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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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Part:         Session:         Page of 512

I would like to insert here a memo that I've just put my hands on, to go into the part of this discussion that deals with the Op-Ed page in 1967. The reason being that this is a memo May 26, 1967, to Punch, which was ticked off by the departure of Dick Peters, whom I have mentioned as someone that I brought on with the basic idea that he would be handling the Op-Ed page.

He left, I can't remember, under very friendly circumstances, but I think he came to the conclusion that we weren't going to have one.

Q:

He'd been looking forward to this assignment, here and he wasn't going to get it.

Oakes:

Oh, yes. Oh, sure. He was doing editorial work also, but this was the thing that he really had in mind, and when he left, under friendly, very friendly circumstances, I sent Punch a note pointing out that his departure suggests again that we really ought to take action on Op-Ed, instead of letting it string on the way we had, and I think, without reading this thing, I think that his memo kind of brings it all up to date, with various points I was making about the letters, the relationship of expanding letters space to an Op-Ed, which I felt was terribly important. I felt that it was a disgrace that the Times was printing such a small percentage of letters received, and a constantly small percentage, because we were receiving more and more letters and had such small space to do it, and this was quite an important point.





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