Harry Luce once called one of his editors and thrust a marked page of TIME under his nose. "I want you to tell me how that sentence got in there and why," Luce demanded. The editor gulped, admitted that he had written it, and said that it represented his judgment of the truth of the situation. Luce sighed. "I've been trying for seven years to get that sentence into the magazine," he said.

H.R.L. was no press lord in the tradition of Britain's Lord Beaverbrook or America's William Randolph Hearst. Power was not his passion--what burned in him was the search for truth and the desire to communicate it. And the way he went about it was to hire the best men he could and engage them in what amounted to a continuous dialogue. The degree of autonomy he gave his editors and the interplay of ideas he encouraged was a constant source of amazement to any outsider who encountered it. The late Aga Khan once offered Luce his memoirs for publication--gratis--in LIFE. He was startled when Luce said he would have to pass the offer along to LIFE's managing editor, and bewildered when the answer came back: No, thanks.

Luce insisted that his ideas for stories and any copy he wrote be treated like those of any other editor. Once, when something he wrote turned out to be wrong because insufficiently rigorous checking seemed to have been applied to it, he announced at a staff luncheon: "I want to advise this college of cardinals that this particular pope is not under the illusion that he's infallible."

He did his best to make his relations with his editors and writers as personal as possible; many of them, regardless of rank, saw him often. In TIME's earlier years, when the staff was smaller, this was easier. He had a favorite drugstore in Rockefeller Center where he would take the writers working on stories that interested him. There he and the writer would trade views over coffee and doughnuts; sometimes he would make three or four conference trips to the drugstore in a single morning. He was an early riser--even on Sunday, which used to be a working day for TIME's editorial staff--and would drop in to the office as early as 7:30 to see if anyone was around. No one was ever there at that hour except former Managing Editor Roy Alexander, another early bird, and Luce would look around at the empty office in mock surprise and say: "Hello, Alex--where is everybody?"

In those days, too, he frequently sat as TIME's managing editor for two or three weeks at a stretch. One M.E. described these visitations as "like a strong wind that blew fresh air through the office but also scattered the papers into hopeless confusion. There were usually two noticeable results . . . The staff got less sleep but their morale went up, and the finished issue, though it might be uneven, had some unusual high spots in it."

As an editor, Luce was no fine and fancy stylist. Instead of smoothing out a story, he would often advise "roughening it up" with abrupt transitions that might make the piece less readable but --he thought--more difficult to forget. Editing for him was mainly cutting out blocks of words; a Luce-edited issue of TIME was usually identifiable to insiders by its staccato style.

Luce's curiosity was insatiable--he sprayed questions in all directions wherever he went. Correspondents, notified that H.R.L. was about to appear in their territory, frequently gave themselves cram courses of vital statistics about the area to cope with his barrage of queries. The ride in from the airport was legendary, and many a correspondent prepared himself by making the run a couple of times with a guide--only to have Harry ask him about some distant ruin he had failed to notice. It was even more disconcerting when Luce knew more than he did--as when TIME's New Delhi man told him that he had reservations at the Ashoka Hotel. "Ashoka?" pounced Luce, "that was an emperor wasn't it--what was his period?"

Luce loved reporting, and he seized every excuse to go after news at first hand. On one trip to London some years ago, he expressed skepticism about a dispatch that had characterized Britain's man in the street as being interested only in "football pools, bus queues and everyday living," so he commandeered an office car and went out to take his own soundings. On his return, he simply told the correspondent: "You were right."

On interviews, Harry was exhaustive --and exhausting. One of his close associates remembers a three-month tour of Europe, on which "we saw everyone of any account, politically, in six countries. At the end of it, Harry had gained six pounds and I had lost ten. After one three-hour discussion-in-depth with an editor of L'Osservatore Romano, our Rome correspondent, who had been doing the interpreting, turned toward me and fainted flat on the floor. Before I got a shot of Scotch into him, Harry was back in the room, saying: 'Well, it's only 6:15--what are we going to do until dinner?' "

One way Luce functioned editorially was by means of give-and-take with his top editors over the luncheon table. He loved dialectic exchange, and often shifted his own position in midsentence, to the consternation of novice listeners.

Participation in such Luce talk demanded adherence to certain rigorous requirements: 1) intellectual convictions, backed up by 2) hard facts, and presented with 3) a delicate sense of timing that could only be acquired by experience. For Luce would often come to a dead stop in his torrent of words, while he thought out the next phase of his argument, and into such 30-second silences many a tyro editor or visitor blundered, thinking it was his turn to talk at last. The fate of such rushers-in was painful to behold: they could be as far as two or three sentences into their rebuttals when Harry would find in his mind what he had been looking for, and pick up exactly where he had left off--talking through their lines as though they had never been spoken.

Harry's single-minded concentration was legendary. Author John Hersey, a former TIME writer, tells of a lunch he had with Luce and a correspondent at which H.R.L. became so involved in his own convoluted reasoning--while they consumed cocktails, soup, lamb chops, vegetables and dessert--that when it was over and the table cleared, he began signaling indignantly to the waiter to demand: "When are we going to get our lunch?" He had only a minimal interest in food and drink. Once, for a lunch in his honor at Le Berkeley restaurant in Paris, the maitre d'hotel outdid himself with a magnificent souffle. Harry was first to dig into the souffle, then stopped his laden fork in mid-air to expound some point that lasted for 20 minutes, while the souffle sagged and expired, and the agonized maitre d'hotel at last, without a word, snatched up the flattened remains and fled to the kitchen.

Perhaps the classic case of Harry's single-mindedness is recounted by retired TIME Vice President Allen Grover: "World War II had just begun. Staffers scurried back from afar. I was in early and was summoned at once to the boss's office. He was writing a memo on something about TIME's National Affairs section and stunned me by ignoring the war completely. When I tried to bring it up, he gave me some chore and dismissed me. Later that day I got one of his screeds on copy paper saying, 'Al, see me Friday re Hitler.' "

Luce's fabled concentration was a function of his jealousy of wasted time. For the same reason, he was a ruthless enemy of small talk--it bored him, and he made little effort to hide the fact. To forestall chitchat, his most effective weapon was the wild-swinging question. Many a correspondent and editor sitting with him at dinner has been hit by some such query as: "Do you think Los Angeles makes any sense?" After a visitation from Luce, one correspondent reported that he was left "intellectually black and blue." Harry's whole life, one editor aptly said, was "a mental chess game."

His intellectual rigor and impatience with time wasters gave Luce the reputation, among those who did not know him, of having no sense of humor and ice water in his veins. But neither was the case. Witness the day that he was sitting in the office of a bureau chief when the door burst open and a member of the staff came whooping in, bottle in hand, tripped on the sill and fell full-length in front of the Editor in Chief. The bureau chief explained to his startled boss that the young man was celebrating the birth of a son. Harry started to laugh and finally said: "Well, aren't you going to give us a drink?" It turned into a fine evening.

Luce put up with a great deal from his staff in other respects. Time and again he was attacked for some position taken by his magazines. Often enough it was a position on which he had not been consulted and with which he might well disagree. Under such circumstances, it would not have been difficult for a proprietor to disown a story. But he always accepted full responsibility for everything--as he expected his subordinates to do all down the chain of command.

Essentially and always, Luce was a reporter and writer and editor like ourselves, and for this we warmed to him and looked to him and trusted him. And he did us. "I am proud to be with you, and I am proud that you are with me," he once told a group of us. "And there is only this self-flattery in that statement: if a man is known by the company he keeps, then this is the company which in my life I have managed to keep, and this is the company by which I would like to be known."

And this is the company we will try to keep.

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