In the last few pages of Andrew Greeley's 1981 best seller, The Cardinal Sins, there is a scene in which a crowd of reporters has gathered in St. Peter's Square in Rome to await the wisp of white smoke that will signal the election of a new Pope. One of those journalists, Greeley writes, is Jordan Bonfante, TIME's Rome bureau chief, who vanishes "to dash off his story" the moment the smoke appears.
The book is fiction, but the reporter and his dedication are real. Bonfante, who is now TIME's Los Angeles bureau chief, was one of the key contributors to...
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