Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The new leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. HYMAN As a former associate editor of THE NEW LEADER and constant...
...Norman M. Spector VIEWS ON CHINA Reading your letters column in the issue of July 19 I wonder why Murray Baron insists in misrepresenting my views on the recognition of, and trade with, China...
...It may be encouraging to note, therefore, that President Johnson seems, in his subtle way, to value the pressures on him from such anti-escalation spokesmen as Democratic Senators Fulbright, Mansfield, and Morse...
...LCDC has not sought to "expel" any other legal group from the field...
...Whether this is an appropriate legal procedure for petty offenses, where "traffic tickets1' have been one of the favorite forms of harassment of civil rights workers by Southern sheriffs and highway patrolmen, is a judgment made by civil rights attorneys in the light of the situation...
...This "haphazardness" could have been avoided last year only at the cost of leaving hundreds of civil rights workers in Mississippi jails...
...Niebuhr suggests, in his subtle way, the haziness of the dividing lines between political leaders' own free will, and the pressures on them, and writes of the consequent "contradictory interpretations by friend and foe" to which "'political policies universally are so subject...
...Over the past four years...
...He further states, "No people on earth can be blamed for wanting victory instead of defeat...
...In any event, the life and liberty and property of "the heroes of our society" must not be lost for lack of a few thousand dollars...
...We are underfinanced and overextended, as is the entire civil rights movement in this country...
...Was that not the real motive of the conspirators, rather than an incredible altruistic desire to establish justice, as claimed by Erhard...
...This underlines the misstatement in the second column of page 20—as quoted before— that I was sentenced in the Nuremberg trial for the conduct of unrestricted submarine warfare...
...His assertion that among the conspirators were scholars, men of the cloth, aristocrats and trade union leaders—supposedly making it a genuine resistance movement—is not borne out by the facts...
...Charleston, W. Va...
...From this one would assume that there was serious opposition to the Hitler regime, and that the July 20 attempt on his life was a natural outgrowth of the opposition...
...HYMAN As a former associate editor of THE NEW LEADER and constant admirer of Stanley Edgar Hyman's column, may I offer congratulations upon his completion of one of the longest, most splendid one-man-stands in recent literary journalism...
...Baron misrepresented my views in a letter to Time May 28 and Time on June 4 published a letter of mine setting the record straight...
...Despite minor differences of orientation and commitment, the "battle of the civil rights lawyers" is against inhumanity, injustice, bigotry, and oppression, not against each other...
...Its board of directors includes the counsel to Dr...
...Chicago, Ill...
...While I would not consider endorsing the type of unionism that exists in Ghana today, I think that it is grossly unfair to paint a misleading picure through an incomplete quotation...
...Was it Hitler, or the very German people who gave him their blessing, and their loyalty, and who shouted themselves hoarse in the encouragement of his regime's depredations...
...Aumuehle, Holstein Karl Doenitz Grand Admiral (Ret...
...The volunteer civil rights lawyers don't get paid at all, the staff only nominally...
...Our budget—minute but hard to raise—pays for the expenses of a large operation...
...We're rather proud of it, but not so proud that we wouldn't rather be predictably solvent...
...Some financing for the LCDC has come from the A C L U and the Council of Churches...
...I was expressly not sentenced at the Nuremberg trial for the conduct of unrestricted submarine warfare...
...Such "haphazardness" as may have existed in LCDC'S first year of operation was directly attributable to our crash response to the urgent needs of countless individual civil rights workers and members of local Negro communities, subjected to brutality, harassment and arrest by Southern officials...
...In 1964, LCDC had some 125 two-week volunteer lawyers in three Southern states...
...In this battle we welcome the help of all lawyers—of all men—devoted to freedom...
...King, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Jewish Congress, National Catholic Conference on Interracial Justice, National Council of Churches (Commission on Religion and Race), and the American Jewish Committee...
...It is possible to attribute the first misrepresentation to ignorance...
...In the three months before the summer projects began, we represented some 700 civil rights defendants in Mississippi alone...
...The shrewdest politicians not only sense the way those pressures work, but try to harness them...
...New York City Henry Schwarzschild Executive Secretary Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee DOENITZ I have read the article about me, "Going Down with Hitler" by Daniel Schorr, in the June 7 issue of The New Leader...
...Rather, we have tried, by hard work and professional competence, to provide for the civil rights movement the services of lawyers who are committed to justice, freedom and equality and have no other political axe to grind...
...This year, we have six full-time staff lawyers, heading up seven civil rights law offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, northern Florida and Georgia, where their work will be supplemented by some 80 to 100 three- and four-week volunteer attorneys...
...Italics mine...
...In it,, Mr...
...Our attorneys represented the 1,000 Jackson demonstrators (in cooperation with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law...
