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it's not the most usual way of becoming President to have done what Harry Truman did. He absolutely refused. So he was in effect saying, “I'm going to get paid six dollars a word”--a hundred thousand words, six hundred thousand dollars, which was fairly good pay in 195--what was it, 1952, 1953? Well, whatever the period.

Well, turned out he was right. He'd quit the Presidency. He'd been working on this for I don't know--three months, four months--with a friend of his, Roger Hillman? Roger--he's credited in the book. Essentially, what they did was was clip and paste. They'd taken speeches and articles and this and that and pasted them together and there was, I think, something like thirty pages of original Truman text, and you weren't that sure as to how, whether he had written it--no, Bill Hillman--whether he'd written it or the other fellow had. So we kept urging him to write, urging him to write, and he was a very reluctant author all along.

It wasn't that much of a problem, really, for us, because we were simply extracting what we wanted for the serial, but I felt very sorry for the publisher. To my surprise, the publisher--I think it was Doubleday--didn't seem to give a damn. All they wanted was copy. And they wanted sixty pages a day, and that was it. And as long as they got sixty pages of copy a day, they were perfectly happy. The book turned out to be not a disaster but a near disaster. I'm not sure that I've read it yet. [laughter]

This reminds me of something I wanted to ask you yesterday about the Churchill. Do you have any memories of Churchill not--of doing any self-censoring? In other words, not saying some things about