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Not originally though?

It's very hard to be sure about that answer. However, I should say right here that I never conceived of it, even as it evolved - I never conceived that the page be primarily a page to answer the opinions of the editorial page. I always conceived it, right from the beginning, and I have a memo some years later when I actually began to draft this formally, I always conceived it more in the nature of a forum for intellectual exchange, which would obviously include opinions that were contrary to those on the editorial page. But the primary purpose of this page was never, in my mind, and still isn't, that it should simply be an answer to the editorial page. It seemed to me that would be really not very interesting.

No, I understood that.

But very much as a place where opinions different from those of the editorial page would be very freely and fully presented, sure.

In any case, I talked occasionally to Orv about this while he was publisher, and I remember that he said to me one day, sort of in dismissing this thing, I remember his saying that I might as well quit talking about the idea of creating a page of the kind that I was talking about, opposite the editorial page - which always, right from the beginning, seemed to me to be the obvious place for it - because as long as his father-in-law, Arthur Sulzberger Sr., was around, he was absolutely certain that he would never agree to moving the obituary