Friday, Oct. 27, 1961
DUSK was gathering over the Kremlin. "As I was walking back to the Congress Palace after the dinner recess the first day," cabled TIME'S veteran Moscow Correspondent Edmund Stevens, "I recognized a familiar figure in a long overcoat walking alone. He waved to me. I walked over and shook hands."
"Isn't it time for you to resume your report?" Stevens asked. "That's just where I'm headed," replied Mr. K. "And if you plan to listen you'd better muster all your patience. It's going to last another full two hours." Stevens listened and cabled his impressions to New York, where Robert McLaughlin and Henry Grunwald wrote and edited the report of the Khrushchev performance that tried a great many patiences last week. See THE WORLD.
ON his first day as Los Angeles bureau chief less than a year ago, fresh from covering Detroit, Marshall Berges went to a dinner party. There he was introduced to a fellow named Tom Jones. They struck up a conversation. At one point, Berges asked the inevitable American question: "What do you do?" "I manage technologies," answered Jones. In the months since, Berges has had plenty of occasions to find out what this intriguingly ambiguous job definition meant, and to become better acquainted with the man on this week's cover.
The story began to take form last April when Senior Editor Robert Christopher, before taking over as TIME'S new Business editor, made a swing about the country, meeting bankers, industrialists, economists, businessmen, and seeking out what was dynamic and changing in the American economy. In Southern California he became fascinated by the way the old airplane business was converting itself into the new arts of aerospace. Berges introduced Christopher to Tom Jones, and Christopher recalls how impressed he was by this "extremely articulate businessman: anyone who could talk like that could write a TIME cover himself."
We didn't quite ask Jones to do that. Associate Editor Marshall Loeb wrote it in New York. But Jones, undergoing the thoroughgoing TIME interviewing process by Correspondent Berges, confessed that he had learned a new view of himself and his relations to his company and competitors as "things came to the surface," and he was forced to explain them.
Business Editor Christopher likes best doing this kind of business story. "Many people seem to think that business is separate from other aspects of society, in a niche by itself, and that it has nothing to do with politics or social advancement or even history. Here is a story that makes clear that not just investors but all Americans--and even history--are going to be shaped by what an industry does."
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