A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

On the first Monday in 1985, TIME Business Editor George M. Taber met with Associate Editor John Greenwald to discuss a proposed cover story on T. Boone Pickens. The Texas oilman had engineered many of the mergers and takeovers that were reshaping American business. For the purposes of the cover, TIME's Business section decided on a merger of its own, teaming Greenwald with Frederick Ungeheuer, the magazine's senior correspondent for business and financial affairs. Their cover story appeared two months later, but it turned out that their work had just begun.

Each week seemed to bring news of still more blockbuster deals: the General Motors-Hughes Aircraft merger and the Allied-Signal and Capital Cities Communications-ABC takeovers to cite a few. In April and again in August, the journalistic combine of Greenwald and Ungeheuer churned out major stories analyzing the accelerating merger trend.

Last month the two TIME staff members began preparing a wrap-up on what was clearly the most important and far-reaching business story of the year. Greenwald made a swing around the country to visit business schools and sample community and corporate opinions. Says he: "There are sharp divisions, and there may be no way to prove right or wrong. Mergers are like marriages: some work, some don't, and we'll probably never know which secret ingredients produce the good ones."

. Ungeheuer, meanwhile, interviewed investment bankers, corporate chairmen and academic specialists. He also attended a symposium at Columbia University Law School on the ramifications of takeovers. Ungeheuer uses a different simile to describe the latest corporate craze: "During the 1960s, when I was a correspondent covering Africa, there were so many coups d'etat that it became tempting to ignore them. That's impossible to do with mergers: while the afflicted African countries seemed to get smaller and smaller, the mergers keep getting bigger and bigger."

Last week merger mania struck again. Greenwald and Ungeheuer teamed up with New York Correspondent Thomas McCarroll on our late-breaking cover story assessing the latest developments, as signified by the General Electric-RCA marriage, the biggest ever outside the oil industry. Says Business Editor Taber, who supervised this issue's story: "We are witnessing the remaking of the American business landscape. The results of merger fever will be felt for years."