PHILIP HAMBURGER.(The Talk of the Town)(Philip Hamburger, a journalist for the New Yorker for 65 years, is remembered.)(Obituary)(Biography)

From 1939, Philip Hamburger's first piece for The New Yorker

From 2003, Philip Hamburger's last piece for The New Yorker

Philip Hamburger, our friend and colleague at the magazine for sixty-five years, spent the last few months of his life watching the President of the United States on television with the volume turned up high. Philip was not impressed. In fact, at lunch at his apartment on East Eightieth Street a month ago, he put down his fork and said, "They've never made one more foolish."

Philip, who died last week, was a liberal, old-fashioned and proud of it, and he tended to waver between fierce affection (for F.D.R., J.F.K., Clinton) and constant disdain (for Nixon, Reagan, George W.). As a reporter, he loved to go to Washington for the inaugurations. He attended his first when he was eighteen, in 1933--it was F.D.R.'s first, too--and he watched the proceedings from a tree. Joining him in the tree were, as a subsequent memoir revealed, "an elderly gentleman in rumpled and ancient green tweeds, with patches; a beautiful red-headed young woman wrapped in a skimpy coat of rabbit, or of some other unfortunate domestic animal; a woman of indeterminate age who can best be described as dressed in rags, and whose face was lined with worry and pain." When the ceremony began, young Hamburger peered through his binoculars:

Far away, through the giant center doors of the Capitol, appeared the President-elect. His face was totally without color. He made his way, painfully and slowly, along the ramp leading to the rostrum, leaning heavily on the arm of his son James. He seemed to be drawing on bottomless reservoirs of physical and mental strength to make the short journey to the rostrum and the Presidency. The crowd held its collective breath. I doubt whether anybody, at that moment, knew that he was carrying ten pounds of heavy steel around his crippled and wasted legs.

When Roosevelt finished his speech--about fear and national revival--the quartet of weary tree-danglers lowered themselves to earth. The redhead, with whom Philip had become entranced (almost as entranced as he was with the new President), delivered the political verdict. "I think we'll live," she said.

Philip was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1914, and his family moved to the city, he once said, when he was "seven or eight." He joined the magazine in 1939, at around the same time as his close friends Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling. Philip was not a single-subject man. He wrote countless pieces for the Talk of the Town; as the magazine's Gazetteer, he reported from more than fifty American hot spots (Bismarck, Butte, Gettysburg), and, as Our Man Stanley, he wrote about the odd corners of the city. He wrote profiles of everyone from President Harry Truman and Judge Learned Hand to Louie G. Schwartz, a waiter at the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen, who sold four million dollars' worth of war bonds. And, at the end of the Second World War, he sent home dispatches from Europe. Roaming the streets of Milan, he witnessed the executions of the Fascist leadership: