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agreed that if anybody won, it was Lodge. We did not consider Lodge terribly seriously prior to the election, because he wasn't really an official candidate, and he himself hadn't taken part in the electioneering any more than Scranton had, or, for that matter, Nixon. Nixon was sort of a semi-official candidate. Well, they all were in this kind of never, never land.

When a vote did occur which brought Lodge very much to the fore, one had to begin to take him a little seriously as a possibility. Therefore, the reality of the vote, naturally, affects your own judgment. However, it is not-whether Lodge can win the nomination is not going to have any effect on our decision as to whether or not we should support him. It will have an effect in the way one writes an editorial about him.

A very good illustration of this came, and I was deeply involved in this, although I wasn't editor of the page at that time, but it was during the Eisenhower-Taft campaign in 1958. I was writing on the editorial board and was doing a lot of the political stuff, and I, and the Times, were very strongly in favor of Eisenhower's nomination particularly, because of the undesirability of Robert A. Taft. It looked as though the Republicans might very well win that election, and so we thought this was terribly important. We felt it was important that Taft not be nominated, so that he wouldn't be president. As part of our own campaign, which was, I think, almost unique in Times history, because we really went very strongly into the pre-convention campaign on behalf of Eisenhower, although we're not necessarily a Republican paper, and were not committed to support Eisenhower, except that by the time he was nominated we were so deeply committed to him that it would have been impossible, I suppose, not to support him.