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Now, what was interesting about the Burnham article, which revealed the corruption in the police department... And this is what Burnham said to me and what Durk said to me, because they liked me; they liked, my involvement. Burnham quoted me in the Times and said in a very nice reference that it was as a result of my criticism of Lindsay, who in response to the Burnham article exposing the corruption had appointed a committee made up of Leary (that's Howard Leary, the former police commissioner) and others. I said, “That's ridiculous having the police commissioner on a commission to investigate corruption of a police force that's corrupt. Why didn't he do it before?” And as a result of my attack on that commission, said Burnham, they had to appoint an outside group, and so he gave me credit for having initiated the Knapp Commission.

Now, it's also interesting as a footnote to history that Burnham had done this article on corruption before any other public expose of it and had given it to the Times for which he worked, and it was a brilliant series -- it was a front-page story which ran for several days, of course -- and what he said was that the publisher (this I'm only repeating; I don't know it to be a fact), Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who had a very close relationship with Lindsay, showed it to Lindsay before it ran, which is really not nice. And knowing that it was going to run, Lindsay then appointed the Howard Leary committee so that the announcement came out either the day before the series ran