December 6, 1967

Mr. Turner Catledge
Executive Editor
_‘The New York Times

New York, New York

L

Dear Mr. Catledge:

One of the features that makes the New York Times the best newspaper in
the United States is its verbatim reporting of important documents and
speeches. JI know that many people, like myself, make a point of clipping
a certain number of these as the most available resource for such documents
for periods of months or years before they possibly appear in some other
published form. I am deeply grateful for this unique resource.

May I just make a very small operational suggestion? Add a brief section
to your dafly "News Summary and Index" to list such documents. Or, if this
is too redundant, asterisk page references in the body of the index where
you include such documents in your story.

About the only thing wrong I can say about the New York Times is (1) the
demise of the west coast edition, and (2), your policy of not running com-
mentaries that originate in other newspapers, especially my own column!

Yours ,faithfully,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

P.5. I was especially gratified at the way the enclosed story was handled,
which, as you might well imagine, was on an utterly different plane from
the way any other newspaper has ever dealt with this subject. I might also
add that I have received considerably more mail that was provoked by this
brief story than any response I have ever gotten from any one of my own
writings.

POA TTLYD