Pamela Maffei McCarthy: “Someone who would find, shepherd, and protect every variety of talent.”

From a note in the New Yorker about the retirement of Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor since 1995:

In the earliest years of The New Yorker, Harold Ross, its founding editor, always said he was looking for a “Jesus”—someone who could keep his venture calm and steady, fending off crisis, bringing the good news. He never quite found that savior. In Pam McCarthy, The New Yorker finally got what Ross was searching for: here was someone who would find, shepherd, and protect every variety of talent, a diplomat who could quiet troubled waters, a businessperson who could multiply loaves and fishes. In no small measure, today’s New Yorker would not exist without her and the extraordinary people she found, put into place, and promoted. The building started the moment she arrived; now she leaves the magazine transformed, expanded, and healthy. She did it not only with editorial acuity and business savvy but with immense depth of character, kindness, and generosity.