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No, this was the guest of honor. If he hadn't been able to bring it out in the questioning. But the norm of these luncheons is that the focus is entirely on the principal guest, and there actually is very little conversation around the table, except directly with him, and everybody is listening to what he says.

He speaks in - Nobody speaks for the institution, to rebut?

Oh, well, I would. For instance, if our editorial is under criticism, oh, sure. But we would rarely have a debate. It would rarely be in a debate form. Sometimes I might make a crack or a response, you know, explaining, sometimes that would happen, but much more normally, it's simply a question, and people all around the table, and news people and editorial people, would be putting questions to the man, particularly if it was in the political sphere.

I wonder how long this institution has been going on?

Well, I think for many, many, many years; certainly during all my connection with the Times, which is thirty years or more, Arthur Sulzberger, Punch's father, had these luncheons too, and in fact, I'm not sure that they weren't more frequent in his day than they have tended to become now, in recent years.

But I wasn't in any sense suggesting that these were improper. The only thing, when we started talking about this, I was a little uneasy about the aegis under which this particular representative of the Wall Street community was brought in. We were talking about the