All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't) -- Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page by Jerelle Kraus, Foreword by Ralph Steadman, Columbia UP '08, 260 pages, ISBN #0231138245. Index, notes, lavishly illustrated.
Scarcely anyone under 50 remembers when newspapers didn't carry op-ed pages. For 13 years, Jerelle Kraus was the art director of the world's first op-ed page, that of The New York Times, which introduced the feature in 1970. In this lively, oversized retrospective, she examines how The Times mobilized art to illustrate and enhance the message of op-ed contributors in a way that went beyond the pages of most other newspapers, some of which simply used editorial cartoons unrelated to the subject matter of the day.
Worth the price of the book is Kraus's 2 1/2-hour encounter with former President Richard Nixon, who called the newspaper he hated to request the original of a drawing it had done for an Op-Ed article about him. To meet with Nixon at his office at 26 Federal Plaza, she had to follow Byzantine directions: "At the end of the long hallway, there's an unmarked door. Knock three times, pause, then knock again."
Famously ill-at-ease with visitors, Nixon tried in his hamhanded way to make Kraus feel comfortable as the two chatted about his pace-setting trip to China, the nature of Quakerism, a religion the two shared; and Kraus's plans for the future. "Experiencing Nixon behind his unmarked door showed me there was a human creature beneath the ogre for whom I'd felt nothing but disgust," Kraus writes, "someone profoundly ill at ease with himself and others, a man who wore a suit 24/7 and couldn't surrender the role of dignitary. I saw his awkwardness as well as his pain, pride and prickliness."
