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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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priests who were on the liberal Catholic side and who were really on the outs with the church, as a matter of fact, because --

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO; BEGIN TAPE TO, SIDE 1]

Oakes:

-- were on the outs with the established church because these priests were very much on the popular side, which was against these repressive, military governments -- which the United States, in all these three cases, as well as in Guatemala, which I actually didn't visit -- really in all four countries -- Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador -- the U.S. was supporting the wrong side in all these cases. I came back and I wrote quite a lot. I had written before but I wrote quite a lot more about how misplaced our American weight was on the side of the government in these cases: on the side of very repressive governments, against the popular movements which, of course, were encouraged by the Communists but which the U.S. was so wrong to consider mere tools of Communist imperialism. Naturally, the Russian Communists supported these revolutionary movements, but they were ostensibly home-grown -- if sometimes communist-led -- protests against military, economic and political suppression.

Q:

How important do you think these kinds of site-visits are -- traveling and visiting these places to an editorial writer or Op-Ed piece writer?

Oakes:

Oh, I think very important. And from the day that I became editor of the editorial page of the Times, in 1961, I began to encourage the members of the editorial board to do what they really hadn't been accustomed to doing very much at all, prior to that time.





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