In the International Bomber Command Centre’s records, Flight Sergeant Jan Ryszard Bychowski of the RAF was killed in a crash of his Avro Lancaster aircraft on May 22, 1944. He was buried in Newark-on-Trent Cemetery, Polish Plot Grave H320B (exhumed July 29, 1974, for reburial in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York).
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Magda Gabor was the eldest of the three Gabor sisters, who were famous enough in their era for a 750-page book called Those Glamorous Gabors: Bombshells from Budapest, Great Courtesans of the 20th Century to be published in 2013. It was awarded the prize for Best Biography at the Hollywood Book Festival that year.
Invariably described as actresses and socialites, the sisters made nineteen trips to the altar. Magda was married six times, Eva had five husbands, and Zsa Zsa had eight. The first of Magda’s husbands was a man she called Count Jan de Bychowsky.
I was aware of the man because my mother talked about her cousin, “a shoe salesman” (with apologies to shoe salesmen, this was not a compliment) who married Magda Gabor and was renamed by her Count Jan de Bychowsky of Warsaw, which made her a countess.
There is no such inherited title that I could find in a determined search.
But in Those Glamorous Gabors, the author, Darwin Porter, writes, “The count was the scion of one of the oldest and most prestigious families in all of Poland, his pedigree stretching back to the days of the Vikings.”
After meeting Jan in London in 1937, Magda wrote to her mother, Jolie, in Budapest: “I’ve fallen in love with the Count of Warsaw. He is a divine creature, so strong, so masculine, so handsome, so intelligent…can you imagine your Magda one day presiding as the Countess of Warsaw? Oh, I forgot to mention. He is the sole owner of the Bychowsky family castle outside Warsaw.”
“When Jolie learned to her disappointment,” Porter writes, “that the Bychowsky castle had been stripped of most of its art and furnishings, she sent her daughter and her new son-in-law as a wedding present, two truckloads of antique reproductions. ‘I’ve learned that the count had a prestigious title but no money. The family fortune and its treasures had disappeared at the end of World War I.’”
Descriptions of Jan emphasize his military bearing and his skills as a fighter pilot. A grainy uncredited photograph in the book of him in full flight gear is captioned “prior to an aerial dogfight against the Nazis.”
By 1939, the book reports, “Magda found she and her husband were growing increasingly estranged. She wanted to retain her title as the Countess of Warsaw, but Jan, for nights in a row, didn’t come home…He kept telling her he was preparing his regiment for the imminent invasion of Hitler’s forces from the West.”
Three weeks before the invasion, Magda wrote to her mother that she had fallen in love with another man, a fighter pilot named Zdzislaw Henneberg. “Nuci, Nuci,” she wrote her mother, I have just learned that when I divorce Jan, I will have to surrender my title as Countess of Warsaw. Zdzislaw is a common man. He has no title. But I will make the sacrifice to be with the man I love.”
Once the war started, according to the story, Zdzislaw went to join the battle and Jan, unaware of his wife’s affair, succeeded in getting them both across the border into Romania, en route to England, where Jan said he would “fly again in a plane to fight the Nazis.”
Zdzislaw and Jan, the book relates, both joined the Poles who formed RAF units, which were legendarily gallant and successful in the Battle of Britain. (Official records list Zdzislaw as a fighter pilot who was killed in 1941.)
In a visit to Magda, Jan, who apparently had never discovered his wife’s infidelity, asked for a divorce because he was in love with a “ruddy-cheeked Devonshire girl. I call her my English Rose.”
“After packing a few possessions, he left the cottage,” Porter reported. “She never saw him again.”
In her 1975 memoir, Jolie Gabor wrote that “Magda returned to Budapest and never learned what happened to Count Bychowsky. Actually, he died in 1944 when his Hurricane was shot down over the English Channel.”
Magda’s love life progressed. In Budapest she fell in love with Dr. Carlos Garrido, Portugal’s ambassador to Hungary, and “through him,” according to the book, “Magda became a heroine of the Hungarian Underground, battling the forces of Hitler then occupying her homeland.”
Wikipedia’s biography of Magda carries this entry about her marriages:
“Jan Bychowsky (m. November 19, 1937 – May 22, 1944; his death), a reputed Polish count and RAF pilot. Gabor gave her name as “Magda de Bychowsky” and her marital status as divorced on a February 11, 1946, airline passenger manifest, accessed on ancestry.com December 30, 2011; according to this form, she had left her city of residence (Lisbon, Portugal), where she lived at 17 Buenos Aires, and arrived in New York to visit her family.”
She soon married William M. Rankin, a screenwriter, and then four more men before dying at age eighty-one in 1997 in Palm Springs, California.
Jan de Bychowsky’s life details in the available online databases always list his date of death as May 22, 1944 – the day when Jan Ryszard Bychowski was killed. I could never find any reference to Jan de Bychowsky’s military service, anywhere at any time.
Tellingly, in The Glamorous Gabors there is an italic note on page 45, where the count makes his first appearance, that says: In some news accounts, Magda was incorrectly reported to have married the similarly named Sgt. Jan Bychowski, who was a young poet who died in England on May 22, 1944, at the age of twenty-two.
Jolie Gabor, Magda’s mother, moved to New York, where she opened a jewelry shop on Madison Avenue. My mother told me that she would stop in the store occasionally and the subject of a family connection would come up.
Alas, I never pursued the saga with my mother to its logical conclusion — that the count was no count and that his death was conveniently listed as May 1944 in a plane crash.
What did happen to “Jan de Bychowsky”? He apparently kept in touch with my mother. She shared with me a letter she had from him in 1960 from Paris, where he was living, including the detail that his new apartment had an “ensuite bathroom.”
I can’t pin it down, but that may be when my mother told me the story of her cousin, “the shoe salesman.”
This is the picture and caption said to be Magda’s husband in the Gabor biography
The lineup of reporters,columnists, and editors leaving the Washington Post in the past couple of years is invariably presented as an exodus of “stars” and reflects the problems that the Post has had in the latter years of Jeff Bezos’s ownership.
