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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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with my family in Paris and studied quite intensively French political institutions, and used the time also to travel quite a lot in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. This is why I went to Poland. And on to Russia from there. I ended up by making quite an extensive trip to Africa which ended up in a little book I wrote, the following year, entitled The Edge of Freedom, my one and only full book. This dealt with both Eastern Europe and Africa, as a matter of fact, and The Edge of Freedom -

Q:

That was quite a time to write a book on that. The dawn of that period.

Oakes:

I was down there in the autumn of 1959. That's correct. And The Edge of Freedom, the title applied to both what I was saying about Eastern Europe, that is, the edge of the East-West confrontation in Europe, and also in a different sense, the rising nationalism of Africa, and I included all that in a quite short book.

In any case, that's what I was doing in Warsaw. That's why I was in Warsaw. We got on beautifully and the Rosenthals couldn't have been nicer.

So when he came back, when Rosenthal came back a year or two later, whenever it was, I was very friendly and was on friendly terms with him, as far as I knew, all through this period.

Q:

So his elevation to the managing editorship is one you greeted with enthusiasm?





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