LETTERS

...I apologize for the conclusion I drew from hiswritings...

...But his Open Letter to Michael Harrington exhibits so scandalous a departure from the ethics of controversy that I feel compelled to speak out...

...Morally we are with you...

...It is a pity that such a fine venture has to ask for funds...

...I wrote in DISSENT, November-December 1968, that Professor A. J. P. Taylor belonged to the notorious Cliveden set, which was responsible for the appeasement policies of the thirties and hence for the Second World War...

...Professor Taylor has embraced the latter view explicitly on p. 424 of his English History 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1965), and also in his Origins of the Second World War of 1961, polemicizing against Churchill and discarding the Hossbach Memorandum and other evidence brought out at the Nuremberg trials...

...LEWIS COSER Stanford, California November 26, 1968 Correction I sincerely regret having repeated a piece of misinformation which I picked up in another magazine...

...The issue is whether it was both more humane and more political to let Hitler conquer a few more countries, and Professor Taylor has affirmed this position in his more recent papers inthe New York Review of Books...

...I also regret that Professor Taylor has not answered my charges in the columns of DISSENT, as he and the editors of the New York Review of Books were invited to do, but chose to pick a minor point and to counterattack in another magazine...

...This, I submit, is not only a serious breach of journalistic ethics but a procedure that undermines all civilized intercourse...

...All of us are so eager to go through it...

...H. PACHTER...

...When private opinions privately expressed are dragged into public print, this undermines that basic trust among people without which there can be no moral community...

...I must take his word for the latter assertion, though as a contemporary I was not aware, in the thirties, that he was denouncing Chamberlain as loudly as he now does his successors...

...It would have been our privilege to have returned the pledge card, but for our country's severe restriction on remittance of money in foreign currency...

...I am not concerned here with the issue at stake but solely with the fact that Macdonald chooses to quote at length from private telephone conversations with Harrington in order to make his point...

...Editors: Every time a copy of DISSENT arrives at our desk we feel thrilled...

...Now Professor Taylor writes in the New York Review of Books that he never belonged to, but in fact "often denounced," this group...

...RAM SINGH, EDITOR THOUGHT A Weekly of Politics & the Arts Delhi On Dwight Macdonald The following letter was sent to but not printed by the New York Review of Books...

...The major issue is whether A. J. P. Taylor's"explanation" of Hitler's policies amounted to an apology, or to be specific: whether in the opinion of Taylor, as in that of the Cliveden set indeed, British statesmen were justified in meeting Hitler's acts with the same methods as the acts of, say, Stresemann...

...To the Editor: It pains me to take issue with Dwight Macdonald for whom I have a great deal of admiration and to whom, moreover, I owe a deep debt of gratitude for having been my first guide to the American intellectual scene...

...Or, perhaps its excellence is the cause of its financial stringency...

...By violating one of the essential requirements of mutual respect among men of good will Macdonald has ill served the cause of democracy and liberal comity to which he is otherwise so deeply devoted...