Will on Times’ Editing

* Gracious, there certainly has been ample commotion about The Times’ decision to remove the following italicized words from my Jan. 11 column summing up the Clinton presidency: “It is reasonable to believe that he was a rapist 15 years before becoming president, and that as president he launched cruise missiles against Afghanistan (a nearly empty terrorist camp), Sudan (a pharmaceutical factory) and Iraq to distract attention from problems arising from the glandular dimension of his general indiscipline.”

The Times, without endorsing or dissenting from my opinion, removed those words because apparently it felt that my opinion, without the context that would have been provided by supplying the name of the person who says she was raped (Juanita Broaddrick), seemed opaque. In that I think The Times’ judgment was not unreasonable: Clarity might have been served by supplying that name.

However, The Times would have economized its readership’s commotion-quotient if it had simply asked my permission to put the name in the sentence in question. I do not think I was censored. I was edited, which is The Times’ right to do, as long as the editing, as in this case, does not change the meaning of any part of the unedited text.

I, of course, in no way recede from the content of the unedited sentence in question.

GEORGE F. WILL

Washington