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stating that I disagreed with the editorial supporting Moynihan for the Democratic nomination for senator.

To me this was an absolutely traumatic experience. I can't emphasize how strongly I felt it represented absolutely everything that a publisher should not do in relation to an editor. Even the language, you see, I felt was disgraceful. Even the language, quite apart from the support of Moynihan.

5The publisher claimed that he had written the editorial, but admitted he had had “a little help” with it. It was so badly argued and poorly worded that I could not imagine who had helped him. Some months later, my successor Max Frankel told me he had written-re-written-it at the publisher's request. I felt-and feel-that this was a highly unethical thing for him to have done, not only because of my prospective successor.

I think that I probably could have agreed to an editorial, probably could have agreed to an editorial in support of Moynihan, if we had been able to talk about it and if we could have worded it in a way that I could have accepted. I think I probably could have. I'm not sure of that. But I am sure of the fact that the way this was done epitomized everything that was wrong in the relationship between publisher and editor. And I will say, it kind of was the culmination of my growing unease with our relationship, as I've indicated earlier. If I hadn't been long since, if it hadn't been announced that I was leaving the Times editorial page in another three or four months, on December 31st of that year, I probably would have felt it necessary to have resigned - that is, if I had seen another two or three years of being editor of the page under these circumstances, which I couldn't have accepted. But that seemed a very futile gesture at that point, and so I didn't do that.

I should add, on this incident, that I tried to get - because one of my colleagues, Roger Wilkins, was absolutely as outraged as I was but for somewhat different reasons, about the