The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich

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