"He leaned back and did one of these long windup Hunter kind of things where everybody is supposed to be amused by it all, and Clinton wasn't going to have any of it," Wenner recalls.
"We published as a serial novel, a new chapter every week, written on deadline, the way Charles Dickens used to do it," Wenner said, while noting that Rolling Stone still lost the fiction award that year to Seventeen magazine.
It missed Wen by several feet.
"The kids enjoy it," said Wen Shi of Orangeburg, N.Y., who was there with her 12 year-old son.
It was Wen who visited the survivors of the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed 80,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
It was Wen who toured the farms and rural villages of southern and western China when they were devastated by the exceptionally severe winter last year.
It was Wenner's patience and indulgence that enabled Thompson to produce his very best work; Wenner's vision made Rolling Stone, in the early 1970s, one of the most exciting publications in American history.
"Wen, it's not my idea," said Mr. Rose, "It's the policy of the house.
"I'm not completely proud of it," said Zhou Wen, 27 and unmarried, a secretary at an American marketing company in Beijing, "but it is at least a neutral word.
Mr Hu and Mr Wen, it appears, do not agree.
