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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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illustrations of the pressures and kinds of pressures, but not stating to you that he forced through any of these conflicting views. I have to say that. The only time that he ever forced through an editorial, which, if I hadn't been so near to leaving the editorial page at that point, would have probably forced me to resign, was in a strictly political editorial which involved our support of Senator Moynihan in the Democratic primary of 1976. Maybe I should talk about that for a minute, because -

Q:

Although this came after you had -?

Oakes:

That is correct. It came after my departure from the page had been announced. That's quite right. It had.

Incidentally, my changeover, departure from the editorial page was announced early in April, '76, and there is a whole history of that which I am not going to go into at this moment, but maybe would be relevant, I think would be quite relevant at a later date.

But to talk about this question of editorial independence, I have always successfully resisted whatever efforts (and the whole story that I've been giving you would substantiate this), whatever efforts there were to infringe on what I felt was the essential point of the independence of the editorial page, from all other interests, whatever they were, business or social or any other kind that the Times was involved in.

Now, I think it's literally true that Punch never had an editorial forced onto the page (until 1976). And I always thought that if that ever happened, and recognizing the publisher's





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