(FORTUNE Magazine) – Sol M. Linowitz has had a life that many businessmen surely envy. Coming from a family in straitened circumstances, he was immensely successful as a lawyer and then a corporate executive. As an insider in the early years of Xerox, he made himself a fortune. Then, just as many executives dream of doing, he moved into the public sector and served two Presidents with distinction in high- visibility diplomatic assignments. Linowitz organizes his memoir, The Making of a Public Man (Little Brown, $19.95), into three parts. The story begins in October 1966, when Bill Moyers, then White House aide to Lyndon Johnson, called Linowitz in Nice and interrupted his plea of other business by saying: ''I'm afraid you don't understand. The President wants you back now.'' (The President, we gather, had come to know the author as a result of Linowitz's heavy commitments to a broad range of liberal causes.) The next day Johnson named him U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, in which role he was soon initiated into the mysteries of Latin American diplomacy. Part two, the most consistently interesting section of the memoir, begins with Linowitz flashing back to his first meeting with the late Joe Wilson in Rochester, New York. This section tells us how, ''in the shadow of Eastman Kodak,'' the two men made Haloid into giant Xerox, producing copies and profits in unlikely amounts. In the final section, about half the book, we again see Linowitz functioning as a ''public man.'' He triumphed as co-negotiator (with Ellsworth Bunker) of the Panama Canal treaties. And he labored, ultimately without success, as the President's ''personal representative'' in the peace negotiations that followed the Begin-Sadat-Carter meetings at Camp David. In 1946, when he began practicing law in Rochester, Linowitz first met Joe Wilson, who had just succeeded his father as president of Haloid. The company was then a modest producer of photographic paper and machinery. The two men became close friends and, on their endless walks, talked ''about everything -- politics, literature, business, personal matters.'' Later, says Linowitz, and ''much to the horror of the management consultants Joe occasionally called in,'' these walks became central to Xerox management. Wilson would start out on the walks with a written agenda. ''When we had finished discussing an item, he would take his pencil and cross it off the list.'' Wilson turned to Linowitz for help in a matter that proved crucial to the triumphs that followed: nailing down the rights to patents for the copying process. It had been invented by a lawyer, Chester F. Carlson, and the patents were controlled by a contractresearch organization, the Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio. John Dessauer, director of research at Haloid, had originally read about the process in a bulletin put out by Eastman Kodak ) -- which missed one of history's great corporate opportunities. Wilson decided that he wanted ''electrophotography'' for Haloid and, with Linowitz serving first as outside counsel and later as company chairman, began buying up the licenses. An early demonstration at Battelle put Wilson's confidence to a test. A Battelle scientist, says Linowitz, brought out ''a metal roller coated with some dark substance, a rag of cat's fur, a transparent plastic child's ruler with dark lines scratched in it, and a bright light.'' The light was directed through the ruler onto the roller, and soon some faint lines appeared on the dark surface. ''That's it,'' the Battelle man said. Wilson was incredulous: ''That's it?'' Luckily he recovered his confidence and came to see a world of promise in that unpromising beginning. Battelle would have preferred a big-time associate, but no major company showed an interest in the process, and slowly Battelle began to sell Haloid its rights. The company's own labs, Linowitz says, finally delivered ''the ultimately triumphant copying machines . . . designed, breadboarded, and engineered for mass production.'' Linowitz himself made a decisive contribution to Haloid at this point: he armored the company with impenetrable patent protection as the copying process grew in complexity. When RCA and other companies began to look at what was going on at Haloid, they discovered that it was too late to get in on the game. IN A FASCINATING aside, Linowitz notes that Haloid's independence was bolstered by some monumentally bad advice given IBM, which briefly considered licensing and joint-venture arrangements that would get it into the copier market. The management consultants at Arthur D. Little discouraged IBM by telling it that the U.S. market for copiers would never exceed a few thousand units. Even so, Haloid (it was rechristened Xerox in 1961) worried for years about competitive copying technologies. Says Linowitz: ''We lived in fear that one of the giant companies . . . would suddenly emerge . . . with a copier based on principles other than those on which we had patents. It would be cheaper or faster and it would make better copies . . .'' That ax never fell. Linowitz's strategy was to use the weaponry of licensing as an engine of growth. To gain access to ''minds