That the Post began losing money after a successful run and has had upheavals in newsroom leadership in the troubled tenure of the publisher Will Lewis is an undisputed reality.
But I want to make a case for aspiring journalists, and even those with some years of experience, that this may be the right time to try for a job at the Post. Why? Because while nearly all of the stars who are leaving excelled in their various roles, it was the Post that gave them the platform from which to display their talent.
Reaching back decades in the annals of the Post to support my point: In the 1970s, much of the paper’s foreign coverage relied on young stringers in far-flung trouble spots. There was Bill Branigin in Tehran during the revolution there, Michael Dobbs in Eastern Europe as Soviet hegemony reached its apogee, Caryle Murphy in southern Africa in apartheid’s heyday, and Karen DeYoung in West Africa.
Branigin, Dobbs, and Murphy (who later won a Pulitzer) became Post stalwarts with impressive careers, and DeYoung has had one of the most illustrious records of anyone at the paper — as a correspondent, senior editor, and, to this very day, an ace on the national security beat.
DeYoung’s editors on the national desk, relative newcomers, talk about her with enormous respect for what she has done and continues to do in these exceptionally turbulent times.
Today’s staff at the Washington Post, even after buyouts and layoffs, is considerably larger than it was when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as local reporters, made history that is still the benchmark for journalism of impact.
And the Post’s circulation in the Washington, D.C., area then was roughly half of what it is today around the world — the majority of which, of course, is now digital rather than print.
The Post’s strength came from two things: the commitment of Katharine Graham and her family to the company and the newsroom, and the Post’s overwhelming dominance in the Washington advertising marketplace, which was its principal source of revenue.
As Mrs. Graham would say, “The Post is Woodward and Bernstein and Woodward and Lothrop,” the downtown department store, now long gone.
I was there in that era, and we always felt that in the competition with the New York Times for stature, the Times had resources we could not match, although we were more aware of that than was generally believed.
But the Post’s energy was a great asset. The Style section reinvented coverage of the arts, society, culture, and even politics everywhere, including at the stuffier Times. And during the tenure of Leonard Downie Jr. (1991-2008), the Post set a record for the most Pulitzer Prizes awarded under a single executive editor — twenty-five.
The stars leaving the Post now seem mainly to be going to the Times and The Atlantic, currently among the acknowledged leaders in legacy media (“legacy” meaning that they have been around from well before the internet upended the business model of news).
But my personal and not altogether uninformed view is that there are already so many notables at the Times and The Atlantic that space in the limelight is crowded. I won’t name names, but my sense is that a number of the new arrivals are less visible in their roles than they were at the Post.
The competition for major play is intense. And stars tend to be impatient for luster. Many of the biggest news stories carry multiple bylines these days, diminishing the glory that goes with exclusives.
So, what the Post badly needs now is this:
The attention of Jeff Bezos. What does his attention mean? A good start would mean a renewal of his initial enthusiasm for the Post’s prospects: editorially by adding staff, a savvy approach to digital reach, and imaginative ideas for reinventing the company’s business model.
Bezos has said publicly that his intention is to return the Post to greatness, as he did in the early years of his ownership. Personally, and apparently politically, his priorities seem to have changed. We will see whether the mission can be resurrected.
The second requirement is to attract, nurture, and feature reporters and editors among whom will come the next generation of stars.
I can say this with certainty because all those many years ago, I saw it happening to my generation’s reporters and editors at the Post, on their way to being the absolute best in journalism. Seeing talent emerge is a thrill — and worth the effort for all concerned.
For those of us who value the extraordinary role that C-SPAN plays in our polarizing and cacophonous era, this expansion of its reach on what are now the most important media platforms is a cause for major celebration. Congratulations to all who have worked so effectively to make it possible.
September 3, 2025
We are pleased to announce that beginning this fall, all three C-SPAN networks will be available on YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV—the two largest live streaming television platforms in the United States. This expansion significantly broadens access to C-SPAN’s trusted, nonpartisan coverage of the nation’s democratic process.
“C-SPAN’s mission is to bring American democracy unfiltered to as many viewers as possible. Today’s announcement guarantees that millions more Americans will now have access to their government in action,” said C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist.
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Sam Feist who joined C-SPAN last winter as CEO, was recruited from CNN, where he was the Washington bureau chief. His career in public affairs programming began, he says, when as a ninth grader in Ridgefield, Connecticut, he organized a candidate debate for the town’s first selectman on behalf of the League of Women Voters.
C-SPAN leadership is a natural career pinnacle.
In a January conversation as he was settling in, we focused on three issues that will shape the future for an enterprise that for forty-five years has been supported by cable companies. C-SPAN now consists of three television networks, a radio channel, and a website that maintains a vast archive of material — all available for free.
(1) Funding and Distribution. How to enhance the resources and reach of C-SPAN. The cable companies have provided almost 100 percent of C-SPAN’s revenues, and with the rise of competing streaming services, the viewership available to C-SPAN through cable has been reduced by as much as 40 percent.
(2) Programming. How to make best use of the 24/7 broadcast schedule — with live programming, events, documentaries, and interviews developed and hosted by C-SPAN staff. Full coverage of the Senate and the House of Representatives is, of course, the primary content when they are in session and was the initial reason for C-SPAN’s creation in 1979.
(3) Content Moderation. All callers to C-SPAN are screened before they get on the air. Now that Facebook, X, et al., have decided that anything goes when it comes to people’s comments, what will happen to C-SPAN’s discourse? Can it maintain logic, common sense, and accuracy?
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“Cord cutting from traditional cable and satellite companies has had an enormous impact on our distribution,” Feist says, “particularly as so many cable customers switch to YouTube TV, Fubo TV and Hulu, which don’t currently carry C-SPAN.”
From the outset, the cable industry has seen a benefit to broadcasting the sessions of Congress, where members can reach constituents directly — and without commentary, a political plus for them.
The owners of what are known in technical lingo as vMVPDs — “virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors” — like You Tube TV, Fubo TV and Hulu are all purely profit-focused. C-SPAN, by contrast, is considered a public service and not a financial asset.
