That The New Yorker has become a sacred cow for the American mainstream as well as for the cultural elite has just been demonstrated by the top-priority treatment given by the press to Tina Brown’s departure from the magazine and S. I. Newhouse’s subsequent choice of David Remnick as editor. The changeover was awarded a front-page spread in the Times and a Page Six cartoon in the Post, among other choice spots; it’s hard to imagine any other periodical in this country arousing such curiosity about its behind-the-scenes doings. The whole fuss is nothing, though, compared with an even more seismic event in the magazine’s life: its 1985 takeover by Newhouse, and his ousting of longtime editor William Shawn, the man who for many years personified and defined The New Yorker.
The avid interest taken in two new chronicles of Shawn’s tenure, published a decade after its actual end, testifies to the fact that the aftershocks of the 1985 coup are still being felt. Since these books were written by Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta—two of Shawn’s authors and closest colleagues–unwary readers might well pick them up under the impression that they ought to deliver original or insightful views of the magazine and its famously fastidious, widely revered editor. They will be disappointed, however.
Ved Mehta, who came to the magazine as a young writer in 1960 and stayed on until Tina Brown slammed the door on him some thirty years later, has written a
