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He said he would think that over. I called him back shortly, later. This all was occurring say within an hour or so on the telephone. I believe that what he did was confer with one of his advisors, probably with Gruson who was his closest advisor by this time, and he told me, having been kind of receptive to my idea that he sign this editorial - which would have been fine with me; no, it wouldn't have been fine, I would have hated the whole thing appearing in the Times because I thought the editorial was a disgrace to the New York Times, but at least the publisher would have taken responsibility for it.

He called me back and said no, he'd decided that he wouldn't do that, but how about my writing a letter if I felt so strongly about it?

So I thought a little about that. This, of course, would be an absolutely unique thing to do, for the editor of the editorial page to write a letter to the editor of the editorial page saying he disagreed with an editorial that had appeared on the editorial page!

I said, “Look, I will do that. I'll take you up on that.”

I then had to leave the island, and I wrote a fairly lengthy and quite strong letter, partly on the ferry after taking my wife to the plane and partly in the parking lot at Wood's Hole, and telephoned it in, late that afternoon, with the idea for it to run alongside the editorial, in the Letters column, as the publisher had invited me. I dictated the letter, which was a strong denunciation of Moynihan, and I felt that it was necessary for me to be for somebody in such a letter - it would be too negative to just say, “I think Moynihan is terrible,” so I