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What is the job of an editor-in-chief exactly?

When I go on a lecture tour, for the following three weeks, gobs of stuff pour in addressed to me personally. I dump them all on poor Jim's desk. He's got to route it and see that somebody looks at it. If some special book comes in that I want read right away, I take it to Jim and, instead of my having to do it myself and having to con the editor into reading it--I'm afraid that I can't order anybody at Random House to read a book because they're all too independent and you have to implore them--I let Jim do that.

And yet, what I'm trying to get through and I'm not succeeding, you are in a sense editor-in-chief because you still oversee; and if there is a big decision to be made, it comes to you.

I think that is an over-simplification. Donald and I ran the whole show for a long time, but that's no longer the case. Every book is done in sort of a different way. Sometimes Erskine and Silberman and Donald fight over a book, or sometimes Jason and Loomis and I will fight over a book. Somehow or other it gets settled. When there's a big fight over a book, then we'll all sit down and talk about it. I'll turn down a book in rage sometimes and don't even ask the others, and I get hell for it from them.

Then we have young John Simon--the good John Simon.