So, why bother to carry it? the owners ask.
FAST channels — “Free Ad-Supported Television” — are the latest approach to streaming. From the earliest days of broadcast, viewers got whatever was on air without paying for it, and endured advertising in return. This has now become accepted practice in streaming as well. Today’s streaming behemoths like Netflix and Apple TV+ have vast numbers of paying subscribers and now seek growth by offering lower monthly fees to those viewers willing to watch ads in the middle of their programs.
If C-SPAN were to create a FAST of its own, would it for the first time in its history use advertising to pay for it?
C-SPAN’s challenge — and Feist’s immediate objective — is to persuade vMVPDs and FASTs to include C-SPAN in their packages to subscribers. There are two ways to do this: Start selling advertising would be the most dramatic change, or lobby members of Congress to take action, reminding them that C-SPAN covers what they do.
Politicians are always attuned to their self-interest, and Feist believes they may advocate for all streaming platforms to include C-SPAN. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) are the first members of Congress to publicly make that case.
Feist is also exploring ways to add revenue in the manner of other nonprofit media outlets: subscriptions, donations, paid events, and philanthropic grants. He says that C-SPAN will not ask for government funding, as NPR and PBS still do — and which makes those networks subject to political pressure.
To repeat: C-SPAN is and never will be a government enterprise, but its purpose is conveyed in this motto: “Democracy Unfiltered.”
So, what all these acronyms and money issues mean for C-SPAN is this: The “good old days” of a single funding and distribution source (the cable industry) has to be reinvented for the digital era.
Now.
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On the question of programming — what brings viewers to C-SPAN’s networks — Feist wants to emphasize live programs: news as it is being made. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News do that, surrounded by commentators describing what is happening and telling viewers what they should think.
C-SPAN can let viewers decide for themselves. But that means being present at those events, which in turn requires staff and cameras — back to funding.
My greatest personal interest is the programming that C-SPAN itself creates. For years, Booknotes, Brian Lamb’s Sunday evening interviews with authors, was C-SPAN’s most popular show. (C-SPAN does not collect audience ratings. But when I published books based on those conversations, they were national bestsellers.)
Lamb was insistent that he was not the “star” of Booknotes, but he definitely was, for his distinctive style of preparation and questioning. Like him, NPR and PBS hosts do not come draped in the glamour and paychecks of commercial newscasters. Their fans are drawn to the style they project — less bombastic, less opinionated, curious rather than pontifical.
Identifying talent is an art. There are many people with the right talent in the broader media world for C-SPAN to hire. Sam Feist and his colleagues need to look for them.
As a publisher, I have watched with interest and admiration the weekend programming of “Book TV,” two days during which nonfiction books are featured at events or interviews. The audience for book programming is significant; stores like Politics and Prose in Washington draw good-size audiences for their events and then stream most of them, which can attract thousands of views.
Feist intends to help venues improve their setting for events (lights and sound quality, for example). Making the authors and locations partners in production would enhance the experience for all concerned.
C-SPAN’s documentary series on presidents, first ladies, and other historical figures and periods have been very good. Again, the goal is programming that is absorbing, without becoming so expensive that it is out of reach.
So, this is the programming objective: Do more with what is already there. The memorable line from the film Field of Dreams applies: “If you build it, they will come.”
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How the viewer call-ins will evolve — the open lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are a unique feature of C-SPAN’s programs — in a world of social media free-for-all remains to be seen. In live programming, fact-checking isn’t feasible. When a caller descends into rants, conspiracies, or insults, the hosts have always had the prerogative to end the call.
Free speech and censorship are especially sensitive topics in this era. Maintaining standards is another of C-SPAN’s goals in our time of media mayhem.
When Sam Feist learned that C-SPAN was looking for a new CEO, he knew immediately that he wanted the job. Predictably there were those in the commercial media who said that he would be consigned to a niche.
Maybe, but what a classy niche to be in.
The New York Times, Tuesday, May 30, 1944
New York Flier Is Killed
The Polish Telegraph Agency reported yesterday in a London dispatch that Sgt. Jan Bychowski of 49 East Ninety-sixth Street, New York, had been killed in action last week over Germany. He was the navigator of a Polish air force bomber. The son of a Polish psychiatrist, Dr. Gustav Bychowski, the flier came to the United States with his father after the German invasion of Poland. He volunteered for the Polish forces and trained in Canada before going overseas.
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Jan Ryszard Bychowski was born in Vienna in 1922. His father, Gustav, was there studying psychiatry with Sigmund Freud, on his way to becoming a prominent psychoanalyst in Poland and then for decades in New York. Taking advantage of the city’s nightlife, he married Ellen, a “music hall dancer” according to the brief description that In the Garden of Memory gives her.
The marriage did not last. In the 1940s, Ellen was living in Buenos Aires with her partner, Zosia, and sent affectionate letters to her son, Rysz, then serving with the Polish forces in Britain’s Royal Air Force. Written in English to get past censors, she wrote in May 1943: “My dear precious boy, I am so happy of your letters and beg you above everything else to take care of yourself, so that we may find you healthy and victorious back home…always your Ellen.”
She would never see him again.
Gustav’s second wife was Maryla Auerbach, “elegant. pretty and well educated” and “from the rich Jewish plutocracy.” In the Garden of Memory observes that she was “certainly a much more suitable wife for a renowned Warsaw psychiatrist.”
Among the many relatives Joanna Olczak-Ronikier writes about in her book, Rysz stands out as heroic, a martyr of course, but also for his charm and talent. Joanna’s chapter about him is called “The Boy from Heaven.”
Although only twenty-two when he was killed, he left behind a remarkable collection of writing, journalism, essays, and fiction, curated by his family and donated to the Jewish Historical Society.
