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It is November 20, 1991. I will be interviewing Dr. Frank Stanton in his offices at Rockefeller Center in New York. My name is Mary Marshall Clark. This is the seventh session with Dr. Stanton for the Columbia Oral History Research Office.

I wanted to talk with you this morning a little bit about Bill Paley. It's a hard way to get started just to say, “What did you think of Bill Paley. Tell me something about the man,” because so many years of your life were spent with him and you had so much time to sort of observe him over the years. But I'd like to get just some of your impressions. If you had to give a description of him, how would you begin?

I suppose it would help me out if you asked me something specific, because there's so much to say about Bill. We've worked together, I guess, for almost a half a century.

Well, when I started to work at CBS right out of college, Mr. Paley was a bit of a myth because I never saw him or had anything to do with him whatsoever. And indeed, until he went off to war, I hadn't had any contact with him whatsoever. I think I was in a small meeting just before he left [tape glitch]. When he came back from the war, those of us who were there gave a reception for him. This was in the fall of '45. He was in uniform. There might have been twenty-five or thirty senior people. In the course of that reception, which was on a Friday afternoon, he came to me while we were having drinks and asked if I was I