More Amplification

To the Editors:

One would scarcely realize from Miss Renata Adler’s letter [NYR, Dec. 7] that her coverage of the convention was so spotty that when she wrote her article in The New Yorker she did not even know I had written and campaigned for the resolution on which she now relies. And relies only through distortion: she carefully omits to mention that my resolution, after making clear the legitimacy of an independent act by the Black Caucus to adopt its own resolutions, goes on to describe the “different situation” and “different constituency” and concludes, “Our two approaches are both valid in their own contexts.”Not a bicameral thought? She even falsely stops her quotation from the opening words of my resolution with a period at a point where in fact there was a semicolon and a statement concerning another resolution. She refers to as “a few generalities, none of which in any way contradicted or altered the endorsement,” eight paragraphs of a resolution that specifically differs from the 13 points on the Middle East, wars of national liberation, and how to organize among whites, and that ignores the “Newark resolutions” which the 13 Points blindly endorsed.

But we can leave the issue here: I feel Miss Adler’s letter an absurd distortion of the facts. Should I therefore urge the editors of The New York Review not to print it? That is what she did with mine to The New Yorker. I do not claim to know the whole truth about myself or anything else; she does, and The New Yorker supports that absurdity.

Arthur I. Waskow

Resident Fellow

Institute for Policy Studies

Washington, D.C.