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editorial conference room, which was subsequently abolished. It may have been in that editorial conference room, but it was unquestionably in the editorial department, in my -

I think I just should say, though, that as a kind of prelude to the Op-Ed page, I had been developing a topics column, that is, a single column, since - to go back a great many years, the Times had had for years a column called “Topics of the Times” which first was written by a genius named Simeon Strunsky, who wrote it every day for years and years and wrote it on every possible topic.

Allan Nevins was his close friend

Is that right? Of course, Strunsky must have been an extraordinary genius to have written that column all by himself for years. Then after his death, it was continued with contributions of various people. There were a number of regular writers to that column, during Mr. Merz's regime, and when I succeeded Mr. Merz, we continued the column, but I eventually - I felt that it really wasn't as good as it ought to have been, and I changed the format a little, and began to get outside writers to contribute who were not the regular Topics people (who mostly had been from the New York Times, although it's true there were one or two regular contributors from outside, one from Norfolk, Virginia). But I began to try to get and did develop, during the sixties, a column that got actual contributors of real articles of the kind of thing that I ultimately wanted to see on an Op-Ed page, but these were just single topics, columns, and signed columns.