35 GOING ON 18

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100500018-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 5, 2004
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: September 23, 1968
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

NLtr15WEEK
Approved For Rda& 2$'IA-RDP88-01314R000100500018-1
35 Going on 13
Esquire magazine is brash, impious,
mischievous, outrageous, scatterbrained,
uneven, immodest, naughty and adoles-
cent. And it is also great fun-for both its
readers and its editors. "I dream." up
ideas on anything I want and for the
most part assign them to outside writers,"
says John Berendt, 28, an associate di-
for who went directly to Esquire from
the Harvard Lampoon. "It's pretty much
like the Lampoon, very casual."
Next month Esquire celebrates its 35th
birthday with a typical mixture of irrev-
erence and pretentiousness in a 302-page
issue dedicated to "Salvaging the 20th
Century." The cover, a macabre mon-
tage, shows the faces of John F. Ken-
Ahedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Mr?tin
Luther King Jr. attached to three Mod-
els standing in a graveyard. The cover
springs from an article by William Buck-
ley Jr.: "The Politics of Assassination."
One inside feature quizzes congressmen
on their tastes (Karl Mundt likes Law-
rence Welk), and contributors offer their
advice on how to rescue civilization.
But Esquire is far more than a gradu-
ate Lampoon. Despite its pop flippancies
and its facile impieties, Esquire is one of
the brightest and most imaginative forces
in journalism. It seethes with so many
bizarre ideas-some good, some bad-
that a number of its graduates have left
,to start magazines of their own: Hugh
1-Iefner of Playboy; Clay Felker of New
York and Ralph Ginzbur?g of Avant-
Garde. Esquire was one of the first
patrons of caricaturist David Levine; it
gave Gay Talese the space in which to
dissect The New York Times, and it pro-
vided Rex Reed a showcase in which to
pick apart the movie colony. In 1960 and
1964, Esquire dispatched Norman Mail-
er to cover the political conventions, and
this year it sent a team to Chicago that
included playwright jean Genet, novel-
ist William Burroughs and satirist Terry
Southern. Their twelve-page report, dc=
voted almost exclusively to the turbu-
lence outside the convention hall, will
appear in the November issue. And Sen.
Eugene McCarthy has promised to write
"An Open Letter to the Next President"
for the December issue. (Esquire pays a
base rate of $1,000 an article with bo-
nuses for exceptional talent.)
Hair: "We try," says Arnold Gingrich,
Esquire's gentle and dapper pub-
lisher, "to be first with everything."
That's about the only sense in which Es-
quire is still the "fashion" magazine for
men that Gingrich and the late David
Smart started in the fall of 1933. "From
the start we had to live down the image ?
of being a fashion magazine," says Ging-
rich, "and so we had to put some hair
on our chest." During the Depression
"hair" was cheap and Esquire signed on
such authors as Ernest Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos
as contributors for a pittance.
.~- STAT
But with the war the magazine's qual- C..S or COP?
ity declined and it became best known
as a pin-up magazine, symbolized by Who says the Chicago police don't like
"Esky," the dandy with the upswept newsmen? During the recent demonstra-
mustache and the ogling eyes, and best tions policemen posed as photographers
remembered for E. Simms Campbell's and reporters. By passing as newsmen, it
harem cartoons and George Petty's seems, they could collect unobtrusively
larger-than-life beauties. "We had to information on protest plans and protest
boost the morale of the boys," says leaders-and possibly evidence to prove
Gingrich. "Also, it was a way of convinc- Mayor Daley's conspiracy theories.
