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management and, God, it took a lot of my time from 1946 on.

Then, of course, all the time you were looking at these awful things--figures--and looking at the future. You had to go out and rally the troops, always. Part of the job of being a boss, a publisher, is that you have to instill confidence. You travel around the country; you go to every bureau as many times as you can in a year; you go to meetings of the national advertisers, meetings of the advertising agencies. You try to make the troops feel happy and confident, even when you don't feel that confident yourself.

And despite staff cuts starting in the 1960s.

Yes, that's right. Everytime you had a staff cut, it meant one more swing around the country to explain this was not the end of the world.

Let me ask you something. In the late 1950s, Howard Black--this was one of these periods of trying to figure out what to do--had suggested--and there's a document on this, but perhaps everybody had mentioned this as a possibility as well--that LIFE quit this kind of circulation war, this “firstism” attitude, and settle on four million very high-grade subscribers and not budge from there. Now, ultimately, as you just said, in the last year there were a lot of circulation cuts, in a last effort. Do you think, had LIFE done this, that the outcome would have been different? Is that “no”? [laughs]