(4 of 9)
No Time for Smoking. At 8:16 a.m. Freeman is back in his office. Waiting for him are the key newsmen of the News Leader, prepared to have their brains picked by the editor. Each one is expected to have at least one juicy item a day. Freeman starts with the capitol reporter ("Mister, how's the Governor today?") and goes right down the line. No one smokes, because Freeman objects to the lingering odor (he dropped smoking years ago when he found that the buying, lighting, smoking and crushing out of cigarettes, "wasted" 8½ hours a week). Freeman also has a newspaperman's dislike of office whistlers. He will bolt from his chair, at the cost of precious seconds, to bawl out a whistling copy boy.
At 9:45 Freeman goes down to the second floor to make up the editorial page, then gets in another lick at George Washington until 11, when "my secretaries put me to bed" on an office couch for 15 minutes. After his nap he sees visitors (his secretary says radio listeners sometimes drop in just to look at the great man) until 11:55, when he heads for the radio station again and his noon broadcast.
Lunch at home with his wife is a leisurely, almost time-wasting meal, in a spacious dining room from whose walls handsome young Lieut. Lee looks down. At 2 :30 sharp he is in bed. At 3 (he wakes himself almost on the dot) he begins his "second day." From his attic bedroom he steps into his study for 2½ solid hours of work on Washington. Here visitors, and even his family, are forbidden. On the walls are autographed pictures of his friends Winston Churchill and Admiral Nimitz, a letter from President Roosevelt thanking Freeman for suggesting the term "liberation" instead of the "invasion" of Europe, and a Helen Hokinson New Yorker cartoon in which a bewildered matron returns two fat volumes to her bookshop, saying: "I guess I bit off more 'Robert E. Lee' than I could chew."
Freeman has a quartermaster's command of the immense body of historical material he works with. His researcher's notes on white, blue, pink and yellow slips are arranged to correspond to the biographical plan he has carefully outlined in his notebooks. By the use of an ingenious system of numbers and symbols he can turn to any scrap of material he needs in a matter of seconds. After he has written a chapter, he "lets it cool" for a month and then his revisions always "cut the first draft to pieces." After the fourth typing he sticks to what he has, unless he or his researcher, Dr. Gertrude Richards, belatedly turns up important new material.
Questions & Answers. Freeman sees Dr. Richards once a week, Saturday at 11 a.m. for 20 minutes, when they discuss the past week's work and Freeman tells her what he wants for the week following. At 8 a.m. each day, while Freeman is broadcasting, Dr. Richards picks up a list of questions he wants answered and leaves the answers to those he asked the day before.