flavor of discovery every time, even aside from the liveliness of the writing.” Gunther’s success as a popularizer also springs from his skill in communicating ideas in terms of people. “Gunther is a firm believer in the Great Man theory,” Critic Fadiman points out. “The picturesque foci are the men themselves. This is how you make institutionalized power clear. It’s more interesting to talk about the Pope than the Catholic Church.”

Three-Day S.O.B. Gunther’s Insides have improved almost steadily as he has kept turning them out; he concedes that the years have made him “more guarded and judicious.” Says he: “All those books have been a process of educating myself at the public’s expense.” With Inside Africa (952 pages covering 44 countries), he drew widespread praise from scholars and specialists. Inside Russia Today, in some ways his most challenging assignment, is probably his best book yet.

Inevitably, he will be chided for Russia’s errors of facts and judgment, for gall in attempting so huge a task, and glibness in its execution. In fact, though the book is sprinkled with such minor bobbles as his reference to a nonexistent 25-kopek piece, these are heavily outweighed by his sound reporting, his artful wrap-up of others’ findings, and his sober conclusions. Unlike most books on Russia. Gunther’s Soviet survey is fortified with perspective gained on three other professional sojourns between 1928 and 1939 for as much as five months at a time. Chuckles Gunther: “When people ask how that s.o.b. dared visit a new country for three days and write about it like an authority, I feel like asking. ‘How long did Gibbon spend in Constantinople?’ Of course. Gibbon never visited Constantinople.”

Months before he set out to inspect Russia in 1956, Gunther buried his Roman nose in books, digests of Soviet newspapers, and a magpie’s mountain of clips that he has amassed in more than 30 years. As always when mounting an expedition, Reporter Gunther wrote to dozens of functionaries whom he hoped to interview—and got three replies. Armed with standard 30-day tourist visas, Reporter Gunther and his chic, blonde wife Jane, 41, flew into Moscow in October at the height of the Hungarian uprisings.

His first day there, Gunther briskly informed a startled Intourist official that he had no intention of making only the rubbernecking rounds of collective farms and model factories. Boomed Gunther: “I want to see a really good lunatic asylum, an academy where young artists are trained, and a musician.” He saw them—as well as ballets, church services and plays (including a “stunning” Macbeth). He foraged busily from Moscow’s P.S. 151 to a children’s nursery where they had never heard of diapers. He reached some of the top brass on the merry-go-round of diplomatic receptions, quizzed dozens of functionaries who are not normally tapped by Western newsmen, and with a rarely granted 20-day visa extension went by excursion steamer and plane to the antique fastnesses of Russian Asia.

Inside Out. Back in Manhattan in January 1957 with 30 crammed 3-in.-by-5-in. notebooks and a mountain of loose notes, he immediately went to work in the yellow-walled, fourth-floor office of his 80-year-old brownstone on East 62nd Street, catercorner from Eleanor Roosevelt’s apartment. (Says Gunther: “Mrs. Roosevelt’s lights and mine are the last on the block to go out.”) After writing one 14,000-word magazine article on his trip, he dug in for the 14-month task of shrinking Russia (8,602,700 sq. mi.; pop. 200,200,000) to a 1-lb.-1.2-oz. volume.

Methodically as a mason, Gunther laid out a foundation wall of multicolored manila folders for every chapter and subsection. Into the room-long row of folders he piled notes, clippings, dozens of scrawled, yellow-paper memos—”Why so much education?”, “All small talk in modern Russian novels is about nuts and bolts.” Settling down at his battered Smith-Corona typewriter, across from a child’s map of the world, Gunther started out with the inside chapters on the Kremlin hierarchy, plowed through what he calls “the picture stuff,” i.e., travelogue chapters, tackled science and education, wound up writing the topical opening and concluding chapters.

After at least one rewrite of each chapter, Gunther and his wife checked it for accuracy, shipped it off for closer scrutiny by a Russian scholar. Whole sections had to be updated after Zhukov’s ouster (though Gunther had foreseen Bulganin’s eclipse). Near press time he had to turn out a new, unexpected foreword: “The Sputniks and the Future.” In the last feverish months, he spent up to 14 hours a day at his desk, catnapping occasionally on a grey day bed in his office.