I was especially struck by this item from “The “March of Time,” a national radio broadcast, on July 16, 1942, produced by Time Inc. and hosted by Westbrook Van Voorhis:
Van: This week from Canada…A twenty-year-old Polish youth who had come 20,000 miles from bombed-out Warsaw…stands at our March of Time microphone…about to leave on the last lap towards his destination. Journey’s end for him is in the air over Europe, raining death on the Nazi conquerors of his country, Richard Bychowski.
Richard: I came here tonight because I wanted to say goodbye to a fellow countryman of mine in exile in the United States. He was the composer of the music the orchestra is now playing. His name, Jan Ignace Paderewski. His temporary address…Arlington National Cemetery.
Goodbye, Mr. Paderewski…it is fitting that you are near the great George Washington. Each of you was his country’s first leader when that country gained its freedom and the day will come again when our Poland will be a free and beautiful land.
The full interview in Rysz’s voice is here
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Rysz (I never heard him called anything else) graduated in May 1939 from the Stefan Batory High School. Batory was a King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in the 1500s, and his name is featured on monuments, streets, and schools all over Poland. The school was secular. In its records, Rysz was described as being of “Mosaic” origins, essentially a euphemism for Jewish.
A school friend, Koscik Jelenski, wrote years later that when he arrived at Batory, “I was immediately taken under the wing of a twelve-year-old boy (like me) lively, likeable blond boy with freckles and a snub nose… I remember that on the second day we ‘bribed’ a fat boy to whose two-person desk I was assigned. Rysiek sat in his place and from then we practically never apart.”
He describes how in their second year together Rysz got the answer wrong to a math quiz, and the class began chanting “Zyyt,” a slur of the word for Jew. When a “bloody fight began,” he continued, “only five of our thirty-plus classmates fought on our side.”
Rysz was a Polish patriot to his core, willing to give his life to his country’s defense. But the animus to Jews he encountered, even in his Polish flight unit, endured. Shortly before he died, he wrote to his father that he could never again live in Poland.
The summer after he graduated, he visited a place in the countryside where Joanna, then four years old, and my brother Robert, then eight, were on vacation. A photograph of them captured their unsuspecting innocence about the German invasion that was about to happen. It is the cover of In the Garden of Memory.
Rysz’s parents and his sister Monica, a toddler, left Warsaw when the war started, and only months later was he persuaded to join them instead of the resistance in formation. Because Gustav was already a famous psychoanalyst, the Bychowskis managed to get visas to the United States.
His parents went to New York, while Rysz enrolled as a student at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. The transcripts showed him as “a determined student as he encountered this new language and world.”
After a year, Rysz left for Ontario, where Poles were being trained for roles in the RAF. These Polish fighters in exile were considered exceptionally formidable. In the Battle of Britain in 1940, the Poles scored the highest kill rate against the Luftwaffe of any of the RAF units.
Rysz wrote of his growing commitment to aviation: “Up in the air there’s such perfect peace and quiet that you don’t want to return to earthly matters.” An article he wrote about the Poles training in Canada appeared in the New York Times, which was probably what led to his appearance on “The March of Time.”
He completed the training in December 1942 and went to Britain, where he qualified as a flight sergeant, flying as a navigator in bombing missions over Germany. Squadron 300, also known as the Masovian, had as its motto We Fight to Rebuild.
The squadron flew 3,891 sorties and spent 20,264 hours in the air, according to official records. It was involved in most of the major air offensives in the war. After Poland fell, aviators began to organize in France and relocated to Britain as the last country with the means to challenge the Germans. In all, 19,400 Poles served in the RAF, the largest non-British contingent. Two thousand were killed.
In the Garden of Memory’s description of Rysz’s life over the next two years reflected intensity and an effort to manage stress: “He went out on dates and to dances. He fell in love, and it was requited, writing his family, ‘You should be pleased, because she isn’t anyone’s wife…and there’s no question of matrimony.’” In September 1943 he was promoted to the rank of senior sergeant navigator.
But he felt growing bitterness about what he found among many Poles in the RAF regarding what was happening to the Jews in Poland. A letter to his father that was later reprinted in books and articles reflected his anger:
“My colleagues in the air force were either indifferent or openly pleased…For weeks on end I have seen boys smiling scornfully at the sight of headlines in the Polish Daily about the murder of Jews…I can see that there was nothing but indifference (in Poland) surrounding the Jewish people as they went to their death and contempt that they were not fighting, satisfaction that ‘its not us.’ The Jews could not escape because en masse because they had no where to go. Outside the ghetto walls there was an alien country, an alien population, and that seems to be the terrible truth…”
His conclusion:
“I hope I shall come out of the war safe and sound. I am already determined not to return to Poland…above all I’m afraid of knowing the whole truth about the reaction of Polish society to the extermination of the Jews…people who found it possible to ignore their destruction, occupy their homes and denounce or blackmail the survivors.
“That’s all I wanted to tell you, dearest Daddy.
“Maybe one day, years from now, I’ll go back there to gather material for a book about the Jewish tragedy that I would like to write.”
What happened on May 23, 1944, is summarized in a report in Britain’s National Archives: Rysz’s plane, an Avro Lancaster 1, left Faldingworth station at night with a target of Dortmund in Germany. The plane “suffered engine problems and turned back, jettisoning some of its bomb load to the sea. On return to Faldingworth, the Lancaster struck the gun butts.”
Two other members of the crew were killed also.
Rysz was buried in the Polish plot at Newark-on-Trent Cemetery.
The files at the Jewish Historical Society, so carefully maintained by Rysz’s family for decades, contain scores of condolence letters to Gustav and the family. I saw Gustav quoted as saying in his grief that if he had not had his daughter Monica, he would not have been able to go on.
In 1974, after Gustav’s death at seventy-seven, on a dance floor with Maryla in Morocco, Monica initiated the recovery of Rysz’s ashes, which were buried alongside his father’s headstone at a cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, outside New York City.
The next piece in the series will be the sequel to this story, and it will be, I assure you, surprising.
Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” July 18, 2016:
The idea of Trump writing an autobiography didn’t originate with either Trump or Schwartz. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose company, Advance Publications, owned Random House at the time, and continues to own Condé Nast, the parent company of this magazine. “It was very definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouse’s idea,” Peter Osnos, who edited the book, recalls. GQ, which Condé Nast also owns, had published a cover story on Trump, and Newhouse noticed that newsstand sales had been unusually strong.
