A Man of the World | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Tell me about how did you come to dive under the North Pole. One day I'm sitting in my office so long about four o'clock, I'm bored, and the phone rings. In 1979, Gil Grosvenor was the editor of National Geographic magazine. In that job, you don't stay bored for long. As a voice, it was my friend Al Giddins, who was a filmmaker, and he said, "Hey, Gil, I'm mounting an expedition to dive under the ice at the North Pole. Would you like to come?"

Oh my goodness, of course I'd like to come! Even though Gil had lots of scuba experience, diving under the North Pole was a new frontier. Only a handful of people had ever done it, and Gil would be the first journalist. As he sat in a special dry suit with his legs dangling over the gaping hole in the polar ice, he thought of all the things that could go wrong. One of the instructions was, "You have to be very, uh, very careful not to get ice crystals in your regulator. If you do, your air supply will be cut off. You have to be very careful not to swallow the 28-degree salt water, because it could paralyze your larynx—in which case you're not coming back."

Gil was connected to an emergency rope that ran up to the surface and lowered himself into the water. Then he was all alone, suspended in freezing water at the top of the world. The first thing that I noticed under the ice were these huge ice crystal structures. They looked like a stained glass window—short, amazing. You could go over and just flip your hand across it, and the whole thing disappears and it will reform in yet a more beautiful pattern. Wow!

Oh, and it was like a kaleidoscope. I got so mesmerized by that that I used more of my air than I should have for that particular adventure. I came to the hole, and I had one last thing I wanted to do. So Gil comes from a long line of explorers. In fact, the Grosvenors are essentially the first family of National Geographic. His father had also been the magazine's editor, and so did his grandfather.

There was some poetry in this moment, diving beneath the North Pole, because in the early 1900s, during the golden age of polar exploration, Gil's grandfather had funded Robert E. Peary's efforts to reach the North Pole. Then later, his grandfather had flown over the pole himself, and he had sent a postcard to all of his grandchildren. I thought that was really neat, and I hung that on my mirror in my college dormitory.

Now, my grandfather had said, "I had flown over the footsteps of Robert E. Peary." Years later, Gil's father had made the same flight and sent the exact same postcard: "I have flown over the footsteps of Robert E. Peary." So Gil wanted to keep this family tradition going, but with his own twist.

Before his dive ended, he flipped himself upside down, increased my air, and gently came up underneath the ice. I pulled my weight belt up to my shoulders, okay, so my head was down. I took four steps—I had walked beneath the ice. So when I sent my postcards around to the family, I said, "I have walked beneath the footsteps of Robert E. Peary, and I had a lot of fun doing that."

I'm Peter Gwynne, and this is Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at NatGeo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week we sit down with Gil Grosvenor. You might not know the name, but for more than a century, his family shaped how millions of people see the world.

Gil had a front row seat to some of the world's most daring expeditions: the first climbers to the top of Mount Everest, the first humans on the moon, the discovery of the Titanic, just to name a few. Along the way, he developed close relationships with explorers who helped change our understanding of the planet and its creatures—the Leakey family, Jane Goodall, and Jacques Cousteau among them. But he also came to a sobering realization: it wasn't enough for Earth's inhabitants just to see their planet; they needed to take action to protect it. But how do you do that? More after the break.

But first, this summer, adventure is never far away with a free one-month trial to National Geographic digital. For starters, there's full access to our online stories with new ones published every day, plus every Nat Geo issue ever published in our digital archives. There's a whole lot more for subscribers, and you can check it all out for free at natgeo.com. Explore more.

"There you are!"

"A friendly guy."

"Yeah, really nice."

"Gil, Peter."

"Peter, okay, that's me right here. How you doing?"

"And this is Jake."

Gil Grosvenor lives in a place you might expect an explorer to retire. His house is nestled among the green hills of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, lots of room for his dogs to run around, and it's surrounded by thick forests and plenty of wildlife, especially birds—lots of birds!

But before moving out here full-time, Gil spent 60 years working in downtown Washington, D.C., two blocks from the White House at National Geographic headquarters. He climbed the ranks, working jobs in just about every part of the organization, and along the way, he traveled the world as a photographer and editor. Today, Gil is 91 years old, and due to a rare condition, his eyesight has deteriorated to the point he's almost blind. "Like me, can you see me?"

