“Outside the pale of intellectual

responsibility”

Canadian journalist David Frum has called you the “great Amer - ican
crackpot.” I think that ranks up there with the New Republic’s
Martin Peretz placing you “outside the pale of intellectual
responsibility.” Frum also says, “There was a time when the New
York Times op-ed page was your stomping ground.” Have I missed
something here?

I guess I have too. I did have an op-ed once—it was in 1971, I
think. This was the period when the corporate sector, and later the
New York Times, had decided we’d better get out of Vietnam
because it was costing us too much.
I had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Senator Fulbright had in effect turned the Committee into a seminar.
He was very turned off by the war and American foreign policy at
that time. He invited me to testify. That was respectable enough. So
they ran a segment of....

Excerpts of your comments. It wasn’t an original piece you had
written for the Times.

Maybe it was slightly edited, but it was essentially a piece of my
testimony at the committee. So it’s true, the Times did publish a
piece of my testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee.

And that was your “stomping grounds.” What about letters? How
many letters of yours have they printed?

Occasionally, when an outlandish slander and lie about me has
appeared there, I’ve written back to them. Sometimes they don’t
publish the letters. Once, maybe more, I was angry enough that I
contacted a friend inside, who was able to put enough pressure on
so they ran the letter.
But sometimes they just refused. In the Times book review