Most of TIME'S editors manage to take a yearly junket or two in the U.S. or overseas to whet their working knowledge of the countries and things they write about--but not the Managing Editor. He's stuck. Among a host of other duties, he has to edit every piece of copy that goes into TIME each week (he has, he says, a basilisk's eye complicated by journalist's cataract). So it was good news to me that T. S. Matthews had gotten away for a week's trip by chartered plane to the Pacific Coast and back.

A self-confessed groundling, Managing Editor Matthews hopefully took along a brief case full of work and brought it back in exactly the same condition. His excuse: "On the occasions when I didn't think I was facing the last trump or a dress rehearsal for it, or a sudden reversal of peristaltic action; I was riveted to the window, trying to read the picture book surface of the U.S."

Perspective--a highly useful editorial requisite--was what Matthews was after (except for vacations and an occasional overnight journey, he has scarcely been out of the ME's chair from the day he took it over in the dour month of February, 1943).

When he was learning his trade 15 years ago writing TIME'S Books section, and turning out some poetry and an occasional novel of his own, one of Matthews' novels moved a fellow critic to begin his review as follows: "Thomas Stanley Matthews, 30, has a chin that sticks out from under a nose, eye, and brow that might have belonged to St. Paul, patron saint of his preparatory school (Concord, N.H.)."

Unlike St. Paul, however, TSM has green eyes, greying brown hair, a deceptively formidable exterior, and an indestructible appetite for good celery, good tennis, and good English prose. A parson's son (his father is the retired Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey), he came to TIME via Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was born, Princeton (A.B.), Oxford (B.A.), and an associate editorship of the New Republic. Father of four (boys), he is a soft touch for his family, but a "hard" man with his staff--especially with novice writers and researchers who haven't learned that erudition and journalism can mix.

They can, of course, and it is Tom Matthews' job to see that they do. His staff is familiar with patient memos which begin: "The Managing Editor views with alarm the following: 1) common misspellings (harrassed for harassed, etc.); 2) the use of retain for keep, slew for killed, reveal for anything less than the revelations of William Blake or Moses. . . ."

Although Matthews' knowledge of things literary, historical, factual, is severe, he can be had.

A researcher who had run herself ragged trying to justify a word he had written into a story came to him, Webster in hand and fire in her eye, to prove him wrong. Said Matthews: "Webster is the work of human hands."

Said she: "So is TIME."

That round was hers.

But Matthews can afford to lose an occasional battle because he is certain to win the campaign. As Managing Editor he is bulwarked by the long-standing TIME tradition that he alone is operating boss of each issue and of the editorial staff. He can be persuaded, but he cannot be coerced--except, perhaps, by what TIME says, which he takes very much to heart. One TIME story, which he chose to run recently, told about the appalling havoc that raw clams make of vitamins. Chances are that TSM hasn't eaten a clam since.

As for Tom Matthews' view of his job, an excerpt from a recent address he made to some journalism students tells it plainly enough: "The story journalism has to tell is the story of our times. It is our luck, or our fate, to have been born into a literally terrible day. In other times, perhaps, sheer cleverness (which implies a certain lack of honesty) or sheer honesty (which implies a certain lack of cleverness) might have filled the bill. In our day, it won't. What we need today is a combination of cleverness and honesty for which there is only one right name: wisdom."

Cordially,

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