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By the time Jane Mayer’s piece appeared, I had been in publishing for more than thirty years and had been responsible, one way or another for more than a thousand books, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and many bestsellers, among them Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal”
Now, in the midst of a campaign in which Trump would be elected president, I needed to explain to strangers who would ask — with bafflement — why and how I, of all people, could have been responsible for the book that had elevated Trump from a New York developer and tabloid mainstay to national stature.
A New York Review of Books essay this summer headlined “The Apprentice’s Sorcerer” said that Donald Trump was Si Newhouse’s “most consequential discovery.” The essay was about the new book by Michael M. Grynbaum, “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America” which told the Newhouse-Trump-Cohn story in detail, and in which I have an editorial cameo.
I described working with Trump in The New Yorker and in my book”An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen”, so there is no need to repeat that here. (Spoiler: It was, especially in retrospect, fascinating because everyone has Trump opinions. Mine are based on experience.)
As Mayer’s article disclosed, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal”, now had great regrets about what had been an excellent job channeling Trump in the 1980s. My editorial role was, by my standards, relatively modest. I did design the book’s cover and was much involved with the marketing and publicity plans.
My last contact with Trump was in the early 1990s.
(The success of “The Art of the Deal” is enduring. In 2025 it still makes the New York Times’s monthly audio bestseller list.)
There are two aspects of the saga of Trump, Roy Cohn, and the book that I think may be of interest based on what is, after all, my firsthand knowledge:
(1) Just how deeply was Si Newhouse really involved in the book and Trump’s career ascendancy?
(2) What happened when Newhouse suggested to Random House that it publish an autobiography by his close friend Roy Cohn?
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To publish a book with Trump was definitely Newhouse’s idea. And as a recently hired senior editor at the Random House Trade Books imprint, I was designated to join Si and the imprint’s newly named publisher, Howard Kaminsky, at a meeting in Trump’s office in 1985.
I thought of wrapping an epic Russian novel, Vasily Aksyonov’s “Generations of Winter”, in shiny black paper with Trump’s name in gold lettering to show him how his book would look.
In an hour or so, the deal was made: a $500,000 advance payment, with Schwartz receiving half. No lawyer or agent was involved.
As the project progressed, Newhouse never again asked me about it. The book sold a million copies in a matter of months and was a number-one bestseller in the U.S. and in the U.K. as well. Si did join me on the receiving line at the lavish book party in December 1987 at Trump Tower. Kaminsky had been fired, so I stood next to Trump, welcoming guests.
Newhouse’s only other role was to personally offer Trump $2.5 million, over lunch on Trump’s yacht anchored in the East River, for a sequel published in 1990 called “Surviving at the Top”. “The Art of the Deal” had had returns of fewer than 10 percent of unsold copies. The return rate on the sequel, as I recall, was closer to 90 percent, a flop.
So, no praise. And no regrets from Newhouse, ever.
And, finally, I have no idea whether Si and Donald ever discussed their publishing collaboration.
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Roy Cohn had died in 1986, and so he did not live to see Trump’s book-related triumph or his rise to greater prominence thereafter.
But in the summer of 1984, Newhouse had alerted the chairman of Random House Inc., Robert L. Bernstein, that Cohn might be prepared to write a memoir. Grynbaum quotes Bernstein to the effect that, given the provenance, a book by Roy Cohn would be something for Random House to consider seriously.
Bernstein directed the Random House trade imprint’s editorial director, Jason Epstein, to meet with Cohn. Epstein brought me along to a dinner at 21. Seated in an upstairs banquette, we spent a good-natured couple of hours. I do remember that Cohn ate what he said was his usual fare, tuna fish salad on a bed of lettuce.
Subsequently, a book was commissioned, to be ghostwritten by Sidney Zion, a New York Times reporter.
I don’t know how the project developed (I was not involved), except to say that it was not published at Random House. It did appear in January 1988 from Lyle Stuart, a small independent publisher that specialized in splashy titles — preferably those turned down elsewhere, so they were cheap to acquire.
“The Autobiography of Roy Cohn by Sidney Zion” can be had now on Amazon for $76.50, two-day delivery.
Si Newhouse and Roy Cohn were boyhood friends. It was reported that in Cohn’s final years, as he was on trial and disbarred, Newhouse regularly attended the proceedings.
The Newhouse family owned Random House Inc. from 1980 until 1998. I cannot say with certainty that “The Art of the Deal” (and its sequel) was the only book Si himself bought. But if there were others, none had the long-term consequences of that one.
In the mid-1930s, Maks Horwitz-Walecki, a member of the Polish Communist Party, had been living in Moscow for several years, working on the Executive Committee of Comintern, the international organization of Communist parties.
He and his wife Stefania lived at the Hotel Lux, which before the revolution had been one of the best hotels in Moscow. Since then it had lost much of its former splendor. Maks and Stefa’s rooms were not big, and when guests came to visit, camp beds were set up for them, with not much space to squeeze one’s way between them. Maks’s room was full of books and periodicals that did not fit on the shelves, so he kept them in the bathtub, which was never used because the bathroom had no hot-water supply. They washed in a communal bathroom shared by everyone on the entire floor.
Maks was in a difficult situation. Stalin had not forgotten that Maks had dared to speak against him in the past, and he never forgave his opponents. The stronger Stalin’s authority grew, the worse Maks was rated within the Party apparatus, and the lesser a role he played in the public forum, the more unbearable and despotic he became within the family circle. His sister Kamilla respected his knowledge and authority, and was extremely fond of him, but with time they differed in their views more and more frequently. She resented his political disloyalties, and also the disorder in his personal life.
