From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

Most journalistic careers are counted out in words. Yet mere words do not begin to measure Bill Smith's contribution to TIME in his 3 1/2 decades at the magazine. He wrote thousands of articles, including more than 50 cover stories, on subjects ranging from British elections to Middle East wars and African coups. His 1972 biography of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, We Must Run While They Walk, was a highly regarded study of African politics in transition. But when he died of cancer last week at 62, Bill left a legacy few can match in this competitive, high-pressure profession: a reputation for humanity and compassion that brightened the lives of all who knew him.

Dozens of younger colleagues remember him as a kindly teacher who showed them the ropes about everything from how to write a lead paragraph (taut and lean) to where to find the world's greatest tomato soup (New Delhi's Ashok Hotel). "When I came here in 1971," says editor at large Strobe Talbott, "Bill made a point of guiding me through the mysteries of the place. He had a mentor quality that was very comforting."

A tall man with twinkling eyes, an impish grin and a boyish exuberance, Bill joined TIME's Los Angeles bureau in 1957, not long after graduating from Occidental College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He opened a bureau for us in Anchorage in 1958 and later served as bureau chief in Nairobi and New Delhi. He was for many years a senior writer in the World section and, since 1989, a senior editor of our International editions.

In his writing, as in his life, Bill had little use for ostentatious frills. His friend Tom Sancton, a senior editor, recalls that Bill liked to quote Mahatma Gandhi's admonition: "Simplify your needs." Long after the rest of us switched to electric typewriters, and later computers, he continued pounding out copy on his beloved Royal manual. A blindingly fast typist, he would write one perfect paragraph per page and then rearrange the order of the pages until he got the story structure right. One of his few concessions to modern technology was his habit of wearing airport-style antinoise earphones when he was writing on deadline. It was during one such occasion in 1977, while he was writing a crash cover on Uganda's Idi Amin, that Bill's wife Genevieve Wilson-Smith, then a TIME reporter-researcher, gave birth to their daughter Caroline.

Bill's reputation for speed and accuracy made him the natural choice for one of our toughest writing assignments ever: the crash cover he produced on a Sunday in 1983 when Shi'ite terrorists blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. While our idled presses around the world waited for Bill's copy, he absorbed stacks of correspondents' reports and calmly turned out one of the most dramatic stories in the magazine's history. It was Bill Smith at his most professional.