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relations firm had engineered this luncheon, the invitation to this luncheon, and I was unhappy about the taste of that. We didn't change our editorial position, by the way. But this was a form of pressure, I felt, particularly because of the way it had been engineered. PR people often maneuver luncheon guests at the publisher's luncheon. I think we ought to be much more careful about that than we are. Because a publisher's lunch is a fixture, and it's known at the time, these are marvelous occasions for people in industry or politics or anywhere, any form of public life, to have access to the top management of the Times.

The lunches can be very useful things, but it worries me always when I know that a PR man has kind of maneuvered the invitation. And in this case, we actually had our own PR agent, who was, as I understand it, employed to try to improve our relations with the business community.

Could you give me specifics about publishers' luncheons? On this occasion, for example, were there speeches after the lunch, or was there any time when the guest would have the floor?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Not speeches. Not speeches, but the guest would have the floor. Well, he would say, “I would like to” - it was all very open, very candid - “I would like to point out how you are all wet on this particular issue.”

As a matter of fact, the way we run those lunches, or the way he runs those lunches and has for years, and these lunches occur two or three times a week normally (less frequently recently than they used to), the normal procedure would be that as soon as the first course