ing the War Production Board we were But the Chicago police department is
entitled to more paper." Esquire's "pin- hardly the only law-enforcement agency
upreputation still lingers-despite the that practices the ruse. Lawmen all over
fact that Esky has been reduced to a dot the country slip undercover and disguise
over the "i" in the magazine's name" and themselves as newsmen, particularly
Hefner, who wrote subscription solicita- when they are tailing black militarits,
tions for the magazine in the 1950s, has student activists and other dissenters' In
long since run off with the nude girls.\ Chicago, the police department's pho-
:;ngrich and Smart quarreled after I tographers are called, euphemistically,
the war, and Gingrich left and the cir- "'evidence technicians." Policemen also
culation dropped to a little more than
700,000. Then, Gingrich returned in
1952. "We made a conscious effort to get
the youth market," says Gingrich, "and
so we hired a bunch of Young Turks and
let them fight each other."
irony: The survivor of the brawl was By all accounts, however, the under-
Ilarold Hayes, now 42, a native of North cover police quickly retreat when chal-
Carolina who worked as a UP reporter longed. At adrift-cardburning ceremony
before going to Esquire in 1956. As edi- in Washington, an unfamiliar newsman
tor, Hayes is now the dominating force with a tape recorder claimed he was
on the magazine. Although Gingrich from the International News Service,
reads every piece four times before Es- which merged ten years ago with United
quire goes to press, he leaves the ideas :Press. After the newsman was identi~
up to Hayes and his half-dozen post- fled by The Washington Post as an FB,I
graduate activists in the back room. The agent, Attorney General Ramsey Clark
system works well. While the average told J. Edgar Hoover to instruct all FBI
age of the magazine's readers has agents "`that under no circumstances are
dropped from 40 to 33, circulation has they ever to pose as members of the
risen to a record high of close to 1.1 mil-
lion. news media." During New York's Labor
climbed from advertising million in revenues es8a to Day arade CBS-TV correspondent Mar-
0.9 million rom n in 66.5 1968"We have tried tin Agronsky flushed out two phony.
1968. W t ~
$10.9
to build a personality that's unique and news phQtogr.phers, who had been as-
recognizable," says Hayes. "I see us as signed to photograph demonstrators. One
unbiased and basically rational with a of them said he represented the Press
posture that tends toward irony." Es- Association. When the correspondent
quire covers are created by George Lois, tried to film them, the pair hustled away.
36, of the New York advertising agency Later a police captain admitted they
Lois Holland Callaway, Inc. "Hayes gives were detectives.
me an idea of what's going to be impor- Credibility: Newsmen are harc.iy
tant and what might be fun in an upcom-' blameless. "Police reporters have gone
ing issue and I dream up a cover, says along with this for years," says Nicholas
Lois. "Usually, it's not too much trouble Pileggi, a veteran New York AP staffer.
to get people to pose because the smart "There's been such tremendous collu-
people understand showmanship." sion." And, of course, reporters have
Esquire's covers and, indeed, the ir- often posed as policemen to get a story.
reverent tone of the magazine, offend Belatedly, newsmen are beginning to
everyone's sensitivities some of the time realize that the role switching is under-
and the older generation's most of the mining their credibility. Who's the real
time. "Most issues have one or two good newsman? Who's the real policeman?
articles," says Dwight Macdonald, 62, The American Civil Liberties Union,
who has been writing movie reviews and basing its case on a claim of invasion of
political commentary for the magazine privacy, has filed suit in Rochester and
since 1960, "but they also have a lot of Buffalo, N.Y., and in New Orleans,
trivia. The covers are too 'socko'; the' where the ACLU contends that local
whole layout is too 'socko'." Says Ging- police have posed as newsmen. "It causes
rich: "There are so many excesses in the a decline in public confidence in the
world today, particularly an excess in the press," says Paul Chevigny, an ACLU
cult of ugliness. There is so much anti- attorney, and interferes with the ability,
art, anti-beauty, anti-everything." Well, of the press to collect facts."
what about Esquire itself? "Today," says
Gingrich, "everything shocks 'me."
attend news conferences called by radi-
cals-armed only with cameras, tape
recorders and phony "working press"
cards. In the thicket of mikes, the speak-
er is hard put to know which one is CBS
Approved For Release 2004/10/28 : CIA-RDP88-01314R000100500018-1