home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Time - Man of the Year
/
Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
/
moy
/
061592
/
0615990.000
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1992-09-22
|
3KB
|
66 lines
FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR, Page 4
Most journalistic careers are counted out in words. Yet mere
words do not begin to measure Bill Smith's contribution to TIME
in his 3 1/2 decades at the magazine. He wrote thousands of
articles, including more than 50 cover stories, on subjects
ranging from British elections to Middle East wars and African
coups. His 1972 biography of Tanzanian President Julius
Nyerere, We Must Run While They Walk, was a highly regarded
study of African politics in transition. But when he died of
cancer last week at 62, Bill left a legacy few can match in this
competitive, high-pressure profession: a reputation for humanity
and compassion that brightened the lives of all who knew him.
Dozens of younger colleagues remember him as a kindly
teacher who showed them the ropes about everything from how to
write a lead paragraph (taut and lean) to where to find the
world's greatest tomato soup (New Delhi's Ashok Hotel). "When
I came here in 1971," says editor at large Strobe Talbott, "Bill
made a point of guiding me through the mysteries of the place.
He had a mentor quality that was very comforting."
A tall man with twinkling eyes, an impish grin and a
boyish exuberance, Bill joined TIME's Los Angeles bureau in
1957, not long after graduating from Occidental College and
Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He opened
a bureau for us in Anchorage in 1958 and later served as bureau
chief in Nairobi and New Delhi. He was for many years a senior
writer in the World section and, since 1989, a senior editor of
our International editions.
In his writing, as in his life, Bill had little use for
ostentatious frills. His friend Tom Sancton, a senior editor,
recalls that Bill liked to quote Mahatma Gandhi's admonition:
"Simplify your needs." Long after the rest of us switched to
electric typewriters, and later computers, he continued pounding
out copy on his beloved Royal manual. A blindingly fast typist,
he would write one perfect paragraph per page and then rearrange
the order of the pages until he got the story structure right.
One of his few concessions to modern technology was his habit
of wearing airport-style antinoise earphones when he was writing
on deadline. It was during one such occasion in 1977, while he
was writing a crash cover on Uganda's Idi Amin, that Bill's wife
Genevieve Wilson-Smith, then a TIME reporter-researcher, gave
birth to their daughter Caroline.
Bill's reputation for speed and accuracy made him the
natural choice for one of our toughest writing assignments ever:
the crash cover he produced on a Sunday in 1983 when Shi`ite
terrorists blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. While our
idled presses around the world waited for Bill's copy, he
absorbed stacks of correspondents' reports and calmly turned out
one of the most dramatic stories in the magazine's history. It
was Bill Smith at his most professional.
-- Henry Muller