Dear Editor
Dear Editor Westmoreland Marvin Kitman overlooks one point in his perceptive and witty comment on General William C. Westmoreland's abandoned effort to sue CBS News for libel ("Westy's Last...
...Atlanta Gordon Erving For Goetz Bob Lazarus' letter ("Dear Editor," NL, February 11-25) attacking Walter Goodman's column on Bern-hard Goetz("TheCase of the IRTFive," NL, December 24, 1984) misses the mark...
...Finally, we should remember that the case against Goetz, including every hypothetical problem Lazarus raises, has been supplied by four young men with long criminal records...
...Suppose indeed...
...Even Lazarus concedes that Goetz had "concrete reasons" to be fearful in New York City's subway...
...But then he proceeds to raise all sorts of hypothetical difficulties...
...They tell us themselves: to get to the bottom of this man's relationship with the Jacksons' friends...
...Sure, Goodman went too far in belittling "the question of whether the punishment Goetz inflicted was proportionate to the offense he suffered...
...New York City Victor Eisman 'Pack of Lies' Although Leo Sauvage does manage to praise Pack of Lies, Hugh Whitemore's play about a British couple (the Jacksons) whose best friends are revealed as Communist spies, he also criticizes it unfairly ("Pick of the Pack," NL, January 14-28...
...Why, Sauvage asks, do they stay on...
...Here Lazarus himself has some wise words—"the manner of the request may have transformed it into something more imperative"—though they undermine the general thrust of his argument...
...Suppose, he asks us, only one of Goetz' four victims asked for $5...
...Westmoreland didn't merely make a fool of himself...
...in suddenly deciding to switch the focus to the motivations of his spies in two superficial monologues...
...And whatever the moral complications of shooting people in the back, it does not appear that Goetz actually did so...
...he made fools of us all...
...Dear Editor Westmoreland Marvin Kitman overlooks one point in his perceptive and witty comment on General William C. Westmoreland's abandoned effort to sue CBS News for libel ("Westy's Last Stand," NL, February 11-25...
...Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney who relied on this man's testimony to secure the indictment, disarmingly admits that his witness is "no angel...
...Yet Lazarus clearly seems to suggest that Goetz fails the test, and in this he is dead wrong...
...In plain English, the young man is a self-confessed liar...
...Trials are expensive not only for the parties directly involved but also for the government, which must provide the judge and the courtroom...
...Actually, each lasts 30 seconds or so...
...Information from such a source is quite as tainted as information acquired through wiretapping, and very much less reliable...
...Does it really matter exactly how many of them popped the question when all four surrounded Goetz...
...And then he in effect admitted that he didn't have much of a case...
...General Westmoreland spent thousands of our hard-earned tax dollars pursuing a personal vendetta...
...Perhaps, as Sauvage suggests, it is true that even such a good reason for continuing the surveillance might not have cut the mustard, but there was a good reason, which he overlooks...
...His chief point in evidence is the fact that these security people originally gained entry into the Jackson house on pretext of needing a vantage point to spot a Russian agent and find him "the very first weekend...
...First, Sauvage tells us that after handling the story well for two thirds of its length "Whitemore went wrong...
...Stamford, Conn...
...We are left to infer that the monologues occupy the rest of the evening, or at least a good deal of it...
...Then, too, Sauvage argues that "it stretches the imagination to have a British couple sufficiently impressed by the country's security service to let agents stay for weeks in the family castle" trying to flush out a Soviet conspiracy...
...WILLA KORN...
...No doubt the suitability of Goetz' response is a crucial issue...
...We can judge their level of honesty by recalling that one of them, at about the time he testified before the grand jury which indicted Goetz, faked his own kidnapping...
Vol. 68 • March 1985 • No. 3