"Oh yeah, I wouldn't recognize you. I wouldn't recognize my wife, but everybody. See, you got a white shirt? So open up the collar. Yeah, I see you have a check shirt."

"You can't see your face?"

"Really, it's just contrasting."

"Okay, right."

"You know, you spent your life looking at images and seeing the world in code. It's ironic."

"I mean, it's ironic, but that hasn't stopped him from publishing a new memoir titled A Man of the World. To compose it, he enlarged the font big enough on his computer so he could make out the words as he wrote. But possibly a bigger challenge was having gone on so many adventures, he could barely fit them into one book. I did stories on Sri Lanka, Bali, Monaco—this hyena had been in our tent—accompanying President Eisenhower to Europe, Asia. My counterpart from Russia, very outgoing, KGB."

But Gil didn't always plan on working for National Geographic. In college, he studied psychology. But when you look back on where he came from, it almost seems inevitable. Gil's great-grandfather was Alexander Graham Bell—yeah, that Alexander Graham Bell. Not only did Bell create the telephone, in addition to several other inventions, he was also an early president of the National Geographic Society. He had a voracious appetite for learning and envisioned a magazine that would cover the world and all that is in it.

By 1931, when Gil was born, that magazine had become a centerpiece on American coffee tables. His grandfather was running the place, and his dad was one of the photo editors. "So when you were a kid though, and you'd come to the office, I assume you came down to the office a lot."

"Yeah, what was that like? What were those days like?"

"I took it for granted, but it was wonderful. If Dad was working, I would go down in the museum. There was a big display down there–a purist sled and a stuffed sled dog, and they had these sled dog stuff—although these dogs were all stuffed. It was the major exhibit in Explorers Hall, and I would pretend I was on the sled driving the dogs. That was fun for me."

"Yeah, my idol was my grandfather. I tried to emulate him; he was low-key, he tried to be thorough, he was modest, and I admired those traits."

"You want me to begin now?"

"You can begin."

"All right. This is Gil's grandfather in a National Geographic film from 1957. His name was also Gilbert Grosvenor. He joined the National Geographic Society in 1899 as its very first full-time employee, and over the next 55 years, he did more than anyone to put National Geographic on the map. In 1910, he added the famous yellow border to the cover and championed the use of photography—a controversial decision at the time, believe it or not—and it emphasized the importance of map-making. He also funded expeditions in Peru, which made world headlines when they revealed the ruins of Machu Picchu.

And it all started when he got a letter from Alexander Graham Bell. "Well, so I came down on the 1st of April, 1899. Mr. Bell took me down to the geographic headquarters. At the time, the National Geographic Society had fewer than 2,000 members, and it published a journal, but Bell thought it was too technical and scientific. Grosvenor's job was to turn it into a magazine for regular people. At the same time, Bell's daughter, Elsie, had taken a shine to young Gilbert Grosvenor. Grosvenor took the job, and a year later, he and Elsie were married.

"Well, I addressed the first edition of the magazine, and the edition was so small and thin that I, after dressing it, I carried it down to the post office and mailed it. Yeah, back then the stack of magazines was so small that he could carry them by himself. But it's safe to say Grosvenor was the right man for the job. By the time he retired in 1954, the magazine circulation had grown from 2,000 to more than 2 million."

"He had seven principles of journalism. There were things like it must be accurate, must be timely, or it must be factual, it must be important."

When Gil's grandfather retired, there was another Grosvenor waiting in the wings. In 1957, Gil's dad took over as editor. His name was Melville Bell Grosvenor, or as everybody called him, MBG.

"MBG invented charisma. It was his stocking trade. He could motivate anybody, and he recognized charisma in other people, as someone from a younger generation. MBG had new ideas about how to run the magazine. At the time, Nat Geo didn't have photos on the cover—just a list of the stories inside. MBG changed that over the protests of older editors. He also expanded into television programs, another controversial decision, and he commissioned the famous theme song that still introduces its shows and documentaries.

But MBG's trademark, his real talent, was identifying superstars just before they made it big. During his tenure, he would introduce the world to some of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. "So, another icon I'd love to hear about that revealed kind of the world of animals in a completely different way."

"I know this is going to be."

"When did I first meet her? Who am I talking about?"

