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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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kept talking, asking me about church and state. And it crossed my mind the other day that there was really a triangular state of tension, because in a way there was church, and there was state, and there was Luce. And the tension between Luce and his managing editors, or even Luce and the publishers, or officers of the company, were unusual, in that he was a--I guess in that he was so unusual. Because he was determined to have his way by dint of reason and argument rather than by giving orders. He didn't really--I think he realized that he couldn't have a good staff, that he couldn't hire the best people, the best talent, if he was known to be like Hearst had been, or McCormick, or any of those. So he spent an awful, and incredible amount of time arguing, writing memos, trying to win his point, to win his victory, without giving any direct order--which, as the years went by, became more and more difficult--as the organization grew, and became too large for him to get his arms around or to argue his way around it. This is a little bit before 1960s, but the situation with Tom Matthews, who was managing editor--oh, in the late 1940s, was typical of the fact that he and Harry would disagree about a lot of things. Matthews' great virtue was that he had great literary taste, and great respect for the English language, and I guess is mainly responsible for getting rid of that dreadful “Timese” that we used to have, where all the sentences went backwards and all that stuff. He got it into English. He was as moral a man in the sort of the theoretical sense of it--I think his father was a bishop--as Harry, whose father was one also. But apart from that, they didn't really get on. But Harry was determined to get Matthews over to his side, and Matthews was





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