Jim Michaels

HE WAS used to ordure, because at school (Culver Military Academy, Indiana), they had made him shovel it, “wet manure, which is not like dried manure. It's very heavy.” He knew about sludge, because as an ambulance-driver in Burma in the war he had spent long hours in it. So when Jim Michaels came to Forbes in 1954, charged with shaking things up, it was second nature to take the hacks' copy and wring it through his typewriter, digging out the buried leads and the smothered conclusions, cutting the waffle, and transforming “oatmeal” into lean, tight prose. He did this for 38 years of editing the magazine, from 1961 to 1999. Circulation rose sixfold while he was there.

Tiny though he was, he was terrifying. Business journalism, for him, was a tough trade. When writers joined they were given a tape recorder for phone calls, to give them crucial backing when they were hauled into court. They were hustled to get better stories than the competition, different ones, and sooner; covers were scrapped and copies pulped if a piece had appeared elsewhere. “No guts, no story”, ran a Forbes ad in his time. His journalists had to be brave, and one way to show their pluck was to survive working with Jim.

“Curmudgeon” was too soft a word for him. When editing, he was a man of shrill explosions and unmasked savagery. “EITHER FIX THIS OR DUMP IT,” ran his capitals, rampaging through the piece. “THAT ALL VERY TOUCHING BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN”. “CAN WQE SPEAK ENGLISH HOWARD AND STOP THIS STTINKING JARHGON!!!!!!!!.” Shorter was always better; he could cut 15%, he said, from any piece, and was rumoured to be able to get the Lord's Prayer down to six choice words. A reporter once wrote a euphoric story about Nepal, ending with the plaintive line: “I don't know why they would ever want to leave such a beautiful spot.” “Ya dont. did you ever go hungry or jobless????” came the furiously typed reply.

The journalists who came, trembling, through his boot camp—many of them moving on to high perches at the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the New York Times and even The Economist—clipped his comments and kept them. Some took his edits home, unpicking them at leisure, as they licked their wounds, to try to see exactly how their copy had been so improved. His edits, seen by everyone on the open filing system, were surreptitiously collected in the “Abuse File”. Some entries became famous outside the magazine, such as his wild reaction to “upscale”: “IF I SEE THIS WORD AGAIN ILL UPTHROW”. Copies are still circulating.

Mr Michaels was not a tyrant by nature. He had a streak of tenderness in him. A book of favourite poems was often in his pocket, and he once told a journalist, reporting for work the day after his first child was born, to “Go home and be a father.” (The same journalist, caught leaving the building with a dozen copies of the magazine, was told, with a smile, that he had excellent taste in reading.) He skewered stories, and people, because he wanted the copy in Forbes to be provocative, sceptical and dramatic. Each story was pushed to the edge, and the fact-checkers, legions of them, were made to justify the claims or get them taken out. If they let an error through (whisper had it), they were fired.

“Bah! Overvalued!”

Mr Michaels loved, and revelled in, American capitalism. (“Forbes: Capitalist tool” was an ideal slogan for him, hitting the lefties with their own language.) But he did not like corporate managers as a breed. Business iconoclasts he admired, but he hated sycophancy (“Why not just send them a nice lacy valentine and forget the prose?”), and once considered a cover story on phonies who had made it to the top. He refused to pay court to businessmen by going to their dinners or holidaying in the Hamptons. Forbes's founder, Malcolm Forbes, could do that. Mr Michaels—sharp-eyed, endlessly curious, unbuyable—would hold them to account.

Arriving at Forbes, he found a second-rate investment magazine running flattery about corporations. Mr Michaels proposed to help small investors in a different way, by telling them, in unvarnished prose, which stock picks were good and which were not. (He did the same, in retirement, on “Forbes on Fox”, where his “Bah! Overvalued!” kept TV audiences alert.) It was he who first thought of rating mutual funds. He was less keen on Forbes's annual Rich List of the 400 wealthiest Americans, partly because it was first tried out in his rival Fortune, but mostly because he thought it was a stupid thing for Forbes to do. He changed his mind as it improved.

Where he never wavered was over the importance of straight, short and timely reporting. He had learned that lesson young. On his first posting as a newsman, with United Press in India in 1948, he had managed a world scoop by witnessing the death of Mahatma Gandhi. It was a story that caused him agony to write. Gandhi was someone he revered. With not a word spare, and without sentimentality, he described the emaciated figure crumpling under the assassin's bullets, the last gesture of forgiveness and, the next day, the burning of the body on the banks of the Jumna. After that, perhaps, the pretensions of corporate America could never have had much hold on him.