In the past two-and-a-half years, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times—so-called because it appears opposite the editorial page—has become a powerful presence in American culture. Like the Times itself, it is an institution of national rather than merely local interest and significance, and also like the Times itself, it has achieved this position at least partly as a result of the sheer quantity and range of the material it has published. In addition to pieces by the Times's regular columnists,¹ the Op-Ed page in its first thirty months of publication carried well over two-thousand articles covering a very broad variety of subjects. Some of these articles were of a largely non-political nature. One person preferred old-fashioned kitchens to the modern variety, another thought that gourmet eating was a good antidote to joylessness, a third happily reflected on her decision to move to the country. But the great majority of Op-Ed-page pieces in this period were devoted to political and social expression by writers who had “no institutional connection with the Times and whose views”—just as the statement of September 21, 1970 announcing the inauguration of the new page promised they would be—were often “completely divergent” from the paper's editorial line. When we examine the way several major questions were treated on the Op-Ed page in its first two-and-a-half years of publication, however, we find that while it did fulfill its promise to air “the widest possible variety of opinions,” it did not in general fulfill its promise to contribute to a “deeper public understanding of difficult issues.”

_____________

The first major issue treated on the Op-Ed page was the issue of student protest, and the main question posed for discussion was whether it was possible for “youth” to work for change within the system. A central focus of this discussion was a letter from a professor urging students to get involved in electoral action and to assist the farmworkers and other worthy causes. To this, three editors of campus newspapers responded. Of the three, the most “moderate” observed that although “our society is disintegrating before our eyes” and “all the channels to change in America are plugged,” he himself could not engage in violence as it was “antithetical to both my upbringing and education.” The second editor was bolder and more dramatic:

We are in the streets because we are attacking our own mother country—attacking it at one of its wells of lifeblood: the great resource that is the university. . . . The buildings we burn are not our own. Nor are they the American people's, even though the American people pay for them. They belong to the Pentagon, to the police, to the government. . . .

Our generation is confused and uptight. This year will be the most difficult one we have had to face yet. We may see our friends die before it is over. Yet we also know that if we dare to struggle, we also dare to win.

The third editor found electoral action “farcical, dishonest, manipulative, and virtually lacking in real political content,” and he urged the following more honest and politically substantial course:

Mass disruption and low-level property destruction have proven effective organizing tools. We have only begun to feel our way toward building a popular front for social change.

Virtually the only indication given that there might be other ideas circulating in that particular age group was a piece by a “non-conformist” who wrote that “I marched with Martin Luther King at Selma, and voted for Barry Goldwater for President. My favorite contemporary writers are Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr. I am a registered Republican, a longhair, a capitalist, a grass smoker, a Vietnam hawk, a rock freak.” But no pieces appeared by young people critical of these apocalyptic attitudes toward the country and its political institutions, or who might have dissented from the idea that the country was falling apart and that the democratic process was a farce—although, of course, many such young people existed at the time even in the colleges.

So too with adult attitudes toward American youth. In article after article young people were pictured by their elders as a separate and distinct category of the population, nearly monolithic in social and political character, highly idealistic, and radically alienated from an unjust, even wicked, American society.

Louis Untermeyer, refusing to be resigned “to the crippling divisiveness, the widespread injustices and accumulating cruelties in my country,” found himself “instinctively, if incongruously, allied with the protesting young” and “stirred by their enthusiasm, their experiments.” Senator Ernest F. Hollings felt that youth was “more concerned about the future of this country and what it stands for than my generation.” Reverend Theodore Hesburgh regarded campus unrest as the result of the “moral concern” of students about “war, violence, racism, poverty, pollution, human degradation on a large scale.” M. L. Rosenthal thought “students would be a dull lot indeed if they stood mute” in the face of “the stale ways and old injustices.” Terry Sanford compared the current student generation with our Founding Fathers, while Leonard Bernstein called it “the best generation in history.”

As against this, a Mississippi doctor told his son going away to college at Tulane that if he engaged in protest and was shot, “Mama and I will still back the U.S. . . . The National Guard can shove in a couple of clips and clean Tulane. I think they ought to when students disturb the peace and destroy property.” And excerpts from a report of the Santa Barbara Citizens Commission on Civil Disorders blamed the unrest on the intolerance of the “straight people” who felt that the “counter-culture” youth should either conform or leave town.

