“In 1958
Mr. Pusey was considering requests that he write the biographies of several
distinguished jurists when the children of George Albert Smith asked him to
write this story. He responded to the request because he had warm memories of
George Albert Smith from his days as a Deseret
News reporter when he covered the LDS Church Office Building in the early
1920s. He found the journals of George Albert Smith and those of his father and
grandfather to be both informative and delightful—full of trials and difficulties
as well as joys and triumphs.” (Foreword, Leonard Arrington)
“I began
working on the story in the late 1950s at the request of George Albert Smith’s
two daughters, Emily Smith Stewart and Edith Smith Elliott, and his only son,
George Albert Smith, Jr., then a professor at the Harvard University School of
Business Administration. They made available to me the journals of all three of
their distinguished progenitors and a vast array of letters, memoranda, and
other data in George Albert’s personal papers. To supplement this information,
I read widely in church history and interviewed an enormous number of church
and civic leaders, friends of the family, and others who had had an impact on
George Albert’s career. By this means I was able to obtain extensive
information in the early 1960s that would not be available today [ca.1980].
Most of the original manuscript was written in those years, but publication was
delayed in deference to objections from one member of the family to my
treatment of some episodes with what I deemed to be proper objectivity. I have
tried to tell the story as I found it, with lights and shadows, problems as
well as achievements, and with candid reporting of controversy where it has
existed. Recently the manuscript has been extensively revised in the light of
historical research that was not available in the early sixties.” (Preface,
Merlo J. Pusey)
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