"Do you get to ask this all the time? How did you meet Jane Goodall?"

"Yeah, all the time, all the time."

Jane Goodall, today her name is synonymous with chimpanzees. She started studying chimps more than 60 years ago, so it's hard for most of us to imagine a time before Jane Goodall. National Geographic gave Goodall her first major funding. In fact, Gil remembers her very first meeting here at our offices.

"It was 1961. Nobody knew who she was, but she showed up with Louis Leakey. He was a paleoanthropologist who'd found some of the earliest human fossils, and he was looking for a new round of funding. So, Lewis makes this pitch and squeezed mega bucks out of the research committee for his thing. Then he said, 'Oh, by the way, you might be interested in doing a little bit of support for this young researcher I have named Jane Goodall.'

"So, these old floods on the research committee say, 'What's she done?' Well, she hasn't done anything yet because she doesn't have any money. What I'd like to see the research committee do, is give her $400 and let her go out and study chimpanzees. I believe you can learn about human behavior by studying chip behavior.' So I said, 'Where did she get her college degree?'

"Didn't go to college? More groans! The research committee was just about to say, 'Get out of here, Lewis!' when MBG looks at Jane and says, 'I think we ought to give her a chance.' And so that's how she got her start. I'd say that was pretty well spent money by the research committee—that's $400 bucks we ever spent!"

With that small amount of money, Jane Goodall lived among the chimps at Gombe National Park in Tanzania. She showed the world a whole new side of humanity's closest living relatives. For instance, scientists thought only humans could make and use their own tools, but Goodall showed that chimps do it too. Her field research at Gombe still continues to this day through the Jane Goodall Institute.

And around the same time, another superstar was coming into his own. Coming up—a surreal conversation with Jacques Cousteau that makes Gil see the world in a whole new way.

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In the 1950s, MBG had discovered another one of his big stars, a Frenchman shining a new light on the oceans. "He would become totally enamored of something, and he became totally enamored of Jacques Cousteau, and we supported him before he became famous."

"What did your dad see in Jacques Cousteau? What was it that he fell in love?"

"He was a genius at assessing talent, even assessing the promise of talent. In 1952, Cousteau appeared in the magazine for the very first time in an article called 'Fishman Explore a New World Under Sea.' Just like MBG, Cousteau and his fish men were oozing with charisma. For example, he hosted a lunch meeting with food served on two-thousand-year-old plates that Cousteau had salvaged from an ancient Roman shipwreck.

By the early 1960s, Cousteau was a hot ticket to see in person, and Gil was in charge of the National Geographic lecture committee. "It was my job to make sure he showed up, escort him around during the day, get him to Constitution Hall on time, and also make sure he had a film to show—because Jacques sometimes would come in, he'd hold up a piece of film, 'Oh, that'll work,' and he’d go out and lecture with it. That was my job."

In 1963, Cousteau arrived in Washington, D.C., to give a talk. The date was November 22nd. Hours before he was scheduled to speak, a news flash said President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Then Walter Cronkite came on the air and announced to the world Kennedy had been shot and killed.

"That's how I learned about it. The news was so shocking that nobody felt comfortable giving a lecture that night. They canceled, and instead, Gil and Cousteau went to dinner. The National Geographic offices are only a couple blocks away from the White House, and that night the whole city, including Cousteau, was in a somber mood. There weren't many people there, but the waiters were all huddled around a radio listening to the progress of Air Force One being flown to Andrews Air Force Base and then to the White House.

But these waiters would be whispering together—never mind, the patrons weren't getting their dinner. People were just so out of character. Everybody was out of character; it was an extraordinary evening."

"So what did you and Cousteau talk about? I mean, I think this is so interesting."

"Well, it's interesting. Cousteau and I first talked about the canceled election; it was the right thing to do. Then we talked about the assassination of Kennedy, and then we got talking about conservation—the oceans, the fear that the oceans were not impervious to man's destruction. It was the most poignant conversation I ever had with Cousteau till they died."

Cousteau would go on to dedicate the rest of his life to protecting the oceans, and that conversation stuck with Gil. It made him consider that Earth might be more fragile than we thought.

In the 1960s, other people were waking up to that revelation too. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which raised alarm bells about the dangers of pesticides. In 1965, a report by the Johnson White House warned about the dangers of burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And in 1969, in one of the most vivid environmental disasters of the time, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire because it was littered with oil and debris.