There were some pieces that departed from the basic pattern. Jerzy Kosinski wrote that college youth lacked individuality, Andrew Greeley insisted that religion was still alive on campus, a retired Yale professor proposed an aristocratic university with a smaller, more select student body, and Jeffrey St. John blamed the intellectuals for campus unrest. But there were no articles emphasizing the moral and political diversity of the young or challenging the other assumptions on which the entire discussion of student protest was being conducted at this point. It was many months before two articles appeared, both written by White House aide Stephen Hess, pointing to the growing body of evidence that youth tended in overwhelming numbers to share in the political ideas of their parents and of the social class from which they came. In the original discussion of youth no such views appeared. It was always “Agnew vs. Spock,” as one Op-Ed feature of the early period was called, and when Sidney Hook managed to squeeze his way into the debate with an even-handed condemnation of student terrorists and their “liberal” faculty apologists alike, the accompanying note indicated that Hook's “views on campus unrest have been widely circulated by the White House.”

During the second month of its history the focus of the Op-Ed page shifted from student protest to the so-called counter-culture. The discussion was launched with two articles by Charles Reich summarizing his ideas about Consciousness III and “the greening of America.” Many responses followed, including pieces by John Kenneth Galbraith, George F. Kennan, Herbert Marcuse, Tom Hayden, and the editors of the Yale and Harvard newspapers. Two subsequent articles by Reich concluded the episode.

As in the treatment of the youth protest, the discussion proceeded in the context of certain basic assumptions that were themselves highly questionable but that were never adequately questioned. There was a later piece by Peter and Brigitte Berger on “the bluing of America”—i.e., the possible takeover of positions of power by working-class youth following the abdication of such positions by “greened” affluent youth—but nothing was printed asking whether a new consciousness had indeed emerged among youth, nor did anyone challenge Reich's indictment of American society as a closed totalitarian system. Despite the fact that the contributors to this discussion were people with many different political perspectives, the only point debated on the Op-Ed page was whether the new consciousness contained the remedy for the manifold injustices and inadequacies of American life. (Galbraith and Kennan found it insufficient, while Marcuse and Hayden saw it as a distraction from more radical solutions.)

Yet so shallow were Reich's ideas about “youth” that only a few months later even the editor of the New Yorker (which had serialized Reich's book) could say: “That all seems so long ago. I don't mean only in time, the months that have passed. The whole mood is so remote now. It was a last whimper. . . .” The same might be said about student protest in the 60's. That the Youth Candidate in 1972 lost the youth vote to Richard Nixon was a development which could only have been incomprehensible to any reader of the Op-Ed page who took its picture of the world seriously. For instead of providing a critical perspective on the phenomena of student protest and the youth culture, and thereby “deepening public understanding of difficult issues,” the Op-Ed page indulged a superficial faddism and a fashionable apocalypticism and thus helped distort the public understanding of what was happening in America and why.

_____________

The Op-Ed page dealt in much the same way with the race issue. The tone was set early in the page's history in a letter to Angela Davis from George Jackson in which Jackson wrote: “I don't believe in mercy or forgiveness or restraint. . . . No one will profit from my immolation. When that day comes they'll have to bury ten thousand of their own with full military honor. They'll have earned it.” In “An Open Letter to the Ethnics,” John A. Williams urged them to ally with the black revolt because “They're killing your children, too.” Roger Wilkins vowed to fight hard “against the spirit of repression and intimidation” in America, while a black priest labeled the Catholic Church “a white racist institution.” A piece entitled “For a Black Political Agenda,” written shortly after the 1970 elections by two associates of an Atlanta research organization, Vincent Harding and William Strickland, defined black political objectives:

During the recent elections, both parties abandoned black people and our issues: the insane, wasteful, imperialistic war; the arrogant national support of anti-liberation forces across the Third World; the persecution and assassination of our young people; the deterioration and poisoning of the urban centers; economic depression in black America; educational genocide practiced against inner city children; the uses of token “desegregation” in the South to destroy real black control of black public education—none of these was seriously addressed by white politicians.

In the weeks and months that followed, discussion of the race issue continued to be dominated by such strident rhetoric, most of it coming from black revolutionists and separatists like Angela Davis, Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Bobby Seale, and many lesser known figures with similar points of view. Fred Hampton, in a speech printed after his death at the hands of the Chicago police, said that he wanted “to die for the people” in “the international proletarian revolutionary struggle.” Another Black Panther, Richard Moore, took it on himself to write in “the organ of the ruling class, to present the necessary information” that would help “the masses of misinformed People . . . differentiate between the revisionist clique of West Coast pimps headed by Huey P. Newton, and those who have cast their Fate in the making of the American Revolution.”

