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Gunther did not include in the book his own footnote to history. When the U.S.'s invasion commander, Major General George Patton, refused to let Eisenhower ashore early, it was Gunther who spotted a quiet Sicilian cove from their destroyer. He told Ike: "General, I can write a story that will make every newspaper in the world tomorrow. The first paragraph will be this: 'The commander in chief of the Allied Forces of Liberation set foot on the soil of occupied Europe for the first time today.'" Says Gunther: "Ike gave me a long, dirty look and said: 'It would serve a good propaganda purpose, I think.'" Twenty minutes later, Gunther got his story.
Death Be Not Proud. Insider Gunther, who says he "would give all those Insides to have written one good short story," is still writing bad ones. He has published four uncelebrated novels. His longest-remembered work, nonetheless, is less likely to be one of the Insides than a short (261 pages) book called Death Be Not Proud—a tender, harrowing vignette of valor and suffering.
John and Frances Gunther's first brush with death came in 1929, when their only daughter Judy died at four months of a glandular ailment. In April 1946 they learned that their only son, then 16, had a brain tumor. For 15 months Johnny, a lively, charming youngster, clung heroically to life and sanity. Though Frances (who now lives in Jerusalem) had divorced Gunther in 1944, they fought an agonizing side-by-side battle for Johnny's life. In desperation they consulted more than 30 doctors, tried such extreme treatments as intravenous mustard-gas injections, which had never before been tried on a brain patient. Throughout the ordeal, Gunther wrestled with the added burden of completing Inside U.S.A.
When Johnny died, his father wrote Death as a private memoir, but was persuaded by friends that it would inspire other parents in similar straits. Gunther has given his $25,000 in royalties from the book to children's cancer research, and Harper's has also contributed its profit. Almost ten years since the book's publication, he still gets 200 letters a year about Johnny from readers all over the world, many enclosing money, pressed flowers or a poem. Gunther and his second wife Jane, whom he married in 1948 (her first husband: Newscaster John W. Vandercook), are the parents of a handsome, adopted two-year-old named Nicholas, over whom, as a friend says, "John glows and grins like a fond mother."
The Darkening Continent. On the first leg of his 1952 reporting safari for Inside Africa, Gunther awoke to another nightmare: he was going blind. With cataracts closing over both eyes, he explored the darkening continent for 10^ months and 40,000 miles without even a weekend off, ground out nine magazine articles on the road. Unable to read his minute reporter's scribble, he could never have finished the assignment if willowy, tough-fibered Jane had not been along. She scrawled notes on interviews, digested reams of background material, took thousands of photographs for Gunther to pore over back in Manhattan.