...According to some interpretations, he even went to the extent of staging his celebrated attack on GOP Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan at least in part to protect the integrity of his anti-escalation friends' positions by switching the focus of criticism to his pro-escalation friends' zeal...
...We do need financial support very urgently—and the help of your readers will be welcome...
...Why should one allow Ludwig Erhard, or for that matter any other German leader, to idealize the meaning of the attempt to assassinate Hitler as an attempt to establish justice in Germany, when, in reality, the military who surrounded him and who saw him commit one tactical, strategic and political blunder after another, precluding any possibility of victory, decided to remove him from the scene to prevent utter destruction of what remained intact in Germany...
...The question of removing prosecutions from state to Federal jurisdictions is a highly technical one...
...This is not true...
...We have no apology to make for our choice of options...
...But what must one attribute the second misrepresentation to...
...It is then pointed out that Ghana is encouraging private investment and that approximately 50 per cent of the wage earners —and probably union members—are in the private sector of the economy...
...Joseph Epstein 20TH OF JULY In his article ("The 20th of July") in the July 19 issue of THE NEW LEADER, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard states "When we heard on the radio during the afternoon of July 20, 1944, that there had been an attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler, we held our breath...
...From the manner in which Erhard states this, one would also assume that "the author of the vast tragedy," Hitler, was the sole perpetrator of this tragedy—a subtle and an adroit way of informing the world that the German people had nothing to do with it and bear no guilt...
...the civil rights action groups themselves have had their own financial problems, and LCDC has obtained the bulk of its support from foundations and private contributions...
...LABOR IN AFRICA I have just read the article "Labor in Africa," by Morton A. Reichek, in your July 5 issue...
...In the third column of page 20 of the article, in quoting my answer to a question about the Nuremberg trial...
...What a wanton glossing over all the deeds and misdeeds of Germany's aggressions against the world for the sake of the good old and legitimate desire of any people to want victory instead of defeat...
...Hans J. Morgenthau LAWYERS IN THE SOUTH Permit me to correct and update some remarks about the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee that appeared in "The Battle of the Civil Rights Lawyers," by Geoffrey Cowan and Leonard Chazen (NL, July 5 ). The LCDC was founded by the major national civil rights, civil liberties and intergroup relations agencies in order to provide legal representation to the civil rights movement, especially in the South...
...What a convenient release from guilt for a people who deliriously encouraged its hero leader Hitler to seek conquest and victory...
...But the Tribunal also did not convict me of that...
...I request you to correct the two mistakes in the interest of historical accuracy and truth...
...they have filed numerous affirmative suits against segregated facilities, discriminatory and repressive treatment of Negroes, and against unconstitutional state laws and municipal ordinances— and have won a great many, LCDC enjoys— because it has earned—the confidence of the civil rights movement, irrespective of organization...
...Our experienced staff attorneys assume the risks of the South and work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for $2,400 a year...
...they obtained an injunction against the "law-enforcement" officials of Bogalusa, Louisiana...
...Little Rock, Ark...
...Is it not true that the meaning of July 20 was a last desperate attempt to save what was left of Germany...
...Reichek unfortunately quotes out of context from an article of mine that appeared in the January 1962 issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change, to imply that the unions of Ghana are Communistic...
...New York City Lester Trachtman Assistant to the Executive Director, African-American Labor Center NIEBUHR In his article "Roosevelt and Johnson: A Contrast in Foreign Policy" (NL, July 19), Reinhold Niebuhr makes a complicated point which might be extended a step further...
...Schorr omitted one sentence of mine which was the most important in this connection...
...Immediately after noting similarities between the union in Ghana and those in a Communist society, my article continues: "However, to describe the Ghanaian labor movement as a Communist-type organization would certainly be a misguided oversimplification...
...Hyman's intelligence, wit, and wide learning were a bi-weekly source of pleasure to me personally—and, obviously, not to me alone—and I very much hope you can hook him into doing pieces on more than an occasional basis in the years to come...
...We militantIy and committedly defend the constitutional and legal rights of the civil rights movement and of the Negro community—we do not make civil rights policy...
...On page 20...
...The whitewash attempt by Erhard, couched in high and exalted terms to remove the stain of guilt, is not very convincing...
...New York City Paul Gutzel...
...He further says: "Despite overwhelming propaganda and terrorism calculated to cripple any thought of opposition, an action had been undertaken against the man who was the author of the vast tragedy...
...column two it says: "The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal sentenced Admiral Doenitz to 10 years in Berlin's Spandau prison, mainly for his conduct of unrestricted submarine warfare...
...I ask, who really disgraced Germany's name...
Vol. 48 • August 1965 • No. 16