At the same time, black leaders like Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin, who continued to press for integration and to oppose the resort to violence, were virtually ignored by the Op-Ed page. The only article by Wilkins, head of the largest black organization in the country, was a eulogy for Adam Clayton Powell, and it appeared alongside another tribute by a student militant. A piece by Bayard Rustin on school decentralization was submitted and rejected. Whitney Young discussed ghetto investment and Dr. Kenneth Clark wrote in favor of busing, but neither they nor any other integrationists were ever given space to criticize the militant line. When, finally, the militants were criticized, the attack came from a super-militant who charged that the “Afro-American community, once considered a hot-bed of radicalism, was rapidly becoming a new conservative force in American politics,” conservative meaning “patriotic (anti-revolutionary).” Among those accused of having “turned Right” were the Black Panthers and Stokely Carmichael. The mainstream civil-rights organizations were not even mentioned, presumably on the ground that they had “turned Right” a long time before.

Thus, to match the stereotype of youth as radical, alienated, and idealistic, a stereotype of blacks as angry racial militants prone to violence emerged from the Op-Ed page. To be sure, a series of pieces appeared by Mary E. Mebane (Liza), a black teacher from South Carolina—about her youth in rural Durham County, her teaching experiences, the black church—which conflicted with the stereotype. But apart from this distinctly regional exception, there was scarcely a hint of the fact that most blacks rejected the militant line and those who were urging it upon them, that far from being separatists most continued to believe in integration, and that far from thinking that “both parties abandoned black people and our issues,” growing numbers were registering and voting (for the Democrats).

_____________

As with politics, so with morality. Here the discussion was dominated by the idea that blacks, being the victims of injustice, are not morally responsible for what they do. “I was born innocent and trusting,” George Jackson wrote. “They created this situation. All that flows from it is their responsibility.” The doctrine of collective black innocence was stated with equal forthrightness by Alfred Hassan, a paroled convict, in a piece called “You Gonna Send Me to the Pen”:

Don't be telling me what is right. You talk that right jive, but where was you when my old man and the neighbors was teaching me how to steal and shoot dope? . . . Where was you when the World was calling me a dirty nigger and a greasy Mexican and a poor white peckawood? Where was you when the cops was whipping me upside my head just because my skin was dark? Where was you when I was losing respect for your law and your order? Where was you when Wrong was my only salvation? . . .

Yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder. But it didn't get up there by itself. And it's gonna stay up there until you eliminate the funky conditions that breed cats like me. . . .

Such sentiments were crystallized by Attica and the death of George Jackson, and the Op-Ed page provided an unusual amount of space for their expression. No fewer than nineteen articles were printed on the Attica incident alone. Six were by regular columnists Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis, and of the other thirteen, only one took issue with the idea that the “system” was exclusively responsible for the violence; it was written by Spiro T. Agnew. Mayor Kenneth Gibson of Newark, describing Attica as “one of the most callous and blatantly repressive acts ever carried out by a supposedly civilized society on its own people,” found it symptomatic of the “systematic violence” pervading American society. The president of the American Sociological Association declared this a “sick society” which, “like our prison system, pursues policies that generate more violence.” To Ramsey Clark, Attica showed “again America's reliance on violence as a problem-solver.”

The San Quentin prison break in which George Jackson was killed was treated in much the same way (seven pieces). In this case Ronald Reagan rather than Spiro Agnew represented the voice of opposition, asserting that “In California we will not compromise with rioting prisoners.” One piece by an ex-convict criticized the tendency to make “myths” out of prisoners like Jackson, but the other five (two by Wicker and three by outside contributors) represented Jackson as a blameless victim of society. Thus, in “My Brother, George,” Roger Wilkins argued that even if Jackson had killed several people before being killed himself, he could not be held responsible:

Death of prisoner and keeper alike are the natural consequences of state-sponsored savagery. If some men kill to prevent the theft of the goods of their store or their family jewels, might others not also kill to prevent the theft of their lives and their spirits?

This idea, so popular within the liberal community in the last few years, and so insulting to all those blacks who believe that to see themselves or other blacks as less than morally responsible for the actions they commit would be to see themselves as less than fully human, encountered opposition on the Op-Ed page only from Agnew and Reagan.

_____________

Underlying the specific issues of youth and race was the general issue of America itself, and a very large number of articles on the Op-Ed page during its first thirty months were naturally addressed either directly or indirectly to the character of American society.

