John Phillips, who died last August at age 81, led a frenetic, world- crossing career as a Life photo-reporter from 1936 to 1959. It was Phillips who, just shy of 30, took the well-known shot of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Tehran on November 29, 1943 — and attended and photographed Churchill’s private 69th birthday party that evening. It was Phillips — and only Phillips, by the way — who smuggled out dramatic before- and-after photos of the Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem on May 28, 1948, the day the Arabs destroyed it; and it was with Phillips’s pen that Don Burk of Time wrote out longhand the English version of the Jewish surrender.
Phillips’s photo-memoir Free Spirit in a Troubled World, published by a small Swiss-American press, is a real find. Two hundred magnificent black-and- white photos testify to Phillips’s professional talent. But just as impressive is that Phillips wrote as he photographed: in vivid, compelling snapshots. Phillips was a well-read man with a keen eye not only for photographing people but also for sizing them up.
Phillips’s scrambling childhood undoubtedly prepared him for his travels. He was born on a farm in Algeria in 1914 to a Welsh father and an American mother. (How they wound up there is a story in itself.) His father was lovingly extravagant, having inherited plenty of money but little sense of responsibility. Before long the farm failed, and the family left for a peripatetic restaurant-and-hotel existence in Paris, where Phillips mingled with such expatriate libertines as the dancer Isadora Duncan (“Stinkadora Drunken” to her friends). In 1932 Phillips went with the family to London — his father having evaded creditors in Paris for as long as was humanly possible. In 1936, at age 21, he became a stringer for Life.
And then the adventures began, many of them journeys among men at their most barbaric, although Phillips relates them with modesty and sang-froid. In 1938, he rode in the last Czech vehicle to leave the Sudetenland. He saw the Germans enter Prague and Vienna, recording tears in the former and joy in the latter. He watched the Allies rehearse for the invasion of Italy in 1943 on the sands of Transjordan. He was flown into German-occupied Slovenia to trek with Tito’s partisans as they blew up a bridge at Litija. He was with the first outsiders to examine the Nazis’ human soap factory in Danzig. He observed the hulking and drunken Red Army looting Austria down to the last broken telephone in Vienna. He photographed David Ben Gurion and the Mufti of Jerusalem; played chess with the Emir Abdallah; took automobile journeys with King Farouk; and chronicled the communization of Romania, Poland, and Hungary. In short, he watched Europe and the Middle East fall into their own characteristic forms of hell, and then try, with very mixed results, to pull themselves out again.
As a prose-writer, Phillips had a knack for the succinct characterization of the broadest of pictures, a way of using details to reveal the general, as when he discusses the Russian occupation of Hungary in the winter of 1945:
The Russians, believing themselves liberators, were continually surprised by the fear they inspired. Intensely patriotic and insular, they did not understand the rest of the world, though they openly marveled at it in a way which must have worried their government. They took their superiority for granted, yet apart from their modern weapons, they were not an army in the modern sense of the word, but a medieval host. They did not have the niceties of a PX, or a graves’ division to notify the relatives about their dead. These armies marched across Europe with the rear brought up by trudging civilians and children straggling along behind,
I met one of these children, a 12-year-old boy who had been swept along by the war from a place he could no longer recall. He wandered around Budapest dressed in a soiled and ill-fitting Red Army uniform. . . . At the other end of the social scale was Marshal Kliment Voroshilov in elegant uniform. Voroshilov had not only liberated Budapest, he had also taken over a defeated German general’s residence and his red-haired mistress. Between these Russian extremes was an enormous variety of types whose behavior depended upon whether they were educated or not; what time of day it was; and how drunk they were.
But most detailed are his descriptions of the Arabs: the simultaneously sweet and caustic Algerians around whom he was raised; the hordes of Egyptians mobbing King Farouk’s car outside of Cairo in 1939 in a welling up of filial devotion; the Palestinian irregulars of 1947-48, whose looting and fanaticism helped doom their own cause. More valuable still are the records of Phillips’s conversations with such Middle Eastern leaders as Farouk and Abdallah, Glubb Pasha, and Moshe Sharett.
Phillips was an astute interviewer, and a keen eye for fakery made him uproariously funny on occasion. He tells of his 1946 return to Bucharest to watch another chapter in the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. Phillips meets a certain Dimonescu, a genial political opportunist he had known before the war. They recall a common acquaintance, Tatarescu, who had energetically served Romania’s fascist government in the 1930s:
“Speaking of fascists, what’s happened to your old boss, the Foreign Minister?”
Once again, he looked uncomfortable. “Please,” he begged, “do not speak in that tone about Mr. Tatarescu. He is our new Vice-Premier?”
“How are you, Mr. Tatarescu?” I said when ushered into his office. “You may recall I visited your country before the war, in the days of King Carol.”
“That fascist dictator,” Tatarescu snapped. Then in sonorous French he made a speech for my benefit in which he portrayed himself as a fearless defender of democracy.
“That’s what you told me the last time we met,” I told him.
Tatarescu beamed. “As you can see, I haven’t changed. I’m still on the barricades fighting for democracy.”
Phillips did have a free spirit, but not in the usual sense of the phrase. He was not so much free of constraints as free of pretense. This is a remarkable book that shows that pictures can capture what words cannot — and vice versa.
Adam Garfinkle is executive editor of the National Interest.
