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the first editor of it, subject to my supervision. Harrison certainly deserves plenty of credit -- and he certainly has received that for the imaginative way the Op-Ed page did develop.

My point is that it is flat wrong to attribute the idea or the origin of the Op-Ed page to him. Same thing: I discovered only recently that Scotty, in his book, Deadline -- which I must admit I never read when it first came out -- describes the origin of the Op-Ed page with this phrase: “Things don't happen at the Times, they emerge by slow growth, like flowers from the sea. The incubation of the Op-Ed page --” and now I'm just reading extracts from this paragraph on Page 363 of Deadline: “The incubation of the Op-Ed page illustrates the point. This was not a new idea. The New York World had introduced something similar in the '20s. I had argued for it with the publisher between our gin rummy games, on our trip to Moscow in 1943, but the editors couldn't agree on who should direct it so the project was filed for future consideration. This long, internal controversy was finally resolved on instructions from Arthur Ochs Sulzberger on September 26 [sic], 1970, and he ordered it to begin, under the able direction of Harrison Salisbury, but not without one last, difficult debate.”

Scotty goes on to say, “E.C. Daniel [managing editor at that time] felt the Times was not under any obligation to present a forum for people who disagreed with us. An Op-Ed page, he argued, would put the paper in a ridiculous position, etc., etc. I said I thought we were not paying enough attention, either in the news columns or on the editorial page, to the news of ideas.”

Then Scotty goes on: “The issue, I insisted, was simply whether the Times would be a better paper with the addition of the best sources we could gather, all over the world ...” and so on and so forth. After another several sentences Scotty observes: “The idea has since been copied