As portrayed on the Op-Ed page in the period under consideration, America was a divided nation, with the line drawn between a majority (as it would have appeared to a reader of the Op-Ed page) which saw the country as sterile, cruel, violent, racist, sexist, power-crazed, and militarist, and a minority which chauvinistically disagreed with this assessment. On a few occasions a social democrat or a dissident liberal offered an alternative point of view. Thus Daniel P. Moynihan observed that “nihilism has been taking root in upper-class culture in the United States.” Alexander M. Bickel, criticizing John Gardner's remark that our political parties “are virtually useless as instruments of the popular will,” wrote that Gardner “sees fit in a manner increasingly fashionable to speak in tones of the apocalypse, and to heap virtually unqualified condemnation on society as now organized and run.” And Robert Bendiner, faulting Edmund Muskie for having abandoned his moderate posture in the pursuit of the White House, noted that extremism had recently “come into its own as an upper-middle-class attitude, highly popular at suburban dinner parties, occasionally lauded at church breakfasts as ‘prophetic witness, and found thoroughly ‘understandable’ in the columns of respectable journals.” But such voices were rare indeed, and they were muted by the shrill cries of condemnation of America that took up so much space on the Op-Ed page.

Thus, according to Marshall McLuhan, the norm in America was “total alienation of men from their fellows.” Cynthia Buchanan confessed that “Packaging, performance, image have made us, as individuals, false. Falseness has made us lonely.” Joseph Rhodes, Jr., a member of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, opined that “Americans are hungry, bored, sick, frustrated, polluted, and discarded.” From Herbert Marcuse we learned that “the real people” in America were “men and women madly in love with death, violence, and destruction,” and a young graduate student in history wrote that murder had become “the most American of acts.” Rollo May offered the thought that America was “engaged in a vast repression of the fact of death,” while a father whose son shot a water pistol at the breakfast table gravely concluded that guns and killing were “built into our society.” For Philip Berrigan, the problem was that “Morally speaking, Americans are bleeding to death.”

Our penal system, according to that apostle of democratic values, Angela Davis, was a form of “unmitigated totalitarianism.” Jonathan Kozol complained that our school system was “not working” because “School cannot at once both socialize to the values of an oppressor and toil for the liberation and the potency of the oppressed.” Douglas Dowd made a similar argument about the universities, which were under “deserved attack” by students because they served “the causes of business, of war, of power, of status.” A husband-and-wife team who traveled 20,000 miles around America reported finding only a few small towns that could be deemed “habitable,” and even those suffered from drug abuse and xenophobia. A “distinguished Professor of Urban Affairs” feared that “American totalitarianism,” in the form of a “pluralistic ‘friendly fascism,’” could overtake us “slowly as a cancerous growth within and around the White House, the Pentagon, and the broader political establishment.” Shirley MacLaine declared that “Right now the social soul of America is so sick that even the overthrow of a political regime may be insufficient.” A young draft resister assured us that we had “an economic system based on cancerous growth, resolute greed, and unmitigated corruption.”

In America, a Cornell student told us, “a white elite has colonized, enslaved, and practiced genocide to maintain their power.” But relations between the sexes were no better than those between the races, and for much the same reason. Robin Morgan, fearing the Times's tactic of “cooptation” in opening its pages to her, chose to write anyway in order to communicate with her sisters about “the growing repression . . . by which white male imperialism” intended to keep women and other oppressed people “from a righteous rebellion.” Her colleague, Gloria Steinem, asserted that the United States had become “the most destructive of the world's great nations” because “the masculine mystique” drove our leaders to be “Number One.” Yoko Ono added that “feminine direction” was needed since “In the last two thousand years, men have repeatedly shown us failure in their method of running the world.” And another contributor charged America with “sexocide” in permitting women to be viewed as “just a housewife, only a mother.”

_____________

In the world of the Op-Ed page, Jews too shared in this general estimate of America. From the Right Meir Kahane urged Jews to “evacuate” before it was too late, but other Jews preferred to remain in Babylon as prophets from the Left. Arthur Waskow reported that young Jews who rejected what they called “‘Amerikan’ society, and would say it with images of Germany and genocide before their eyes,” were trying to tell us that “either Isaiah's Days of Peace and Justice will be achieved on earth in the next generation, or the earth itself will be consumed by fire and poison. If that is indeed the choice, who could more joyfully work for Isaiah's vision than Isaiah's people in America?” A young rabbi noted that Jeremiah's “message of doom was considered subversive and dangerous,” but that he had been proven right in the end. He added:

Moses's warnings and the subsequent plagues have their parallels in our own time. The power failures are darknesses that cover the face of our land. The odor coming from the Hudson and the death of fish in our national waters remind us of the Nile. The rats and roaches in our city, even on Park Avenue, are certainly a plague of vermin. Our unbelievable infant mortality rate in this, the most affluent country on the face of the earth, is to be taken as seriously as the death of the Egyptian firstborn.