that we couldn't hire and research facilities we couldn't afford to build,'' Linowitz and Wilson began to license big companies to use xerography in whichever of its many applications the companies were interested. In return Xerox required the companies to grant licenses to Xerox for any patents they took out in areas outside their immediate interests. Xerox then granted these licenses to all its other licensees on the same terms -- in effect, heaping rights on rights in an ever- growing golden pile. This manipulation of patents and rights kept unwanted raiders away too. Linowitz explains how the company's aggressive promotion of licenses tied it in with GE, Stromberg-Carlson, and Western Electric (then AT&T's manufacturing subsidiary). Result: ''An RCA or an IBM could not possibly buy us up without creating an antitrust issue.'' And, happily, everybody got rich. Battelle began accepting blocks of Haloid stock in payment for its rights and in 1955 finally sold all the remaining rights for a chunk of 55,000 Haloid shares. Within ten years those shares were worth around $27 million, and Battelle grew into a worldwide research organization with over 7,000 employees. Reversing the stereotype ending, even the inventor got his reward: late in his life Carlson was able to give millions to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, leading Robert Hutchins to call him ''the only saint I ever knew.'' In addition to Linowitz and Wilson, 40 or more executives at Haloid became enormously wealthy. Not long after the smashing success of the 914 Xerox copier, Linowitz took that call from Moyers and entered his ''public man'' phase. Linowitz's judgments on the years at Xerox seem generally shrewd and insightful, but his narrative is slowed by his undiscriminating insistence on telling you everything. You find yourself awash in details that simply make no point: for example, that Wilson was president of the City Club in Rochester at the same time that Linowitz was chairman of the club's program committee. And when Linowitz turns into a public man, his instinct to be all-inclusive pretty much takes control of the narrative. Every association, every connection with any organization, every eminence encountered along the way -- seemingly all are soberly detailed, everything seems to be as important as everything else. A related problem is Linowitz's unbounded faith in just about all the noble- sounding institutions with which he dealt in his public career. He believes deeply in the Organization of American States and the Alliance for Progress. He believes that much was accomplished at Punta del Este, where Lyndon Johnson | met in 1967 with the heads of state of a number of Latin American countries. The President himself seems to have had misgivings about this expedition. At one point during the trip to Punta del Este, Johnson suddenly turned to his OAS ambassador and asked plaintively, ''What the hell are we going down here for?'' Not many people today could supply a good answer to that question, but Linowitz indicates that he was not put off by presidential skepticism. He solemnly reports: ''I undertook to lecture the President of the United States on why it was important for this meeting to go forward . . .'' The same affirmative spirit seems to have carried Linowitz through the numerous pro bono works that absorbed his energies in the years just after he resigned as OAS ambassador: the National Urban Coalition, the Federal City Council, the American Red Cross, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and more. The organizations brought him into contact with a large and diverse cast of characters: Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, Kingman Brewster, Richard Nixon, David Rockefeller, Saul Alinsky, John W. Gardner, Whitney Young, Vernon Jordan, Father Theodore Hesburgh, Elliot Richardson, Henry Ford, and Walter Reuther are among those named. (Reuther and Ford are brought onstage because Linowitz finds it interesting that both were ''appalled and impressed by the firebrands from the black ghetto, their articulate fury, their despair . . . and their dreams.'') DRIVEN TO NOTE every detail, Linowitz ends up not doing justice to himself on his two most difficult tasks in public life: successfully negotiating the Panama Canal treaties and trying to help Jimmy Carter implement the Camp David agreements. The story of the Panama Canal treaties is dragged down by a tedious account that appears to mention every whistle stop made to promote the treaty's passage. The account of Linowitz's failed peace mission after Camp David would seem more compelling if the author were not so insistently upbeat about the prospects for peace. He attributes the ultimate failure of Camp David not to the intractable problems of the Middle East but to neglect by the Reagan Administration. ''I have admittedly an optimistic temperament,'' Linowitz remarks. Sol Linowitz plainly deserves a place among the honorable men who have moved from the business world to the public world to serve their country. Unfortunately for the concept underlying his book, The Making of a Public Man is most absorbing when he's writing about his years in the private sector.