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what in a way was my country, France, go down the drain. I'd been brought up in France from the age of twelve to twenty. That tends to be when you are formed and your allegiances are created. So it was a very bloody, emotional time for me in 1940-41.

I went back to being assistant general manager and got involved in operations, and learning the job of what management is, and I remember one of the strange facets of this shift in career was that when I was on the editorial side I was a member, of the Newspaper Guild, the union. Then I moved into management and very shortly I found myself a member of the management team negotiating with the Guild of which I'd been a member.

You mean the contract that year?

We were having a terrible time with the Guild in 1940, 1941 and negotiations were endless, complicated by, although we didn't realize then just how complicated they were, the shifting political sands. The Guild was quite heavily influenced by communists or people who believed in communism. It became very much of a “Left Wing” outfit, which further complicated any normal negotiations, because you were negotiating both about labor situations and really about ideology. They were intermixed.

What would be an example of that?

It's hard to point to an example of it. They used their sympathy with Russia as part of gaining strength, just as in 1937,