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A group of us were having dinner with Eisenhower one night, maybe eight or ten. There were two of us in there from the media. One was the publisher of international renown, was Harry [Henry R.] Luce, of Time magazine. I got in to talking about some things having to do with--even to this day I've now forgotten what they were, but it had to do, as I recall, with some problems with labor, which if I had walked out and given it to our evening news people they would have had to have had one hell of a story.

What kind of labor, in general or?

No, it was a labor problem with the government. The next issue of Time magazine had, on the front page, in the publisher's page, a little boxed item right out of that dinner. I had lunch with Harry about, oh, maybe a week or so later, and [laughs] in the course of it I said: “Gee, I thought that dinner was totally off the record.” “Well,” he said, “nothing's off the record as far as I'm concerned.” I said: “Well, I thought that item that you printed broke the understanding we had at that dinner.” He said: “You're just too timid in radio. You believe these guys. You can't do that. You've got to do what you want to do.” Well, you know, that's just a different attitude. I don't know whether that was true all throughout the Time empire or not, but certainly as far as Luce was concerned. He told me that he went right back to his Washington office that very night--it was, again, a Sunday night as I recall--and typed the item himself and gave it to his Washington bureau chief to run.

Can you tell us what that item was now? What was the item about specifically?

I think it had to do with some manpower question. At the time it seemed like it was terribly important. In the sweep of history, you know, it's nothing.