Acknowledgments

In 1988, when he was deputy publisher and I was preparing to leave The New York Times for the last time, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., approached me about the possibility of becoming an Op-Ed-page columnist. He will always have my gratitude for that blessed leap of faith. So will Arthur O. Sulzberger, who made the formal offer, and Jack Rosenthal, who told me in no uncertain terms to take it.

Twice a week the best copy editors in the business vet my work. You don’t see the names of Steve Pickering and Linda Cohn on my column, but their care and attention are in everything good I do.

My colleagues at The New York Times are the most generous people—and the finest reporters and editors—I could ever know. Those in the Washington and City Hall bureaus, on the national staff covering social policy and on the metro staff covering social welfare, know how often I have called upon them to share reporting and insight. They have been invaluable sources of information and inspiration.

All my friends have been involved with this column, but three deserve special notice. I owe a good deal to the wit and wisdom of the team of Michael Specter and Alessandra Stanley. And if Janet Maslin didn’t exist, I would have had to invent her, so that I could have someone smart, thoughtful, and funny to talk to every morning on the phone.

Two books in particular have been of great help to me over these last three years, giving me a historical grounding in the work of opinion-column writing. The first, Charles Fisher’s The Columnists: A Surgical Survey, was published in 1944. The second, Peter Kurth’s superb biography of Dorothy Thompson, American Cassandra, put me in touch with the woman whose work first informed my own. Both were primary sources for the introduction to this book.

For three years Elizabeth Cohen has been much more than my assistant. She has been my surrogate, my protector, and my office voice. This is her book, too. And it also belongs to Amanda Urban, who is a great agent and a better friend, and Kate Medina, who is the best editor in the book business.

Quindlen, Christopher, and Maria Krovatin, my children, have been extraordinarily understanding of how distracted I can be, particularly on what are known around here as column days. And they have consistently provided me with good material—and a sane and balanced view of the world that I would not have had otherwise.

There’s little precedent for a man married to an opinion columnist, since there have been and continue to be too few of us who are female. Sinclair Lewis, when he was married to pundit doyenne Dorothy Thompson used to beg not to have It discussed in his home, It being the world situation or anything else that smacked of the Op-Ed page. My husband, Gerry Krovatin, has instead been unstinting of his opinions on every aspect of It, and uncomplaining if I did not adopt them. And he is responsible for what remains the best line in anything that has appeared with my byline: “Could you get up and get me a beer without writing about it?” I suppose this is the answer.