For he was leading a double life. Although he had been living with his wife Stefania for twenty-six years, in Moscow he had taken up with a girl almost a quarter of a century younger than himself. Józefina Swarowska, known as Josza, was an Austrian, the daughter of a famous Viennese prima ballerina. She was brought up in Vienna, in a wealthy home and a refined atmosphere. Her brother gained a higher education in music and became a well-known violinist, leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, but she had other ambitions. Very early on in life she became involved in communist activities; she met Maks at an international congress, and they fell in love.
She followed him to Moscow, and in 1932 she bore him a son, who was named Piotr for Maks’s tsarist-era pseudonym. Maks helped Josza to find work at the Comintern Secretariat, and put her up in a nice, two-room apartment on Gorky Street, but he never had the courage to legalize the relationship. He went on living with his wife, who eventually found out all about it and demanded a divorce. But Maks refused to give his consent. His grown-up children, Kasia and Staś, bore immense grudges against him. In their view he was making himself and his relatives miserable.
The year 1936 marked an intensification of the Great Terror. There were mass repressions and show trials. Some believed in the treachery of those arrested, others questioned it; while people consoled each other that it was a mistake that would be sorted out immediately, at the same time mutual mistrust and suspicions grew.
The Hotel Lux was gradually being depopulated. At night cars would drive into the courtyard. In their rooms people listened intently to hear which way the NKVD agents’ footsteps were heading. Sometimes a scream rang out, sometimes a woman or a child was heard crying. And then came footsteps on the stairs again, as the arrestees were brutally hustled away.
Maks’s niece Mania Beylin also lived in Moscow. Worried about the family, she would run to the hotel every day at dusk. Before entering the gate she would look up at Maks and Stefa’s windows to see if the light would be on. From day to day there were fewer and fewer lighted rectangles in the wall of the building.
On the evening of June 21, 1937, the light was on in the familiar windows. But the hotel seemed dead. There was no one on the stairs, and the corridors were silent and empty. Mania knocked at Stefa’s door, entered and found her lying in bed. She was having some sort of heart trouble and was desperately sad. Soon after Maks came into her room, changed beyond recognition. Usually full of energy and life, he looked like an old man now. His face was sunken, his lips compressed and his eyes dead. He sat on his wife’s bed and said nothing. Feeling at a loss in this atmosphere of hopelessness, but in an effort to help somehow, Mania went into the kitchen and made some tea. They gratefully accepted the glasses of hot tea, but could not swallow a drop of it. She tried to talk to them, but all her words died in mid-air. It was as if they were in another reality, another dimension, where she could not reach them. Time was passing, and midnight was approaching. She did not want to leave them alone, but finally Maks said: “Go now. It’s getting late!” And he hugged her goodbye.
Downstairs in the hall she saw an NKVD detachment coming through the hotel doors. “Who will be the unlucky one tonight?” she thought. First thing next morning she called Maks. His son Staś picked up the phone. “How’s your mother feeling?” she asked. “Don’t come here,” he replied, and hung up.
They had come for Maks at about two in the morning. Stefa, who could not sleep, decided to look in on her husband. She could hear men’s voices on the other side of his door. She tried to enter his room, but was not allowed inside. Instead she was brutally ordered back to her own room. According to the neighbors, Maks was taken away first, and then Stefa. Next a thorough search was conducted in both rooms. The books were thrown from the shelves, papers from the drawers and clothes from the wardrobes, as usual in such cases. Early next morning, worried that neither his mother nor his father was answering the phone, Staś ran to the hotel. When he saw what had happened, he tried to get some information about their fate, but no one was willing to tell him which prison they had been taken to, what sort of danger they were in, or what could be done for them. Neither influence nor personal connections were of any use. At that time people were disappearing without trace, as if they had never existed.
Mania later learned that when she saw Maks the previous evening, he had no doubt what was in store for him. He had already been “thoroughly investigated” earlier by the Special Control Commission attached to the Comintern. His closest collaborators and friends had interrogated him and had accused him of belonging to an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite group,” “counter-revolutionary activity,” “spying for fascist Poland” and other European countries as well. For three days he tried to prove his innocence, but the sentence had already been passed a long time ago, and at a much higher level.
He was told that he had been dismissed from the Party and was ordered to hand back his Party membership card. For a dedicated communist losing this document meant annihilation, civil death and spiritual bankruptcy. He had lost faith in the meaning of his entire life, and he must have sensed that he would soon lose his life as well. After all, he could see what was happening around him.
When Mania called the Hotel Lux on the morning of June 22 and heard Staś’s voice at the other end, she immediately understood what had happened. There was no way she could help. She had no influential acquaintances, and she herself was in a desperate situation. The Journal de Moscou, the French-language magazine where she worked, had been closed down and its editor-in-chief arrested. Since losing her job she had been giving math lessons, but then the Soviet authorities had withdrawn her residency permit. She would have to leave the USSR as soon as possible, but she could not go to Poland, as the Polish embassy had taken away her Polish passport because she was a communist. Thanks to the fact that her young son Pierre had been born in Paris she managed to obtain a French visa, drawn up on a scrap of paper because she had no travel document. All around her the situation was growing more and more dangerous. Leaving Russia was her final chance of salvation.
But she did still manage to seek out her uncle’s young girlfriend, Josza. She was afraid someone uncaring or malevolent would pass on the tragic news, and preferred to do it herself. She wanted to leave her some money, because she could tell that the girl would be in a difficult situation. Unknown to the rest of the family, who refused to tolerate the relationship, she had been to see Josza before, and was very fond of her. She could see how much Maks loved her and how affectionate he was toward his little son, whom they called Petya. She knew he must be worrying about their fate.
Josza and Petya were now living in a Comintern dacha in the Moscow suburbs. That evening Mania went there by train and got out at the small station. There were dozens of identical summer holiday cottages, with the same sort of curtains in all the windows and the same porches in front, with little tables set out on them. On each table stood a samovar, around which the holidaymakers were gathered, eating their supper. The air smelled of pine forest. From a distance she could hear the sound of an accordion and someone singing. It was a peaceful idyll, an atmosphere out of Chekhov, as if the echoes of all the dramas being enacted so nearby did not reach this far. But the carefree mood was just superficial. When Mania tried to find out where the Comintern house was, at the sound of her foreign accent fear appeared on the faces of the people she asked, and they fell silent. No one knew a thing, and no one was willing to talk to her. She was foreign, and that made her suspicious¾she could bring the all-pervading misfortune down on them. Finally someone very bravely whispered: “It’s over there,” and showed her the way.
