Wells

"In that one year at Harvard, the amount and breadth of my reading were something I never again matched later. I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Shaw; Churchill’s memoirs of World War II; famous speeches by modern American presidents; American history; Wells’s world history; several English books about China; and I also ventured into a few classical giants such as Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and even Marx’s Capital. Besides these major works, I subscribed to two newspapers, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor published in Boston, as well as Time magazine."

"Ultimately, Wells graciously agreed to be president, but those complications were what had kept it all up in the air—and kept Michael unreachable. He didn’t want to risk his one firm job offer by telling me he was after the Disney job. I was at home on a Sunday morning when Warren Beatty called to say that Michael was going to Disney. The pieces in the disappearing puzzle of Michael now fit. Shortly thereafter Michael called me from his car to say that he’d just left the Disney board meeting and it was going to be announced that he was its new CEO. I was angry that he hadn’t told me the truth about his maneuverings, and I was terribly disappointed that he wasn’t coming with me to Fox, but of course he was right to take the Disney job. Even though Disney was a much smaller operation at that time and had been moribund in the last few years, it was also an extraordinary opportunity and Michael was right to do it. And what a beyond-spectacular success he was to make of it."