Gardner Botsford

Botsford had multiple connections to The New Yorker: his stepfather, Raoul Fleischmann, had cofounded it with Harold Ross, and he met A. J. Liebling, whom he would later edit, in wartime France.^[1][13] After Botsford graduated from Yale, Ross hired and fired him in quick succession, telling him he needed newspaper experience; he found it at the Jacksonville Journal.^[1] He was eventually hired back, and rose to be one of the most influential people at the magazine. At the height of his career, due both to his editorial work and his connection with Fleischmann, he "was perceived to have an unofficial veto power" on important decisions.^[14] One of the many writers he worked with, Jeremy Bernstein, recalls him as an exacting editor unafraid to profoundly transform a piece of writing, as he did in reworking Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard into a less mystical, more adventure-driven article.^[11] To force his writers to rethink their prose, Bernstein reports, Botsford would insert nonsense (like "A stitch in time makes Jack a dull boy") into the proofs of articles. One writer evidently referred to him as "The Ripper" for his editorial aggressiveness.^[15]

Botsford's later years at The New Yorker were sometimes difficult. His editing of his wife Janet Malcolm's writing on the murder trial of Jeffrey R. MacDonald was subjected to scrutiny, some of it harsh, when Malcolm was sued by one of her sources, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, for defamation.^[16] He clashed with the chief editor, William Shawn, over plans for the magazine's future; Shawn reportedly came to regard Botsford and his friend Roger Angell as "enemies."^[17] Botsford officially retired in 1982, though he continued to be involved.^[1][12] Not long before his death, he published a memoir of his patrician childhood, his experiences in the war, and his career at The New Yorker, titled A Life of Privilege, Mostly.^[5]

Botsford married twice. His first wife, Katharine Chittenden, known as Tass, appears only sparsely but unhappily in his memoir.^[3] She died in 1974.^[1] He married one of the prominent New Yorker writers he edited, Janet Malcolm, the following year; she had also been recently widowed.^[18] In late work published after Botsford's death, Malcolm revealed a number of previously unknown details about their relationship, including that they had had an extramarital affair before their spouses' deaths.^[19] They also seem to have shared a puckish sense of humor. Decades after the fact, Malcolm acknowledged that a snapshot she had presented as the work of a professional in her book on photography, Diana and Nikon, was actually an anonymous picture Botsford had found in a pile of rejected materials at The New Yorker and, as "an exercise in absurdism," framed and retained.^[20] Malcolm writes with relish of the "delicious condescension" of a reviewer of the book who relied heavily on the photograph in attacking her "wrongheadedness."