Gil saw this was a huge story. But inside National Geographic, there were debates about how to cover pollution or whether to cover it at all. "You know, you have this period, right, where Cousteau is revealing the ocean like we've never seen it before. All this new environmental storytelling is happening, and how did you decide what role National Geographic plays?"

"There's more of an activist feel, I think that comes with Kennedy. Like you said, the country's stagnant; they're ready for some change, and activism is sort of in the air. How does Geographic fit into that?"

"The Geographic was a fairly conservative outfit. We didn't change things rapidly. Why would you change when you have an incredibly successful organization? It's difficult to motivate that change. The magazine still followed the seven basic principles laid down by Gil's grandfather. One of those principles was, 'If you can't write something nice, don't write anything at all.' But Gil felt like he had to say something about a river catching fire, and it was not going to be nice. Pollution is hardly a compliment; it's a downer, it's a negative story if you will, and it was controversial at the time."

In 1970, Gil became the editor of the magazine, the third Grosvenor to hold that title. Inside the Geographic, he was part of a generation of editors that called themselves the Young Turks. Many of them opposed the Vietnam War—something the older editors, several of whom were World War II veterans, disagreed with.

The Young Turks pushed for edgier stories about contemporary issues, like pollution and racism. Gil had watched his dad remake National Geographic with big ideas and big personalities, and now just like MBG, Gil had to balance the way it was always done with his own internal compass. To kick off his career as editor, he left no question about where he stood.

The December 1970 cover story is called "Our Ecological Crisis." Inside, there's a foldout photo of the Cuyahoga River with smoke rising from the water. There are photos of air pollution and smog, and on the cover, a duck swims through water tainted by an oil spill off the coast of California. "In our projection session, where we decide on these things, there was a fair amount of objection to publishing such a downer picture on the cover. We just didn't do that. But it was the thing to do. It set the tone for the issue; it set the tone for my editorship. I wouldn't take it back in a thousand years."

Today, we're still following Gil's lead by reporting the threats to our planet: the causes and effects of climate change, the widespread loss of crucial habitats, the extinction of species. And like his predecessors, we're constantly looking for new explorers—new Goodalls and Cousteaus, people like Tara Roberts, Andres Russo, Paula Kahumbu, Lee Berger, Enrique Sala—many of whom you've heard right here on our show. Of course, we're still experimenting with new ways of telling stories, using virtual reality and hey, even podcasts!

At the end of this year, Gil's daughter Lexi will complete her term on the board of the National Geographic Society, and after that, there won't be a Grosvenor here for the first time in more than a century. But even as National Geographic evolves and changes, we'll still be following in the Grosvenor footsteps as we continue to cover the world and all that is in it.

If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That's the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/explore more to subscribe. There's a link to that deal in our show notes, and we have tons of material to send you down the rabbit holes we just talked about in this episode.

For starters, we've profiled Jacques and Jane Goodall right here on Overheard. Yep, the links to those episodes are in the show notes. Subscribers can even read Jane Goodall's iconic 1963 article about the early years of her chimpanzee research. We also have a behind-the-scenes shot of Gil's grandfather, the first Gilbert Grosvenor. You can see him in the field in 1913 testing a new state-of-the-art camera for the time, and you can check out the full video where he reminisces about his first day on the job in 1899.

Also, see how we're carrying on Gil's legacy of speaking up for Mother Nature, like our series Planet or Plastic, or our special issue from earlier this year called Saving For Us. And finally, we only had time to scratch the surface with Gil. Get the whole story in his new memoir. It's called A Man of the World: My Life at National Geographic. You can find it wherever books are sold. More about his legacy and much, much more is in our show notes. They're right there in your podcast app.

This week's episode is produced by senior producer Jacob Pinter. Our producers are Kyrie Douglas and Alana Strauss. Our senior producers include Brian Gutierrez. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Our manager of audio is Carla Wills. Our executive producer of audio is Devar Artiland. Our photo editor is Julie Howe. Hansdale's sous sound designed this episode and composed our theme music.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. Nathan Lump is National Geographic's editor-in-chief, and I'm your host, Peter Gwynne. Thanks for listening and see y'all next time.

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