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Notable New     Yorkers
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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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Specifically on the China issue, I wanted to advance the Times editorial position on the recognition of China and its admission to the U.N., and I, of course, as editor would not have done this without consultation with the publisher and without his approval, because this was a major position for the paper to take. I might say as an illustration that if the publisher had disapproved of the position I wanted to take, we would not have taken the position. This would be quite different from taking a position which I disapproved. It would simply be not taking a position which I wanted to take. In any case, this didn't happen. After much consultation, we did take a rather advanced position on the China question. I offer this as an illustration.

There were one or two other such issues. I believe in each case they were raised by me with the publisher to make sure that he was in complete agreement with the position that we were going to take. If I felt that I would get the Times into trouble because of a specific editorial-I mean with a body of readers, whether they were an important classification of readers, a religious group or perhaps a labor group or a major segment of business-I would feel that it was my responsibility to call the attention of the publisher to this kind of editorial before it appeared so that he would be warned of what was coming. And if there were any real objection, it certainly seemed to me-and it seems to me-that he, as the final arbiter in the sense of holding the final control over the paper, certainly had the right to be informed and I had the obligation to inform him. And if there were objections, I had an obligation to modify the position accordingly. There's a big difference-I have to state this again because I want to make it clear-in the situation I'm describing and any situation in which the editorial page would be required to produce something that the





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