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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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developed, as I eventually came to understand, that the news department, under its managing editors, didn't really -- if we were going to have an Op-Ed page, they wanted it to be under the control of the news department and not of the editorial department -- a thing that was eventually settled by Punch very definitively.

So in my second paragraph of this memo to Punch, dated May 26, 1967, I say: “You tell me that at long last the third floor is willing to trade the index for obits, which, of course, is what would make Op-Ed possible. I am willing to guarantee that we can fill the page with appropriate material, etc.”

I'm not going to read that whole memo, but it's just evidence of the fact that I was fighting, for years, for an Op-Ed page. As far as I know, during all that time I was the only person doing it. Now I have no reason to doubt Scotty in his statement that he had originally brought up this idea years and years before. I don't dispute what he said in that, but I wasn't present at such conversations. There's no reason why I should have been. I never knew about them until I read about them in his book, which was only very recently.

The point that I'm trying to establish is that the originator of this idea and the guy who fought for years -- beginning in the very early '60s, during the time when Orvil was still publisher -- was myself. While I've never tried to grab the spotlight of credit for that, I do resent the idea of other people taking, either by inference or directly claiming, the credit for what has undoubtedly been one of the great newspaper innovations of the century, as far as newspapers go. Even Scotty's reference to the fact that an Op-Ed page had appeared in the New York World years before is perfectly true. Scotty said an Op-Ed page did exist in the New York World, and I have often, often made that point and said that. But I've also pointed out that





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