Caviar & Cognac. Despite his $1,000,000-plus earnings, Author Gunther is perennially strapped. He was forced to interrupt work on Inside Africa to pick up much-needed fees from a lecture tour. Last fall he was so short that he did something he had always staunchly refused to do: an Inside blurb for an advertiser. Hired by a pharmaceutical manufacturer, he ground out a 5,000-word piece called Inside Pfizer (“Before I visited Pfizer, I did not know the difference between an antibiotic and a housefly”). Typically, Gunther earned his fee (more than $12,500) by traveling 2,000 miles and interviewing 50 Pfizerlings.

Gunther’s explanation for the financial situation: “I’ve eaten every book by the time it’s published.” He helps support “13 females,” counting his secretary, relatives, and a cinnamon poodle named Josephine, has fixed expenses of $21,000 a year “before buying a single hamburger.” More to the point, he prefers filet mignon. A check-grabbing bon vivant, he turns pale at the thought of scaling down his caviar-and-cognac way of life—and managed to stay in the pink in Russia, where caviar cost $1.35 a portion, cognac up to $2.25 a snifter. He wears custom-made suits from London and monogrammed shirts from Paris (though they do nothing for his built-in rumples). Asked his favorite color, Gunther beams: “Smoked salmon—Prunier’s, of course, not Reuben’s.” Nor would Host Gunther dream of serving domestic champagne at his massive parties. For one gala, co-hosted at the Gun-thers’ house by Claude Philippe of the Waldorf, liveried footmen carried scrolls to invite the 80 guests.

Child in a Hurry. John Joseph Gunther was born Aug. 3, 1901, in North Side Chicago. From his father, Eugene Mc-Clellan Gunther, a convivial drifter, he inherited big-boned bulk and heroic alcoholic capacity. From their schoolteacher-mother, Lisette Schoeninger Gunther, John and sister Jean took on lifelong respect for book learning. As a sickly eleven-year-old, John showed precocious talent as a rewriteman by compiling a children’s encyclopedia from John Clark Ridpath’s Cyclopedia of Universal History. Contents: “All the Necessary Statistics of the World,” “World Battleships,” “Greek and Roman Mythology with Genealogic Tables of Gods,” “List of Species of World Animals.”

Gunther remembers himself as “an appalling, monstrous child who wanted to do it all.” In the Lake View High School magazine, he broke into type at 16 with an essay on the Russian Revolution. At 20, English Major Gunther wrote 20 U.S. publishers that he would review their books in a literary column he had started in the University of Chicago’s Daily Maroon, followed up by soliciting puffs on the column from such critical luminaries as H. L. Mencken and Harry Hansen.

He was in such a hurry to be on his way that he left the university without bothering to pick up his Phi Beta Kappa key. In 1922, after a bicycling trip through Europe, he went confidently to work as a $15-a-week cub on the Chicago Daily News. When the Teapot Dome scandal broke in 1924, he landed one of his first out-of-town assignments by observing that none of the news stones said what Teapot Dome looked like. In a breathless Inside report from Wyoming that made Best News Stories of 1924 and foreshadowed a familiar Guntheresque ploy, he wrote: “Teapot Dome has no resemblance whatever to a teapot [or] to a dome.”

“Inside Fodor.” Soon afterward, the cocky young reporter put in for the Chicago Daily News’s foreign service, which then boasted such prestigious byliners as Paul Scott Mowrer, his brother Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Hal O’Flaherty, Junius Wood. Turned down, Gunther quit his $55-a-week job and hopped a ship for England, where he was i) promptly hired by the News’s London bureau, 2) fired when Chicago spotted his byline. After six months with the United Press in London, he was taken on by the News’s Paris bureau and launched into an invaluable round as continental swingman, filling in for vacationing correspondents all over Europe.

