Cousins Quits

Norman Cousins dropped the other shoe last week: after 31 years, he resigned as editor of the Saturday Review. When the magazine's new owners announced plans to turn the Review into a base for a cultural conglomerate (TIME, Nov. 22), Cousins guardedly said that he would "stay around as long as I feel I'm genuinely useful--and not one second longer." After only a brief period of indecision, he decided he could not remain with a Review that would no longer reflect his own high-minded, liberal mixture of reviews, trend reporting and commentary.

In a "final report to the readers" in the current Review, Cousins claims to have had a "companionable partnership" with John Veronis and Nicolas Charney, who acquired control of the magazine six months ago. But he emphasizes his "philosophical and professional disagreement" with their ambitious expansion plans: "I strongly object to the commercial use of the Saturday Review subscription list for purposes that have nothing to do with the magazine. I also object to the exploitation of the name of the Saturday Review for sundry marketing ventures."

Veronis, 43, is former senior vice president of Curtis Publishing Co., and Charney, 30, holds a psychology doctorate from the University of Chicago. Together, they merchandized Psychology Today into a profitable part of Communications/ Research/ Machines, which they founded in 1967. Last July they quit C/R/M, took over the Review, and started planning its transformation. Now that Cousins is gone, Charney becomes titular editor of the Review; he and Veronis will become co-editors in chief of the newly formed parent conglomerate, Saturday Review Industries. They are still seeking an executive editor to run the weekly and four planned monthly versions of the Review.

"I'm certainly not going to get into a period of protracted vegetation," Cousins told TIME'S Roger Williams. "At the moment, I'm thinking very hard about communications as a carrier of ideas, especially with respect to peace and the entire question of world law. Whatever I do will be in that arena. It is the grand adventure of the '70s"

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