War & Peace Quote by Robert Scheer

There is a quiet act of defiance baked into Scheer’s phrasing: he doesn’t romanticize dissent, he itemizes it. “It had run as a column” is bureaucratic on purpose, the language of an institution, not a rebel. That’s the point. He’s reminding you that opposition doesn’t always arrive as a heroic break; sometimes it survives as a recurring slot on the page, tolerated, negotiated, wedged into the machinery.

The timeline matters. Scheer enters the paper in 1976, but the column predates him by 13 years, placing its origin in the early escalation of Vietnam. That detail functions like a receipt. He’s asserting longevity and consistency, a counterweight to the way newsrooms later rewrite their own histories: We were skeptical all along. No, he implies, some people were, and they did it inside a workplace that wasn’t.

Then the knife twist: “criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.” Scheer frames the paper as an actor with a position, not a neutral platform. The subtext is an indictment of institutional consensus, the kind that makes war feel inevitable by laundering it through respectable editorial voice. Against that, he offers the “strong column” as proof that journalism can be adversarial even when the brand isn’t.

It’s also a claim about what counts as courage in media culture: not the op-ed written after public opinion turns, but the weekly insistence on skepticism while your own masthead cheerleads the project. The intent is autobiographical, but the real target is structural amnesia.