On the theory that the best offense, at that point, was a good defense, they pulled in their editorial horns for the duration and sent an elderly, conservative mediocrity named Clifton Daniel down from the executive backwaters of New York to keep the aggressive Washington Bureau under control. At almost the same time, they hired one of Nixon's top speechwriters, Bill Safire, and gave him a prominent ranking columnist's spot on the Times editorial pages. Both of these moves were thinly veiled concessions to the prospect of a revenge-hungry Nixon/Agnew juggernaut that had already telegraphed its intention to devote as much of its second (and final) term energies to their “enemies” in the “national media” as they had already successfully devoted in the first term to scuttling the U.S. Supreme Court.

It was clearly a management decision, safely rooted in the Times concept of itself as “a newspaper of record,” not advocacy -- and when you're in the business of recording history, you don't declare war on the people who're making it. “If you want to get along, go along.” That is an ancient political axiom often attributed to Boss Tweed, the legendary “pol” and brute fixer who many journalists in Washington insist still sits on the editorial board of The New York Times.

Which is probably not true, if only because the Times got burned so badly by going along with Tweed's crude logic in the winter of 1972-73 that the whole Washington Bureau -- except perhaps Clifton Daniel -- is still reeling from the beating they took from The Washington Post on the Nixon/Watergate story. While the Times was getting down in the trenches and methodically constructing its own journalistic version of a Maginot line against the inevitable Nixon/Agnew offensive, the Post was working 25 hours a day on a multipronged panzer-style offensive that would soon become one of the most devastating scoops in the history of American journalism.

Rather than be cowed by Nixon and his army of power-crazed thugs, the Post elected to meet them head-on, hitting both flanks and the center all at once -- and when the bloody dust began settling, just a few weeks ago, with both Agnew and Nixon having resigned in disgrace, The Washington Post had unquestionably replaced The New York Times as the nation's premier political newspaper.

To compensate for the loss of what is widely regarded as one of the fattest and heaviest jobs in journalism, the Times gave Wicker a column -- his own chunk of turf, as it were -- and that unexpected burst of freedom seemed to have an almost consciousness-expanding effect on his head. When I met him for the first time in Miami in that star-crossed political summer of 1972, he was writing one of the sanest columns on the market and he talked like a happy man.

We were sitting at a beach table near the surf, outside the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, taking a break from the chaos of the Democratic Convention, and I took the opportunity to tell him about my reaction to his long-ago comment on Nixon.