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or four months gave me the indication that perhaps he had lost interest or had changed his mind. “Oh, no,” he said. He'd just been waiting for me to do it.

He expected you to go back to him?

Yes, which I would have done, had I done if I had known he was even in the city. I then immediately said, “If you still want me, I still would like to take it on.” “Fine,” he said. “We'll move forward.” Or something like that. That was it. I'd say roughly ten days later, we had a board meeting and I was elected and took care of the announcement and that was it. I only give you this background because it somewhat typical of the relations I had with him. We weren't close. I think that if he had needed me on any occasion, he would have called me. Certainly if I had needed him, I would have called him. But I ran my side of the operation, and he ran his. We never had any understanding of what were his responsibilities and what were mine.

How did you figure out which were yours, then?

I did everything that I thought had to be done. As long as he didn't say, “I want to do that,” I just did it. I guess this rather typifies the relationship for a good part of the period of our days together. The first stockholders meeting in 1946, which was the first one when I was president, I had been out to lunch and said to the man that I was having lunch with, when I looked at my watch and saw that is was approaching two o'clock, “Gee, I've got to get back to the office because there's a shareholders meeting.” I walked up Madison Avenue in a bit of a hurry to be there a few minutes before two. There had been no prior discussion with the lawyers or with anyone about the meeting. In as much as I'd never attended a