Calley agreed and showed up, with Sack along, at Carl Fischer’s studio, a converted carriage house on East 83rd. As Lois describes the session, he thought Calley seemed nervous, so he told the makeup people to stay away while he and Calley talked informally, conversationally, on the ground floor. He told Calley he himself was a Korean veteran, and he told him some war stories, so that Calley would trust him. He said he wanted Calley to look at the camera, proud, not ashamed. Posed behind him would be the Asian kids. While Calley was being made up, Lois walked upstairs and cocked his thumb as a signal: Everything was set.

Lois did not share Sack's sympathy with Calley. Yes, he understood combat, he would say later; he had even killed a civilian once during the Korean War. He had been on guard duty when he spotted a man running away, with something in his hand. Lois was not going to fire on him, but as the man started climbing a fence, he turned around and looked at Lois and Lois looked at him. The man had a revolver and fired it at Lois. Lois shot back. But what was happening in Vietnam was very different, in Lois's mind. "They would go into the huts and they would beat up people. They did shit, they did shit. It was hit mentality--it was anti-communism," he said later.

After the photo session, as Hayes was looking at the Polaroid shots in his office, he called Jill Goldstein in to see them. She saw Calley with one Asian child, Calley with two. She started to gasp, but before she could say anything Hayes said, "By the way, I'd like to introduce Rusty Calley." She had not seen him sitting there.

Hayes asked her to fly to Salt Lake City to clear the story and cover with judge George W. Latimer, Calley's lawyer. When she got there, Latimer's young colleague read the story and set to work eliminating passages in which Calley spoke too harshly of the army, which was trying him, or in which he appeared to be actually confessing his guilt.

I'm sorry, I'm not myself today. I didn't think that I'd be uptight about it, talking about it. I thought, I've gone to Vietnam and I've done the job the best I could. I shouldn't have any hang-up about it. But after talking about it yesterday, I don't know. I thought about it. I couldn't sleep. I lay there and I asked myself, My god. Did you really hack up all those damned people? Did you really pull a machete out and--kkk! Chop into all those people and do all those horrors? Did you, and I got the answer back, Yes. I hacked up those people, I hacked up millions of people--not millions. But yes, I killed plenty of people, I killed lots of NVA, I killed lots of VC with weapons on, I killed lots of--people. I asked myself why did I do it? Why didn't I stand on a corner like everyone else and say, "It's wrong."

After the lawyer reworked the passage with Goldstein, Calley no longer confessed:

I'm sorry, I'm not myself today. I didn't think that I'd be uptight about it, talking about it. I thought, I've gone to Vietnam and I've come back. I shouldn't have any hang-up about it. But after talking about it yesterday, I don't know. I thought about it. I couldn't sleep. My country accuses me of slaughtering innocent people. Even the President calls it a massacre. I lay there and I asked myself, My god, who are they talking about? I only know, I went to Vietnam and I did my job there the best I could. I even asked myself why did I do it? Why didn't I stand on a corner like everyone else and say, "I won't go. It's wrong."

The change wiped out the coverline Esquire had planned--a condensed version of Calley's question: "Did you really pull a machete out and--kkk! Chop into all those people and do all those horrors?" Would the lawyers eliminate the cover image as well? Goldstein showed Judge Latimer several pictures of Calley with the Asian kids--all possibilities for the cover. She was casual about it, bringing the pictures out almost as an afterthought, but she knew the importance of getting Latimer's tacit approval. The magazine was already past its cover deadline. What if Latimer objected?

He looked at the pictures of Calley and the children. "Don't you think that's gilding the lily?" he asked. He raised no objections.

While Goldstein was in Latimer's office, a call came from Hayes: How were things going? Okay, she said, feigning nonchalance. There were no objections to the cover. She would catch a plane out of Salt Lake City that afternoon.

The cover of the November 1970 Esquire showed a smiling, friendly Rusty Calley, blond hairline receding, blue eyes crinkling with cheer, surrounded by somber Asian children. One leaned on his shoulder, the youngest--a toddler--sat in his lap, and a young girl stood comfortably in the crook of his arm. A blue background picked up the blue of his uniform. Yellow letters floated above his bead: "The Confessions of Lt. Calley."

It was the first picture Sack had ever seen that looked like the Rusty Calley he knew, but he couldn't understand the point of the cover--what was it supposed to say? He thought the original idea was more powerful. He looked at this cover and thought, Yeah, there's Rusty, good picture of Rusty. Lois didn't see it that way, or at least as he told the story years later, he didn't. He thought anyone who saw Calley as guilty would think, You slimeball, the idea you could pose with children. At the same time, he knew the cover was ambiguous, as he thought a great cover should be.

