LESLEY: What about deciding what position you’re going to take on an issue? You didn’t sit around and have knock-down, drag-out arguments?

GAIL: We had a few. You don’t normally. You don’t have as many as you would think because there’s one person on the editorial board that is in charge of every general area. And for a normal position, they’d be the one to decide if it’s something that’s fairly esoteric. And also the Times has a very, very long history of editorial page positions. And you don’t change them unless you really agonize. One of the biggest was when we changed our position on suffrage back around, you know, 1920. But until then we were really against it. And it’s wonderful. I found one of the editorials that said something like, "People often say that every human being has the right to vote. This is obviously not true because small children do not have the right to vote. Therefore why should women have the right to vote?"

LESLEY: Oh, my word.

GAIL: I mean, the Times has taken a position on every important issue that’s come up in, you know, the last 100-odd years. So there’s just an enormous tradition there. So you kind of know on many, many issues.

LESLEY: How often did you have to go to the owner and say, "Here’s what we want to do," and then, would he automatically get to have the last vote, or —

GAIL: The publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, does. I mean, he would if he wants to. I’m gone already. You know, we all change. He’s the one who stays there and keeps the paper afloat and in the end the publisher always, in theory, has the last word. Arthur had a wonderful combination of both being interested and not dictatorial about it. And if something new came up that you just knew everybody would be talking about, you know, I would usually just sort of tell what we were doing, or he would read the editorials in advance. But I cannot remember a time when he said, "No, you can’t … that’s not the way you can go. We have to go the other way." In fact, there are a number of things that we did that he was not — which I’m not going to define for you, before you ask — that he was not wildly crazy about. But he never, you know, intervened in any way.

LESLEY: Even on politics, even when you endorsed candidates?

GAIL: No. But he always knew what the endorsements were ahead of time. And he certainly —

LESLEY: Was he ever at the table when that decision was made?

GAIL: No. He never came in for the decision making. I would come afterwards and tell him, or I would tell him ahead of time, what we were thinking about. And I cannot honestly remember a time, when I was the editor, that he said, "No, no, no. You can’t do that. You’ve got to go this way." I mean, he would have had a perfect right to. But I can’t remember a time that that ever happened.