‘The New Republic,’ cont’d

To the Editors:

I have read Mr. Peretz’s letter in the March 28 issue of The New York Review

I am enclosing a copy of a letter to me, dated September 2, 1982, from the then Editor of the New Republic, Hendrik Herzberg, in which he quotes in full my “letter to the editor of August 2.”

Thus, Mr. Peretz is plainly not telling the truth when he claims that “what Straight wrote was a private protest letter to me.”

In addition, when Mr. Peretz quotes from his editorial of August 30, 1982, he is not and cannot be referring to the statements which prompted my letter of August 2, in which I cancelled my subscription to the New Republic.

My letter was in fact prompted by the article which Mr. Peretz wrote and published in the New Republic following his return from Israel. In that article, he did indeed, as I charged, “condone the brutal and aggressive war waged by the Begin government against the people of Lebanon.”

Needless to say, Mr. Peretz further distorts the truth when he asserts that I “started my career as a volunteer in Stalin’s espionage network and ended it as an enthusiast and servant of Richard Nixon.”

Michael Straight

Bethesda, Maryland