It occurred to me that it might be inevitable, over time, for the leader of any large enterprise— particularly a leader as acutely sensitive as Mr. Shawn to what people needed or wanted to hear—to acquire a habit of saying, or promising, something, and promptly forgetting it. You cannot, I think, have too good a memory and run a weekly. I came to believe that these inconsistencies, this duplicity, these lapses of memory, were an essential element of Mr. Shawn’s way of running the magazine.
