All in a Day's Work

Of the legendary publishers of the 20th century, Barney Rosset ranks among the most influential, and certainly the most controversial. Over the course of his half-century career, he introduced American audiences to Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet through his publishing house, Grove Press, and literary magazine, Evergreen Review. Frequently accused of being a "pornographer," in 1964 Rosset altered the course of First Amendment law by convincing the U.S. Supreme Court to allow publication of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Rosset died in 2012 at the age of 89; this is an excerpt from his memoir.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was killed in Bolivia on Oct. 9, 1967, and the February 1968 issue of Evergreen Review contained a special section commemorating his life. It was in 1955, in Mexico, that Che met Fidel Castro and joined his guerrilla force to enter Cuba and fight the corrupt Fulgencio Batista regime. On Nov. 25, 1956, Castro's group of 82 men embarked on a leaky vessel, the Granma, for a slow voyage to the island. They landed—starved and worn out from seasickness—on Dec. 2 at the swampy Las Colorados beach. The bedraggled army was eventually victorious, ousting the dictator and putting the revolutionaries in power.

Once Castro's leftist government was stabilized, Che set off for Bolivia to join the guerrillas there. In a letter dated April 1, 1965, also included in Evergreen, Che wrote to Castro bidding him farewell. "I feel," he said, "that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban revolution in its territory, and I say good-bye to you, the comrades, your people, who are already mine."

The next piece in our tribute was an account of what went on among the guerrillas Che led in Bolivia. After a futile week accompanying the military as they hunted for the guerrillas, photographer George Andrew Roth hooked up with some peasants who led him to the guerrilla camp. Che agreed to be interviewed, and wrote both the questions and answers into Roth's notebook. He then sent a friend to lead Roth and two other journalists, one being the French intellectual Régis Debray, back out of the mountains.

Debray, Roth, and the other journalist were arrested as revolutionaries by the Bolivian military and thrown in jail. Debray was sentenced to 30 years, but he was released in 1970 after Pope Paul VI and other prominent figures put pressure on the Bolivian government. While things were going badly for Debray in prison, they were also deteriorating for Che. After two years in Bolivia, Che was wounded on Oct. 9, 1967, and taken captive. Later, while under guard, he was shot through the heart.

Che was a very important figure to me. Grove Press published a number of books about him, including The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia by Luis J. González and Gustavo A. Sánchez Salazar, which detailed the perils of Che's attempt to create an insurgency in Bolivia. The story of how we signed this book is part of the larger story of how we attempted to secure a copy of Che's diary from the Bolivian authorities.

In March 1968 I asked a close friend, Joe Liss, who had been a top-notch correspondent for CBS News, to travel to La Paz to obtain Che's journal. Liss later wrote in an unpublished report that when he arrived at my office to get the plane tickets, "To my astonishment Barney handed me cash amounting to $8,500 in denominations of $50 and $100, and told me that with this money I was expected to spend about $6,000 to get what I could of the Che Guevara diaries."

Since the Bolivian government seemed to be actively against giving any further publicity to the murdered guerrilla, this mission was undercover. Liss was to pretend he was visiting the country because he was working on a screenplay about Che. As a further precaution, all communication between Liss and myself would go through his wife. After a deal with a mysterious, high-ranking...