Mr. Whipple died of pneumonia on March 17 in Greenwich, Conn., his son, Christopher, said. He was 94 and lived in Old Greenwich, Conn.
The fight was over a picture taken in late 1942 or early 1943 by George Strock, a photographer for Life. It showed the bodies of three American soldiers who had been killed on Buna Beach in New Guinea. Though none of the men were recognizable, the photo was arresting in its stark depiction of the stillness of death, and then shocking when it became clear on second glance that maggots had claimed the body of one soldier, face down in the sand.
The military censors refused Life’s request to publish the photo, as they refused to allow any pictures of American soldiers killed in combat.
At the time, Mr. Whipple was a 25-year-old Washington correspondent for Life, assigned to the newly completed Pentagon. (He had failed his physical examination for military duty.) Important as his magazine job may have sounded, Mr. Whipple recalled in a 1986 oral history for the Time Inc. archives that it “consisted chiefly of getting photographers cleared to go wherever we wanted them to go” and, “more importantly, getting their pictures cleared when they brought them back.”
He added, “I had to go over to the Pentagon and really beat on the censors.”
Mr. Whipple and his colleagues at Life believed that Mr. Strock’s photograph would provide a badly needed dose of reality for those on the home front who were growing complacent about the war effort. “I went from Army captain to major to colonel to general,” he recalled in a memoir written for his family, “until I wound up in the office of an assistant secretary of the Air Corps, who decided, ‘This has to go to the White House.’ ”
In September 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the War Department and the director of the Office of War Information, Elmer Davis, decided — in the words of a Life editorial on Sept. 20 — “that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.” Opposite the editorial, Mr. Strock’s photograph took up a full page of the magazine.
Addison Beecher Colvin Whipple, known as Cal, was born on July 15, 1918, in Glens Falls, N.Y., to Frank and Adela Colvin Whipple. He graduated from Yale in 1940 and earned a master’s degree at Harvard before joining Time Inc. in 1941 as an office boy. His first wife, Jane Banks Whipple, died in 1993. His second wife, Sally Schilthuis Johnson, died in 2010. Besides his son, he is survived by a daughter, Ann Whipple Marr; five stepchildren; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Six months after the Buna Beach photo was published, Mr. Whipple was transferred to New York as a writer for Life, where he worked until 1956. He was posted to the Spanish-language edition of the magazine, Life en Español, from 1956 to 1962, the last five months as senior editor. For the next eight years, he was editor of all the magazine’s international editions. In 1970, he was named executive editor of Time-Life Books. He stepped down from that job in 1973 and retired in 1975.
Beginning with a trip to the Whaling Museum on Nantucket in 1944, Mr. Whipple immersed himself in maritime history. Among his books on the subject were “Yankee Whalers in the South Seas” (1954), “Vintage Nantucket” (1978), “The Whalers” (1979), “Restless Oceans” (1983) and “The Challenge” (1989), about clipper ships.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/nyregion/cal-whipple-dies-at-94-won-1943-fight-to-print-photo-of-war-dead.html?partner=rss&emc=rss