The publisher arranged for me to see his managing editor. She was a quiet, tough-minded woman in her late fifties who had gotten her start as a copy editor at the Chicago Tribune. She seemed embarrassed when I arrived for the interview. The publisher had leaned on her to see me, but it wasn’t that. I was a famous journalist from the East; I had won a Polk Award. I had gotten into trouble—yes, she was certainly aware of that—but I was still a news celebrity, and it was hard for her to understand why I would be applying for a job at a small paper with a daily circulation of under fifty thousand.

“This is what I know how to do,” I said. “And, frankly, I need a job. The big papers won’t hire me.”

She had two openings. One was an entry-level job for a reporter-trainee who would cover local education. It paid $17,500 per year and was, as she said, “not appropriate.” The other was for business editor, a relatively senior job that paid $42,000, with eligibility for an annual profit-sharing bonus. The old business editor had quit a few weeks before to start a public relations firm, and she was looking for an experienced journalist to take over.

“I could do that job,” I said, without thinking about it a great deal. Editing sounded like a job for a grown-up. People at the Mirror had been telling me for several years that I should become an editor; perhaps they had been right. She asked me a bunch more questions and eventually said that if I truly wanted the job, I could have it. My biggest problem, she said, was that I was overqualified to work at the News-Herald.

I was elated. But I thought I needed to raise the unmentionable subject. “You know why I left The New York Mirror, don’t you?” I said gravely.

“You did something for the CIA that you weren’t supposed to. Isn’t that it?” She was trying to remember the details of what she’d read in the newsmagazines. “I certainly don’t approve of that. But I gather you feel now that it was a mistake and you’d never do it again—in the unlikely event that the CIA was bent on infiltrating the nerve center of northern California agriculture.” She laughed, and that was it.