Oakes attended the Collegiate School and later Princeton University (A.B., 1934), where he was valedictorian of his class and graduated magna cum laude.

(the Office of Strategic Services), and as a result he served two years in Europe, capturing and "turning" enemy agents still in communication with the Nazis.

His memorable profile of Joseph McCarthy ("This Is the Real,the Lasting Damage," March 7, 1954) became the basis of an Eleanor Roosevelt newspaper column[5] and was subsequently widely reprinted.

Their most noteworthy confrontation occurred in 1976, when the Times had to decide who it would endorse as New York's junior senator in the upcoming Democratic party primary.

But according to Harrison Salisbury, writing in Without Fear or Favor, Sulzberger judged Oakes' response to be too emotional and divisive.

According to the Village Voice article on Oakes' death (May 1, 2001), "the Times was credited with giving Moynihan his one percent margin of victory."

In 1961, the year Oakes was appointed editor of the editorial page, Harper and Brothers published his book The Edge of Freedom: A Report on Neutralism and New Forces in Sub-saharan Africa and Eastern Europe.

But his principal areas of concern were human rights and civil liberties, manifested by anti-McCarthyism and consistent support of the civil rights movement; strong and early criticism of the Vietnam War (1963), making the Times one of the few papers to take such a stand and leading to personal attacks on him by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Dean Rusk and others; and advocacy of conservation and protection of natural resources.

[1] Wrote Hess, in his obituary, "If people think of the Times today as a great newspaper and a liberal one, it’s largely an illusion, but Oakes believed in it and tried to make it true."