In 1930 Correspondent Gunther won an assignment to Vienna—and a seat in the world’s most exciting press box. As Europe sputtered toward war, Vienna became a vantage point from which U.S. correspondents shaped a new tradition of alert, informed foreign reporting that gave readers back home the world’s best European coverage. From such resident and visiting firemen as the New York Evening Post’s Dorothy Thompson. I.N.S.’s late H. R. Knickerbocker (who once interviewed Stalin’s mother), the Chicago Tribune’s William (Berlin Diary) Shirer, and Author Sheean, Correspondent Gunther busily soaked up lore and legends that never made the news stories. Gunther’s most valuable mentor: the New York Evening Post’s M. W. (”Mike”) Fodor, dean of Balkan correspondents, who helped the young Chicagoan so generously that fellow newsmen later dubbed Inside Europe “Inside Fodor.”

For all his brain-picking, Gunther was so likable and professionally esteemed that he was elected first president of Vienna’s Anglo-American Press Association in 1931. With his small, assertive first wife Frances, Gunther was as famed even then for doughty partying as for hard work. In his spare time, fast-working Gunther wrote dozens of political pieces for magazines ranging from Foreign Affairs to Woman’s Home Companion.

Footnote to History. The germ of Inside Europe was planted in Gunther by Harper’s Editor Cass Canfield after IQSI’S Washington Merry-Go-Round, by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, created a demand for uninhibited political reporting. In 1934 Gunther reluctantly agreed that he might do a book on Europe’s political leaders if Harper’s put up what he considered an “impossible” $5,000 advance. He got the advance, slaved over the book at night while working in the Daily News’s London bureau. With help, as he acknowledged, from “colleagues in 20 countries,” he did the job in six months. Given its final title by Gunther at the last moment, Inside Europe became an overnight hit. In five revised editions it has sold some 650,000 copies worldwide, gone into 70 printings in the U.S., where it still sells 1,200 copies a year.

With less than $2,500 in savings, Gunther left the Chicago Daily News for the third and last time. He has not worked on a newspaper since. But in 1943 Gunther served the whole U.S. press as pool reporter at General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Allied general headquarters during the Sicilian invasion, later published a Sicilian invasion diary, D Day (dedicated to Actress Miriam Hopkins “with love”).

Gunther did not include in the book his own footnote to history. When the U.S.’s invasion commander, Major General George Patton, refused to let Eisenhower ashore early, it was Gunther who spotted a quiet Sicilian cove from their destroyer. He told Ike: “General, I can write a story that will make every newspaper in the world tomorrow. The first paragraph will be this: ‘The commander in chief of the Allied Forces of Liberation set foot on the soil of occupied Europe for the first time today.'” Says Gunther: “Ike gave me a long, dirty look and said: ‘It would serve a good propaganda purpose, I think.'” Twenty minutes later, Gunther got his story.

Death Be Not Proud. Insider Gunther, who says he “would give all those Insides to have written one good short story,” is still writing bad ones. He has published four uncelebrated novels. His longest-remembered work, nonetheless, is less likely to be one of the Insides than a short (261 pages) book called Death Be Not Proud—a tender, harrowing vignette of valor and suffering.

John and Frances Gunther’s first brush with death came in 1929, when their only daughter Judy died at four months of a glandular ailment. In April 1946 they learned that their only son, then 16, had a brain tumor. For 15 months Johnny, a lively, charming youngster, clung heroically to life and sanity. Though Frances (who now lives in Jerusalem) had divorced Gunther in 1944, they fought an agonizing side-by-side battle for Johnny’s life. In desperation they consulted more than 30 doctors, tried such extreme treatments as intravenous mustard-gas injections, which had never before been tried on a brain patient. Throughout the ordeal, Gunther wrestled with the added burden of completing Inside U.S.A.

When Johnny died, his father wrote Death as a private memoir, but was persuaded by friends that it would inspire other parents in similar straits. Gunther has given his $25,000 in royalties from the book to children’s cancer research, and Harper’s has also contributed its profit. Almost ten years since the book’s publication, he still gets 200 letters a year about Johnny from readers all over the world, many enclosing money, pressed flowers or a poem. Gunther and his second wife Jane, whom he married in 1948 (her first husband: Newscaster John W. Vandercook), are the parents of a handsome, adopted two-year-old named Nicholas, over whom, as a friend says, “John glows and grins like a fond mother.”

