Journal May 1, 1963

May 1 (concluded)— Meanwhile, back in Geneva, President Moyle, Jr., received my letter and called President Ernst in Frankfurt to change the literature meeting to the 3rd! He then sent back a very gracious letter confirming the date and incidentally inviting me specifically to come to Geneva. Whereupon (this morning) President Petersen called President Moyle, Jr., [237] to tell him that he and President Hinckley would have to come to London on the 2nd, after all, and would he please phone President Hinckley to clue him in. Thus finally got together on the telephone (1) President Hinckley and (2) President Moyle; President Hinckley still expecting to go to Geneva tomorrow (the 2nd) and not to London at all. So the upshot of the whole mess is that nobody but me’s mad at me for getting my dates wrong, ’cause everything worked out all right, anyhow. But never, perhaps, has such a tiny typo from the machine of such an insignificant mission staffer changed the travel plans of so many big shots!

This may be the place to insert my favorite Priesthood-leadership story. You’ll have gathered that I had a lot to learn from Ella. And perhaps that she left before I’d absorbed it all. So, I started accumulating a list of mysteries of the publishing game, as it applied in the French Mission. When the list ran to several legal-yellow-pad pages, I did what one always does, in the Church: I took it to my file leader. Now, it was only later on that Steve Covey, then the first President of the Irish Mission, would congratulate the missionaries of Paris on their association with our beloved President Rulon T Hinckley, who, said he, “…until the day that the Lord put him in charge of the Kingdom in Paris, had never been more than ten feet from the tail of a horse.” We were aware. of course, that the Parisians didn’t know what to do with his honest, straightforward, no-bribes-of-course approach to business, and that they usually let him have his way rather than try to figure him out…

So, you can imagine President’s response to my long list of technical questions. His adam’s-apple began to bounce up and down; his sweet grin got wider and wider, almost alarmingly so; and he interrupted me at last, with “Well, Elder Anderson, I think we’ll just let that go forward under your direction, just the way it ought to.” If that were the end of the story, I wouldn’t tell it: I love President Hinckley too much for that. No, here’s the coda: A few days later, my phone rang, downstairs. It was the President: “Elder Anderson, please come up here, and bring your yellow pad.” “Yes, sir!” When I stepped into his office, he wasn’t alone: I had the full attention of President Mark E Petersen for the next 45 minutes. Had I mentioned that President Petersen had then been in charge of publications for the whole Church, for many years?

Moral of the story: Great Priesthood leadership doesn’t require you to know everything. But you need to be able to get hold of whoever does.

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