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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1993-04-08
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3KB
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FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 4
Presidential debates tend to be pivotal moments in most
campaigns, and that fact generates a dramatic atmosphere. But
on the eve of their first high-stakes face-off, George Bush,
Bill Clinton and Ross Perot weren't the only ones under
extraordinary pressure. Since the debate was scheduled to begin
a full day after the magazine's usual closing time, managing
editor Henry Muller made the rare decision to hold presses until
Sunday night to accommodate this week's cover story. We are used
to stretching our deadlines occasionally in order to include
late-breaking major news, but covering Sunday's showdown in St.
Louis, Missouri, required considerable last-minute coordination
and planning. Like the candidates, we had virtually no margin
for error.
Overseeing this ambitious effort was production director
Brian O'Leary, who admits, "It's definitely been a nail-biting
experience. But I've always been good at creating order out of
chaos." The soft-spoken Harvard business school graduate, who
spends his free time these days rewiring his suburban New Jersey
house, joined TIME in 1983 as assistant operations manager for
our international editions. After a three-year assignment
setting up and running our production plant in Singapore, and
a successful stint as ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY's first production
director, O'Leary happily returned to TIME two years ago to
assume his current job.
As millions of Americans tuned in to watch the candidates'
meeting, a team of staff members assembled at the Time & Life
Building in New York City on Sunday night to work on the debate
stories. Says chief political correspondent Michael Kramer: "Our
aim was to place the presidential debate in the context of the
overall campaign, in a way many newspapers haven't done because
they were fixated on the event itself."
Meanwhile, picture operations manager Kevin McVea was on
the scene in St. Louis to transmit color images directly from
the debate, among them the cover photo. By 12:30 a.m. the
pictures were beamed via satellite to eight printing plants
around the country, including our facility in Saratoga Springs,
New York, where a fleet of four twin-engine planes was waiting
to airlift the magazines to major cities for early Monday
morning arrival. In addition, dozens of extra trucks were hired
to speed delivery to our wholesale distributors.
O'Leary's object was to get all 4.5 million copies into
readers' hands as close to the regular delivery time as
possible. Says he: "If we have done our job well, our efforts
will be invisible to most people." But not to his colleagues.
Elizabeth P. Valk