The Darkening Continent. On the first leg of his 1952 reporting safari for Inside Africa, Gunther awoke to another nightmare: he was going blind. With cataracts closing over both eyes, he explored the darkening continent for 10^ months and 40,000 miles without even a weekend off, ground out nine magazine articles on the road. Unable to read his minute reporter’s scribble, he could never have finished the assignment if willowy, tough-fibered Jane had not been along. She scrawled notes on interviews, digested reams of background material, took thousands of photographs for Gunther to pore over back in Manhattan.

To meet the deadline for the book, plus a dozen articles for magazines (Look, Reader’s Digest) that had helped to bankroll the trip, he was unable to spare six months of his two-year writing time for the two operations that eventually restored almost complete vision through bottle-thick spectacles. Against dwindling sight and funds, Gunther, a hunt-and-peck typist, had his typewriter equipped with outsize keys, used ever stronger eyedrops that enabled him to read and write only for two hours at a stretch. Says Jane: “The house was littered with magnifying glasses.”

Name-Wonder. Before going off to the hospital, Gunther gallantly tossed a farewell shindig, insisted on greeting each guest without help, though he almost had to rub noses before he could recognize them. It was a typical gesture. Anything but the traditionally tough, cynical newsman, Gunther fairly quivers with delight at meeting people, deeply craves their approval. Says one intimate: “He has no acquaintances—only best friends.”

Gunther’s best friends, who tend to be conspicuously witty or pretty, run a stellar range from Addams, Charles, to Zorina, Vera. To Book-of-the-Month Club Judge John Mason Brown, “John’s foible isn’t name-dropping, it’s name-wonder. He’s never got over the mica that’s in names. He has a child’s sense of giving a party, a fairyland belief in celebrities.” One fairyland fable who slips frequently in and out of the house on East 62nd Street is Greta Garbo, the “G.G.” to whom John Gunther dedicated Inside Russia Today, along with “G. and V.” (Socialite George Schlee and his wife, onetime Fashion Designer Valentina, who introduced Garbo to the Gunthers).

As a host, Gunther likes to invite at least 75 people and mix such disparate guests as Foreign Affairs Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor. He dotes on introducing the famed to the famed in glowing detail, as if they inhabited far-distant planets. One occasion when Gunther skipped such identification was in presenting Paul Auriol to the Duke of Windsor, who murmured: “Don’t I know something about your father?” The glacial reply: “Possibly. He’s President of France.” (The duke was repaid at the same party when the Adman-Philanthropist Albert Lasker lengthily congratulated him in the innocent belief that he was the real-life hero of the newly opened Broadway musical, The King and /.)

“Myself — with Fingers Crossed.” What does Gunther believe in? “I believe,” says he, “in myself—with fingers crossed.” Puffing thoughtfully on his ever-present Marlboro, Gunther adds: “I have no deep, institutionalized religious beliefs. I believe in the fact.” On looking inside Gunther—despite his deep faith in his prowess as a journalist—Gunther finds: “I’m terribly limited. I completely lack intensity of soul. I’m not original. I’m really only a competent observer who works terribly hard at doing a job well.”

Last month, after finishing Russia, Gunther plunged into a quick biography of Albert Lasker, one of the “small” books that “I play with my left hand” (others: Roosevelt in Retrospect, The Riddle of MacArthur). After the 1960 election, he intends to write his long-planned companion to Inside U.S.A., a book on U.S. politics. He will also edit Doubleday’s ambitious Mainstream of Modern World History series. He is making notes for an autobiographical book on the people and events he has covered, and is pondering a biography of his longtime friend Sinclair Lewis. Next year he plans to go Inside Australia. It is virtually the earth’s last unguntherized land mass. By the time the book comes out, explorers of outer space may have given him new worlds to conquer. Frets Gunther: “What disturbs and upsets me is that there is not time or freedom or energy enough to do all the things I would like to do.”