Witness

By Ralph Ingersoll

I was publisher at TIME, and the Man of the Year--the most newsworthy--was Adolf Hitler. TIME had a very striking photograph of Adolf--not deifying him but making him look very respectable. It began to worry the hell out of me. I did not see how TIME could put this picture on the cover without conveying some kind of tacit endorsement. In December, I stumbled on a fine lithograph of a Catherine wheel with naked bodies hanging from it, and down in one corner a little man playing a hymn of hate on an organ, and the man was Hitler. By the time I found it, Harry was away, and I was running the shop. The editors of TIME fell into violent disagreement over my proposal to substitute the lithograph for the colored portrait. In the end, I put the lithograph on.

The day Harry came back, I went to see him. He was standing over a copy of the issue. "Who did this?"

"I did."

"You did?"

Luce's face was white. "Have you any idea what you've done? A basic tradition destroyed...everything I've built...in one gesture."

We simply stood there, eyes fixed on each other.

"Spilt milk," Luce said. "Let's not discuss it."

--Ralph Ingersoll