The message was strong: “CONVICT CRIMINAL CLINTON.”
The medium was stronger: a four-by-eight-inch red brick.
Bearing an address label and sufficient postage, the brick — with the message stenciled on it in green paint — was delivered to the Letters to the Editor desk at The New York Times in late 1998 or early 1999. That was when The Times was quartered at 229 West 43rd Street and President Bill Clinton was being impeached, tried and acquitted in Congress for perjury and obstruction of justice.
Even though it fell well within the suggested word count of 150, the anonymous exhortation on the unsigned brick was not published in The Times.
Readers have resorted to other unusual media with greater success.
Thomas Feyer, the letters editor, said in an email last week that the “most charming missive” he has ever received was a 15-foot-long scroll to the editor sent in 2011 by students at Birch Lane Elementary School in Davis, Calif.
Mr. Feyer inherited the brick when he became the letters editor in October 1999. By then, the label and postage had fallen off. He donated the inscrutable artifact to the Museum at The Times, where it is on display.
“I don’t know how it arrived at The Times,” Mr. Feyer wrote last week. “Perhaps through a window in the old building?”
Not likely. His office was on the 10th floor.
The post The Hardest Letter to the Editor appeared first on New York Times.