On the Op-Ed page the “other America” was mainly represented by heroes of the extreme Right. J. Edgar Hoover feared that young people were being subverted by the Communists and, in another instance, called upon the judiciary to “deal promptly and decisively with vituperative outbursts and disruptive tactics in court.” H. L. Hunt also suspected the Communist enemies within who “envy the success and the greatness of our individual initiative, personal enterprise, and profit-motive system and want to destroy all this.” A column on capital punishment by an official of the New York Conservative party was entitled “They Must Surely Die,” and Reverend Charles E. Coughlin returned from a long oblivion to urge us to “hasten now to dissolve wastage, racism, forced integration, youth pollution, the supremacy of minorities, and compromises with evil.”

It was this unshaded view of America which colored the discussion of Vietnam on the Op-Ed page. The tenor of the articles critical of American policy was entirely in keeping with Anthony Lewis's widely quoted statement that “The United States is the most dangerous and destructive power in the world,” while the only alternative to this general stance seemed to derive from the Right.

“We are torturers,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “and we once hoped to win in Indochina and anywhere because we had the most expensive torture instruments yet devised.” “Obviously,” according to Kennett Love, “the main business of the most powerful nation in history is death and violence.” Said Harold Taylor: “We wiped out the Indians and are now wiping out the Vietnamese simply because it suits our interests.” The Reverend Francis B. Sayre wrote that “Calley is all of us. He is every single citizen in our graceless land,” and the founder of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War agreed that “every last one of us is guilty, along with Calley, of committing war crimes.” Rennie Davis charged that in Vietnam America had committed “the greatest atrocity of the 20th century.” Other writers, like Davis himself, expressed solidarity with North Vietnam and the Vietcong. Fred Gardner approved of the practice of “fragging” (i.e., blowing up) officers who ordered troops into the field, and noted that “blatant racists are dealt with similarly.” Marya Mannes wrote with some pride that she and “thousands of other Americans” were “traitors” in the sense that they wanted North Vietnam to win. Grace Paley called each American POW a “killer” and noted that each “may have accomplished half a dozen My Lais in any evening.”

In line with the usual pattern of the Op-Ed page, the main alternative to this extreme position seemed to be the military or the Right. The Secretary of the Air Force and a retired Air Force general defended Nixon's bombing policy; General Westmoreland defended the reputation of the Army; retired Brigadier General S.L.A. Mar-shall responded to charges about killing civilians: and Barry Goldwater contended that Nixon “has shown more political courage in Indochina than all of his opponents and critics put together.” But except for an occasional piece by Walt or Eugene Rostow, there was little trace on the Op-Ed page of a more complex conception than either the Left or the Right could offer of what the United States was doing in Vietnam and why and what the long-range geopolitical stakes might be.

_____________

Apart from America, the only other countries which presented themselves as significant issues on the Op-Ed page were the two major Communist powers, the Soviet Union and China. In general, the treatment of the Soviet Union was based on what Mihajlo Mihajlov called the theory of Soviet-American convergence. Thus Sir Herbert Butterfield spoke of “a United States and a Russia standing at the top of the world, exactly equal in virtue.” In “Kafka and the News,” the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt said that in a Communist country like the Soviet Union “power struggles are conducted in a secretive body, the Politbureau,” and that “the U.S. administration also has its place in Kafka's castle.” In another piece Mihajlov declared that “our whole modern era is the enemy of art. We may be made prisoners not only by a one-party system but also by a modern technological society whose only aim is material prosperity. The means of control of human souls are different there than in Communist countries, where power is more open and crude.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi pronounced the United States and the Soviet Union equally evil on the ground that both were spending large sums of money on arms. In a piece entitled “Banned in Russia,” Arthur Miller wrote: “Once blacklisted in my own country, I was now blacklisted in Russia. Comrades, shake hands with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.” The Soviet leaders, he added, “are disgracing Russia, just as our witch-hunters disgraced us and are again fingering the tools of repression.” The French novelist Romain Gary, a recent Polish immigrant, and several right-wing spokesman insisted on civil liberties and democratic institutions as major points of difference between the Soviet Union and America, but what Arthur Miller called the “ironic parallels” between the two otherwise went unchallenged.

