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Time Magazine's coverage of the last years of Trujillo's iron-fisted rule was outstanding. The editors recognized the importance of this story and gave it plenty of space in the Magazine. But as this book contains quotes from Time Magazine stories, there is need to explain how Time -the leading weekly newsmagazine and for which I was a correspondent-- put a story together. There were no bylines then and the reporters involved remained anonymous. While the correspondent reported the story as he saw it from the scene, providing an enormous amount of firsthand facts, under Time's practice of "group journalism", related reporting from other correspondents and bureaus, such as Washington D.C. flowed to New York. There a writer went to work focusing the story in conformance with the editors' consensus interpretation.

Time was co-founded by Henry R. Luce who believed that "objectivity" in journalism is a highly relative term. Luce once declared: "When we say 'the hell with objectivity,' this is what we are talking about. It is both theoretically and practically impossible to select, recognize or organize facts without value judgments". The result was which Time called "interpretive journalism."

Sometimes that interpretation did not please the correspondents in the field. In the case of President Lyndon Johnson's sending in U.S. Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division to the Dominican in 1965 where a revolt to restore President Juan Bosch to power had broken out Time's stories weighed heavily in favor of the Johnson administration's intervention. more