She opened the gate. She could see people’s silhouettes in the illuminated windows of the villa. On the lawn there was a motionless white shape, like an elongated bundle. When she had gone a few steps forward, the shape began to move, and someone raised their head. It was Josza; she was lying on the grass, on a straw mattress. Beside her, wrapped in a blanket, little Petya was sleeping. She threw herself into Mania’s arms, sobbing: “It’s impossible! It’s not true! It’s a terrible mistake!” She already knew what had happened. Mania tried to comfort her, saying: “Of course it’s a misunderstanding! He’ll be back. He’s sure to be back.” And then she asked in amazement: “Why are you sleeping here on the damp grass and not in the house?”
It turned out that the Comintern authorities had acted very efficiently. They had instantly revoked Maks’s rights to an apartment in the dacha and had assigned it to the family of another top official. The new tenants had arrived that afternoon, brought the news of Maks’s arrest and told Josza to get out at once. Trembling all over, she had not had the strength to organize the move and did not even have the money for a ticket to Moscow. So they had agreed that she could stay until morning, but outside, not in the house. She and her son had spent the whole evening on the lawn, and then she had covered him up and cuddled him until he fell asleep.
Mania had to go home. The only thing she could do was wish the broken-hearted woman courage and offer her the money she had brought. Then she left them both on the lawn. Next day she and Pierre departed for Paris, and Josza and Petya returned to Moscow.
Josza never saw Maks again. None of the family ever saw him again either. The Polish Communist Party leaders were not given big show trials, and their sentences were not announced publicly. Instead they were liquidated on the quiet. Their relatives deluded themselves for years with the idea that they were still alive. However, they could not make any proper efforts to find out the truth, because they themselves were in prisons and camps under long-term sentences. They belonged to a special group of victims that bore the official title: “members of families of traitors to the fatherland.” By some miracle Josza escaped repression, though fate still had some trials in store for her and Petya too. But that is another story.
Coming tomorrow an audio version of the first three pieces about the book and how to pre-order..
These are the first three pieces in the series about Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s
Edward Luce has written a terrific book, Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. It is thorough, balanced, and anecdotally colorful, reflecting access to reams of diaries, memoranda, letters, private thoughts, and even some regrets. It also disturbingly frames today’s realities compared with those in Zbig and Henry Kissinger’s times.
Nothing I say below should diminish my admiration for the book. If you are intrigued by Zbig’s ascendancy, the extent of his Polish identity — in office he exchanged many heartfelt letters in Polish with Pope John Paul II — and the competitive machinations of two geniuses, this is the book for you.
It is also the most intricate dissection I have read of events during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, when Zbig as national security adviser was indispensable in the establishment of diplomatic relations with China on the positive side and the debacle of upheaval in Iran on the downside.
I am not a typical reader. My family background is Polish, a country I have visited often and written about. From 1977 to 1982, I was the foreign editor and then the national editor of the Washington Post. I published a half dozen books with President Carter after he left Washington (and two with Rosalynn). There are very few major characters in this book that I did not know – or had strong views about.
So, what could I possibly have to say about Zbig that would shift the focus from admiration of this biography to serious concern about where the United States is in 2025? Too much, unfortunately.
Henry Kissinger was a bona fide celebrity for his mind, an undeniable charisma, and a willingness to shape his messages for the limelight and, cynically, for what he would say in private. Brzezinski was rarely duplicitous, less charming, and ultimately more honorable.
And therefore, in this tag team, he was the lesser star.
But these two men, who both maintained the accents of their ancestral homelands were giants, whereas the current secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio came to my attention when Donald Trump called the Florida senator “Little Marco.”
His retort was that Trump had “small hands.”
The decline of stature in the foreign policy leadership of the country is profoundly troubling. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the bizarre role of outsider Laura Loomer in deciding who can serve the nation — this is a disgrace and also very dangerous.
Which brings me to the second reason why Zbig illustrates how serious the present global situation is.
The core of Luce’s book is a meticulous reconstruction of all the major challenges of the Carter presidency. Every issue is debated in memos, meetings, diary entries, triumphs, and embarrassments. The competition for influence between Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance plays out as a class clash, the WASP paragon against the not-quite-American émigré.
And, fifty years later, every one of those major issues remains either unresolved or in worse condition than they were in the 1970s.
Relations with the Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race were at the top of the Carter agenda. The possibility of a superpower conflict and the annihilation of civilization was considered a distinct possibility.
But less than fifteen years later, in 1991, the USSR imploded. Progress in arms control made the nuclear threat somehow less ominous. A decade later came the Global War on Terror. The Soviet failure in Afghanistan evolved into America’s similarly unsuccessful effort to manage the country. American support in the 1980s for the mujaheddin became a triumph for the Taliban four decades later — and a tragic fate for the people of that nation.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is arguably much more a problem than Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR. Luce quotes from documents that reflect Brezhnev’s “horror” at the prospect of a nuclear exchange. Putin is rattling the nuclear saber while he pursues a war to the finish against the people of Ukraine.
In the Middle East, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and the possibility that the Palestinian people might get a state of their own has produced, for now, a catastrophe in Gaza and an Israeli government at the extremes of ferocity.
The revolution in Iran, which emerged as the U.S. badly misjudged the viability of the shah’s rule is now a fifty-year tyranny of the mullahs. Will the Iranians ever get the nuclear weapons they were developing? Or might they simply acquire the weaponry from North Korea or with Russia’s help?
And China is a superpower with an extraordinary capacity for military and economic expansion. This is most assuredly not the country whose leader Deng Xiaoping, Luce writes, spent his first night on a visit to the United States at Brzezinski’s Virginia home exchanging warm toasts over a homecooked dinner.
