John Morris — so old his father was born just after the American civil war — has seen plenty of US history. Yet this American abroad feels that last month, aged 99, watching TV all night in Paris, he witnessed the worst political event of his lifetime. “I was with my granddaughter, she was in tears,” he says. “It was not as hard for me. I’ve been through other tragedies, usually somebody’s death. But I think Trump’s election makes it easier for me to contemplate an early death. In my case, you can’t exactly call it early but, at any rate, I’m glad I’m going to be through!”
The number of American centenarians — a cohort that had an outsize role in shaping modern history — has burgeoned in recent years to more than 70,000 and counting. Morris will join their ranks on December 7, though you’d never guess it from his spookily unlined face and thick white hair. He is possibly the photo-editor who did most to depict the 20th century: he started with the Spanish civil war, published his friend Robert Capa’s 11 D-Day pictures in Life magazine and, in 1972, put the Vietnamese “Napalm Girl” photo on The New York Times’ front page. He still beavers away. We meet in his home office, where there are piles of newspapers — “A Startling New Political Reality”, says a US headline — and neat inboxes marked “Urgent” and “Thank You”. Yet post-Trump, Morris is left wondering whether his twin life-long endeavours — political activism and photojournalism — achieved anything.
His life changed on his 25th birthday, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Life magazine sent him on a Norwegian freighter to wartime London, where he witnessed “the first drones”, Hitler’s pilotless V1 missiles. “We wasted a lot of time trying to photograph the drones. The story was in the faces of the people looking up.”