When Howell Raines quit The New York Times, Jerelle Kraus publicly called him Caligula, because he chopped off people's heads before they got to speak. Now she is telling me how Raines saw penises everywhere, in the most innocent, ridiculous places, making her job as op-ed art director difficult. "Nobody else would see it, but he would see it," she tells me, "and then I'd have to change it." What she remembers is a pencil. A Janusz Kapusta illustration of a round-erasered pencil, signing a peace treaty, which she had to square off, in 1993, because of Caligula. "Get it?" she says. "A round-erasered pencil?" I got it.

It was hard enough defending imagery that confronted ...