Edward Luce has made a significant contribution to the historical record. I can’t imagine anyone delving more thoroughly into the persona of Zbigniew Brzezinski.
On the other hand, Brzezinski’s “Spenglerian” pessimism — in which the future of the world was fraught and U.S. power was destined to decline — seems for now a valid prediction. My guess is that Zbig, an American patriot (and a Polish nationalist), would wish it were otherwise.
This is the biography of three generations of a family, a remarkable family, by reason of the place and time in which they were born, but also in terms of character. Joanna Olczak-Ronikier has taken the trouble to investigate their lives and understand their decisions and emotions, resulting in a family saga that is as compelling as a novel. She starts with her great-grandparents, Gustav and Julia Horwitz (born in 1844 and 1845), and from the first challenge of Gustav’s early death, his relatives’ responses to the trials inflicted on them by their historical fate show unusual determination and courage. As I read about them I find myself returning to the old question, ‘Is man the product of his heredity or his environment?’
Many of the personalities in this family are strong-willed and rebellious, refusing to remain passive in the face of iniquity. The generation of nine siblings born to Gustav and Julia in just thirteen years (from 1868 to 1881) include Maks whose commitment to the communist cause was so singleminded that it led, through prison and exile, to a horrific death in Stalin’s purges; Kamilla, whose obstinate confidence in her own role in life led to a medical career but also prison and exile as another victim of Stalin; and Janina, whose creativity and fortitude helped her to found a great publishing house, to weather widowhood and save her immediate family from the Holocaust. What would their lives have been like if born in a different era, or in a different country? I suspect they’d have been just as stormy and productive in any situation.
But they happened to be born in Warsaw when it was still inside the Russian Empire, and they happened to be born into an assimilated Jewish family, educated and well-to-do, with opportunities but with the limitations imposed by the anti-Semitism that was deeply ingrained in Polish society. However committed to the noble cause of Polish independence, however refined and well-read, they were never entirely accepted by the Polish elite and could never be equal. Growing up with this sense of second-class citizenship seems only to have reinforced their determination to prove themselves to the world, and never to forget their mother’s instruction to keep their heads held high.
By taking the story of her family back to her grandparents’ generation, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier provides a lucid explanation of the position of assimilated Jews in Poland; we generally have some idea of the isolated and impoverished existence of Orthodox Jews in shtetls who were destroyed by pogroms, but fewer books focus on the sophisticated, urban Jews who had dropped religious practices and Yiddish, who joined the fight for independence and had refined literary tastes. Reading this book for the first time revealed to me a whole different stratum of Jewish society at the turn of the nineteenth century and helped me to understand attitudes to Jews in Poland in the twentieth, as well as Jewish attitudes to Poland. As the author has said: ‘This book was a way to say it: I do not have to be afraid any longer. It is an homage to a particular world the Polish intelligentsia of Jewish origin, people who have chosen to love Poland with a love that was not always a happy one, but that was always faithful.’
The next generation, mostly born in the first decade of the twentieth century, could profit from the advantages brought by Poland’s independence between the world wars, and started on successful lives and careers. But then they had to contend with the tragedy of the Second World War, the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland, the Occupation and the Holocaust. How on earth does anyone survive sudden invasion, bombardment from the sky, brutality in the streets, and an orchestrated genocidal campaign? It is impossible to imagine. Once again, the members of this family showed their grit, backed also by their firm family solidarity and devotion to each other, and by escaping or hiding in harrowing circumstances most of them survived. In the next generation Ryszard Bychowski began a promising career as a writer, and after enduring the ordeal of a refugee, refused the safety of California. Instead he became a war hero who fought and died as a navigator on an RAF bomber at the age of 22. His letters are poignant testimony to that family tenacity, as well as to the terrible time in which he lived. Most of the surviving descendants of Gustav and Julia went on to resume their careers and build new, fruitful lives, whether still in Poland or abroad.
The generation of Polish Jews that survived the Holocaust is dwindling. The child survivors are now in their nineties. Every story is important, shocking and different, and needs to be recorded. Not every memoirist is as skilled a writer as Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, who in this book provides a first-hand account of what it was like for a child, understanding very little, but sensing a lot, to be moved urgently from place to place, hidden in altars and disguised as a Catholic; just as her forebears had learned in childhood to conspire against the Russian Empire, she had to dissimulate from an early age, and know how to keep her mouth shut. What a challenge for a small child. Here she pays moving tribute to the incredibly brave individuals, Poles who were not Jews who saved her and her mother and grandmother at great risk, and sometimes at the cost of their own lives. When she asked Jerzy Żurkowski why his family had consciously risked death by hiding Jews, he explained their conduct as ‘common decency’. Who can be sure they’d behave so decently to strangers?
I have met several descendants of Gustav and Julia, and can confirm that they are extraordinary people with strong personalities. They’re creative, generous, defiant and determined. They know what they want to do and nothing will stop them from achieving it. They place great value on genuine friendship and commitment. And as the epilogue describing their historic gathering in 2000 shows, they have an unshakable sense of family loyalty. Their refusal to be repressed is inspirational. Since the Holocaust two more generations have grown up and are living productive and original lives, and since this book was first published twenty-four years ago, a whole new generation has been born, giving their story a happy ending. I shall override their dislike of sentimentality to say: ‘Long live the heirs of Gustav and Julia Horwitz!’
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. Her recent publications include translations of The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk, Voracious by Małgorzata Lebda, and as compiler and co-translator, The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories.
To see the video click here Ryszard Bychowski
Ryszard is one of the many remarkable people you will meet in Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s prize-winning book In The Garden of Memory -A Family Memoir. This is an interview with him on “The March of Time” radio broadcast while he was in Canada training to be a flier in the Polish branch of Britain’s Royal Air Force.
To see the video click here Ryszard Bychowski
Ryszard is one of the many remarkable people you will meet in Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s prize-winning book In The Garden of Memory -A Family Memoir. This is an interview with him on “The March of Time” radio broadcast while he was in Canada training to be a flier in the Polish branch of Britain’s Royal Air Force.
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