_____________

If the Soviet Union emerged from the Op-Ed page as a country remarkable for its similarities, especially in evil, to the United States, Communist China emerged as a glowing alternative to both. Few subjects were written about more intensively on the Op-Ed page in its first thirty months than China, The most frequent single contributor, the novelist Han Suyin, appeared on the very first day of the page's publication with an article praising Mao's “Little Red Book” as “the touch stone” for “the new sense of freedom, a real grassroots democratic spirit, which is evident everywhere.” Another column by Madame Suyin, in which she gave the official Maoist line on the removal of Lin Piao (Lin “smoldered with a Napoleon complex,” he lost his “revolutionary dedication,” he wanted to be “absolute master,” and he was thus guilty of “parricide”) appeared not once but twice, on successive weeks. In the ensuing months no fewer than three additional pieces also followed the official Maoist line on Lin Piao.

Madame Suyin's adulatory and idealized reports on Chinese society and politics were echoed by many other writers. John Stewart Service found “courtesy, cheerful good humor, and cooperative helpfulness” everywhere in China, and he could identify “no derelicts or beggars, no people in rags and tatters, no signs of starvation nor malnutrition.” Paul Dudley White could discover no alcoholism, drug abuse, venereal disease, or pollution. “To be in Peking,” he wrote, “was like going back to the Puritan days of my youth, in the Victorian age when it was safe to walk the streets of Boston even in the dark, and when thefts were relatively rare.” Chester Ronning was impressed that “The masses of China are awake. They are intelligent, industrious, and virile,” with young people “excited and enthusiastic about the scientific approach advocated by Chairman Mao.” According to Alberto Jacoviello, China was “a country of philosophers, meaning that in China all discuss all things with a competence and precision that I have not seen in any other country.” In addition, “The Chinese soldiers are the humblest in the world. Their only duty is to be more at the service of the people than anyone else.” Samuel Rosen, reporting on the Chinese use of acupuncture, observed a patient fully awake during surgery and then leaving the operating room “waving his Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” A Japanese observer reported that the people “respect and love [Mao] more than ever,” and that he was most likely to be seen “in a country place talking peacefully and happily with members of a people's commune.” Jack Chen described Mao as “a veritable demiurge of a man,” while Robert Williams saw him leading the Chinese people to “the top of humanity.”

By contrast, J. Edgar Hoover feared the “shadow of pro-Peking subversion” throughout America. Anna Chennault argued that the best interests of all Chinese were linked to “the American free-enterprise way of life.” Vincent Miceli criticized Nixon for thinking he was “above the radical metaphysical conflict raging eternally between the forces of good and evil” by considering himself capable of harmonizing “a world dedicated to criminal aggression and a world dedicated to civil liberty.” James Burnham wrote simply that “I'm afraid that I do believe a Communist regime is a bad thing.”

The absence in all this of any liberal criticism of Chinese totalitarianism was glaring, especially in view of the abundance of articles on the Op-Ed page condemning the denial of human rights in Greece, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, South Vietnam, and, of course, the United States.

_____________

During the summer of 1971, a contributor to the Op-Ed page imagined what the reaction would be like in America to the announcement of peace in Vietnam:

Raging pro-war groups and exultant peaceniks carrying signs that read “America is a Nest of Traitors” and “Peace in Southeast Asia” fought pitched battles in the parks and plazas of a dozen cities. At a rally in a Midwestern town, the commander of the American Legion Post beat his fists into the air as he ticked off the agents of betrayal: “The drug-crazed hippie anarchists, the long-haired college radicals, the pinko professors, the degenerate bohemian intellectuals, the Senators from Moscow, the lying press, the TV commentators, the scum from the ghettos.”

That nothing of the sort actually happened when peace was finally announced only underlines the accuracy with which this description reflects two states of mind, at opposite poles to be sure and yet equally distant from contemporary reality, each needing the other, feeding off the other. The author of that article and “the commander of the American Legion Post” have more in common than either would be willing to admit. Together they dominated the Op-Ed page in its first thirty months of publication, effectively setting the terms of discussion, squeezing out for all practical purposes voices critical of extremism and apocalypticism and faddism. The Op-Ed page thereby made it harder rather than easier to arrive at a deeper understanding of difficult public issues, let alone at a new set of terms by which we might as a political culture escape from what George Bernanos once called “the worst, the most corrupting of lies [which] are problems poorly stated.”

¹ These are not properly considered a part of the Op-Ed page and will not be discussed here.