Slow Suicide

To blase reporters, covering New York City's three suicides a day is among the most unpleasant of routine assignments. Last week, however, when John William Warde decided to commit suicide in his own good time (see p. 24), reporters were fascinated, newspaper offices took on the kind of tension common in the cinema city room, rare in fact.

For 100 or more reporters and photographers who covered the story, the assignment was simple and harrowing. Reporters picked out handy telephones, photographers found good angles, glued their fingers to camera triggers--and waited (see cut). Nightfall meant the complication of flash bulbs for photographers, a more lurid scene for excited spectators who bought binoculars and made bets on whether Warde would jump. Most spectacular shots were caught by Associated Press Cameraman Harold Harris (Warde, arms akimbo, plummeting past the sixth floor of the hotel), and Acme Cameraman Charles Haacker (Warde toppling from the hotel marquee, police scurrying out of his way).

In Manhattan, almost every paper sold thousands of extra copies. Throughout the U. S., Warde hit the front page the moment his body hit the sidewalk. Editorial writers reacted instantly. The comforting New York Times asked: "Is life worth living?" answered: "Of course life is worth living," mentioned a few of the things worth living for: "... a majestic sunset or moonrise ... an understanding look in another person's eyes. . . ." The crusading New York Post noted the extensive efforts to save the suicide, asked: "If so much could be mobilized for one man, how much could be accomplished by a fully awakened common effort against hunger, slums and sickness?" The philosophic Washington Post considered Warde "a modern Faust" who "did not begrudge payment for the brief period of power granted him." The New York Herald Tribune, ever Republican, saw in Warde striking proof "that civilization is not the product of external rules and compulsions but of individual consent." To Hearst's New York Mirror, the helplessness of the people who watched Warde symbolized ''the numbed futility of the millions of peoples all over the world who pray for a return to sanity."

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