Anyone who went beyond the cover to "Backstage" would find John Sack's view of Calley prevailing over George Lois's. Comparing Calley to Sirhan Sirhan who killed Robert Kennedy, "Backstage" called Sirhan "his own creation, but Lieutenant Calley had all the guidance an ungrateful nation, which includes you and us, could lend him in arriving at the crossroads of destiny. Therefore, we reason, nothing in Calley is alien to us and if he feels moved to talk it behooves us to listen and heed."

The Calley cover stirred up more controversy than any Lois cover since Sonny Liston as Santa Claus. The furor began in the Esquire offices. The staff read the cover as a statement favoring Calley's side of the case. Esquire's new fiction editor, Gordon Lish, recalled it as "an absolute insult to decency, as an effort by Esquire to be playful about something which was in no wise susceptible of playfulness. We all felt Harold had gone too far." Connie Wood, Hayes's secretary, who vigorously opposed the war, was so enraged by the cover that she threatened to resign. Described by Lish as "the kind of person whose moral center was never in doubt," she was scandalized. "And I must tell you that I don't think there was an editor in that office who wasn't on her side," said Lish.

Hayes told Wood that deciding what was to go on the cover was not her province, it was his. He did not try to explain to her, or to anyone on the staff, what the cover meant. You either got it or you didn't. He did not try to justify it. Recalling the controversy as the most intense during his time at the magazine, Lish said, "Harold had been a Marine, had he not? And he understood these things. We didn't understand them at all. We took the common and easy view that this man was a villain, and I think such a view is an entirely superficial view, too little knowing what it is to be in combat, too little informed of the actuality of such an experience; our view was childlike and stupid, obtuse, and Harold was the only editor in publishing who sought to say…that there's another side to this story."

After the issue was published, Newsweek featured it in a critical report. Describing Calley's return to Vietnam to gather evidence for his trial, Newsweek said journalists could not get near him. Perhaps Esquire was to blame, said Newsweek: perhaps the army was protecting Calley's $150,000 exclusive contract with the Viking Press and Esquire magazine--a hypothesis Newsweek supported with a quotation from John Sack: "I don't hang out with Army brass. But I suppose they might think the Esquire articles and the book were useful to them. Like most career soldiers, Rusty believes that the people of the U.S. have ordered the soldiers to fight this war…and the soldiers are doing as best they can." Commercial arrangements with murderers were not without precedent, Newsweek noted, citing books by Caryl Chessman and Dr. Sam Sheppard, and Sirhan Sirhan's $15,000 for an interview with CBS, but Calley was getting a good deal more--$50,000 from Esquire alone, Newsweek reported erroneously.

In London, Helen Lawrenson read the Newsweek article and "was stunned--and appalled." She wrote Gingrich,

I will reserve judgment until I see the issue, but however it is presented, I am shocked at the immorality of paying Calley. Christ, it's like paying Ilse Koch to write an article on "How to Make Lampshades." To all the English I know, making Calley rich--rewarding him--is incomprehensible, especially for a magazine of Esquire's prestige. I'd love to know the thinking behind it--and, as I say, I haven't yet seen the issue.

Seeing the issue didn't change her views, which she laid down for Gingrich at length in a letter about a month later, but she had no objection to the cover, she said; in fact, the cover was "brilliant."

I can even understand running the articles to show what the American mind is like--or what this particular mind is like--and those of the people who praise Calley--as an example of a type of thinking--very real, very revealing…I do think, however, that the commentary in the front of the book about the article should have made it clear that Esquire does not really believe Calley is just any good-natured, innocent all-American Boy--to say, as it did, that he could have been "all the adult males of sound health in the United States," is certainly not true--as 70,000 adult males have deserted from the army rather than go to Vietnam, and many others have deserted in Vietnam and many more than that number have refused to go--either by leaving the country or otherwise evading the draft or just plain risking prison rather than go. Even some of those at Mylai refused to join in the massacre. Anyway, it is not a matter of "good taste" or "bad taste." It is a matter of moral principle--and even if, as I say, you ran the pieces as an important and revealing bit of Americana--which they certainly are--I don't think that Calley should be rewarded for what he did. (And so munificently, too.)

