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RADER: No, I didn't say it caused high blood pressure. I think the
work and the stress may have caused that. No, we have an organization
that sometimes manufactures problems for itself. And I would say
that's about as nice a way of putting it. And those problems surface
and then we go to work on them, and we "kill th� dragon." But since
you know it's really not a real animal and it never really was a
serious threat, there isn't any real sense of satisfaction of having
slayed the dragon. It's kind of a futile exercise. But that's what
we have to do periodically--kill the new dragon.
QUESTION: Are there any plans to gear up the work in Europe?
RADER: Yes. We have a study of all of the European offices that
was just completed. I haven't seen it yet, but I'll be getting it
sometime today. And several men have been transferred to the European
area who have worked there before, and will be doing more and more
in that area.
You know, the press operation in England is the only place today where
we have such an operation. And it is not only furnishing the foreign
edition of the PT to the world, but it's also supplying Canada and
it's supplying the eastern part of the United States with their PTs.
It's a very important operation, and they're operating at a profit.
They're taking in outside work and doing very well. So we'll have
to beef up that entire European operation. And we're doing it at
the present moment, making plans for the years '79 and '80.
QUESTION: Is there any possibility of reconsidering the Press oper
ation here or was that a mistake?
RADER: Well, I don't believe it was a mistake. Mr. Armstrong was
always very much opposed to it from the beginning. He never wanted
to get into press operations beyond those smaller letter presses and
the like, to do more or less in-house type things that any organiza
tion of our size would have. But very strong pressure was brought
to bear and all the wrong reasons were stressed. Some of them were
ludicrous. And Mr. Armstrong and I kind of together fought the move
ment, went on record that it was a mistake, but sometimes you just
simply are complelled to make a mistake because so many other people
are certain that they are right even though they are wrong. And we
should never have been in it. It took us some time to get· out, so
I'm sure we would never go back into large scale press operations.
The way I described it at the time is that, no matter how clean your
dog is, the dog is going to attract fleas. There's no question about
it. But you don't really take the dog and go out and deliberately
seek the fleas so you could start having the flea collar and whatever
else is needed to combat the condition. And with the press, that's
all we did. We suddenly had labor-management problems. It cost us
more to produce the magazine than it was costing us before, and we
were having delays, and we were having problems of meeting paper shor
tages, of ink shortages and what have you because our own leverage
wasn't as great necessarily as a larger printer. Some of the argu
ments that they gave were, as I said, ludicrous for the press opera
tion, the idea being that we didn't dare trust our PLAIN TRUTH to
an outside publisher. Some union member on the line might see it
and refuse to publish it--just would refuse and wouldn't get it out.