Thomas Guinzburg during his tenure as head of the Viking Press, with one of his editors, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

The least famous — although he perhaps should have been the most famous — member of the triumvirate that founded the Paris Review has died: Thomas Guinzburg, who co-founded the famous literary journal with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen in 1953, and also ran the Viking Press, which was founded by his father, died in Manhattan after complications from heart surgery, according to a New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber.

Matthiessen recalls that of the three Paris Review co-founders, Guinzburg, who had as a student been managing editor of the Yale student newspaper (working under a young editor-in-chief named William F. Buckley), “was the only one of us who had any publishing expertise.” Matthiessen tells the Times that Guinzburg “possessed the natural publisher’s gift of having no agenda: ‘He had no axes to grind. He just had very good taste.'”

Not always, perhaps. While as the head of Viking, Guinzburg published some great writers — including John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Arthur Miller and Saul Bellow — he did publish one questionable work that led to the resignation of perhaps his most famous editor: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. As Weber tells the story, it all came about due to …

… the publication of a political thriller called “Shall We Tell the President?”

In that book, the author, Jeffrey Archer, a former member of the British Parliament, imagined Edward M. Kennedy as the president of the United States and an assassination plot against him. Mrs. Onassis “did not edit the book or, evidently, read it” but knew of it and had told Mr. Guinzburg that she would not object to its publication. John Leonard, however, lambasting the book in a review in The New York Times, took barely disguised aim at her.

“There is a word for such a book,” Mr. Leonard wrote. The word is trash. Anybody associated with its publication should be ashamed of herself.

Mrs. Onassis resigned shortly afterward.

It might be noted that Leonard didn’t remain at the Times Book Review much longer after that, either.

Thomas Guinzburg was 84 at the time of his death.