THE SWAMP ROOT CHRONICLE

Likable memoirs of a newshound and well-known editor, today best-remembered for helming the Atlantic Monthly. Manning jumped into his 50-year newspapering career in 1937 as a copy boy for his hometown Binghamton Press. Binghamton, N.Y., was the home of Swamp Root patent medicine, which had earned its maker sufficient millions to start up the Press as a response to his bad coverage in Binghamton's other paper. Manning left Binghamton to join the AP wire service during WW II, was released from the army for bad vision, then joined UPI in its Washington bureau, where he attended FDR's press conferences. The author then left reporting for a year to get a taste of college at Harvard. Afterward, UPI sent him to Lake Success, N.Y., where he covered the new United Nations and its early, immensely involved problems with the Arabs and Jews. This in turn led to a perch on the National Affairs department of Time magazine when Time was shaping much of the nation's consciousness. Manning's best chapter describes a long visit with Hemingway in Cuba for a Time cover story. Despite the festive visit with its drinks, fishing, and fabulous chat, Manning regrets not having shown in his piece that Hemingway was on the downside of his talent. Eventually, service at Time palled, and Manning set out to make his own mark as a writer. Free-lancing was harder than he'd foreseen, however, and he wound up as a press liaison for JFK and fell hard for the glow of Camelot. Manning was with a large batch of Cabinet members on a plane to Tokyo when the President was assassinated. At the Atlantic, he moved among the literati—Updike, Cheever, Bellow, Malamud, etc.—while shoring up the magazine with ever stronger articles. Witty and readable, if never impertinent. (Photographs—not seen.)