But enough. You will no doubt continue to get letters. The English I know are uniformly appalled. And one American woman I know--in her forties--said she felt like taking her American passport and burning it on the steps of the Embassy. This is a woman who loathes "hippies," student rebels, etc. etc.--so I was surprised at the vehemence of her reaction…

A couple of advertisers were upset enough about the cover to withdraw their ads from upcoming issues of Esquire--$200,000 worth of them, Hayes told Sack. Jerry Jontry, the former advertising director who was by now a vice-president of the company, reported to Hayes that neither Volkswagen nor Porsche, which had together bought nine advertising pages in 1970, would advertise in Esquire again. Jontry understood Volkswagen thought the Calley cover was "like showing 'Hitler talking in a synagogue.' " Jontry arranged a luncheon meeting with the advertising director and the marketing director from Volkswagen. Jontry would go, along with two other members of the Esquire business staff. "We will need you as a key member of the salvage squad," he said to Hayes.

Possibly in preparation for the meeting, Hayes made notes outlining his justification for the Calley cover and, for that matter, the Calley confessions. His notes provide the most complete and reasoned account of Hayes's thoughts about the Calley story and the way Esquire played it.

As Hayes saw it, the public had missed an essential point in the Calley affair, "not who had killed all those people but who was responsible. Calley was a servant of the people."

The question was: "How to force this point?"

"If he was not a mad, bestial killer, how could the public be challenged to reconsider its attitude?

"If he alone was guilty, the cover was cruel and savage.

"But if he were no more guilty than any other soldier carrying out an act of war, what next possibility does that cover lead to?"

Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials ("no radical," Hayes wrote in the margin), "has publicly implied we are trying the wrong man. On precedent of Nuremberg and the Japanese War Trials, General Westmoreland--his subordinates and superiors--bear the guilt." If the military was on trial, the military ought not to be acting as judge. Instead, a presidential commission ought to investigate U.S. war atrocities, although Hayes doubted President Nixon would take such an action.

Was showing Calley with the Asian children like showing Hitler in a synagogue? "If there had been such a cover at that time, perhaps we would never have had a Buchenwald," Hayes wrote.

At no point did Esquire back down from its decision to run the cover. When readers wrote in accusing Esquire of bad taste, Esquire replied to the letters with an "Editor's Note" quoting Sack on Calley: "He's kind, he's considerate, he's compassionate, and when he sees little children, he wants to hug them." Sack hoped readers would study the cover photo and say, "He isn't a murderer. And ask, Well, who is the murderer then? And answer, It's us."

Arnold Gingrich responded to criticism of the cover--specifically to Newsweek's description of it as "gleefully tasteless"--with uncharacteristic sharpness. In his publisher's column for the issue containing the second installment of Calley's story, February 1971, Gingrich accused readers of demonstrating prejudice when they assumed Calley's guilt before he had even gone to trial. "People wrote in likening the portrayal of Lieutenant Calley, surrounded by Vietnamese children, to a depiction of Hitler, kissing Jewish babies on their way to the gas chambers, and to Himmler, fondling little Poles and Czechs, before handing them over to waiting S.S. officers." Yet, said Gingrich, the cover appeared and the letters were penned before the trial had even started.

Readers were not even listening to what Calley said in the story, said Gingrich. In the first installment he had spoken against the war, yet hawks still hailed him as a hero and doves still maligned him as a monster. The cover had given them all a chance to sound off on their tightly held views.

All Esquire was trying to do with that cover, Gingrich explained, was what it always tried to do with its cover--"present an unexpected aspect of any subject that is currently in the national consciousness." Often, he said, that simply meant presenting subjects with an open mind, and that was why Esquire liked George Lois--"his is the openest mind we've encountered, in a long spell of dealing with artists and designers."

The furor over the Calley cover had reminded Gingrich "that just as there is no puritan more austere than a reformed rake, there is nobody more bigoted than an outraged liberal." He closed with a suggestion that readers of the second installment ask themselves, "in the light of as much as you may know about the case, what you would have done, if you had been there, and in this man's shoes."

Calley's trial by an army court-martial jury began on November 12, 1970, in Fort Benning, Georgia. A couple of days into the trial, Sack got a call from Hayes...  More

Read a scene from Lieutenant Calley

Buy an autographed book
from the Author's Guild

Buy an autographed book
from amazon.com

Buy
It Wasn't Pretty, Folks,
But Didn't We Have Fun?
Esquire in the 60s
by Carol Polsgrove
from amazon.com

Read about Lieutenant Calley
in Vietnam, We've All Been There:
Interviews with American Writers
by Eric James Schroeder 

     Read about Lieutenant Calley
in Dictionary of Literary Biography

Other books by John Sack