http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13rich.html?_r=1&hpI can’t say I aspired to be a columnist, however. My first love was the theater, and the first opinion writers I read religiously were the drama critics Walter Kerr and Kenneth Tynan. The political guys (almost all guys then) were too Olympian for my taste. But when, decades later, I was intent on ending my run as The Times’s drama critic after nearly 14 years as Kerr’s successor, an editor at the paper floated the notion of taking my highly opinionated self to the Op-Ed page. And so I leapt. I had written about politics on and off in my career, and had always been fascinated by the intersection of politics and culture. It had not been lost on me as a child that the Kennedy inaugural gala had been studded with stars from Broadway and Hollywood, and that the Rat Pack might have held even more sway over the White House than, say, Lippmann.
Now 17 more years have flown by, and, as you may have heard, I have decided to move on from Op-Ed columnizing (as Bill Safire called it) to a fresh adventure in journalism at New York magazine. It was a highly personal decision and I’ve been weighing it for some time.
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