Part: 1234         Session: 1234         Page 262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287288289290291292293294295296297298299300301302303304305306307 of 512

department. I think maybe essentially, they didn't want to have a page of this sort outside of, that would presumably not be under the control of the news department. But I think perhaps the reluctance to give up space, which would have been necessary, because the obit page would have had to go somewhere, was a principal reason, plus loss of control of one more page.

I had, by the way, a perfect place for the obit page to go, which surprisingly enough, is the place where the obit page eventually went, more or less. I thought that pages two and three of the second section - in those days we had a two-section paper - thought pages two and three, to the degree necessary, could be a fixture for the obit page, which would enable us to give a good deal more space to obits than we could when we had to crowd them onto the page opposite the editorial page, and then put other overflow ones scattered elsewhere in the paper, which I always found unsatisfactory, because I thought obits were very important too, and still do.

This is where they went immediately when the Op-Ed page began, isn't it? Pages two and three of the second section?

That's my recollection. Yes. But during this year of 1967, a contributory cause of the failure of Op-Ed to gel, at all, was that the news department was also very busy in studies for an afternoon paper. It was that year that there was a very, very intense study of the possibility of the New York Times putting out an afternoon daily. That undoubtedly was a contributory cause for the diversion of the publisher's attention from what I felt all that year, and of course right until it occurred, was an absolute necessity, for the Times to