Warren Boroson, a veteran magazine editor and writer, died on March 12 at age 88.
A former colleague and longtime friend, Warren is the subject of a lengthy obituary in the March 23 New York Times, which condenses the bulk of his career into a single sentence, while devoting nearly half a page to a lone episode he seems fated to be remembered for. (Of course, without that episode he might not have gotten an obit in the Times at all, let alone a big free one written by Sam Roberts.)
The episode involved a famous 1964 poll of psychiatrists published in Fact magazine. The story based on the poll concluded that a majority of psychiatrists believed the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater to be mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency. Goldwater’s lawsuit against the magazine (and Boroson personally) went all the way to the Supreme Court and led to the creation of the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule, which says it is unethical for psychiatrists to pass judgment on people they have not personally examined.
The Goldwater Rule was back in the news in recent years, when a certain president’s behavior raised questions that members of the psychiatric profession appeared best equipped to address, if even they could.
I worked with Warren at Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance magazine in the late ‘80s, where he was a senior editor. The Goldwater experience hadn’t totally spoiled the fun of polling for him, but his polls were now confined to mutual fund managers and other financial worthies, whose ethics rules seem to have been a bit looser.
The Sylvia Porter editorial crew in Central Park, 1988. That's Warren kneeling beside
the magazine's editor, Pat Estess.
Warren had more contact with Sylvia than most of us; as far as I know she never set foot in our offices. Regarding her unfortunate late-career habit of publishing PR handouts virtually verbatim, he famously observed that, “half of America read Sylvia’s columns, and the other half wrote them.”
At some point prior to SPPFM he had worked at Money magazine under, I believe, its founding editor, William S. Rukeyser. Warren once told me that he’d discovered the common denominator among personal finance writers and editors: “We were all English majors.”
Warren also mentioned that he had worked in some capacity at Pageant magazine, whose boy wonder editor, Harris Shevelson, he recalled, “Told entire staff, on Friday, to come in Monday with 100 story ideas!” (This must have been early in Warren’s career because Shevelson was killed in a famous East River plane crash in 1959, having already left Pageant.)
Another stop in his career was Next, an early 1980s magazine about the future that, unfortunately, didn’t have much of one.
In 2017 Warren sent around an email with the subject line “My Contribution to the Goldwater Rule” that to my knowledge was never published elsewhere.
In that email Warren explained how he came to work for the late Ralph Ginzburg, the founder and editor of Fact magazine: “I had been a college English major, and now at age 29 eager to become a famous writer. But I found myself working in the public relations department of Western Electric, then a part of AT&T. So I jumped at the chance to join Ginzburg’s staff, first at Eros magazine, a pretentious, hard-cover sex magazine (Time called it a four-letter word: b-o-r-e); then at Fact, an angry, muck-raking magazine. Fact published some trash, but also excellent articles, including an essay by Arnold Toynbee against the Vietnam war.”
Separately, Warren told me that he had taken a magazine writing class with Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire in its 1960s New Journalism glory days, and a fellow classmate, Frank Brady, had helped him get the job with Ginzburg. (Coincidentally, Hayes and Ginzburg were contemporaries at Esquire, and Hayes had beaten out both him and Clay Felker for the top job there. Each went off to create their own magazines.)
As to the infamous Goldwater article, Warren explained that the poll was Ginzburg’s idea and that his own contribution was to have been “a psychological profile of Goldwater. I based my article mainly on a famous study of fascist sympathizers after World War II, a study called The Authoritarian Personality. And I spoke with a noted psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, author of ‘Young Man Luther,’ who was encouraging. My article argued, among other things, that Goldwater was trying to prove his masculinity with his relentlessly tough stance against the Soviet Union.”
But, he said, Ginzburg had someone “whom I never met, rewrite my article. He did, taking out all mention of authoritarianism. I was so furious that I resigned from the magazine and insisted that my name not appear on the article.”
Ginzburg, he added, “was a clever, ambitious, contradictory person; a liberal in politics, but also somewhat unscrupulous. His main failing: oversimplifying things. He did know a good deal about mailing lists and promotion.” Warren said he considered the Goldwater poll “slapdash.”
The Goldwater article, to the extent that Warren was responsible for it, wasn’t his only controversial contribution to Fact. Another was a piece about Reader’s Digest titled “The Pleasantville Monster,” in which he characterized the magazine as a “cross between the John Birch Society Newsletter and a Sears Roebuck catalogue” and went on from there.
That article also proved memorable, at least in Pleasantville. He was still persona non grata at The Digest when I worked there 30 years later.
