Rx

To the Editors:

In I. F. Stone’s essay “Who Are the Democrats?” [August 22] he says, “Harry Truman was an unsuccessful haberdasher while Humphrey has been stigmatized, somewhat snobbishly, because of his family business, as ‘a drugstore liberal’ “—and, as his footnote indicates, he bases the second half of that sentence on the title of the book I co-authored, The Drugstore Liberal.

Shucks, I thought everyone would be familiar with the old saying, “He’s a drugstore cowboy,” meaning no cowboy at all; and I thought everyone would understand that I was just playing on this to say that Humphrey isn’t much of a liberal. The title is only accidentally related to the fact that Humphrey owns a drugstore—a happy accident, however, which I hoped would add some humor to the title and therefore to a topic that is too often painfully dull. In any event, while there are few things I would not do to show my regard for Mr. Stone, permitting him to inflate his reputation as an unsnobbish democrat at my expense is not one of them.

Robert Sherrill

Washington, D.C.

I.F Stone replies:

Sorry, that was dumb of me.