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- <text id=90TT0226>
- <title>
- Jan. 22, 1990: From The Publisher
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Jan. 22, 1990 A Murder In Boston
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 8
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> The title on the door says Associate General Counsel. But
- it is no secret around TIME that lawyer Bob Marshall is
- actually a major league baseball player manque. Instead of his
- business card, he is likely to hand you his baseball card, a
- souvenir of the "fantasy" session he attended at the
- Philadelphia Phillies training camp in 1986. "Have one," he
- told a visitor. "Have two."
- </p>
- <p> Perhaps it is his shortstop's ability to anticipate that
- makes Marshall so well suited to his real job. He reads TIME
- articles (including this one) before publication to help keep
- anything defamatory from slipping through. Still, says
- Marshall, "I get more pleasure from helping TIME say something
- than from keeping TIME from saying it." Marshall is known for
- his "elegant fixes," the subtle changes of phrase that defuse
- potential libel problems without reducing hard facts to mush.
- His batting average on keeping TIME out of trouble is
- substantially higher than the impressive .689 he hit for the
- magazine's softball team last year.
- </p>
- <p> Marshall's empathy for the journalists he advises comes
- naturally: as a boy, he wrote for The Log of the West Wind, the
- paper at his summer camp, and he was later sports editor for
- the Harvard Crimson. After graduating with a degree in American
- history, he joined the Peace Corps and taught English in Libya
- and Tunisia. Columbia Law School followed, and in 1976 Marshall
- joined TIME.
- </p>
- <p> Between briefs, Marshall has managed to write some less
- academic material. His Diary of a Yankee-Hater, which is just
- that, was published in 1981. He is now editing a book on
- Lawrence Park, the turn-of-the-century artists' colony in
- Bronxville, N.Y., where he grew up and lives today. Our
- renaissance lawyer is also an avid bird watcher, gardener, art
- buff and rock-'n'-roll aficionado: his raunchy rendition of
- Blue Christmas, Elvis-style, is the highlight of the law
- department's annual lunch.
- </p>
- <p> Staffers consider Marshall an honorary journalist and value
- his extralegal advice; he even catches occasional grammatical
- errors. Senior editor Jose M. Ferrer III recalls asking
- Marshall to review an early draft of a story. "He said there
- was no problem legally, but that it was the dumbest thing he'd
- ever read in TIME," says Ferrer. The story was killed. Some
- fielding.
- </p>
- <p>-- Louis A. Weil III
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
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