Coming from a small town in North Dakota, Thompson began his love affair with photojournalism as the picture-page editor at the Milwaukee Journal. He joined Life in 1937 and stayed there - except for a few years in the military during World War II - for thirty years. After his retirement, and at the behest of S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, he founded Smithsonian magazine and was its publisher and editor for ten years. Because Thompson's career of five decades coincided with cataclysmic historical events, he guided some of the most fascinating journalistic projects of his day: Life followed NASA's astronauts and their wives through each training and flight until they landed on the moon; serializations led to personal encounters with Harry S. Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Ernest Hemingway, and Winston Churchill. Through Thompson's years, Life and Smithsonian drew the best and the brightest staff from all over the world. Thompson describes his working relationships with several of this century's most famous photographers and writers, among them Alfred Eisenstaedt, W. Eugene Smith, Margaret Bourke-White, Theodore H. White, and Robert Capa. He also describes his relationships with Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce.