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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S My thanks to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger,who is known as Punch to older readers of the New York Times. Punch was the publisher during my tenure. He was generous not merely with the company’s money but also with his encouragement of new and bolder methods of reporting and writing. In the history of the paper, he will be remembered for keeping the Times in the upper ranks of the world’s great newspapers, often at considerable cost in money and headaches. I regret that it’s too late to thank personally a number of others who were important to my life and career. I’m thinking of four editors at the Arkansas Gazette: Harry S. Ashmore, the executive editor; A. R. Nelson, the managing editor; Bill Shelton, the city editor; and Bob Douglas, who became managing editor and later my colleague in the Journalism Department at the University of Arkansas.They taught me to respect good newspapers and the craft of reporting. Turner Catledge, executive editor of the New York Times, and Clifton Daniel,the managing editor,hired me and kept me on the payroll in spite of repeated derelictions. Irv Horowitz, for many years the assistant national editor of the Times, deserves my thanks for his unshakable patience as he tracked me and the other national reporters across the map. All those men are dead now. There was another Times person who,while having no discernible connection to this book,remains warm in my memory.Dixon Preston, the manager of the Atlanta bureau for many years,earned the devotion and gratitude of a generation of the paper’s Southern correspondents. She was good to me, and I think of her often when I remember traveling to some inhospitable little old town and needing a clipping or a phone number or just a shoulder to cry on by long distance. She, too, is dead. Among other friends from the Times, I am grateful to Claude Sitton, my predecessor on the Southern beat. He got me hired when he became national editor. He had more to lose than anyone else if I ix went wrong, and he made sure that I didn’t. Gene Roberts, another national editor, rescued me from the swamps of Washington and sent me to the swamps of New Orleans, which I recognized at once as my natural habitat. Dave Jones, his successor as national editor, kept me moving when news was sparse and when my inclination was to stop and rest. I also thank Punch Sulzberger’s son Arthur, now the Times publisher, who pulled strings and got me a club membership in London when he was a competing reporter with the Associated Press. The club was a Fleet Street dive, and we were not deluded that we were gentlemen. Larry Malley, the director of the University of Arkansas Press, and his staff of editors,marketers,and designers have my gratitude for their helpfulness and patience. Two members of my family work as copy editors, those shadowed caryatids without whose support the world of letters would fall down in a heap of hyphens, commas, and runaway sentences. Very special and heartfelt thanks to my daughter Cindy Buck, an editor with years of experience, and my grandson Bernard Reed, a talented beginner with bright prospects,for their careful scrutiny of this book.They have reduced its wind content and made it better. Once again, and never often enough, I thank my wife, Norma Pendleton Reed, for her patience and support. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...

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