so then he badgers harold ross into having it vindicated in reader's digest. harold wrote. i don't know how kennedy twisted his arm but it did vindicate in reader's digest, he got his story. >> another thing about the new yorker and the war years was the so-called pony addition appeared and a smaller addition which is available the key thing and driving up circulation hersey has this relationship with Ãincredibly on the pt 109 piece. then what happens? how does it get to japan? how does he break through the walls of the cover-up? >> one should never assume the first lesson of life. [inaudible] i was initially a very bad journalist, i chastise myself publicly for that right now. hersey's hiroshima has this feeling of it expose. i assumed it was him getting in and getting out somehow unilateral because of the reporters had made a run of the story that way. they went there crazily length he has mixed feelings about hiroshima, nagasaki you think is a total criminal action. he knows he's going to cover the bomb but he doesn't know exactly how just yet. then he has l

so harold ross drew inspiration from himself.he comes back he says tashawn i will give you the green light. william shawn is really the driver on this whole story. and in terms of having sent him to first place, championed it to run at full length. champion it to run the single issue instead of four installments because people would've lost interest. >> host: glasses essential form. if the essential form is the intersection of the stories. not just having them chronologically one after another. >> guest: exactly. the cliffhanger as he intervenes a story as it only if it's one wrong peace. and so, ross is convinced to do it. i mean it is a hell of a gamble. not only are they about to drop this on their readers who have no idea that it is coming. they are in peace time motor this point. they are not expecting a huge wartime atrocity story. they are expecting -- they are innate moment of recovery of regaining again the feeling of normalcy. are of what albert ines i would say escaping to ease of pleasure without confronting the past.

harold ross never at that point had any aspirations for it to be big news operation. he had been a news man before that and as you say when pearl harbor happened, that was it. the magazine went to wartime printing right away. harold ross wrote to one of his coeditors, quote nothing feels funny anymore. >> and many of the writers were already on hand went off to work and really outdid themselves as writers anarchists. i think about a. j. a bubble who is a local feature writer who then went off and became, went off to report the war and north africa, eventually the normandy invasion and the rest of it and was whole generation who made that trip. >> they dispatch correspondence all over the world, in many theaters of war and they had a pretty deep relationship with the war department and their public relations operations. [inaudible] -- whose work i once edited was working for curtis lemay npr throughout the whole or so he was the linchpin of the new yorkers operation. >> was a lot of overlap like that, a lot of, not a lot but a handful of the correspondence anarchists w