He showed himself a mordant editorialist with far-reaching influence.
"Henceforth, in order to know where the next revolution will break out," suggested one editorialist, "you only have to look at where members of the government are taking their holidays".In the past the French might have dismissed all this as business as usual by their political class.
Writing in Le Monde, a daily, Françoise Fressoz, an editorialist, called this a "strategy of silence", designed not to stir up divisions.
Nor, it has to be said, is Mr Shachtman a natural editorialist.
It was primarily as an editorialist, however, excoriating slave owners and their moderate opponents alike, that he became known and feared.
In his eponymous treatise on public opinion published in 1922, the American editorialist Walter Lippmann qualified his observation that democracies tend to make a mystery out of public opinion with the declaration that "there have been skilled organizers of opinion who understood the mystery well enough to create majorities on election day".
Instead, he is a prolific editorialist and meets with local politicians, as well as the likes of Václav Havel.
"Roosevelt arrived in Washington with no firm commitments, apart from his promise to 'try something,' " the Times editorialist Adam Cohen writes in his forthcoming book, "Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America".
In 1926, when the Chicago Tribune denounced a "degeneration into effeminacy" signified by the appearance of a face-powder dispenser in the men's washroom of a new dance hall on the city's North Side, the editorialist cried, "A powder vending machine!
But he was a fictionalist, not an editorialist — a bird, as he liked to say, not an ornithologist.
Bill Clinton is shown aiming a rifle at a row of Iraqis, all of whom have targets pinned to their chests except for Saddam.Some Saudi editorialists, who tend to reflect official opinion, suggest, obliquely, that the trouble with American policy is that it is ineffective: effective action, that finished off Mr Hussein once and for all, would not necessarily be unacceptable.
