Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 512

Q:

On side two now. Go ahead.

Oakes:

To answer your question, I have to revert again to this long memorandum that I dictated in May of '76. On April 5th, the day before the announcement was to be made in the Times, the public announcement -- and remember that this thing first was brought up to me by Punch as a “non-conversation” on March 25th, I think it was -- and I won't go right now into all the conversations and my discussions with Punch about this and how I felt it looked as though it would be a repudiation in fact of everything the Times editorial page had stood for because of the timing of this announcement and how far ahead of my retirement and so on.

But in any case, the decision was made by the publisher to make this public announcement on April 6th. I'm now going to read from my notes. This is dated April 5th, 1976. “Because the official announcement was scheduled to appear in the Times tomorrow and I've been informed by Gruson that Rosenthal and Frankel were making their own announcements today,” -- April 5th -- to their respective staffs, of course -- “I decided to do the same by calling a luncheon meeting of the entire editorial board, followed by a meeting of the entire staff in my office. At both meetings,” -- and then I'm skipping here some of the memo -- “I announced that Frankel was to replace me on January 1st and that I have the highest admiration for him, that my own preference was that my successor be chosen from the tenth floor [the Editorial Department], but that I hoped and expected Frankel would meet with the members of the board later on in the year so that he and they could get better acquainted. I foresaw no policy change,” and so on and so forth.

And then -- and the announcement, of course, came the next day. The announcement appeared in the Times on April 6th -- on April 8th, “Frankel came to my” -- I'm now reading





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help